Ep201: Revealing Nirodha Samāpatti - Delson Armstrong, Shinzen Young, Chelsey Fasano, Dr Laukkonen

In this episode, special guests Delson Armstrong and Dr. Ruben Laukkonen discuss their latest groundbreaking paper, Cessations of Consciousness in Meditation, Advancing a Scientific Understanding of Nirodha Samapatti, in which Delson Armstrong's ability to enter the rarefied state of Nirodha Samapatti, a feat of extended cessation achievable by only the most virtuoso meditators, was tested by Dr. Laukkonen's neuroscience team with astonishing results. They join the ongoing discussion with Shinzen Young, meditation teacher and neuroscience research consultant, and Chelsea Fasano, a Columbia University neuroscience graduate. Delson and Dr. Laukkonen tell the story of their study, how it came to be, the various tests they administered, and why they believe the results are so remarkable. into the state of Nirodha Samapatti, and to stay there for up to seven days.

How he can determine in advance to the minute when he will exit the state, and the profound effects on the mind after a period of extended cessation. Shinzen analyzes Delson's abilities, probes the mathematical models used in the study, and shares his own work creating enlightened AI arhats. The panel also discusses possible scientific connections between Buddhist doctrines such as the five aggregates, dependent origination, and the three gates of liberation.

Wow. I am delighted that the stars have aligned, if you'll forgive the pun, to allow such a stellar lineup to come together here to discuss this fascinating new paper, Cessations of Consciousness in Meditation, Advancing a Scientific Understanding of Nirodha Samapatti, published very recently in the Progress in Brain Research Journal. Our illustrious panel here, Shinzen Young, Chelsea Fasano, thank you so much for joining us, along with very special guests, Delson Armstrong and Dr. Ruben Laukkonen. So in a moment, Ruben, I'm going to ask you to summarize the paper for us. But first of all, I wonder if you would both mind saying, perhaps starting with Delson, in just a few words, what your role was in this study?

So I was the subject. I was the guinea pig for the research. And Ruben, the lead researcher, is that the right way to characterize it? That's right. Yeah. Well, thank you. Dr. Ruben, would you be so kind as to give us a brief summary of the study and how it came about? And then from that point onwards, it's open for dialogue. Sure. Excellent to be here and really, really wonderful to have this happen so quickly after the paper came out. So the paper is about a very interesting state called Nirodha Samapatti. And the way this came about was that I was hanging out with a friend of a friend and he was quite a serious meditator himself.

And he told me that he has a meditation teacher of his that can do something very unusual with his mind, which is essentially to turn off his consciousness at will. And along with that goes things like experiences of time, of space, of self, basically everything we take to be part of our subjective experience with no experience of anything happening in that period of what's known as cessation or Nirodha or Nirodha Samapatti in this specific case. And when I heard about this, the way it was pitched to me, I have to admit, I was initially very skeptical. In some ways, there's parts of me that still harbor the skepticism, and I'm excited for future research about this.

But the way it began is he told me about this state. I was very skeptical. And then he pulled out his phone and showed me this time series of neural data, specifically, spectral data. You see things like alpha frequencies, beta frequencies, gamma frequencies, and so on. And it was done with one of these kind of market EEGs known as a Muse headband. And so I was showing this little time series. I think it's about a five-minute snippet. So you can imagine there's this five-minute snippet of neural activity unfolding.

And it all looks very normal, except for about just about 10 seconds before the end, there's just this complete flatlining and then a return up, so all of these neural frequencies in the brain, in this sort of very home science sort of job, that they seem to briefly disappear during the specific moment that this cessation, this absence of this meditation induced absence of consciousness occurred. So this was of course fascinating as a scientist. I had a lot of alarm bells ringing at the same time. I thought, this is not a rigorous device. This is not something we would use in the lab. We use something much more complicated with many electrodes on the head.

This is just a kind of band on the frontal lobes. And so you might have something that's going on there. For example, there's just a failure in the capacity of the system to transform the data, to do whatever transformations it needs to get those frequencies out because you have to do some transforms to the data in order to actually extract these particular neural functions. frequencies. So I was expecting there's all these possibilities going on, but this kind of made me curious enough to kind of follow this up. And I've also been a meditator for 15 years or so. And so, having experienced some very strange things, I was kind of probably more open-minded than the other scientists in the lab.

So when I brought them this prospect, it was initially a bit of a hard sell, but then I saw that movie. It's called Flatliners. It didn't end well. Not to interrupt, but they made a movie about this, right? We're going to flatline. And now it's like, what? This is a little cinematic and a little hard to believe.

Yeah, no, it was really wild. And of course, there's this sort of both excitement and skepticism sort of all blended together and this sort of curiosity. This is really, I think, the right scientific attitude to be curious. And so I brought it with this sort of spirit to my collaborators and the professor I was working for at the time, Professor Helene Slagter, who's sort of the co-PI on the project. So I brought it to her and we discussed it and we thought, hey, we should at least have a conversation with this interesting meditator. And so we set up a Zoom call to chat with Delson. And there was a few of us there, and we were really impressed by that conversation.

And we talked to Delson. He described his background, how this came about, how it's described in the suttas, in classical Buddhism. He describes what the actual phenomenology is. And it was really when Delson describes the experience of how one enters through the different stages of meditative deepening where this then unfolds, and also the re-emergence from that state, that I think all of us were somewhat

more convinced that this is possible and the reason for that is we'd recently developed this kind of broad theory of meditation from the perspective of predictive processing, which are these new overarching models of the brain, and when describing this deconstruction and reconstruction of the mind, it resonated super well with our scientific theoretical work about how the mind constructs itself in each moment, because the mind is made up of layers and so on. So there's this sort of resonance, and also with, for example, Helene, who's herself not a meditator at all and a long time in the field studying meditation, so very much sort of clear that these things are doing something, but not at all sort of otherwise inclined to believe these outlandish claims if there's not sort of evidence.

And the more extraordinary the claim, the more extraordinary the evidence. But she also, if I can speak for her, was very much resonating with this description. And we both sort of, I think all of us that left that meeting felt sort of, hey, there might be something here. Another thing we're very much impressed by was Delson's very open, the real openness to be rigorously tested and sort of sobriety variety with which the whole thing was described

And this suggested to us, what would he have to gain by making this up? And if we take him into the lab, this can only kind of look bad if it doesn't work out that there's something going on anyway. So this sort of discussion really heated things up and got us excited about it. And so we got to work kind of designing an experiment time before Delson actually was arriving in Amsterdam, though, or I think it was that the trip sort of came up spontaneously and we're like, okay, he happens to be here.

Let's make this happen. So we moved very quickly and came up with an experimental design and tested him over a couple of days, mostly doing EEG work, but we hooked him up to all kinds of other measures. We did two days of testing, and on the first day we presented stimuli in different states of meditation: focused attention, sort of a control condition where he was just watching a documentary, and then also during the nirodha samapatti, the cessation of consciousness state. And we repeated this multiple times, presented some stimuli and took the EEG and different physiological data. And then we moved on and did it the following Monday. So that was a Friday.

