 So for those folks who don't know, for those folks who don't know what this talk is, this talk was originally something that I tried to give at Clojure Conch in the U.S., so I offered it up as an analog between La Posse Meditation and Clojure as a programming language. That was rejected three times. Then I changed it up to be Vipassana for LISP programmers, which was a talk that I submitted to Stranger in St. Louis. That talk was also rejected. And I've sort of broadened or narrowed, depending on how you look at it, Vipassana for Clojure developers to Vipassana for LISP programmers to Vipassana for hackers generally. And I've kind of widened the definition of hackers as well. Does anybody not know me? Sorry. I don't know a few of the phases, but most of you I actually know. So I'll kind of skip the introduction because I don't really think that that's necessary with this craft. I wasn't sure who was actually going to be coming. So this talk is a little strangely structured. It is about 70% introduction to the talk itself, which is a little bit like Vipassana actually, and that is very self-referential. So the reason that we need to do this is to kind of get through all the things that we won't be talking about in the course of this talk. So we're going to start out with discussing an episode of Radio Lab that I heard after my last Vipassana course that I think is really relevant. And this episode is called Where Am I? You can look it up and hear it online for free as a podcast. And it's basically a bunch of small explorations of consciousness and speaking to neuroscientists and speaking to people with very peculiar neurological diseases and trying to piece together exactly what is consciousness from kind of a scientific perspective. And so the way that they introduced this episode is with a conversation about how your body is effectively deceiving your mind almost continuously. And so you can kind of look at this as an extension of the deception of reality. So if you're looking at something, the light traveling into your eye is not actually reaching your eye and telling you about the thing that you're seeing. So if you're looking in the space, you're seeing years into the past. If you're looking at this, you're seeing just a split moment or two into the past, but you're not actually seeing something that's actually there. And then they go into the history of neuroscience to a degree with some psychologists, and particularly William James. So William James proposed in the early 20th century this idea that your consciousness and your intellect is rooted in your body and that people who are paralyzed would not feel emotions the way that people who are able body would. He was essentially lapped out of his discipline around 1900. And what they come to realize the scientific community is that this is actually true. So there's this whole notion of visual imagery reaching your visual cortex and being processed by your brain. But what's occurred in the past 30 or 40 years is we've realized that what we used to know about sound very clearly and very like physically. So if you hear a live explosion on the volley, for example, your body jumps before you actually cognize the fact that you've heard an explosion. So that is your ear sending signals directly into your nervous system and your nervous system is jumping without your brain actually really being aware. They found that this is true for all the senses. So all the senses send signals into your body and the process by your nervous system almost in parallel, but also faster than your brain is processing those signals. And so the example in the radio lab episode is that if you show up your friend Tommy's house and your friend Tommy is dead and he's lying on the ground, that you'll see his dead body and your body will start to react by your heartbeat getting faster and you start sweating and things before you actually realize that your friend Tommy is dead. So there are these new studies, which essentially corroborate what William James had proposed, which is going to people who were previously able body and are now paralyzed to varying degrees and asking them how they feel emotionally and how they feel as a person. And people who are quadriplegics generally feel like less of a person. So not just physically but emotionally and intellectually, they feel like they've lost some part of themselves. And so one of the neuroscientists that they have on this episode says that our being is rooted in a body state. And that you were if you were able to remove your brain from your body, you wouldn't know who you were. And this is kind of like scientifically rooted idea, which essentially eliminates the future drama notion of keeping heads of famous people from the past in glass jars, and not having bodies attached to them and they can still talk and think they wouldn't know who they are. And so towards the end of the episode, they have a little skit between one of the people from Radiolab and his wife, where they have a pretend fight during the podcast. And it ends with this concept of the autonomic nervous system governing our own anger. And so between the two of them, they discussed the fact that it's been researched that men's autonomic nervous system has a half life, which is about half of that of women's. So the imbalance that occurs in relationships between men and women when they're having fights and getting upset with one another is actually physiologically rooted. So men will recover within the scope of the autonomic nervous system more quickly, and women will hold on to the physical state of their emotion for longer. And interesting uptick of this is that women seem to be better at dealing with their emotions in a vipassana course. So if you watch vipassana courses are split into men and women are segregated by side. If you watch the women side, they're very calm and they're always on time and everyone's sitting properly. And the men side is like a kindergarten class, like everyone's running around and upset, and people are crying. The men are crying, the women are not crying. And so the last thing that they cover is actually a singular case of a fellow who lost his proprioception. So your proprioception is the sense of where your body physically is in space. So you know intuitively where all your limbs are where your head is all the time. And that's what allows you to walk. So that's why newborn baby can't walk, they have to learn proprioception as a sense. And he lost this. So we actually had to learn to walk again, but visually and through other cues. So he would literally watch his legs and watch when they're hitting the ground so that he could tell, okay, I'm taking a step now, because his leg wasn't sending any signals back to his brain, he could control his legs. So he could manage this, but he had to manage it intellectually rather than from the proprioception sense. So I recommend that everybody go and listen to that Radio Lab episode because I think it actually helps ground some of these things because they might be a little bit difficult to get a handle on. Now we're going to start with why are why am I actually giving this talk or why would I like to give this talk? And before we get quite to that, I'd like to give a bit of an introduction. So the past meditation is a meditation that was brought you something same like we brought back to India, depending on how you view the history were brought from Burma to India, and has expanded to quite a few centers and smaller non centers in a lot of countries around the world. A lot of people asked me after the last time I gave this talk, why do you pay for this? The course is free and the way that it's financed is by donations, and they only accept donations from old students. So you can't just show up to a center and start giving them money. And the structure of the course is essentially broken down into one third and two thirds slices. So days one through three, you're considering your nose, classic breathing meditation, and days four through 10, take that nostril sized circle and move it all around your body. And that's pretty much it. So the actual why is because every time you try to explain Vipassana it's very difficult because there's quite a few pieces. And what people tend to focus on I think are always the wrong things. So people who have never taken a course always focus on the fact that it's decided course. Oh my god, you can't talk. What do you do if you can't talk, you go crazy doesn't really doesn't matter. The fact that you can't talk is almost the least relevant component of a Vipassana course. There is to discuss the food is more interesting than the silence. So the second thing is that people who've taken one course will come away from the course and their mind is blown and they think they've gone crazy or they had some weird crazy experience. And then they just tell you about their individual experience like oh, I saw God, oh, I saw my childhood or whatever. Right. And that is also irrelevant. That doesn't really matter. That only pertains to that one person. And that's very contextual. You weren't there with them. So I like to move from why to caveats, I've only taken two tending courses. So I'm essentially this same person, but like one step away where I'm talking about the thing that you talk about when you take two verses and then to take three, this talk will be completely different. And I will be taking a third course in a week, actually. So had I given this talk in December or January, it would have been a completely different talk. Caveat number one is something that I hear a lot. So you hear this from people who've learned something for a first time. They were like, Oh, I learned, you know, this martial art, or I learned this programming language, and they really want to teach it to everybody else. And that's a great instinct. But they really are the wrong people to teach. And that's probably partly why I'm doing this is I want to teach people things. And so take everything that I say with a grain of salt, because I'm not teaching you vipassana, which is caveat number two, I am not teaching you vipassana. You're not learning vipassana from this talk. And I actually cannot teach vipassana. So a 10 day course is the introductory vipassana course. Teachers have to do at least one, it might be multiple 60 day vipassana courses before they're allowed to teach, which is probably something I'll never get to. And when I initially gave this at Hack Beach, Hack Beach is mostly about doing things and building things. And they like workshops. And so I had to explain with this line, and I felt it was valuable to keep it in, that this can't be a workshop because I can't do vipassana with you in 45 minutes or however long we have. Caveat number three, I added just before we sat down, I am not a neuroscientist. So I attempt to kind of figure out what was going on in my body on the last course that I did. But I don't understand all the specifics of how neurons work or like the neurons in the nervous system versus neurons in the brain. If you take a vipassana course, there will almost certainly be neuroscientists