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Choosing the Way of the Coder

March 3, 2016 by Kenji 1 Comment

In Paulo Coehlo’s The Alchemist a mysterious old man by the name of Melchizidek presents the protagonist Santiago with two mystical stones by the name of Urim and Thummin. He tells Santiago to consult them when his path is unclear. Should he retrieve the black stone from the pouch, the answer to his question was “yes.” Should the the white stone surface, then the answer was “no.”

I found myself inspired by Santiago’s openness to the unknown and a little envious that he had the wisdom and the magic of the stones to help guide him to the right path. Like Santiago, I wanted to pursue a meaningful and fulfilling life, and yet, without any mystical omens to guide me, I found myself stumbling from one unfulfilling job to the next.

As my shelf and my kindle list filled up with career and self-help books, I began to learn, both through the advice they offered and through my own experience, that while no Melchizdek will come knocking at my door, I can develop a sense of what is right for me as well as the openness and courage to explore new things. Through developing this openness, I learned that I enjoyed software development, something which I had once viewed as a soulless pursuit. Through reading about the stories of others who had taken risks and found fulfilling careers, I found the courage I needed to take the leap.

Eventually, I quit my final job as an internet marketer and put down the cash to enroll in Code Fellows, a Seattle software development bootcamp. It was a big decision, and while I did wrestle with some uncertainty before making it, I also felt a level of confidence I had never felt before. I felt confident because I could find meaning in the value coding offered others; because learning the secret language of machines and using it to solve problems felt utterly engaging. And yes, I’ll admit that the fact I wouldn’t have to worry about paying the rent as a developer boosted my confidence as well. Over many years of searching, these three standards of meaning, engagement, and financial security had become my guides, and as I started taking my first steps into the world of code, they were there to reassure me, encourage me, and urge me forward.

Meaning

The first guide, meaning, is the “why” of your work. It’s what keeps you going when the work isn’t particularly fun or financially rewarding. But you can be mislead by it. This guide can become a creature of the ego–a preening, haughty, and ultimately frail thing that inflates when people shower it with praise, and shrinks, withers, and dries up when encountering criticism and indifference.

If you follow this creature of ego as I have sometimes done, you’ll pursue some goal or path because you want to be better than others or to stand out from the crowd. The problem is that the moment you receive criticism you’ll either give up because you’ve derived all motivation from what others think of you, or you may double down on your endeavors and drown out the voices of others who may provide you with constructive criticism. You may achieve some success by following the advice of this creature, but oftentimes it’s short lived. The creature is always hungry for more.

If, on the other hand, your “why” is driven by the need to contribute and help others, it will make you think about the value your work can provide. You’ll ask yourself if the work helps you grow and if you’ll be satisfied that the time you’ve invested has been a net positive for you and those you serve through your work. You do your work to the best of your ability not because it makes you look good, but because it’s an offering of respect to those who have decided to pay for what you do. This ensures that even if you don’t reach the pinnacle of achievement for the path you’ve chosen, you’ll feel content that the work you’ve done was worthwhile.

I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to ignore the drive of ego completely. There’s a part of me that wants to be envied and have valuable skills and knowledge that others don’t have. I must admit that I do find some motivation and purpose in that. But I also find purpose in the feeling that I’m acquiring the tools and knowledge to solve problems I care deeply about. As a junior developer, I do modest work. In my first month on the job I had spent most of my time orienting myself to an overwhelming amount of code and doing minor bug fixes. And yet, this was the first time my work felt like a true offering. I could point to what I had done, and I didn’t have to resort to any mental gymnastics to convince myself or others of its value.

Code is meaningful to me because it makes up our world: from simple websites to algorithms that regulate the dosages for radiation treatments. As a coder, I can ensure that the little part of this world that I build I build with care and attention. And even if it never happens, I find real motivation in the idea that one day I could help create something that could enrich the lives of many.

Engagement

The second guide, engagement, is about the enjoyment of your work as you do the work.