And there we had three conditions. We had a nap condition. We had a cessation condition and then a control condition again. there was what's the difference between this state and sleep for instance. There's a huge amount of data to analyze and given how extraordinary this state is, we are really taking our time with doing the data analysis, being careful to replicate. We are analyzing and reanalyzing. I am having people analyze it who are skeptics, and who have no interest in the data coming out the way we might want it to come out. So we're being very careful about it. And this recent paper was very much the kind of initial conceptual overview of nirodha samapatti and what it actually means for our understanding of the mind and consciousness, assuming that this capacity really is possible, this capacity to at will kind of subdue your own conscious experience, which is very interesting because you imagine this agent being a construct sort of within our conscious experience.

And yet somehow this agent develops the capacity to turn itself off. It's kind of mysterious in this way. And so we kind of took a theoretical approach to it, trying to understand what is the process that's unfolding there, and also just provided a kind of taste of some preliminary data that might be going on there. And we gave that taste because, coincidentally, our colleagues at Harvard, from Matthew Sackett's lab, had their own meditator there doing these sort of brief nirodha cessations, which is a little bit different from nirodha samapatti, but also has this quality of a brief absence of consciousness.

And they found something interesting, which we might go into in more detail, but it is this sort of breakdown in alpha synchronization, or functional connectivity, in the brain. And so we thought, hey, let's first try to apply this to our data. We found the same thing for cessations. So we thought, hey, look, this seems consistent. There's probably other people interested in this. We know they're interested. A theoretical overview about what this state is, what it means for science, give them a taste of what we think is a robust finding across the two labs. And then there's much more to come out, and I think, as a caveat for the rest of the conversation, I don't want to speak too much about the other data. I can say it's interesting, and I'm probably most excited about that data, even more so than what we have so far released, but I don't want to talk about it too much until we're super confident about what we found.

So that's the story. By the other data, you mean Matthew's data or? No, our data. So we have this EEG data, but EEG data can of course be analyzed in all sorts of ways, right? So we can look at spectral frequency, and we also presented stimuli, so we can look at stimulus responses in the brain. We can do machine learning on the data. And then we also have this physiological data, and also potentially interactions between physiological and neural data. So all of this we're still unpacking. Yeah. And it's very rich. And we have two days of testing as well. And then Matthew also has his own more data coming out soon. That's the story.

That's wonderful. Thank you, Ruben. Now I think we've got a few options. We might turn to Delson. And perhaps, Delson, you could say a little bit about your side of the story, if you like. That might be interesting. Or we could open straight up into dialogue, if that's coming up. I'd lobby to hear Delson's perspective. Can I ask you a question? Yeah, go ahead. And just very quickly, I just wanted to say also a huge thank you to Delson for being a participant in this research. And it's been super exciting for us, and the initial data is also exciting for you to see. We haven't actually spoken since it came out. Yeah, that's right.

Chelsey, sorry. Oh, I was just going to say, but it seems, although you're still in the process of analyzing this data in a very thorough way, which is exciting because I don't know if everyone does that, the initial results do show a similar decrease in alpha. Is that correct, that you found? That's right. So it's specifically a decrease in neural synchronization in the alpha band, which in some ways I think is actually more interesting, though we have data around this sort of increasing and decreasing of the different frequencies as well, which is part of what will be coming out later. But this alpha synchronization, to put this in really simple terms, it's correlations between different electrodes on the scalp.

But what this is suggesting is that different areas of the brain, because different areas of the brain are usually kind of linked together functionally, and that functional linking between different areas of the brain, as you probably know, maps onto, kind of correlates, very simply, like correlations between the activity of two parts of the brain. So if the activity here is kind of consistent or related over time to the activity here, this suggests that they're somehow functionally linked to each other. And in most cases, you do get this sort of functional integration between brain regions, to different degrees, in different states. And so what we find is that this sort of functional integration, the, let's say, the message passing between different regions of the brain, or that sort of indicates, breaks down, and quite dramatically.

So, yeah. But I think the issue is the specific way it breaks down. It's a way of it breaking down that can be formulated with mathematical formalisms. So how would you characterize this particular flavor of disconnect? It's in the alpha band. Can you give some more sort of, put it in a moduli space, or put some parameters to it? It's this is the question. Breakdown, yeah, is the question. What do I think it means? No. What does it look like mathematically? How would we distinguish it or characterize it? Okay, it's a form of interference with functional connectivity.

What kind of interference with what kind of functional connectivity? That kind of detail is what I'm interested in. What it means? I think I know what it means, actually. Okay. So, to be honest, I might not be able to answer your question satisfactorily. But I can say that what the actual measure is, and we might be able to, or you might want to look into this a little bit in more detail. It's called phase lag index.

Phase lag index. Exactly. So it's called phase lag index, the actual measure. Oh, my God. Okay. I mean, if it means what I think it means. Okay, I'll look into it. Cool. And I mean, very simply put, there's different sort of measures, of course, you're completely right, different ways of mathematically trying to formulate that correlation over time. But if you imagine that there's two waves, and the extent to which those two waves are either moving together, or one is lagging behind or going faster than the other one, I mean, this is the sort of simplest way of understanding it. Honestly, the underlying mathematics of the phase lag index measure, I'm not familiar with. Yeah. So it is, in the alpha band, not the gamma band that you're interested in. Wasn't Matthew interested in gamma, or am I conflating his work with someone else's? There's definitely people who are interested in sort of gamma-related activity due to meditation, because we've seen changes there before.

Of course, we've also seen changes in the alpha frequency. Alpha is the kind of strongest and most powerful frequency that we see in the brain, and is sort of implicated, I think, in a lot of different tasks, and certainly in meditation. But, you know, we found the effect in the alpha frequency, but of course, we also looked in the other frequency bands, but the effect was consistent and robust in the alpha frequency. This is between what region or regions? So, whole brain. Whole brain. So this is like whole brain.

So we're spatially looking at the whole brain. We are temporally, we are frequency band and wavelength wise considering alpha, and we're looking at a global phase lag index, an index of how in phase or out of phase the global... so yeah, okay, good, that's clear. Delson, did you want to jump in now with your side of things?

Sure. So I, this started actually, I would say, probably mid or late 2019. I was in San Diego at the time, and I got an email from David Johnson at the Dhamma Sukha Center. And he said, you know, we have a meditator who has a bunch of these EEG headbands, these Muse headbands, who's offering them to different meditators within the community, and would you be interested in taking a look at it and seeing if you'd like to contribute to any kind of findings we get? I said, sure. So they sent me a headband, and I had done different things with it. So, looking at each of the jhanas, going through jhana one, jhana two, all the way up to neither perception, non-perception, and then also going through nirodha.

So I submitted whatever I had done. And then I think it was later, in 2020, that I was connected with another individual. I think this is a mutual friend of ours, Ruben, who basically said that, would you be interested in being part of some research in Amsterdam? So that was how we got connected. And I met with you and Dr. Elaine and a couple of other people on the call.

And we went through, we went through basically, they had asked me all kinds of questions about, what is your experience day to day, what happens when you go into this state, and I gave them an understanding from my perspective, which is really more sutta-based, more experiential: what happens through each of the jhanas as I'm going through them, and then as I'm going into nirodha, what's actually happening. So I talked about the way I do it, which is starting to see each of the five aggregates, and then letting go of each of the five aggregates, seeing the impermanent nature, and so on. And then what happens is, before that, there is an intention. So there's an intention to say, you know, you'll be in the state of nirodha for five minutes, or, you know, three hours and 49 minutes or something like that. And so I do that. And then that's it.