there. And they're fun to talk to you because they know a lot about what you've just experienced and hearing them describe it in scientific terms is a lot kind of more validating than hearing people describe their different crazy experiences. So again, I haven't really said why this talk. I've said why not to do other things. I really just want to pick people's curiosity in this because it takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of time away from work and other things that you might do. It's essentially 10 days or 12 days that you might otherwise spend on vacation and you're essentially taking away your phone and your laptop and like home cooked food and everything else to go deprive yourself of things. And I think that people should be interested in this for the right reasons. And so part of where this came out from was the second course that I did which is hacking vipassana in a different sense of the word, which is that I was trying to figure out what vipassana was and I was trying to figure out the structure of the course and I was trying to figure out what was happening inside my own body. And I was doing that by partly not actually really meditating properly, but I'll get to that. So before we dive into the actual vipassana stuff, I said the intro would take forever. I'd like to describe what we're leaving out. And so first and foremost we've already said that this is not about administrative details, so this isn't about the fact that you can't talk or any of the other stuff that happens in the 10 days. It's not a discussion about spirituality. I don't actually really believe in spirituality. I don't really know what that word means. I don't think it's really relevant to the conversation or to this presentation. This is not at all about the specifics of past experiences, although we'll create an exception toward the end. And it's not a comparison with other meditation techniques. I actually thought about including that, but that would basically double the length of the presentation comparing it to zazen and other forms of vipassana. This vipassana specifically is vipassana as taught by Esen Goenka, which will be the first Google result you get if you Google the word vipassana. But there are other forms of meditation which use the term vipassana to describe themselves. So, the 10 day course ends with a cute little story about qir, milky dessert that you sometimes get and you'll actually get it on the 10th day of the course as you return back to reality. And the cute story is about a mom and her daughter and the daughter doesn't like qir. And so she says there's stones in the qir and the mom is like they're not stones, they're not just take them out if you don't like them. And so Goenka in his recordings, vipassana is taught on video recordings, which is very weird, but we'll leave that out. That's administrative detail. He says if there's a part of this that you don't like, take it out. Like just keep the meditation, that's the important part. And so we're going to take out a bunch of stuff. We're going to take up spirituality for this conversation for any sense of the word and for any definition of the word. If you talk to people who try to approach meditation from like a non religious perspective, they often spend a lot of time trying to define spirituality, I just won't follow it. We'll take up Siddhartha Gautama. So like Buddhists obviously believed that there was a person 2,500 years ago named Siddhartha Gautama who achieved enlightenment, whatever that is. So we can't remember the history from 60 years ago and in some ways the internet is making your worse, not better. And so we're just going to say like maybe that guy existed, maybe it actually doesn't matter as far as like this activity is concerned. We'll leave out enlightenment because that requires a whole definition itself. We'll leave out any religion, Buddhism, anything that like derives from Buddhism. We will leave out predicting the future, which is another thing that some Buddhists believe is possible if you meditate hard enough and you learn enough about the world or whatever. We will learn out, leave out the notion of kalapas. So this is the Buddhist equivalent to strings and string theory or other subatomic articles which are essentially the smallest irreducible physical particle in the universe. And then we're like they have a name and we've identified them as blah. Supposedly 2500 years ago they were named kalapas and now we have other names for them that physicists have come up with doesn't matter. We're not going to talk about those things. We're not going to talk about reincarnation because that doesn't really affect the whole neurological approach that we're looking at. We're not going to talk about energies for any value of energy or vibration or any of those sorts of things. We are not going to talk about metta or morality. So there is the last meditation that you do in a vipassana course. It's only like five minutes at a time on the very last day, which is loving kindness, which is metta and pali. So the reason to leave this out is because it has an opinion. It's telling you that universal love is a thing and then maybe you should try it. The rest of vipassana meditation does not have an opinion. It just says do this thing to yourself and see what happens. So we'll leave out any sense of morality just so that we can keep this in very cold, isolated, as scientific as possible box. And then the last thing that we'll leave out is sankaras. But we'll divide this into two categories. So sankaras in the notion of your mind or your body being impure somehow, which is a part of vipassana. We'll leave that aside and say we don't because that seems a little judgmental or at least the word choice seems judgmental and it doesn't seem necessary for the time. So morality, these are some of the rules that you have to follow in the course. Doesn't matter. But we're going to hold on to one of these things. So we'll make an exception for lying. You're not allowed to lie on the talk, which is pretty easy because you can't talk. Sorry, you're not allowed to lie on the course, which is easy because you can't talk. The lying thing is important because you can lie to yourself. So during the course, you could be feeling something and telling yourself you're feeling something else. That's a lie and your body is actually going to be aware of that lie, which you'll see if you ever take the course. Your body kind of knows when you're trying to trick it or your mind does one or the other. And then when we take a look at sankaras, I said we divide them into two categories of things. We'll leave out impurities or like tainted myths or whatever, and we will hold on to the notion of habits. So the habits of the brain and nervous system are things like I don't need to think to type anymore. I type all day every day. I don't think about it. There's no real active brain thing going on. That's a habit of my fingers to translate words or characters that I want to put into the screen through my fingers without much intervention on my part. And there are other habits that you tend to have. So if you're like me and you're an incredibly angry, anxious person, you have angry, anxious habits. And so you get into a fight with somebody and you get really anxious in the fight and then you get angry and then that kind of boils and spirals out of control. Those habits are partly due to the autonomic nervous system that we discussed earlier. So we're going to leave out this whole thing. But just to look at it briefly, there's no books, there's no talking, there's no looking people in the eye actually, there's no touching other people, there's no making sounds. And it all does help you meditate because you're focused on yourself. But you don't really need to worry about it. If you were to describe the mechanics of a papasana course, eat, sleep, poop, bath, meditate. That is all you're doing. There is nothing else. You can look at monkeys and birds. Like there are monkeys and birds because they can't keep them out of the course site so if you watch them do their thing and that's as much excitement as you're going to get. And so getting away from the introduction, we started with a hacker mentality. And I think that this picture sums up a lot of what the hacker mentality is. So kids are really great hackers, right? Any kids, it does not like some sort of preconceived thing that certain people are better at than other people. It's curiosity. It's wanting to pull things apart. It's wanting to find out how things work. It's mentorship, right? So if there's somebody older or more experienced than you at what you're trying to figure out, it's great to go get their hand in things. And then especially get you kind of kicked off and bootstrapped in the process of hacking and stuff. And hackers, I added this. We love the reason and rationality, right? We love to be able to reason about a problem, sort of like take the problem as a whole and then break it down into pieces and find the smaller pieces and then chop those up until we can solve the problems. And then we move those aside and then we solve the next problem we move on. And this applies to all sorts of things. So this isn't just software. So this was originally going to be very software oriented to talk I think that it applies to almost all disciplines where you're applying this mentality, right? So it could be architecture. It could be baking bread. It could be bicycles. It doesn't particularly matter. And so for the traditional nerd hacker who loves taking apart hardware and taking apart software, we do that with almost everything, right? So if you find these people in your friend circles or in your community, they love to take things apart and they will take everything apart, right? So software developers I know who ride bicycles love to learn how the bicycle works. Software developers I know who like to drive cars, you generally like to know how the car works and like to be able to service it themselves. Why don't we turn that inwards more often? And I think that we do try, right? So we like to talk. And so that's the thing is like if you love riding bicycles, you spend just as much time talking about riding bicycles because you do actually riding bicycles. And I was guilty of this as anybody. So I really actually brought this up when it was at the Hasby open house on Friday. He was talking about how do you know about the homunculus policy or the homunculus argument, which is the little man inside your head and he's driving and controlling you. But then if he's seeing whatever your eyes are projecting on the screen and how do you not wind up in an infinite recursion of homunculuses, which of course is why it's a fallacy. But we've constructed some really kind of nice media around this, right? So this was kind of a claim by quite a few people and actually people in psychology. I don't think neuroscience field as being kind of like a nice analog in representation for how your mind actually works and how your personality actually emerges. That's for children. For adults, there is of stuff, right? So there's Godel