Have you ever been so engrossed in a task that all chatter in the mind fades, and your sense of self recedes into the background, so much that it seems as though you don’t make your own decisions, but rather the decisions are made through you, and you feel a sense of delight in watching your work unfold?

If so, you’ve experienced what psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi calls “Flow,” a state of heightened concentration and complete engagement. To Csíkszentmihályi, finding work that consistently brings us to flow is the key to happiness, and I believe that’s the reason why so many people from diverse backgrounds have learned to enjoy programming, because of how easy it is to enter a state of Flow when developing software.

Three conditions that are essential to Flow are:

Having a clear goal.
Immediate feedback.
Having the right amount of challenge.

Clear Goals
Anyone who has worked in a job where the goals are nebulous or nonexistent know how demotivating that can be. After all, how can you feel any sense of progress or achievement when you don’t have a clear idea of what you’re progressing toward?

With coding, I’ve rarely found myself in this situation. It’s as though the goals are already set for me. I know what features need to be built and what bugs need to be fixed. I know that web pages need to be loaded in 2 seconds or less and I know what behavior to expect from software when I complete a feature. Yes, sometimes the goals in coding are not always the right ones, and can lead to unforeseen consequences down the line, but at least there is always a direction to move toward. This fuels a sense of productivity and progress that often leads to flow.

Immediate Feedback
In software development, you write tests to ensure that your code does what you want it to do and when they pass you get instant validation that you’ve pulled it off. If the code doesn’t work, you investigate what went wrong and then you try something new based on what you find. You try your new solution out and you continue to get instant feedback. Granted, the feedback isn’t always helpful or informative, but the fact that it’s always immediate can give you a sense of progress at every stage.

NOTE: I should point out that there are integration tests that can take a significant time to run, so feedback in software development is not always immediate. But hey, no job’s perfect, right? 😛

Challenge
Unfortunately, most coders, especially beginners, don’t spend 100% of their time in a heavenly state of flow, and the reason is oftentimes that the problems that need to be solved are so challenging that you feel anxious, frustrated, or sometimes even like you want to abandon coding altogether.

The trick to entering flow is to have just the right amount of challenge for your skill level. As shown by this handy chart below, too much challenge and you become anxious. Too little challenge and you suffer boredom:

Mental state chart model by Csíkszentmihályi. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Striking this balance, especially when learning to code, is not always possible. Indeed, when I was at Code Fellows, our class was designed so that we’d be “just barely drowning” nearly every day. Depending on the day, my emotions ranged from triumph (I just solved a difficult problem! I am the best!) to despair (I can’t figure this out. I might as well give up). My experience ran all over that chart, with boredom being the one possible exception.

I noticed, however, that even when I found myself up against what seemed an impossible problem, there were plenty of books, internet articles, teachers, and fellow students to point me in the right direction. Because my goal was clear, and because I was able to get regular feedback whenever my code failed to work, I was able to progress quickly towards whatever goal had been set, no matter how impossible it may have seemed at first.

Although learning to code can be very challenging, the combination of clear goals and immediate feedback can help accelerate the learning process, and often gives you glimpses of flow, even when your skills are put to the test. As you continue to code, moments of flow become more common as the number of problems you tackle will match your level of skill.

Financial Security

The third guide is financial security. Wait, what? Shouldn’t we just “follow our passion” instead?

I grew up indoctrinated in the church of following one’s passion. And I must admit that I feel a vague sense of shame when I tell people that I’ve chosen software development as my new path. There’s a part of me that wonders if I’m being judged for choosing security and stability over more uncertain but potentially more rewarding paths.

I eventually realized, however, that when it comes to financial security vs. finding your passion, there actually is no choice. If you had to choose between starvation and a menial job fastening zippers to jackets in a sweatshop, you’d choose the sweatshop every time. You wouldn’t have the luxury to think about following your passion because the options are so incredibly limited. You’d line up for that zipper job and you’d feel grateful if you got it.

The very fact that we’re having a debate between choosing a life of stability and financial security and choosing a life of creative expression, purpose and meaning, shows just how affluent our society has become. As Eunice Hii says in her Illuminating talk, Don’t Just Follow Your Passion: A Talk for Generation Y: “Passion is a Privilege.” The fact that we are able to pursue our passions today is incredible–a luxury that few generations who’ve lived before us have known.