There's just this blank, no idea what goes on, and then come back up. And I also explained how, you know, I went through this process. It was actually pretty rigorous training beforehand, which Bhante Vimalaramsi had me going through, which is what we call jhana hopping, right? So you start off with going through each of the jhanas for a predetermined amount of time, using a clock with a second hand, and then going through it, you know, for a few seconds in each jhana, maybe 40 seconds, maybe 30 seconds, maybe five seconds in each jhana. And then skipping jhanas, going from the first jhana to the fourth jhana, going from the fourth jhana back to the second, then going into infinite space, and so on.

And then once the mind is that malleable, you start to go into experiencing the ability to go into nirodha at will using this particular exercise. So that's what I explained to them, and then they seemed like they were pretty interested afterwards, because then there was an invitation to see if we could... I was in Cambodia at the time, I remember, and I think what they wanted to do was actually visit me in Cambodia and see if they could do some preliminary experiments there. Just curious, what were you doing in Cambodia? I was, well, I was in India before then. I was on an extended retreat. This was during the pandemic.

And then in August, my parents were in Cambodia at the time, so I went to go see them. And then we just spent time, and we spent the pandemic, most of the pandemic, in Cambodia. But I was also teaching there. So I did Dharma talks, weekly Dharma talks with people. I did some three-day retreats with people, things like that. And I was also working on a few books. But for the most part, I was still trying to do my own kind of extended retreat.

And then, so the idea was that Ruben and his team would come to Cambodia and we would do some preliminary experiments. But then, as it turned out, there was an opportunity to go to Amsterdam. And so this was for the purpose of just visiting some Dhamma friends and doing a couple of retreats, things like that. And then, Ruben found out, I think through one of our mutual friends, that I was coming to Amsterdam, and it was planned out, and he and I met and we discussed what was going to happen. The first day was interesting, because they put this octopus on my head, the whole EEG thing and everything, and they had some other sensors on me. I sat in a very comfortable chair, and he had me do basically three things. There were three things I was supposed to do.

There was a focused attention. There was watching the documentary. It was a Netflix documentary on animals, I remember. And then going into nirodha. And I think we did that a couple of times, if I remember correctly. And the idea was just to stay relaxed and do what you're doing in the chair. That was great. And then the next experiment, or the next day, was basically probably the easiest I've done, because all I had to do was take naps, right? I had to just go into the sleep lab and rest in the bed. But there were a lot more sensors on me. There was the octopus. There was something up my nose. There was a belt around my waist.

You know what we call that? It's a polysomnogram, right? That poly means many. It's a torture device. You're supposed to sleep. That's right. That's right. That's right. So they had me go through just normal day-to-day, I mean, just normal, ordinary consciousness, as it were, and then take a nap. And I think it was like 90-minute segments. So they had me then go into nirodha.

And I explained to them, well, they said, how long do you need to get into nirodha and all of these things? So I said, I'll just take my time. And then by about 10 minutes, I'll be in nirodha. And at the 90-minute mark, I'll just start coming up. So that happened, and I came out. They basically came into the sleep lab, they asked a few questions, things like that, and then that was the end of it, really. And then I spent some time at Ruben's, we had lunch, I was at his place, and we had some really great discussions after that. And one of the wonderful things about this was I made a new friend, or a few new friends, while I was there in Amsterdam. We also described, I think in a footnote in the paper, because of course we can't make a lot of sense of it at this stage without further replication.

But we thought we would test this capacity to come in and out of the state within the expected time. So it was a 90-minute period. And we thought, hey, Delson, go into the cessation, but we're not going to tell you when the 90 minutes is up. We're just going to wait for you to indicate to us that 90 minutes has passed, to test his capacity to tell the time during the state, which itself is a very mysterious process. And so we did that, and we were observing the different things. We took careful notes about things like eye movements and heart rate and respiration and these kinds of things while it was unfolding.

And what we did end up seeing is that pretty much exactly at the 90-minute mark, we saw eye movements come back online, and we saw the markers that he was coming back online pretty much exactly at 90 minutes. And then a few minutes after that, he reported being awake. So that was also quite interesting. If I might interject one extra data point to round out the story: you're able to enter, if you take your time, in about 10 minutes, and we're seeing here 80 to 90 minutes. What's the longest that you have personally stayed in the state of nirodha samapatti, Delson? Six days.

And what does that mean exactly? Six days of... Nothing going on. Just complete blank for six days and then coming back up online. I think you're muted, Shinzen. During the six days, were you seated or lying down? Seated. Sitting in a lotus posture. So this is like right out of the textbooks. The master hasn't moved for almost a week. Fantastic. Amazing.

Too bad they weren't there with all the equipment. I think they're pretty interested. - I say, let's just do it again, right? It can be, how many other people are you folks aware of that have this capacity? Analogous, because Delson's reporting and he knows, and you know, this is in the old books, and it's not encountered very often in my experience.

And that's what the old books say too. You have to have special karma for nirodha samapatti. You can become an arahant, but arahant plus nirodha samapatti is a little bit of a special thing. So now we've got it caught on camera. This is amazing. How many other people do you folks know about that have, call it what you want, this capacity? That could be part of this research, where we would actually show people flatlining, to the skeptics of the world. Are you unique in this regard, or do we have a bunch of others lined up so we can do statistics? Yeah, I think in the community there are maybe a handful, or maybe a couple more, as far as I'm aware. But in terms of their ability to go in with duration, I think you'd have to speak to them about that. But I am aware of at least a couple who are able to consciously enter this state.

It's been reported by other meditators. I've heard anecdotes of people that I know, even one of my students, that when we were at Harvard, he went into it in the scanner for a moment. That data was never used, but I think we caught it. It was not long, but we think it might have been this. I can connect you with that person if you're interested. They're a senior practitioner. But you're telling me there's a few more people that we might be able to use, and we got you, but it's a proof of principle if it happens in one person, right? Yeah, this is a real... this is very significant.

Chelsey, you were going to say something. I think you're going to ask a question. I was going to ask you, how do you come out of it? It's almost a magical idea that you could decide that before you go in. And then the sort of question becomes, if there's nothing there, what is it that decides to reemerge? And how does that function? So I'm curious about your subjective experience. Yeah. Like I was saying, going into it, it's like a shutting off of functions.

And by the way, just so we're clear on this, I did say 10 minutes, but this can happen like that. Essentially, the preparation for it can happen in such a way that you're just going through, let's say, the neither perception or non-perception state of mind. And then before you do that, you just make an intention of how long you will be in that state. And then there's this clarity into the nature of each of the aggregates. And the mind just disconnects completely from all perception and intention. And it's like you're sinking into something. there's this rebooting process that happens in reverse so first like the the mentality comes up so there's a there's an awareness that comes up that you're coming up and there's a verbalizing going on the the knowledge that okay you're up now and then the feeling of the body and the subjective experience is just a lot of luminosity very a lot of clarity uh everything is like in hyper awareness hyperdimensionality.