Escherbach and there is I am a strange loop, which it was the replacement for Godel Escherbach. So he was like, I need to figure this out. And he wrote about music and art and life, biology and Zen and all these different things. And he tried to like compress it down in the book and it was this massive tomb. And then he was like, wait, I did it all wrong. I'll do it again with I am a strange loop. And he tried again and then he was invited to strange loop 2013 and he gave the keynote. And I was really excited because I actually enjoyed what parts of these books I've read. I have not read all of GED. And his keynote really fell flat because he has all this material and it's really beautiful when it's written down. But when he tries to distill it into a one hour talk, he can't really get to some conclusion that helps you with whatever he's talking about. He can't really define consciousness or define the self for you. And everybody I know is really disappointed in this. And I think the danger is that effectively what you're doing by trying to stand back from the self or the notion of self or consciousness from wherever it comes and look at it and say, OK, I'm going to dig it apart but at a distance I'm not actually going to do anything. You're effectively like an open source mailing list troll or somebody who reads a single book on genetics that's really well written and then goes to talk to a geneticist and is like, I understand your field and I understand all the things that you do with R and statistics and whatever you do all the way. If you haven't actually dug around in your own body and your brain, you don't really know this that intimately. And so shifting gears to another aspect of hacking, I do think that it's worth holding on to the notion of list as a programming language for software hackers. There are other kinds of hackers but I'm a software developer so it's the most approachable for me. This is an ESR quote and think of him what you will. He's not necessarily the greatest person but he has how to be a hacker as a document. It's been up on the web for a long time and he says, learn list to change your own brain. And maybe use list day to day but at least learn list so that you really get it and he even uses the term enlightenment. And if we look at list, list as a programming language has some really neat concepts baked into it. So one is homoiconicity. So list as a programming language for people who are not programmers in the audience has this notion of homoiconicity which means that the programming language itself is represented in the data structures and the recursive data structures which it consumes as data. And so it does this interesting thing it was like in the early days of computing where they recognized programs and computer and data have to be separate things, right? You have to separate those out and the programs work on the data and there's a relationship there and then list says, yes that's true and then I'm gonna mush them back together in this neat self-referential kind of cascading sort of way. And that allows you to do some really fantastic metaprogramming. What that means for metaprogramming is that because the program is written in the data structures it consumes there is no glass ceiling to the metaprogramming. So if you're programming in a list there's no talk. You can't ever get to a point where you can't metaprogram the thing that you just metaprogrammed. It's infinitely recursive in a way that most programming languages other than things that are lists because lists is a dialect to programming languages are not. It's also capable of self-mutation and self-replication. So you can take the program that you wrote and then you can write a program that mutates that program and create a new program just kind of neat. That's a little bit like biology. It's turtles all the way up because I just described so there's no glass ceiling to programs that you write in lists. And then lists as a sort of almost but not really functional programming language depending on your definition of functional has these notions of recursion and tranquil meaning which is that if I define a mathematical function in lists or any variant of lists that thing can call itself and it can call itself any number of times infinitely. And tranquil meaning is taking that and saying I could have two things and they could be calling each other infinitely and they could just keep on going on forever and ever. Where this gets a little sketchier as an analog is in the world of closure which is a list and fortress which is not with the notions of immutability, concurrency and mastering time. So in the 80s we tried to model the world by saying I have a chair I am going to create capital C chair and then I'm going to make instances of chair and it was like the whole object oriented phenomenon. Now we've kind of managed memory management and all that sort of thing. We're on to time. So we have a lot of this computer probably has eight cores in it. I don't know what. Computers are really fancy and they're trying to do a lot of things simultaneously and time and the speed of light all of a sudden become really important constraints for computer programmers. So fixing time is something that closure tries to do fortress tries to do it differently using algebra and fancy math and things like that. But that's a bit of an aside. So Vipassana is or would appear to be turtles all the way down in the same way that list is turtles all the way up. So list is not turtles all the way down although people have described it that way. So even if you're running on a list machine from the 60s say, so you have list and then your list virtual machine is written in list and then you're running on a list machine at some point you get to wires, right? And the wires are not made of list probably. They're probably like bound by the laws of physics and that sort of thing. So Vipassana is digging into your consciousness using your consciousness, right? So there isn't really a bottom to get to like, aha I found it the virtual machine or I found it the hardware and like now I can just go read the specification for human consciousness hardware and I'll know what's going on. So before we get into the mechanics of Vipassana we need to spend a little bit of time suspending this belief because this is part of the reason that you can't actually explain Vipassana in like a 30 second blurb to somebody because there are some parts to it that don't really seem real at first especially the way that people tend to describe them. So the first one is the easiest. Meditation is the thing, like we're going to for the course of this talk we're going to believe the meditation is the thing and what that means is that you can focus your attention on a single thing and you can maintain that attention without getting distracted by thinking about your taxes or whatever. Number two is a little harder. So number two is that your brain and your nervous system and we'll use those two entities for the sake of argument because that's kind of how we visualize it are tied together in a feedback loop faster and tighter than you could ever imagine without experiencing it. So this means that things are happening in your brain and in your body at a speed that you really couldn't fathom if you kind of saw and laid out on a timeline right now on a sheet of paper you would just be like, no, human beings don't do that. And then the third suspension of disbelief is the hardest one because it sounds goofy. Dissolution of the body is a thing. Dissolution of the body is not magic. It's not like levitation or like ESP or something like that. Dissolution of the body is the ability to see through your own body which actually doesn't seem that unreasonable. So your entire body is connected with your nervous system and if you had a pain on the inside of your body right now you would feel it. Like your brain is attached to that part of your body. But day to day we feel like the outside of our body is the only part that we really communicate with. So we're seeing things, we're hearing things and we're feeling things with our hands and feet and whatever, but we don't really think like, oh yeah, if I really focused I could like feel the shape of my stomach and know what it feels like. You kind of have to believe that that's possible to comprehend the rest of this. So spend that disbelief, go back to your disbelief after the talk if you like. But all it really is is saying that you can calm down the outer parts of your body enough to get inside and start feeling things. And so the two courses that I've taken I have not felt the shape of my stomach, right? I have felt the bones inside of my fingers. I felt like the blood vessels and that sort of things but things that I do not normally feel at all. And that will prove relevant once we actually start to get to the mechanics of the process. So I'm going to look into virtual reality, the matrix paradox and attention now. So starting with virtual reality, mostly because I stole this slide from Michael Abrush. So Michael Abrush is, I forget his actual title but he works on the Oculus Rift team at Facebook. And so at the F8 conference, he gave this somewhat stilted talk about virtual reality and what is reality really? So what is reality to you? If I can tell your brain that you're experiencing a thing then you can't know that that's not actually reality to you. And this is, of course, the matrix paradox. Everybody knows this, everybody saw the matrix and probably thought of this long before the matrix ever came out. What Michael Abrush's slide is missing is some senses actually. So he has the classic five senses and where they're wired up in the brain but he's missing a large collection of senses that are often thought of as the sixth sense or the sixth senses or the internal senses. There isn't a whole lot of agreements on how to name these actually. So appropriate exception we've talked about before which is where is my body in space? Do I know that I'm standing up? I'm not falling down. I'm sitting down. I'm lying down. Whatever. Nociception or noceoception is your sense of pain. So if your stomach does hurt, you feel that and your brain registers that you know that your stomach is there. And then hunger and other things going on inside your body are not really the sense of touch. That's usually what we associate with the nervous system and the nervous system sending signals to the brain but your sense of touch is primarily outside. And there are a bunch of other internal senses that operate this way. And then the seventh sense. So Buddhists, to break my rule and talk about Buddhism for a second, Buddhists would refer to this as the sixth sense door. So the mind. So if you are completely deprived of your senses, you still have your thoughts, you still have your memories, you still have your dreams, you still have math. Whatever's going on inside of you which is primarily thoughts and emotions if you think of those things as being different. And so you're doing Vipassana already. You're just very bad at it. We're all very bad at it. Vipassana is actually