So while passion is important, security will always win. The only difference from person to person when it comes to pursuit of passion is:

The amount of security needed
Knowledge of opportunities available

How much security do you need?
While security will always win in an equal battle, you have to think about what defines security for you personally. Can you live from day to day without a worry about your next meal or next month’s rent? I know some people who can, although they usually count on the support of family and friends should the worst case scenario come to pass.

On the other end of the spectrum are people who don’t feel comfortable without a decent income, a good health insurance plan, and a 401k. If these things aren’t taken care of first they can’t pursue their passion because they’re too busy worried about paying the rent not just months from now, but years from now.

Any honest talk about the pursuit of passion has to start with the level of security you need in order to do so. As Penelope Trunk said: “No great art was made by a person who can’t pay rent. If you can’t pay rent, you think about that constantly, to the point that it’s impossible to consider the perfect word or the perfect shade of blue.”

I almost agree with this, but I would revise it to say that no great art was made by a person worried about paying rent. This is an important distinction.

I’m a worrier descended from a long line of worriers. And find that I identify much more with the those who need more security than those who can make do with less. I’ve been told to follow my passion all my life. This is probably why I’ve felt shame every time I’ve traded passion for security.

But instead of feeling shame for these decisions, I’ve learned that it’s much more productive to be realistic about the level of security I need and try to adjust it by:

Reducing worry through mental training: meditation, therapy, hypnosis, NLP etc.
Thinking through the true consequences of a worthwhile risk (Will I really end up homeless if the career change doesn’t work out? Probably not).
Learning and researching opportunities where fulfilling work also fulfills my need for security.

Learning About Opportunities
I believe that of these options, the third is the easiest. If your need for stability and security is high, it would behoove you to spend your time exploring fields you are passionate about that fulfill your need for meaning and creative expression. Chances are that as you search, you may find hobbies that don’t pay well, but you may also find an opportunity where both your passion and need for security meet. The trick is to expose yourself to new ideas, new worlds, and new ways of thinking. If I had done this at an earlier age, I may have discovered my interest in coding much earlier–an interest which, as it happens, pays very well.

Choosing a Way

It’s no coincidence that Taoism, one of the most influential Eastern religions, simply means “The Way.” Choosing a Way is much more than choosing a set of tasks to occupy our time. Our choice is a chance for personal expression and connection, a chance to grow in our skills and engage fully in the performance of a task. It’s integral to our sense of self-worth and value and it’s the way we support our own livelihood and those who depend on us.

When choosing the way of code, I decided to devote all of my attention, time, and resources to making the career change and I don’t think I could have done it without feeling confident that it was the right choice for me. And while I didn’t have any mystical divining stones to guide me, I had developed a sense of what was important to me. Perhaps that was all I needed.

Zen Stones Photo Credit: George Hodan

Why I Took Video Each Day of the Year in 2014

January 1, 2015 by Kenji Leave a Comment

1secondeverday — A Screenshot from the 1SecondEveryDay App. From Jan 20th 2014 to the 31st.

At the start of each new year we reflect and we talk about how it went for us. And when we talk about our year, we usually only talk about the big events: a job change, a new relationship, a heartbreak, this big stroke of luck or that big misfortune.

But the fact is, our lives are mostly filled with moments that aren’t particularly noteworthy at all. It’s not interesting to talk about the Vietnamese sandwich place you went to for lunch a couple times a month. It’s also not interesting to talk about that parking garage space that you rented when you started driving to work. Rainy days when you do nothing but stay inside reading or watching TV are not interesting, nor is that day you spent waiting at the DMV.

And yet, despite the fact that we don’t care to remember them, these moments constitute the bulk or our experiences. They provide background, context and depth to the “big” events that we do remember and talk about.

If I had read the above paragraphs in 2012, I think I would have nodded my head in agreement. However, since I wasn’t particularly diligent about journaling or keeping a record of my days in any way I don’t think I would have understood its meaning completely until I started taking videos each day using the 1 Second Every Day app to make a montage of the year.