The colors are very bright. The senses are very sharp. But as to that part of the mind that's able to direct the intention of how long the mind is going to be in it, my understanding would be, or my speculation about that, would be that we talk about something known as sankharas. And there are probably still some sankharas there, rooted in the intention that is there under the surface, and then those sankharas bubble up as the first part, and then everything else starts to reboot.

Let me just make a comment on what Delson said, which you might not, if you're not sort of a specialist in this kind of stuff, you might not have noticed, but it's critically significant. He's not just describing a sort of natural and natural reboot. That alone, the fact that such a thing exists, that is in our biological heritage and can be consciously experienced because we have a proof of principle. Here's someone that's doing it under the bright, bright lights of a very skeptical modern lab. Just the fact that that is in our biological heritage to be able to find a natural shutdown and reboot.

Whoa, is that a discovery? But the thing I wanted to point out is that it is subtle, that maybe the listeners might not have noticed. He said, decouple from all the components that create self and world. That's what those five aggregates are. That's the early science of India of 2000 years ago or more. It's not modern science, but there was early science there. And they had an idea of how self and world are formed. And it's instantiating in this five aggregate formulation.

So you're systematically decoupling from each of the basic dimensions of inner and outer somethingness that creates space-time self-world. But you're also observing them and gaining insight and clarity about them. just a gymnastics trick of shutting things down and starting it up, or even shutting it down and starting it up with full consciousness. There's insight. And I'm not going to speak for Delson, but he'll agree with me. There's a flavor of Vishuddhi, purification.

You know that this is cleaning out bad sankharas, bad karma, and vasana, bad habit groups. You can taste the Vishuddhi rasa. It's happening to you, the taste of purification. And there's this clarity about things. Without the purification and clarity, this is a magician's trick, in a sense. With those, it's the ultimate life-transforming tool. So I just wanted to point out, I see you're shaking your head. It's obvious to everyone in this room. It may not be obvious that that little comment you were making, that things are very clear and you decouple element by element, that's the big early science discovery of Buddhism. Buddhism can't claim to be science, but it's absolutely pre-science. It's early science.

from India. India can be proud of this early science. There's something else that I think is beautiful about this aggregates idea. And for me, it was really an insight moment as I was writing this paper and trying to think of, okay, what is a theoretical mechanism for this capacity? And as I was writing that and thinking about our desynchronization findings, there was just this immediate sort of click between this idea that you are deconstructing, gaining insight into the three characteristics, let's say, of the various aggregates that are the things that constitute the being in the world, the phenomenological sort of coming together, and the fact that you kind of consciously, in a way, give attention to these aggregates, which attention is already then activating them as separate entities rather than as a coherent entity, and then recognizing their sort of constructed nature. So this sort of separation and deconstruction makes, I think, resonates perfectly with what you would expect: this sort of breakdown in synchronization and neural activity if you're looking for a kind of physiological, biological correlate of deconstruction

of one's phenomenological space and being. So that to me was really a kind of just, it just felt like a wonderful connection. And I wanted to just also jump in, regarding the thing of staying in the state and automatically coming out of it. Your question, Chelsey, and my thoughts about that are, I think everyone and most listeners have this experience of wanting to wake up at a certain time in the morning, and that's sort of spontaneously happening. Clearly the system somehow has this capacity to track time. I don't know whether it's using physiological rhythms or what. And then there's also this, when we wake up, certain hormones are released, certain activations come online in the body, which then sort of give rise to whatever capacities are needed to wake up the mind.

So I don't know how this connects to samskaras, but just to say that I think also from a very Western, sort of biological perspective, the idea that you can get better at timing these things sort of makes sense, especially considering some of the trainings that you've done, Delson, that you've told me about around determinations. Actually practicing this capacity to time yourself. And after we had those discussions, I actually tried some of those things in my own meditation practice, just to see whether you could sit and know when half an hour has passed. And I was also really surprised that we sort of possess this capacity. I heard that...

God, senior moment. Bear with me. Tesla, this may be an internet story that's not true, so I haven't confirmed it, but I have heard it said that he'd create a device that started working six months later. Think about it. It had gone through all the physical wear and changes that it would have gone through in six months. In his subconscious, it was tracking time, and it now shows him how the device is functioning six months later. I don't know if this is true, but that's a pretty spectacular timing ability for the unconscious. So much unexplored territory there around how we are tracking these things. And I just think it's also persuasive that we have biological rhythms.

And of course, many animals are capable of tracking changes in time and changes in the electromagnetic field and so on. And speaking briefly, I don't know if you want to go down this discussion route yet, and I'm not even sure what I think about this, but you mentioned this, just this fact that there is this latent capacity in humans to turn themselves off from within. From an evolutionary perspective, this is also really fascinating. I mean, we sort of hinted at the possibility that this might point to, it's sort of the coincidences and the resonances with torpor and hibernation, which are kind of fascinating.

And also the fact that the meditators go into caves and so on. And it remains to be tested whether a longer nirodha has the sort of decreases in metabolic rates and so on that you would expect with animals. And of course there's the dark retreats where you go in complete darkness, three months, three years, three days. People do it not and not just Asian people. Fascinating. I would love to, if you have any kind of readings, because as I kind of dive into this possibility more, initially, because I was living with an archaeologist, one of my best friends, Igor Jakovic, at the time in Amsterdam. And he was sort of sitting next to me when we were having this initial conversation with Delson.

And he sort of immediately after the call told me, hey, that sounds like hibernation. And I was just like, no way initially. But as I sort of looked at the sort of connections between these things, and also these recent findings just in the last couple of years with archaeologists finding kind of suggestive evidence of hibernation, even in a Spanish population sort of 500,000 years ago. You sort of get these sort of particular impressions on the bones and sort of things that are consistent with human hibernation. It just starts to, I don't know. Well, you see, it's human hibernation, not a bear's hibernation. hibernation so when a human who has been trained in contemplative skills I'm not gonna I'm not saying this is hibernation it's a reasonable hypothesis though that well there's a lot to say but what Delson's describing is a human that is trained in contemplative focus factors and in a certain view of the world based on the three characteristics

which he mentioned, and if people are interested, it's easy enough to find on Wikipedia. It's central Buddhism. I'm going to say a couple of things. It may be related to hibernation. That doesn't make it unspiritual, because it's a human with focus factors that have been trained and a very sophisticated, not just ontology, but yeah, I guess a philosophy about how the natural world works. I just have to mention that, in addition to the three characteristics, there's an alternative formulation in the Pali Canon that is less often talked about but may actually be better for the of science, and that's the three gates of liberation. You're shaking your head. So you've studied your Abhidharma, obviously. What is sometimes translated in English, well, there is no English translation. Let's just start out with that. So we're not going to get into it, because I want to hear about this research. But there's something called the three gates of liberation, and if you go to East Asian temples, in fact a lot of temples, there'll be a, like a hilo, if you know what that is, like a gate in front of the gate

and there'll be like three openings to that, or the gate itself will have three openings. Someone, they say in Chinese it means three gates. When you go into a temple in China you go through, there's supposed to be Sanman, three gates, and those are the three gates of liberation. Um, signlessness. I'm forgetting that. Wait a minute. Election, you help me, Nelson? Right, undirectedness, the undirected contact, the signless, and the... it's hard to remember, isn't it, even though we know it. Wait a minute, musol away. I remember in Japanese, let's see, musol, that's the signlessness. Mukan, that's the undirectedness. And, oh god, what was just... just emptiness. Emptiness, that's it. Yeah, cool. Shunya, yeah, empty. Yes.