just taking this array of senses or sensory inputs and trying to choose the ones that you want and to poke at them a little bit. So where is your attention? And you kind of have to take some extreme examples to think of where your attention might be, right? So the first one is not that extreme. We've all been in a bustling restaurant and if you think of yourself as being in a bustling restaurant right now, you can imagine maybe how this graph would lay up. So if you're sticking a fork in your mouth, you're putting food in, you're tasting the food, your sense of taste is very active and a lot of your attention is focused on that. And probably the bustling restaurant has a lot of noise in behind your table or whatever and you're hearing some of that. So your hearing sense is very aware. Your other senses are maybe kind of quiet, right? Let's assume that you're not super worried about what's going on at work or whatever that day. And probably, interestingly enough, you don't have a lot of attention focused on proprioception and the internals of your body unless you've eaten something really spicy or something like that. So another example, which is a little more extreme is a sensory deprivation tank. So if people haven't seen one of these, I've only just used one of these very recently, my last trip back to Canada. A sensory deprivation tank looks like this. There's a light inside that you turn off once you get inside and you float in this water and you feel mostly nothing. So you feel the water against your skin but it's laden with every conceivable kind of salt so that you're very buoyant and you stay on top. So you don't drown, almost. And there's no sound and there's no light and there's no smell and you're obviously not tasting anything while you're in there. And you're feeling as little as possible in the tactile sense. And so if anybody's ever seen that episode of The Simpsons where Homer goes into a sensory deprivation tank with Lisa, they both go into one and they both hallucinate and they see neat stuff. Actually Homer goes for a ride. Lisa hallucinates. Sensory deprivation tank is much like this. So you might have a little more sense of touch than this is laying out but, and of course it's important to remember that these are all moving all the time, right? So like if you splash the water and you hear this flash and that you're hearing things will go up a little bit. So they're all sort of vibrating but they'll have like a general pattern. And what's interesting is when you're in sensory deprivation tank you become a little more aware of what's going on inside your body than you normally are. So that one goes up and you're definitely thinking, right? So you're in there and you're relaxing so you might not be thinking very aggressive thoughts, hopefully, but you're thinking about some stuff and it kind of takes over. So another great example for people who haven't tried any form of meditation whatsoever is an anechoic chamber. They look like this. So they are usually covered in large foam wedges and those large foam wedges absorb all sound. In fact, this anechoic chamber in particular has a decimal rating of minus nine which means that you will hear absolutely nothing from within the chamber. What you will hear is your own body. And so this is not maybe what you were thinking this graph would look like but it's actually kind of counterintuitive. You wind up hearing the noises, the ringing in your ears, the little bit of tinnitus that everybody has, the sloshing of the fluids in your body, the grumbling of your stomach but they're definitely loud and this tends to drive people a little nuts and so your brain starts to do a bunch of stuff. So we had trouble at the last talk. He says he's been in an anechoic chamber, not intentionally, he was setting up an experiment but he said he could only be in there for five minutes before he felt like he was going crazy. The previous anechoic chamber, this one, is actually used to run this human psychology experiment. The longest anyone has sat in this chamber is 45 minutes and then they really needed to get out. So we're gonna move from some kind of concrete examples into the mechanics of the pastana and before that the mechanics of anapana which is breath meditation. And so the word used in the pastana course is samadhi but I've decided not to use this word because in other schools of various practices, so Hinduism, Buddhism, yogic practices, various things, use the word samadhi to mean totally different things and we were just looking it up on Wikipedia before I gave the talk actually and it means like gravestones and things. So just to avoid any confusion, what we're talking about with anapana meditation is simply one point of this. So to take your attention to one single point and hold it there for as long as you can when your brain drifts away, bring it back. So it looks like this, you're sitting down, I apologize for the pixelation. You're all in like this cushiony thing and your focus, your singular focus of attention is your nose basically. So of all your body that you could be focusing on and anything else in the world, you're focused on your nose. So if this is your face, your brain likes distraction. So before I get to this, you will not just be focused on other physical things, you will be focused on your taxes, your mom, Christmas or whatever is coming up next, people in your family, people at work, all these sorts of things that you normally think about, it's hard to stop those thoughts. And so as you get a little better at this, I apologize if it's difficult to see, there's kind of pink rings and then the last one is kind of watery. You will be finding it difficult to focus your attention under your nose, which is where you're putting your attention. You'll be feeling itching and stuff on your face, but you'll also be thinking about taxes and you'll also be thinking about your mom and you'll also be thinking about the pain in your legs because you've been sitting for so long or whatever. But this goes on for three days and you finally get to a point where you have some narrow focus of your attention. So you might be able to do this for a few seconds, you might be able to do it for a few minutes, doesn't really matter. You've practiced this and you've gotten a little bit better at holding your attention in one place. So this is essentially our first suspension of disbelief. So meditation is a thing, that's not that hard to kind of get your head around. Attentiveness and what this looks like in terms of senses is your sense of touch. So your sense of touch just under your nose is feeling the breath moving in and out and it's feeling its midges and sweats and whatever else. I mean, you're probably hearing quite a bit of stuff, right? So your other senses have quieted down quite a bit, but when someone parts or burps in meditation hall, you're hearing it and it's kind of obnoxious and you'll get annoyed and your thought process will go to them and then you bring it back and you start feeling the same thing again. And so what pause in the meditation is what's more interesting for hackers, I think. And Anabana is basically just a way to get there. And Nick came up with this terminology that I really like, which is mutually recursive consciousness IO. So this is why to bother introducing lists as a concept or software programming in general or computers. So we have a title slide for that, but this whole thing that we're about to talk about is primarily about staying calm. So you've now narrowed down your attention to a single place and then now as you're looking at that single place, you want to kind of look at it and just be like, whatever is there, it's okay and I'm not gonna freak out, right? And so what this is is you move this attention from your nose to the top of your head and then you move the attention from the top of your head to slightly lower than that and then you move it around and then you'll move your way down. There's some intermediary states here and then you'll get like get to the middle of your body and you're moving it across your body and you're doing that. And you'll do that all the way down to the tips of your toes and then you'll move your way back up and you'll just keep doing it over and over and over looking at your body with this tiny little spot. And then there are other forms of this. So you'll take like a line and scan your whole body with the line where you'll look at your whole arm simultaneously. But for the sake of this argument, you can look at the very narrow case and just talk about that. So what we're doing now is we're saying, oh, okay, most of our senses are pretty quieted down. So we haven't talked to anybody for three days or four days. We haven't read any books. We haven't received any cranky emails, whatever. And so we're focusing ourselves and we get kind of calm and quiet and now we're focusing all our attention on what our body is doing. And so we're actually starting with the outside, so the skin and like hair follicles and stuff. So probably to begin with, the sense of touch is more important. But if you can move away from this notion that dissolution of the body is not a thing, then very quickly you start to move inside and feel blood and like tingly things inside your body and stuff. And so what this looks like for me personally is a lot of pain in my knees. So I'm Canadian and I never socked grass-legged as a child ever. So when I came to my first meditation course, which was not a repostment course, I went to go sit down, cross-legged for three days. It hurts a lot and that's pretty much the only thing I can think of. So very quickly thoughts of taxes and my mom get replaced with thoughts about how I wish my knees weren't hurting all the time. So this is mostly what my personal meditation diagram looks like. And what's interesting is if you can narrow the focus of your meditation object, which is just like a patch of skin or whatever like part of your body, small enough, right? And it's kind of fuzzy. So it sees things around it. So if you're focused on your neck, probably you're feeling the top of your chest and you're feeling your chin and stuff simultaneously because you can't really help it. But if I'm focused on my neck, I might not actually feel my knees at all and probably not to start with, right? But maybe on day eight or nine, the pain in my knees goes away until I move my attention down to my knee and they're like, oh crap, my knee still hurts. That's crazy. And then I move away from my knee and then it doesn't hurt anymore. And then every time I get down to my knee and it's hurting, if I can stay calm the rest of the time, my nervous system or my senses, however my body, however you want to kind of categorize it seems to calm itself down. And so every time I get to my knee I'm like, oh, it hurts a little less than last time. And then I'll go up and try and be calm everywhere else and then when I get to my knee, still trying to be calm, they're like, oh, it's hurting a little bit less again. And you get more relaxed and more relaxed and you're freaking out a little bit less all the time. So what's