This was the video I shared for 2013:

I admit that I did feel my ego inflate a little bit when friends started liking my video on Facebook and saying how “awesome” my year looked, despite the many days in that year where the most interesting second was a video of the the overcast sky out my apartment window, that programming book I was studying, or that video game that I got addicted to for a couple weeks. Still, I did the best to make my year look as interesting as possible, and many times I found myself seeking out novel situations and activities just so that I could show I was living an eventful and interesting life.

So yes, narcissism was likely one of the bigger motivations for first embarking on my 1 Second Everyday project in 2013. But after that quick swell of pride I experienced after people had liked or shared my video had subsided, I realized that I was still left with the richest chronicle of a period of my life that I could ever hope for. 2013 was one of the best years in living memory for me, but I think that because I had taken a second of video each day to chronicle it, it seemed far richer than any year before it. It was richer not because I experienced more, but simply because I remember more of it. This is why I continued to take video each day in 2014, and will most likely do so indefinitely.

And here is the video from 2014. Happy new year 🙂

3 Technological Innovations that Could Revolutionize Meditation Practice

November 3, 2013 by Kenji 13 Comments

Almost a century ago, H.G. Wells predicted that “It is quite possible that in contact with western science, and inspired by the spirit of history, the original teaching of Gautama [The Buddha], revived and purified, may yet play a large part in the direction of human destiny.”

Today, we’re seeing this cross-fertilization between science and mindfulness practice becoming a reality. It seems like you can’t scroll through a Facebook feed without coming across an article describing the latest scientific study about meditators reporting less stress, exhibiting higher pain tolerance, and behaving more compassionately. Through fMRI brain scanning technology and behavioral studies, science has managed to provide objective evidence that meditation does indeed work. Thanks to science, what once was dismissed as something only hippies and airy-fairy new agers did has now moved into the mainstream.

This is just the beginning. As I hope to illustrate in the examples below, science and technology will do more than provide us with empirical data suggesting that meditation has value; it will revolutionize meditation practice itself. It will provide us with the tools to help this ancient discipline become many times more effective than it has ever been.

Innovation #1: Mind Reading Technology

While “mind reading technology” sounds like science fiction, the tools that enable us to read brainwaves and record them have been around for more than 100 years. Admittedly, brainwave reading technology or Electroencephalography (EEG) was quite primitive at its inception; likening it to mind reading would have been like comparing stargazing to space exploration. Today, however, the technology has evolved to the point where someone wearing a relatively unobtrusive headset can manipulate objects on a screen using mind commands alone.

The Emotiv Headset

To me, the most exciting application of this technology is one that will help beginning meditation students improve their concentration, their ability to focus on one thing at a time without getting distracted. As concentration becomes stronger, meditators begin to notice the subtlest of sensations, like tiny biochemical reactions on the skin, or the very movements of one’s inner organs. Meditators use concentration to develop insights about the nature of mind and body, just scientists use electron microscopes or particle accelerators to understand the nature of the physical world.

A common meditation technique for students to develop concentration is to focus on the breath. A student will follow the sensations of the in-breath and the out-breath and will seek to stay focused on these sensations without getting lost in thought. This isn’t easy, and beginners often get lost in a stream of thoughts within the first few breaths. When this happens, the student is instructed to gently bring their attention back to the breath once they’ve realized their mind has wandered.

This is a frustrating process since many students won’t realize that they’ve been lost in thought until 5-10 minutes after the fact. To help shorten this period, Meditation teachers will speak up after 10 or 20 minute intervals of silence to remind students to go back to the breath if their attention has wandered. While this is better than nothing, wouldn’t it be nice if the teacher could tell a student to return their focus the very moment their mind wanders?

This is precisely what mind-reading technology can help us do. The soon-to-be-released app, BrainBot, for example, uses an EEG headset that connects to an iPhone through Bluetooth. During the course of a meditation session, the headset will monitor brain activity to determine whether or not you’ve lost focus. Once the Brainbot app detects that your mind has started chasing errant thoughts, your phone will tell you to refocus your attention. (Check out the TEDx talk from one of BrainBot’s founders.)