Vacuous. So you used a very good translation for appanihita. That's the Pali, from the Sanskrit. Apranidhana, a pranidhana, a pranidhana not a pra forward, knee down, dana, placed. It's like that, it's not dana, it's Dana. So it's often translated as without desire or without will. But undirected is a much better translation. And I half suspect that, of course, when they say undirected.

It was our earlier human beings' attempt to describe free energy change and spontaneity in nature. The just happeningness of things is a big theme in Taoism. It's a big theme in Tibetan practice. It's actually in India where they talk about Sahaja, natural. It happens of its own. It may be that that is the taste of the nervous system tasting its own effortless free energy change in doing active inference according to Karl Friston's model. If that is correct, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god. Do we have a relevance of Buddhism to the future of humanity?

Can I ask a question about this? I don't want to derail because I want to hear what these folks are doing. You get me going and no one else is in the room. Well, it was a question for everyone actually about this, what you're saying. So this is something I'm thinking is that in the active inference principle and in a lot of contemplative neuroscience, we talk a lot these days about the idea that when you let go of prediction, you free the system to process incoming sensory stimuli and you get into this kind of blooming, buzzing chaos, as Shinzen describes it, of sensory processing without the weight of predictive coding coming down onto it. And it seems that's a big part of our dialogue, but it seems like what's going on with you, Delson, is that there's not even the blooming, buzzing chaos, that the free energy bubbling up through the system isn't even there, that something's going on that's even deeper than letting go of prediction because it's complete silence.

We're not even getting sensory processing occurring. Is that correct? Yeah, there's no processing going on at all in the mind in Nirodha itself. So can I make some, sorry, just some caveats to what you said about predictive processing, if I can. Just to say that within the predictive processing framework, perception, sensation, all of these things that we take to be the kind of present moment are themselves the output of a predictive process. So there is no, within predictive processing, there is no such thing as really the raw perception because there's no way to directly access any kind of raw information outside of the body.

as something is interacting with the body let's say like light hitting the retina or you know pressure on the body or whatever the sort of gateway is there's immediately a process of interpretation in a way the body interacting with that stimulus already is a there's a level of interpretation there and then there's multiple levels of interpretation by the time that thing becomes conscious so so all sensory experience and experience of self time space is part of this this predictive process and then as a with regard to like whether you can actually experience free energy in any kind of direct sense uh that that i'm i'm not quite sure is is possible because free energy is more of a mathematical principle that's sort of what the system is trying to reduce in order to reach its sort of conclusions about what is actually happening that's sort of the sort of error over time so that's sort of a mathematical principle but you know it is it is possible that there's this sort of we have sort of phenomenology about the state of our system like when

uncertainty is boosted up, like, let's say there's a lot of free energy that is felt in the system, potentially through effective states and stress and anxiety, and these kinds of things. So just, just Ruben, now we're getting down to the shit. Well, yes, well said. This is where the pedal meets the metal. And And I'm not going to go into it because then it's going to be a whole other conversation.

But there are classical Buddhist analogs for what you just said, Ruben. And we can go into that. It's already been covered in the Buddhist tradition, I believe, what you're bringing up. Something rather technical. Yeah, I think that's also really interesting territory. I mean, this happened very much in our writing, our theoretical account of meditation, that we found resonances in Buddhism that were striking. Really, yes. So this isn't going to be the last time we're getting together to do this, say in it. We're going to have more meetings, because this is just bringing up so many potentials. But I do just want to say, without going into the details, let's remember everything Ruben just said, because there's some really interesting stuff in the Buddhist tradition that addresses this. But the question I have, and I just got to ask, Delson, you said that your family tradition was Catholic.

What you're experiencing is analogous, of course, from a very different culture and a different worldview. But it is analogous to what Santa Teresa de Avila, Saint Teresa of Avila, would have called in Spanish, which was her six out of seven stages to God. She'd have waxy catatonia, basically, and they'd come back days later, and she was still there. For a long time, when you read her Las Moradas, the interior castle she wrote at the end of her life, or towards the end of her life, when she had had a very wide range of contemplative experiences within the Carmelite tradition, which she reformed along with San Juan de la Cruz, Saint John of the Cross. They had a sort of priest-nun thing in Spain through the Carmelite order in the 16th century, when the fucking Inquisition is still a force to deal with here.

She never got in trouble with the Inquisition. Her father was Jewish. He was forced to convert to Catholicism. And she ended up writing the standard manual for how Catholics are supposed to meditate, and it's seven stages. And stage number six is close to what we're talking about here. Stage number seven appears to be stream entry or something like that, because she says, this is completely different. This is my mind now works different.

The self-forgetting is so profound that it seems as though the soul no longer exists. She said that in Spain in the 16th century. And no, they didn't give her, and no, they didn't hurt her. They said, this looks good to us. We'll make you a doctor of the church, the only woman that we respect as an authority. Well, it's meditation. Maybe women know something about that. Who knows? 16th century. Jesus, give us a break. So why am I saying this? I just got to ask, what does your Catholic family think about all of this? Anything?

Just to get really personal, because I've got issues. I've got friends that are rock solid astrophysicists that still want to be practicing Catholics. I think we should make that possible for them. I want to invite, that's Jonathan Lunine. I want to invite him on this program. He has a Catholic meditator, no, no, he has a Catholic scientist support group. So how do you get those worlds to agree? Because there seems to me to be a very, a problem: the spirit and achievements of science and what scripture-based and authority-based religions say, they just don't match. I'm just curious how that worked out in your life, if that was not an issue, or an issue, etc. Yeah, I mean, very simply put, it was not an issue because of the fact that they have no idea that I can do this. Discussed it?

No, no. Do you go to church? I mean, this is like way too personal. It's none of my business or anyone's, but just curious. No, I don't go to church. My mother and my sister, they still go to church and they have their own kind of practices that they do. My mother is also a meditator in her own way. My dad was a meditator in his own way. So my family upbringing was such that, my dad basically said, if you want to follow this, you can follow this, but you have your own path and you can do what you think is right and explore the world, essentially. So he had a very, he had a very Hindu attitude towards Christianity.

Figures. Yes. Go figure, right? So, as a family, we're what we call culturally Catholic. We celebrate Christmas and Easter and all of that stuff. But I think in our, in terms of, I can speak only for myself. I think for my mother, she's devout in her own way and she does her own meditation practices outside of Catholicism. She does Anapanasati and other things like that. - Oh yeah. So it's what we expect. It's a cultural mix because that's what humans do. They just make these mixes. If it went into South America, it got mixed up with ayahuasca, in Brazil, and it's legal. It's legal to do ayahuasca.