interesting is this is a very personal example. But if you can't feel the pain in your knees, despite the fact that the pain is real, it's there, your knees are still trying to tell your brain, like I hurt, I hurt, do something about this, stand up, go away, you can effectively eliminate all the rest of your sensory input, right? So this isn't just for knees, you're not just turning off pain in your knees, you're turning off all sorts of things. And so all these other graphs have to have had these senses wiggling around a little bit, right? And probably even in this graph, they're wiggling around a little bit, but they're getting closer and closer and closer to nothing. So you're not actually receiving any sensory input. One other personal example that I can lean on to talk about this and why this is different than being in a sensory deprivation tank. So being in a sensory deprivation tank or being in a meditation chamber where it's completely dark and my eyes are closed, I have a personal advantage, which is that I had a botched eyeball surgery last year. And the botched eyeball surgery crushed the center of my optic nerve. And so what that does is when I close my eyes, I see a yellow oval right in the center of my eye. And if the world is completely dark and my eyes are completely closed, I still see that yellow oval. And I will see that yellow oval just all the time. It's always there. And so what happens is at some point that goes away. So just because you're in the dark, just because your eyes are closed does not mean you've deprived yourself sense of the sense of sight. Your nerves are still active, they're still talking to your brain, but at some point they will quiet down to the point where they're not actually trying to do that anymore. They're not trying to tell me, oh, there's a yellow oval over there. They're just like, whatever, it's all turned off, don't worry about it. And what's interesting here is that your thought process has quieted down quite a bit, right? So taxes and mom and Christmas presents are gone. And what that's been replaced with is a totally different type of thought, which is probably impossible to describe to somebody who hasn't experienced this directly. But this thing, this new thought, and I put thoughts in quotes, and it's not normal thought at all, becomes a totally new kind of distraction. Because your brain really likes distraction, right? And we all kind of know this. So when you're trying to sleep because you have a really important thing to do the next day, your brain is doing all sorts of crazy things and focusing on all sorts of stuff that you don't want it to, right? And your brain sort of seems to be out of your control. You can't say, all right, brain, we're going to go to sleep now and you're going to stop thinking these things. And this is sort of the normal version of this. But the crazier version of this, the vipassana version of this, is where you seem to be looking at your nervous system over and over and over again, and its connection with the brain is kind of poking at the brain and it's saying, do something weird, do something weird. Like why don't you just wake up and be active, right? Like you stop thinking about taxes. So now think about what the body is prodding you into doing. And so you can break this down into a few ways. So Cherry was saying after the last time I gave this talk, arguably these things are the same system, right? So the brain and the nervous system can be thought of as a single system, the brain. The body can be thought of as a single system. The brain and the body can be thought of as separate for the brain and the nervous system, however you want to dice it up. But there's some either recursion or mutual recursion happening here. And so when we say that the brain, I'm going to say that the brain and body or the brain and nervous system are two chunks, right? And that they're mutually recursive so they're trampolining between each other. And to take it aside for a second, pain is a great example of this, right? So you'll see this when I was saying if you get to your knees and they're in pain and you're calming them down, you're like, I'm calm, I'm calm. And they start to get better. That is the reverse of this spiraling recursive process which is you get to your knee and it hurts and you freak out, right? You're like, oh my God, my knee is hurting. And you think that and then your knee hurts more. And your brain is telling your nervous system like, clench up your muscles and be uncomfortable. And this kind of winds up more and more, which is the way in which you get angry without being intellectually angry, right? And all the other things that are going on inside your brain and body. When we say mutually recursive to come back to this, this is not existential. This isn't that the brain could not live without the nervous system or the body or vice versa. This is operational. So what I just described, the pain cycle of it hurts. Oh my God, I'm afraid, I'm freaked out. I'm mad at myself for doing this. Oh my God, it hurts. It hurts more. It just keeps getting worse and worse. And it's like in calm down and unwind the stack. So this begs the question, can we actually see that this is what's happening? Can we hack Vipassana? So can we take Vipassana and look at it from the outside and dig it apart and peel it apart and figure out what the real internals are? And so I'm going to lean on Martin Thompson, who is a really intense JVM hacker. So I know that this talk is kind of geared toward all hackers, not just software hackers, but for the software hackers in the crowd. Martin Thompson has this great slide where he talks about he's built a death star and he has all these distributed load testing agents that are attacking his death star. So he's essentially saying, I built a software system and then I wrote software that attacks the software system by overloading it. And I want to assert that my software system holds up to the attack, right? And what he says is you cannot put that assertion in the X-wings and you can't put it in the death star because they are both biased, right? They are both seeing this thing from their own perspective. The performance of the death star is itself influenced by the observation of the performance of the death star and the observation is influenced by the performance same with the X-wings. And so what he says is stick an observer in there, this third party observer, right? And objective observer. And the objective observer can see how many lasers are being shot and how much damage is being done or whatever in his case. And that's a great way of testing software where you're completely outside of the software system altogether, right? But when it comes to consciousness, you're stuck. So if you put in a third party observer and you say, I have a machine that tells me exactly what my brain and body are doing this whole time that I'm meditating, guess what? When you go to read the machine, you're using your eyes and you're using your brain to process that information, right? If what you want to understand is your own consciousness, you cannot get away from this recursion. There's no way out of this trap, right? So you are stuck observing the observable thing with the observable thing, right? The observer is the observed and there's no way to kind of prevent that. So this whole section leans implicitly on this thing, this thing that we've decided on how to suspend disbelief about, which is the dissolution of the body is a thing because if you believe that your brain and nervous system are constantly interacting in some sort of back and forth or mutually cursive ping-pong, you have to be able to get to all the parts of the nervous system, right? If all you could see is the nervous system that affects your skin, you're saying like, as good as I am at meditating on my skin, that's how much I can do Vipassana, right? So you have to be able to get to the root of it, which in Vipassana is supposedly your final chord. I haven't done that, but that would be neat. And let's go back to the whole thing of a line. So here, where we're in this mutually recursive thing and you're actually, so when you're doing this, you're watching this, right? You're watching your thoughts because you can sort of see your thoughts without being too engaged in them. You're watching the effect on your body and you're watching the effect of the body and your thoughts and whatever. Or your emotions if you're upset about whatever's going on in your body. Honesty helps you with this whole dissolution of the body thing, right? So if you go into Vipassana and you're like, I am going to see you right through to my final chord and like, that's what I'm gonna feel and that's what I'm feeling right now, that's not gonna work. You have to see whatever is there. So if you're feeling itchy or you feel hungry or whatever, you have to just kinda look at that thing and be like, okay, it's there. Until your brain sort of gets bored of seeing that and then it'll go look for something else. And you'll actually start to see through your skin or your blood vessels or whatever you're seeing through. And so that's why this whole not lying thing is not a question of morality. It's a question of the actual mechanics of the meditation because the meditation won't work without doing this. You'll find this out though, it's interesting. So if you happen to lie to yourself, you will detect it. You will be very aware that like, oh, this, like, I'm just getting stuck on this thing and it's not really actually happening. So then what becomes your new distraction is that all these senses that you've turned off will or may come back to life. And so now we are really in the matrix paradox, right? So the classic matrix paradox is, how do we know that Earth, like Bangalore 2015 and all these people that I know and like my thought processes and my taxes, how do I know that they're real and they're not just a computer program and I'm like a piece of software or whatever, that's the usual matrix paradox. So the reverse is when Bapasana causes your senses to come back to life effectively and tell you that other things are going on. So this is where mutually recursive consciousness IO comes into picture. So this is where you've taken this like, I'm hurting or I'm angry or whatever, stack, right? And you've unwound it to the point that you're pretty calm and you're very passive and everything is going very nicely. And now it starts to wind itself back up again but in a totally different kind of way, completely new kind of distraction that you're probably not that familiar with. I mean, if you take hallucinogenic drugs, perhaps, right? Salvia in particular is legal in most countries. It's a terrible experience, I don't recommend it. But one of the effects of salvia is that you will feel as though you were transported to another dimension in another time or another time in your life, so back to childhood and you fully experience all the things in that other dimension or that other time, right? So when you come out of being high from salvia and I wouldn't really describe it as a high because