In fact, it's a public religion. In fact, we collaborate with scientists that are members of the ayahuasca church in Brazil. So yeah, I just had to ask for the whole cultural connection thing. - I did want to explore a little bit more about the three gates that you mentioned, something that I talk about in my talks when we talk about this process of what happens when you also come out of Nirodha, because it is mentioned in a couple places in the suttas, where what happens to the mind, and in those references what it says is that the mind makes contact but that contact is empty, signless and undirected. The way I would look at it from a sutta perspective is that it's really referring to the Nibbana dhatu, the Nibbana element.

And that this could be, or that this is the normal state of mind for one who has basically gone down the path and achieved it. So somebody's mind state is, for all intents and purposes, experiencing Nibbana all the time. Not necessarily always, in the unconditioned, but insofar as the fact that they are free of any of the taints, that their mind is empty of the taints, that there is a signlessness of the taints, and it is not directed to the taints. So such a mind would probably have no experience of any kind of taking things as a process of identification.

So that mind is just seeing things as they are. And this is one of the suttas that I often quote, because it's such a succinct sutta, the Bahiya sutta. In the hearing, there's only the heard. In the seeing, there's only the seen. In the sense, there's only the sense. In the cognizing, there's only the cognized. There's nothing else going on in terms of a projection of self, a projection of identification.

It's all just happening as it happens. There's just an unfolding that's going on. An unfolding of karma. Sorry if you still had more to say about that, but I'm curious, I think you've also been enjoying this sort of nerding out about what's going on scientifically in these states. And so I'm curious to ask you if you have any thoughts on this sort of ongoing state with this sort of Nibbanic quality to it, what you think might be going on there from reading the science, and maybe I'd be curious to sort of speculate about this a little bit, and especially this idea also of direct perception. I think it's kind of fascinating also, if you take what I said before seriously, which is that all perception sensation is itself involved in an inferential process, and that there is no such thing as sort of inferential past learning process unfolding.

There'd be no way to recognize any objects in the world if there wasn't some past conditioning involved in that process. And yeah, I'm curious if that's what you think about all that. The way I would look at it is that possibly, and this is something we'd have to look into further, that is, is it possible to see, looking at the, because I kind of, quote unquote, unsubscribe to the ten fetters model. So the idea is that with stream entry, the first three fetters are gone, and then they're weakened in sakadagami, and so on and so forth. So is it possible for us to say that maybe these fetters are present as a result of how the brain interprets reality, and that certain aspects of the brain are functional, and then when you experience stream entry, they're not necessarily non-functional, but their function is directed in a different way.

So for somebody who has eliminated all craving, all conceit, all of the fetters, that the systems or the parts of the brain that used to be part of that are now redirecting their energy towards just direct perception. And yes, I'm in agreement with you to an extent that perception is just recognizing. Perception is rooted in some process of memory. So for the arahant, they would still have their memory. They have all of the ability to perceive what's going on based on their subjective experiences and subjective past memories. So now I'm bringing up something else, which is dependent origination, because I love to talk about dependent origination. But in there, that process of dependent origination is changed for the arahant, right? Obviously, because there's no more ignorance, so the sankhara that arise, the formations that arise, and the consciousness that arises dependent upon them, are no longer rooted in any kind of lack of mindfulness.

There's full attention, full clarity of mind of what's going on. The key difference is now that while that's happening, there's no ability for craving and clinging and becoming to arise. So everything that arises just stops at the level of feeling and there's no identification going there. So there is perception. But there's no taking of that perception as me, mine, or myself.

There we go. I think this really resonates, maybe from a scientific perspective, because you have these sort of layers of abstraction of how the system sort of builds itself, which maybe has some resonances with the links of dependent origination. But somewhere in this sort of hierarchy of the emergence of the mind from, if you imagine, simpler organisms and maybe their sort of perceptual sensory capabilities, at some point, humans evolved to have this self that they prioritize in their system. So everything, sort of, in the emergence of experience gets reconceptualized in relationship to the ego, to some sense of the self over time, which is just a representation of the body over time.

And then some prioritization of that body over time, because through evolution, we learned that prioritizing our concept of this body over time makes us more likely to survive. What we perhaps evolved to do is construct experience, but then quickly, very very quickly, reference that experience, let's say the raw feelings or the early stages of the predictive process, to this ego construct and its sort of survival and benefit for itself, and all the selfishness and potential conceit and the fetters that might come with that. So it seems like, as an outsider, it's really that sort of self-prioritization or self-referential process with regard to sensory experience that has been sort of blown away, you could say.

Does that seem in the right direction? I would think so, because what's going on there is you're talking about the ego as a survival mechanism, basically. It's retraining itself, so to speak, to realize that that's an impediment in the way that it functions in the world at this point in time. Okay, we should write down the words Delson just said and inscribe them in stone to be revisited.

There's a lot to what was just said. I agree. So let me, I warned you, I'd throw in a goofball that we don't have to pursue. I suggest we not pursue. How many basic kinds of networks do you think there are in the multiverse, in this universe and any other universe that we can conceive of? That's quite a mathematical question. I can point you to a YouTube site where an eminent mathematical physicist, John Baez, and yes, he's related to Joan Baez, and he's the inventor of the blog actually, that's his claim to fame. I can direct you to a website where he will say, I'm an applied category theorist.

And he doesn't use these words, but I'm afraid that the planet might be fucked. And here's my contribution to unfucking it. And he will explain to you in language that you have to have a degree in math to understand. There aren't that many, depending on how you want to break it down. Any kind of network.

A network made of networks. A network made of networks embedded within networks. Oh, does this sound like paticca samuppada? Does this sound like connection arising through connectivity? It does. Is it? I don't know, but it sounds like it. Can we use it? It's highly abstract. It's actually two lines that starts with something he called, and it goes down from two sides.

And if you understand what he's saying, you see one side shows you exactly how to think about any kind of network. How about a mode-dependent dynamical network that's changing its, I'm an agent, but I'm modeled as a mode-dependent dynamical network. What is a nested mode dynamical network? What did I say? Mode-dependent, a dynamical entity. Okay, assuming I'm that, what of the, let's just say, four basic kinds of networks do I use to model myself, my innermost world, my outer world, the relationship between all of the above? Okay, so if you go down one side, you can see, well, there's roughly four kinds of ways that things can network, and this includes networks of networks inside networks that are functioning as mode-dependent systems. Mode means your mood. It means I want to talk to you now, I don't want to talk to you now, I'm feeling good, I'm not feeling good. And I don't want to say hierarchical, because that's only part of the picture.

You can think of it as hierarchical. It's probably best to think of it as nested networks. It's networks all the way down, it's networks all the way up, and from a certain perspective it's therefore agents all the way down and agents all the way up, but they're not agents, they're networks of connectivity of energy and information that can be represented. Okay, so you follow Baez's reasoning on one hand, and you see, okay, here's all the different kinds of networks. You go down the other hand, he's gonna say, they all do the same thing one way or another. They stabilize a Lagrangian relation between some sort of fundamental duality, that's a complementarity, like time versus space. You can go on and on. The math is that good.

If we believe in the Markov blanket free energy idea, and I sort of do, I'm gonna have to just quickly tell someone to call me back in a minute. Sorry about the interruption. Damn so much. Hold it just a second. Peter, can you call me back in about 15 minutes, please? I'm actually broadcasting on the air. Okay, I'll talk to you then.

Sorry about that. Bye-bye. Okay. So what kind of network is that? Well, it's a Markov blanket. So it's a Markov network. But that's a very specific flavor of network. It does certain things. There are more primitive networks and there are more sophisticated networks. The more sophisticated network is a reaction network. It does everything nature does. It can do a lot. Let's just put it there. That way it stabilizes a Lagrangian relation on a semi-algebraic set, and I know that means nothing to almost every human being, but it actually, in terms of the foundations of math, means a lot. I'll just say the words

Tarski-Seidenberg theorem, and go no further. Look it up if you're interested. This gives us a way to model the connectivity, the paticca samuppada, on the inside and the outside simultaneously for this person. Markov networks to model how the boundary is produced. And then if we use reaction networks, which are much, much more flexible, to model what Friston would call your inner model, and also to model what he would call the outer world.

If we use those kinds of networks to model your innermost, which allows for integration of binary into semi-continuous, this is the whole point in Friston of talking about the flavor of calculus he talks about, which is variational calculus. It's a way, and this is what the new AI does. It has differentiable updating of weights. That means you can make a continuous approximation of what is actually a discontinuous thing.

So we can have continuous models for how the innermost world perceives things and the outermost world actually lies. So if we use the right kind of connectivity networks, we get the Markov blanket with Markov networks, but we get the inner and outer world with the more flexible networks that solve. When I say it's more flexible, I mean it's what you use to solve systems of partial differential equations. This is the nuts and bolts of science. So I think if we choose the types of connectivity mathematically in a sophisticated way, we can actually model an entity that isn't an entity but is a connectivity, which is the Buddhist view of things.

We can model that with polynomial functors and higher-order monadic adjunctions. This is real math that I'm talking about, and I think it's directly applicable to the science questions we're asking here. Okay, I'm done. I just wanted to say. Oh no, one last thing: if you put this math into what are called string diagrams, and then you use graph embedding with the new AI, you should be able to impart a science-based view of the world that will help with the alignment issue with the new AI, and at the same time impart essentially a fully modernized Buddhist view of the world, which may not be called Buddhism anymore, but it is compatible with the Buddhist view but perhaps has been put into a language so rigorous that you might not recognize that it really is that. But I think if we choose the networks right, we can pull this off, and if we give the new AI

The knowledge that meditation teachers who are rigorous, I can tell Delson, is that we've had other meditation teachers on your show, Steve, you know who I'm talking about, that we're in that same family. We try to think things through and not be dogmatic. So I think we may be able to get the new AI to incorporate the spirit of science and the science of the spirit at the level of its theoretical, mathematical engineering, with univalent foundations and a homotopy type theory. So I'm just saying, I'm proposing

This math, which actually does exist, is newly minted polynomial functors, monadic adjunctions, and extra special commutative Frobenius monoids. These are actual things. I didn't just concatenate a bunch of weird words just then. There's a reason for each one of those words being there, and these are the tools of 21st-century science. This is a whole different way of thinking about science. It's based on connectivity, as is Buddhism, paticca samuppada. Just had to say that for the record. You know, I'm experiencing such, I mean, a lot of that, of course, went over my head, not not being a mathematician. I wish I could sort of understand it, but at a conceptual level a lot clicked, and I'm experiencing this big synchronicity right now, because the last couple of months I've been obsessing over this potential that I feel intuitively that contemplative

Science and then sort of the marriage between what has been happening, which is contemporary science, neuroscience, and contemplative traditions, and the insights that have come from that, what that can contribute to the development of benevolent AI. I think this is something, this is what I'm working on, and I've got a half dozen people with PhDs in computer science building now, as we speak, the world's first bright bot that's designed based on the principles I just mentioned and actually uses the math. Yeah, that's excellent. Not just that, just says these words to impress people for credibility, but uses this math for the first time ever for something this fucking important. And pardon my French.

- I'm so with you. In terms of true demonstrability and cash value of these sort of contemplative traditions and the insights from there, and also the marriage between the contemplative science and these traditions, to be able to build a mind, a system that embodies those principles demonstrably and therefore behaves in a kind of benevolent way. I think that is, talk about proof is in the pudding. That is it. People will know it when they see it, and it's working so far. We're actually, it's like working much better than we thought it would. I mean, we're not any remotely near what I'm aiming at, but it's like, we're just playing around. They're sophisticated. We're using what everyone has access to, ChatGPT and GPT-4 and all the other similar things that are coming out that are competition.

We're just using the current technology, but we're thinking about it this other way, and I don't think anyone else is. Yeah, yeah. I would just love to, at some point, get together and spend a couple of hours on this, because this is, I think, so interesting. And also, you know, in thinking about things like nirodha, cessation, nirodha samapatti, and especially the transformations that happen to mind, and to the mind, and also the ten fetters and these kinds of things, if we can really understand what's going on when that happens computationally, then the promise there is that we can implement these in a system that therefore doesn't accidentally develop the ten fetters, and cause the, yeah, so we create that has incorporated, and I think we're going to do it actually through graph embeddings, because that's how you make a net. Buddhism is about connectivity, and the math of connectivity is category theory, and it's the trending thing now. It's what the women that are coming into math, they come into this field

The young people, they're asking about this field. So at a fundamental level, it already has some resonance with Buddhism. Can we make that rigorous to the skeptical eye of mainstream science? Under the Ayatollahs, as it is in Shenzhen, China, under the Communist Chinese Party. It's the same science. Once it's part of science, it's in. One society is a feudal theocracy.

The other one claims to be dialectical materialism. Their science on human happiness will agree incontrovertibly if we pull this off, and then it's just a few million dollars of server time. We offer it for free for everyone in all languages supported by a grateful public non-profit. No one makes any money. We solve the dana problem in Buddhism. How do we get paid for teaching? You want to be a professional teacher of mindfulness? How are you going to make a living?

Well, you have to charge. Now, the new AI, we don't have to charge for this expertise. We just replicate the information. It takes very little energy to replicate that information with the new AI. So if we can pull this off, we basically have a cause for sober optimism with respect to human survival and flourishing moving forward. That's not small.

And people will see it if we do it, if we can do this. They'll know it when they see it. They won't know what a polynomial functor is. Then again, they don't know what the Maxwell field equations are either, but they do know how to flip on a light bulb. Flip a switch, the public does know. How to press a button and talk to a meditation master that's going to draw your best future self out of you over the rest of your life, for free.

We can give this to the world now. We have to prove it works to the skeptical eye of science. So philosophically, Delson, I'm curious what you think, and do you resonate with this possibility that future meditation teachers could be autonomous AI bots? And whether there's some sort of key human element, or something within your sort of understanding from the suttas or personal experience, that says that that is fundamentally not possible, and that you have to have some sort of deep subjective first-person phenomenology in order to be a true meditation teacher and guide people towards those insights that you value. First of all, let me just say everything that Shinzen said went way over my head.

I had no idea of any of the words that he used in terms of the theorems and everything else. But if I'm understanding correctly, what he is saying is that you could use the principles of dependent origination, which he's saying is connectivity in this case, and networks. And essentially, if I'm understanding correctly, create modern AI arahant teachers that would never go out of the bounds of the spirit of science, the essence of science, the method of science, and the attainments of science. It would be constrained by that. Yeah, but it's an things about how to do motivational interviewing, how to draw out from a person their narrative, their story. That's exactly. But actually, I don't think of it as independent.