it's really unpleasant. You will have walked around the room and you will like picked up things and done things and you will not remember any of it. What you'll remember is, oh no, I should have turned off my thing. Sorry, this is, that's to have my broken eyeball. And so that's the only experience I can think of to relate to what is happening here in Gopasana. And so I did say that we wouldn't talk that much about the experience of Gopasana, but I think that it helps to lean on a couple of concrete examples. So in the same way that when you go to use an API or when you go to put together a piece of furniture, it helps to see the example of like, these two things will be better than this. And we won't spend much time on this, but I'm gonna start with a non-example. And this is actually when you go to YouTube and you Google Gopasana experiences, this is what you will always find, right? You will find the people who are like, I saw the craziest thing and I unraveled all the mysteries of the universe and like, they basically constructed a paradox and then resolved the paradox for themselves in a way that's not communicable through normal language. And so if you have a mathematical or linguistic paradox that cannot be communicated to another person, there's really no point in talking about it at all. So that's why not to watch those YouTube videos and why to skip over that non-example. So a better concrete example would be Nid. So Nid was on the last Gopasana course that I took. And in one of the later days, she had this experience where she was in the middle of meditating and all of a sudden it felt as though she was transported to our friend Philippe's house and she was sitting at the dinner table and she was holding Raphael, Philippe's two-year-old son. And it wasn't that she was dreaming this and it wasn't that she was imagining or thinking about that memory. It was physically reliving that memory as though she were really there, as though that would really happen. So that's one. So that's like your sense of touch comes back and probably your sense of smell with the dinner or stuff. I don't know if that's true or not, I'm making that up. And so one for me was writing a poem. So this doesn't actually sound like all your senses coming back to life, but this was my senses coming back to life in a way, mostly my mental sense, in a way that I'd never seen before. So my brain was basically over here going, I have written the most beautiful poem you will ever hear. This is the greatest thing on earth and you're wasting your time over here meditating. Come finish the poem. Write the last line of the poem. That's all you have to do. You did this anyway. Your brain did this for you. Just finish off the poem. And it's your brain doing this weird thing of like tempting you not with taxes, but with like beauty and arts. So like, stop meditating. I don't want you to meditate anymore. Come do this other thing. It's obviously not real. I hadn't actually written the world's most beautiful poem. It was just this kind of figment of my imagination, but it was also very concrete. It was something that I was experiencing directly. So then we get into things that were a little harder to kind of imagine or are harder to come in contact with, but are still approachable, right? So like, time slowing down is one. And time slowing down is probably a poor way of describing this. So one specific experience is going for the early morning meditation in particular. So it starts at four a.m. And it goes for two hours. So it actually, sorry, it's 4.30 to 6.30 a.m. But you can start it at four a.m. when the first bell goes off if you want. So you can sit there for two and a half hours. And sometimes you get in a really deep meditative state where your senses are doing all these crazy things and you feel like a lot of stuff is going on. When I say time's slowing down, I mean, it feels like you've been teleported to another place and you're experiencing other things. For an incredibly long time. Like tens of thousands or 20s of thousands of years, like for hundreds of thousands of years, it's really hard to kind of get a handle on what you think you've experienced. But you come out of this and be like, whoa, I just teleported to another dimension and I just experienced 100,000 years worth of time like that. And then you have to kind of think about what's really happening. Or alternatively, time speeding up, right? So sometimes you just go to, particularly in the later days of the course, you'll go and sit down for those two and a half hours or one hour and you'll sit down and you'll be like, all right, time to meditate. Then you start meditating and then all of a sudden the thing goes off the sounds that tell you that it's done, right? And you're like, I didn't meditate yet. Like I just sat down a second ago. This really shouldn't have happened. And then what's more confusing and less approachable is this idea of time going backward. And so it will feel like causing effect internally have been reversed and you're like traveling time in a different direction, not necessarily just backward, but like sliding back and forth and stuff, which is extremely difficult to describe as an experience. And I don't have a drug related corollary for that. I don't think that there are drugs that make you feel this or at least I hope not, because it's quite scary. But those are some examples, concrete examples. And so finally we get to outcomes. And so the kind of final outcome is so okay, great. You can have all these crazy experiences and you can like play with your senses and your brain and all sorts of ways that maybe you haven't tried before or maybe you have and you've done differently. What happens after the meditation is over? Because that's sort of the whole point of doing meditation is not just to sit there silently for 10 hours a day, but to have something happen to you. So first off, I'm gonna lean on Michael A. Gresh's Oculus Rift virtual reality talk again, where perception is relative and he brings up this example, right? So we all know this meme that was floating around Twitter and Facebook and stuff, the dress, right? And people were like, oh my gosh, I see it this way. Oh my gosh, I see it this way, different colors. And they're like, wow, people with different bodies and eyes see things differently. There's not that revelatory, but people thought it was like pretty neat, right? And so then of course, there's always like these visual tricks that you can do. So perception is relative with yourself. And so the Japanese, I think they took the dress and created this, which is like, this is the dress again, but you're seeing two separate colors simultaneously at the same time, even though they're the same. This is kind of a classic trick. There are all sorts of these. And so what I'd like to talk about is not the dress, but the cow. So there was a really adorable, I guess, cow that would wander around the meditation center on the last horse that I took, chewing on things and doing cow stuff. And I think it was on the ninth or 10th day that I was filling a bucket with hot water for a bath. And I was watching the cow and I looked up and I saw the cow and I was in like one of these kind of like, I've been meditating for a while, so I feel very like light and airy. And I looked at the cow and the cow was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen. It was amazing. It was a wonder of nature. It was a work of art. And it was like ready to start believing in God. And I looked down at my bucket and I'm like, bucket's still not full. Okay, good. And I looked up at the cow and the cow was not unlike this cow actually, like quite emaciated and bony and horrifying. And I felt really disgusted by what I saw in the cow and all of a sudden it was like, someone switched the cow, like a second ago with beautiful cow and now this is a horrifying cow. And I don't understand how like these images are so incredibly different from one another, even though the time period was a lapse and like I'm not doing vipassana, so time is just normal. It's like two seconds, but these things are completely, completely different. Yeah. And so that's one of these things that vipassana seems to do after the meditation is that it's altering your perception somewhat and you become a little more aware of your own perception. So you're aware of what you're seeing and how you're judging it and how you're evaluating it. So I think this thing is really beautiful and I think this thing is really ugly and I like this thing or I don't. And it seems to change it in kind of drastic ways. And so there's also this. So honey, don't forget what the half life is on the autonomic nervous system is the little cute quote that they have at the end of the Radio Lab podcast where they're talking about how the autonomic nervous system drives you into anger and getting upset either quickly or slowly and then how it kills itself off either quickly or slowly. This whole thing, this autonomic nervous system is what makes and keeps you angry and it's also what makes you afraid and sad and anxious and depressed and pretty much everything else. And so at the end of a vipassana course you will find that most of these things have been really switched down. So you're still feeling emotions. You're still a human being but you're not reacting to things the way that you would have 11 days prior. So I'm not getting upset with people honking a bunch and I'm not getting mad when I see somebody littering in the street and I'm not as attracted or repulsed to things maybe, a cow say, as I would have been. And I'm more aware of how that process is working in my body and how I can pay attention to it to watch it kind of calm down. So that's kind of helpful. So I mentioned that I'm a fairly angry anxious person by nature. This is why I do vipassana and why people keep asking like, why do you pay for this? It's free. But the reason to do this thing even though it can be fairly unpleasant as an experience is because it does seem to prove fairly helpful if you're actually doing a systematic process and what that systematic process is is fairly straightforward. You're saying like, narrow your attention down to this tiny spot and then just very boring over your whole body with it and just watch whatever your body's doing and be okay with that until it goes away. I kind of calm it down and then move to another beast and be okay with that and calm it down and move to another beast systematically work through your whole body and calm down your nervous system and maybe your brain depending on how you've divided this picture up to get better at being calm a lot of the time. Maybe some, maybe automatically or maybe by accurate practice like to have the first of the day. I won't weigh in on that. And then there's this thing. So coming back to the whole hacker's argument or analogy. So hacking is usually about removing the magic, right? I remember when I first started using the web and I was like, oh, these web pages are showing up on my computer and they're coming from not my computer. It was like 12 or 11 or something or like I don't