I see this as working with human teachers, not replacing human teachers. So for shock value, I'd say autonomous, but for practical value, it's actually just an improved book. In other words, a human teacher is a human teacher, but they might give you a book to read. Now, if that book can interact with you, that's a little bit better of a book, and that's now called an app, and there are meditation apps out there.

But how about something like a meditation app, except it's you. It's actually you. It can even be your face and your voice if you want. But it's been imparted with three things: a map of how you see your best self within the context of your milieu. It's got that, and it lets you do that on your own. It didn't make you a Republican or a Democrat if you're in the U.S., didn't make you on Russia's side or someone else's side if you're in your, didn't take any sides on that.

But it did. If you think Trump is the type of person that should lead the world, it will make you the best of that type of person that you can be. And we're gonna start there. And it also has the knowledge of science and the knowledge of a whole path to liberation involving both absorption and insight and purification. It has all that, and it's you talking back to yourself. It's not another avatar. It's not necessarily a teacher. I mean, you could make it anything you want. For kids, it's gonna be all over the world, especially Asia. It's gonna be anime, animals maybe, that you're talking to. If you're an eight-year-old and you're getting this, but if you're an adult, it can be you, your better self, and you know, if that's yourself that you're talking to, or if it's something that AI is fucking with your view of the world.

You made it, but we're honest, it has expertise you don't have. It understands the method of science, the achievements of science. It understands the spirit of science. It understands the essence of science, which I'm going to say is quality information. It understands all that, and then it's got a complete map of enlightenment that's consonant with the world. And it understands what you want to be as a good Republican, as a good Communist, as a good Muslim, as a good atheist scientist. Doesn't matter. We'll start with what you think the best of that is, and then we'll let you talk to the gods with a Yoneda embedding for your whole life. The devaloka may actually, in a sense, be accessible by

Modern science. Not by believe it because God told me to tell you. Just saying. I mean, that sounds really, really cool, because, you know, to that point, I've been having discussions with people about this. What if we could be able to, because this basically makes the job of a meditation teacher so much easier, in essence. And I think it can be complementary, right? You have this AI system, and then you have the human aspect of a meditation teacher, whether they are enlightened or not or whatever it might be. But the idea would be, what if we could be able to find the neural correlates to what happens when you are in certain states of mind, whether you're in the first channel or the third channel or the fourth channel? Exactly, and then a teacher can actually see that without having to ask questions, and then they might ask certain questions to kind of figure it out, but if you have that, it just makes the whole process that much more efficient, that much more accessible for a larger group of people. You got it, and then add to that

The new biology. If you look at what people like Michael Levin, Lee Cronin, Sarah Walker, and of course Karl Friston, these frontier biologists, they're talking about energy and energy, information in networks in very new ways, and we're doing research with focused ultrasound that relates to the models that these other people are using about letting go of priors with the predictive, you know, predictive that you mentioned, Ruben. We think that the same kind of mechanism of releasing priors happens when we use ultrasound, when we impart ultrasonic energy to modulate the flow of information in biological tissue.

We may be impeded. What's impeding the nibbana dhatu? The basic Buddhist model is not you go out and get nirvana. You have a sufficient procedure that eliminates the necessary block to nirvana. The thing that's getting in the way of the okay nirvana that's always there. I'm going to bet dollars to donuts that the okayness that's always there, that, Ruben, you're saying it's always doing some side of predicting, even if you're, unless you're dead, dead, dead for two or three days.

Something's going on there, okay? Maybe not two or three days, but, you know, it takes centuries for the full entropy of death to come on you. You're still interacting while you're in the grave. I mean, it's meaningless to the human, but it's still going on. In any event, what we think we can do is add a bow on the package of now having this machine doing what machines are good for, freeing the human teachers to do what perhaps only the humans can do. Perhaps it's not just that we can link it to EEG, you've already done it. Well, we may be able to facilitate, say, Delson's students' ability to go into cessation with what we think is a pretty safe and ordinary thing. It's just ultrasound. It's done on pregnancy, on women.

It's done in a bladder scan. If you bang your head, they're going to do a Doppler ultrasound on you. It's ordinary stuff. We're just using it in a different way. You put this all together and you get a picture of something that could be just incredibly powerful. Hold it just a second. I'm going to decline the call.

Sorry. If I may jump in here. I have a kind of question, and maybe it's very subtly a kind of potential sort of challenge to this idea of using, you know, maybe a brain computer interface or some sort of neurofeedback or even some sort of direct intervention in achieving the kinds of outcomes that we might be interested in. And the reason is that if you take something like cessation, and the transformative qualities that come out of that, there's potentially an argument to be made that the reason that you get the sort of transformation is that there's some sort of deep accumulation of evidence for a new model before the event happens.

So if you take, for example, if someone reaches stream entry, they have this long process of meditation and changes to their system, and then some deep sort of disenchantment, pursuit of the meditation practice that is just accumulating evidence against their existing models and their existing model of self, and this recognition that this system is just not working anymore in the way that it's currently structured. So all throughout the nested networks of the mind there's this accumulation of new data towards a new kind of model, and then when it hits this phase change moment of, let's say, stream entry for example, you get this maybe a cessation, and then you have the insight, the real restructuring of the system. And so now if you imagine going through that process but in an artificial way, and this is maybe also related to my skepticism about some of the issues with psychedelics and things that can unfold, and so if you have this sort of intervention that gives you this phenomenology and this re-emergence

does the restructuring of actually the fundamental representations or the representational processes in the system or memories, however you want to frame them, will that still happen, or will the phenomenology occur and then the system will re-emerge just as it was because it didn't have to go through the deep work of restructuring itself to the point of cessation and sort of software reset that we might associate with something like awakening? So, throwing that out there, what do you think, Shinzen? I think that

It is a bundle. What you just brought up is a bundle of very important and legitimate concerns. I think I see what the individual strands are and how to begin addressing them. It's a very long conversation. It's the right question, meaning the answer is long. Yeah, and then the answer is, yeah, then the answer is short. First the answer is very, very long, and then everyone just sort of catches on and you don't need that long answer anymore. So we've already been here for a couple of hours. This is a half hour of me pontificating before you folks even get to say anything. There's a lot to say about what you just said. So can we remember it in full detail and maybe start up here next time?

Steve, this is your decision, because it's your channel. Of course. I would be greatly honored. That would be fine. Yes, I think this is sequel bait. This has sequel bait written all over it, Ruben, what you've just said. Oh, what a great term. Sequel bait. I've got to memorize that term. Hold it just a second. I'm going to have to try to accept this call for a minute.

We're leaving that in. If he's willing, I'll reveal his name, which Peter this is. It's not an unknown Peter. Well, this has been just absolutely extraordinary. I would be so delighted if we could get together again soon to continue this conversation. Shinzen Young, Chelsey Fasano, Delson Armstrong, and Dr Ruben Laukkonen, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you for listening to another Guru Viking podcast. For more interviews like these, as well as articles, videos, and guided meditations, visit www.guruviking.com.