know how this works. I don't understand TCP, IP, I do not understand DNS. I have no concept of what layers are going on underneath the covers. I don't really understand what HTTP stands for. I don't understand why there's a WWW at the beginning of every web address which there was at the time because history. And I didn't understand how any of the software was working on the computer that I was using. I didn't understand the difference between a piece of software and an operating system. I don't know who's a kid. Some kids do understand these things. But once you go and start hacking these things, right? Or I'm like, I'm gonna learn how a Netscape navigator once it was open sourced looks internally or Firefox. So you're like, go and look through the Firefox code base and you pull it apart and you're like, ah, okay, there. That's how Firefox works. And you can pull apart machinery and if people go out of their way to stop you from looking at the insides of their stuff or put a patent in your way, then it's harder, right? But for the most part, and sometimes when people put guards in place to stop you from finding out a thing, when you find out that thing, it's the least magical thing imaginable, right? So you just destroy magic altogether. There's no mystery to a thing that you understand really comprehensively. So far, we should do 10 day courses. The postulate seems to work in the other direction. So the first postulate course, I was like, wow, that was really crazy. And then this second postulate course that was even crazier and I seem to understand but now I have a bunch of extra questions. Like I don't understand all sorts of other things about how this actually worked. And so it's not magic, right? But the mystery of what's going on inside of your body and your brain and the consciousness that's erupting between the two of them seems to just kind of be unbounded as you explore it. So I think that that's kind of neat for hackers and I think that that is worthwhile argument for saying that hackers who are interested in this should give it a shot. These are my credits and references that I do have. So one of them has gotten cut off. So these are all the external credits and references. And then the last two are a couple of blog posts that I've written again to try to distill this stuff for people who would ask me questions and I couldn't really manage it in a verbal conversation over dinner or whatever. So one was just my first go-ahead experience and then describing the mechanics and what does the course actually look like and what happened to me. And then the second was for a friend who was asking about experimenting with drugs actually and experimenting with meditation. And so I explained all the experiences that I have, the risks and dangers associated with those things and why maybe not to do some of them and why some of them are safer and more approachable and whether or not they should be combined which is almost always no, right? So if you're experimenting with anything that has to do with your brain, take it really slowly and do it one step at a time. So those explanations are up on my blog if this did pique your interest in any of these things. And that is the end of my talk. I know you guys have to be, if anybody else has questions as usually the way. Thanks, Bea. I do this thing of course. I mean, I don't do that much about the actual sources of the things that we can do right now. So no. So interestingly enough, the video lectures, so sorry, I'm closer to the microphone. The question was for the video. Is there anything stopping you from doing this at home? And the kind of literal answer is no. So the course is given by video lecture one hour every evening for 10 days, so 10 hours. And there's a bit of instruction during the day. So while you're sitting there, while you're sitting there meditating, there is some audio that's played that describes like now focus on this part of your nose. Now focus on this, like look for these sensations, that sort of thing. So the thing about that is that the audio instruction which is probably more helpful is not released. So they don't, the possible people or whatever, they don't really encourage people to do the course on their own because you can have some pretty freaky experiences and they would prefer that there's somebody who knows the whole thing very well and you can make sure that you're being safe and you're being, that you're okay, right? So there are some people, so who really can't handle the course. So you'll find that there are people that leave them with the third and the fifth day as things start getting more intense. And that is universally the one adjective that you will hear people use to describe them with passing the course, intense. It's not really relaxing, right? You experience a lot of things in the course. Some of the time it's relaxing, but when people come out, the one adjective that they'll use, intense. And so if you're having that on your own at home or whatever, that could be a bit freaky. So they don't release the audio. They do have the videos up on YouTube so you can watch all 10 videos and you could like try to do a 10 day course on your own. But I would recommend against it actually. So I actually think that the course setup is, it's really neat, it's neat that it's free. And it's neat that anyone can go so like there's no restriction bar one. So the one restriction that they do have is your present mental state. So if you have clinical anxiety or clinical depression, you will not be invited to do a pass the course. So the pass the courses are, they're request based so you fill out a form and you send it to them and you're like, can I please take the course? You can try if you have clinical anxiety or depression but generally the response that comes back is we're volunteering women. Our volunteers are not professionals and if something goes really wrong with you, like if you're super depressed and you get more depressed because of the pass the they won't be able to help you in a professional way. Because they're just like you and me, they have jobs, they just go there to volunteer their time out of the goodness of your hearts. So that, and if you've had like a recent traumatizing life event, which can put you in like a wild temporary depression. So if like somebody in your family has died or you've experienced some others form of trauma, don't go on a pass the course because they'll generally reject you and embrace your own senses as well. But otherwise it's open to everybody. And the facilities match up really well with what they're trying to do. So they feed you at the right time and they wake you up at the right time because the right time is four a.m. which is how you do it now. So they do say at the end of the course, once you've taken this first course and you're kind of like, I know what I'm getting into. The recommendation if you're going to take the pass in seriously is to try to do it once a year. So attending course once a year. And the recommendation is if you can't get away from your home city to do attend a course in your own home with like a significant other or a friend providing you food and maybe waking you up with a really thoughtful. So the recommendation is that you could do a course on your own but only maybe once you've done your first course on your first edition. Is it like you can do it? You know it's a little bit of a challenge. If you don't want to practice at home. Sorry, say that again. So can you like do it every day if you're pregnant or you have to do it at home? So the question was, can you do it on your own at home and do you have to do it in the course setting? So the recommendation that you try and do attend a course at home if you can't make it to a course site for your like second and third course if you want to take more courses. I mean think would intrinsically apply that you can try to do it at home. The other recommendation that they make or that as I'm going, who's on the videos and stuff. His recommendation is, Vipassana is great for you because it's great for me. So do it lots, right? And his schedule is do it by yourself one hour in the morning and one hour in the evening. Every day. So personally, I try to do that. I can do the morning meditation so I wake up usually around five, five, 36 and that gives me enough time to do like a one hour meditation before I eat breakfast and everything else and like get into email. I find the evening much harder. And so there's actually the Vipassana group on Insight Timer which is the little Android app that I use for the bombs. And everybody seems to have the same problem. They're like, I can meditate for like 30, 45 minutes in the morning, but the evening is really hard for me because I have to make dinner and I have to put the ginseng bed and I have to do this and I have to do that. I can wake up an hour earlier before everyone else and do an hour of meditation. So whatever you do after the dinner, about the whole process of meditation, what is it? The intensity of the whole process of meditation. Is it just about trying to look deeper and deeper in the morning? So the question was, where is this balance live? Maybe I'll replay the question to see that I understand it. Where is the balance live between this crazy intensity of the course versus the utility of doing it day to day? So what I want to do better is I'm doing what the main portion has said of the whole course. The intensity of the long hours and without talking, like is it only a one thing to look deeper, look deeper, to do the inverse? So are you asking, is it only about the meditation and the value derived from the meditation or in the book? Excuse me. Or is it about the value you derive from the meditation and the course surrounding? So like the food you eat and yeah. So yes and no. So the ultimate objective of structuring the course in that way is to, thank you so much. The ultimate objective as they describe it is to help you meditate. So the reason that you can't talk to other people during the course is because if Nid and I had been at the course and we could just talk whenever. On the fifth day we both would have been like, I feel like crap because after the course we were both like, was the fifth day really hard for you? Like lots of emotions and you did want to leave and stuff. And we were both like, yeah, the fifth day was terrible. And so if you could talk to somebody and ask that, like do you want to leave? You would probably both leave. Or you would at least be distracted from the meditation itself. So that said, the reason that I focus so much on the physical aspects of the meditation or like the mechanics of the meditation is because all those other things, right? The quiet, the dark room that you're in when you meditate in a cell, if you meditate in a cell, the long hours, the food that you eat, the fact that you're not allowed to read books, all that stuff. It's only there to kind of move you toward being better at the meditation. So if those things didn't affect your meditation, they probably wouldn't be parameters of the course. So to give like a counter example, because there's only so many things that you can do during the course, right? You can have a bath and you can walk around, right? So like if the course said no bathing for 10 days, the idea behind that would be like baths are bad for meditation, right? It's not like there's some magical reason or any of that stuff. So intrinsically, like comparatively, if you remove the meditation and if you go into the wilderness for 10 days by yourself and you don't talk to anybody, you'll have an experience, that it will be nothing like you have in the class. Did you mention you're going to another class? Yeah. So yeah, so I'm going for lunch in about a week. I wonder what do you expect from that? Are you excited or do you want to do something? It's a mixture of feelings. So the previous Bapasana, the second Bapasana course that I took. So when I actually kind of skipped out on a bit, the whole thing about Martin Thompson and your ability to observe yourself as a third party observer and the fact that you can't really do that as your own consciousness, observing your own consciousness. So what I was trying to do in the second Bapasana course that I took was to do that. I was trying to like take a part of my brain and just like moving over here and just like keep watching what's actually going on in my body, in my mind. And what ends up happening if you try to do that is you get very doubtful about the course structure, about the meditation itself and you're kind of rolling in this doubt instead of doing the meditation. The other thing that happens is you don't get to like pick out a piece of your brain and move it over here, really. And say, okay, this piece will watch everything else and just see what's going on. It becomes a little bit more like single CPU context switching where you're like, I'm meditating. Oh my God, I'm thinking, oh, I'm meditating. Oh my God, I'm thinking. And so that was when I found very distinctly that my sense of hearing was kind of out. So I was noticing that like, if I let myself think, I could hear the birds. Any early morning meditation. And then if I stopped thinking mostly and really focused on meditation in the later days, the birds, I was like, whoa, the birds stopped chirping. It's like, no, the birds didn't stop chirping instantly like that. I started meditating. And then once I had the thought, oh, the birds stopped chirping and I can hear them again. And so it's violently fluctuating between these two things. I will not do any of that on this course if I can at all avoid it. I would like to follow the instructions as closely as possible because that 10 days of doubt that I applied to my second course basically told me, this seems like a pretty sane thing to do. So I think that some of the people that attend the Boston courses make me uncomfortable. So they tend to be a little culty, like a little bit weird. And I realized that's judgmental, I mean. No, it would be almost to be honest. So like, my graduation present would be like good and bad, but I'm not sure it is. Yeah, it's quite, there's a lot of different like some sections of belief structure. Yeah, so the second time I went to the university, I just wanted to make sure that people got the day to get into the office. So, yeah, at least in those respects, I hope I can just kind of like dive in and do whatever's going on. And if the people around me are bothering me I'll try to not let them bother me. And in terms of expectation, I really, I have a bunch and then every time I realize I'm having an expectation about the course, I try to kind of move myself away from it because if there's one thing that I think will always be true for Kipasa, at least I'm guessing, it's that it never turns out the way that you expect. So the first one, I was like, I've done meditation courses before, they're pretty chilled out. So when you just sit around and you get really relaxed after, I mean it was nothing like I expected and then the second one was nothing like I expected. So I'm guessing this third one will also be completely unlike the first two or having the expectation that it'll be completely unlike the first two, maybe it'll be exactly like one of the first two, who knows. I do think there is an ease to doing it. So when you come away from the course, the early morning meditation is much easier for the first month or two because you've been practicing this thing and it's kind of like basketball or anything else. So like if I'm playing on the basketball team in high school and I get to grade 12 and I graduate and then the first couple of months in university, my friends are like, let's play basketball. I'm like, okay, cool, we play basketball and they're still kind of okay at it. If someone asked me to play basketball now over a decade since I graduated from high school, I would be incredibly better because I haven't practiced in a long time and it is a practice. So I think that that does actually kind of apply. So I do expect the daily practice to be slightly easier when I come out of the course. And I think that that's a fairly easy decision. It's hard to say, you know, it might become harder for me to do this. Yeah, I found, so some of the resistance that I experienced is there are days where I really, really can't focus for like more than a second, right? On my nose. And so the kind of home practice, so like doing it at home, the home practice is do vipassana, but if you can't focus on vipassana, like if your brain is all over the place and you're thinking about taxes, then do vipassana and calm yourself down and then do vipassana. And there are a lot of warnings that I wake up and I'm thinking about work and I'm thinking about this person and I'm thinking about this travel that I have to do and I'm thinking about money or whatever human issues I have. And I can't focus at all and I'm just like, I'm worried about this thing and I've set up this person, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so I'm just doing vipassana for an hour and 45 minutes into that, you're like, I don't wanna do this anymore. But you're just gonna stand up and go have a shower and get to work 15 minutes earlier. And so I think that doing the courses does kind of move you away from that sort of meditation in a given. So one thing I like about this process on my mind there is a distinction between control and sensuality, definitely sense control. And it's like control is like one step above deprivation point, deprivation is one kind of control that you use to take control of the thing. So is any part of vipassana having like, does any part of vipassana have to control over the sense other than sense or whatever thing you have here? Not really, so if you read about, so like as far as the vipassana course is concerned it's basically like narrow down on the spot, you move it around and just keep doing that, right? And so the instruction goes so far as to say if you have completely dissolved your body where you just don't feel like there's a body anymore which would be the like, I'm not sure who I am state that the neuroscientists refer to. And supposedly that's what it feels like. Like it's very scary to cross, like lots of people have done this. This is really not, it's not like a fancy thing, especially monks. So if you speak to monks or people who've been through this experience, they're like, the first time that you dissolved your whole body mentally, you have this really scary moment where you're not sure if you could like, should go this last mile of just observing yourself and then you do it and then it feels like this concept of oneness often comes up there or whatever. But the instruction at that point is just, okay now just keep doing it, right? Like if part of your body reemerges, like your fingers back, then just look at your finger until it goes away. So that meditation is basically like, just keep doing this thing where you're like really calm with everything that you're feeling internally. And then I read a couple of things of Goenka describing like his instruction when he was in Burma, where it's like, okay, you've completely dissolved your body and you don't really feel it and just feel like vibrate or whatever. And now you're going to stop meditating and you're gonna try to feel that while you're like awake and conscious. So you maintain this state and you walk around and you eat food and you like do normal things while maintaining this. And I guess at that point, Vipassana as like an instruction would say, now kind of apply this to other sensory input, right? But it's not really, I don't think that's about control. So you're saying, when you're saying control, the seventh sense or the sixth sense of like internal feeling, it's not exactly control because you're just trying to watch without doing anything, right? It's kind of the opposite of control. So you're like controlling where your attention is, but that's it. And then to let your other senses in, I imagine, I have no idea and I probably will never know, is just to like let your senses come in and be like, oh, okay, food feels like this or like I'm just eating block and just like completely okay with it. I don't get upset one way or the other. Like I don't get passionate and I don't get angry or depressed or whatever. But that's like, you don't read much about that. And it doesn't talk about it in the course really. So I'm guessing that's something that you probably have to experience to become a teacher of Vipassana, but I'm not even sure. But the interesting thing is not just anything that I told you, I think anything that Vipassana did requested when you, like, this course is about training your nervous system to become in case like with extreme situations where you don't even think about it. But if you realize that something is, you're gonna see what it is, you're gonna hear what I'm saying. So the practice is so that if you may come, you're gonna have something that you can have and you can add it without you knowing it. Okay, so that's where I'm gonna end this. So that's why it's up to us to do it. The most essential practice is not to be with half a day to go to the gym, to go to the gym, but to make yourself comfortable enough for that to be doing outside in the morning. I'm going to also ask you one of your questions, the one mentioned from the last page, which is that one. So I think just by watching the analysis of all the celebrations, because you may be in action, so that you actually take action, because you're not necessarily reacting to all the celebrations. You actually become a lot more aware of how they're really, that's what you can't really do. So it's also a bit like in front of you, you're actually like, you know, you come to the gym, you're in the middle of the gym, and you go on the first thing, it's watch your breath as you pass by the post. It would be like, you know, I'm not feeling it, I'm not feeling it, I'm not feeling it, it doesn't matter, it's watch. But if you are, it's probably the same, because you have no idea how to respond. But just like that, so... Does anybody else have any other questions, or should we use that? Okay, we'll start with you.