Giving meditators a nudge whenever they need to refocus, however, is just the beginning when it comes to the potential of mind reading technology—especially when it’s teamed up with…

Innovation #2: Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Broadly speaking, there are three levels of intelligence where software is concerned. The first, is the software that forms the majority of code written since people started writing code. It mindlessly does exactly only what it’s programmed to do and nothing more. A good example of this is your run-of-the-mill pocket calculator.

Second, there is “narrow” artificial intelligence. This is software built upon very complex algorithms meant to perform a specific task very well. An often cited example of narrow AI is that of Deep Blue, the computer that defeated the chess world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. While Deep Blue can simulate millions of possible chess moves per second, it can really only understand the rules of chess, and is (without significant modifications made by humans) completely useless outside the 64 square universe of a chessboard.

Finally, there is “general” artificial intelligence (also called universal AI). A general AI system can take in external inputs from the outside world and determine its own goals and objectives based on the situation at hand. A general artificial intelligence could figure out the rules of chess by studying videos of chess matches instead of being fed the rules through lines of code. Although we are a ways off from computers learning chess, we do have software that can play tic-tac-toe and Pac-Man, and can solve the Tower of Hanoi problem without being pre-programmed to do so. As we’ll see in the examples below, all three types of software (non-intelligent software, narrow AI, and general AI) have the potential to provide great benefit to meditation students.

Non-Intelligent Meditation Software
One doesn’t need to utilize AI technology in order to create incredibly powerful tools to aid a meditator in their practice. Oftentimes these solutions have algorithms that are much less complex than those in your average video game.

Take an app like the BrainBot example mentioned above. Here’s a very abstracted representation of the algorithm governing the function of the application:

Let’s go through this algorithm step by step:

First, the application starts and plays an audio recording encoded in a .wav file with some basic instructions for meditation.
Once the instructions are complete, a timer starts and gives the meditator 2 minutes to focus their mind.
When the timer runs out, the app then uses the information it receives from the brainwave scanning device to determine whether or not the meditator has lost focus.
When both the timer reads zero and the meditator’s brainwaves match what the app has predetermined as an “unfocused” mind, the reminder plays and the whole thing starts over again.

Of course, this flowchart masks the complexity involved in processing the reams of data that the brainwave scanning device sends to the app. I imagine that thousdands of lines of code would be required to determine just what “losing focus” would mean to a machine. Human beings would have to measure the brainwaves of enough meditators to determine just what ranges of frequency and amplitude of alpha and beta (and delta and theta and gamma) waves would constitute a focused or unfocused mind. These parameters would have to be painstakingly measured, recorded, and spoon-fed into the app before it could even begin to answer the question: “Has the meditator lost focus?” So, although the idea behind the app is really quite brilliant, the app itself is not all that intelligent.

Narrow AI and the Virtual Meditation Teacher
Facial recognition systems in security cameras, self-driving cars, and programs that can “read” scanned documents and convert them into encoded text (often referred to as optical character recognition) are just a few examples of how narrow AI systems are making their way into our daily lives. If enough effort was applied in this direction, we wouldn’t be too far off from adding “providing meditation instruction” to the list.

The first time I was introduced to the idea of a virtual meditation teacher was in a Buddhist Geeks Interview with the meditation instructor and science scholar Shinzen Young. In the interview, Young mentions a project he has in the works, called “Virtual Shinzen,” whereby an automated program would periodically ask a student certain questions about his or her mental state and then prescribe a meditation technique appropriate to that state of mind in accordance with a “meditation algorithm.”

Narrow AI would take this concept one step further by helping to process the subtle ebb and flow of mind states just as Deep Blue would process the millions of potential moves on a chessboard. In order to develop something like this, students wearing EEG scanning devices would provide the raw data of their brainwave activity from a meditation session and then describe their experience to a human teacher. The teacher would then provide the appropriate advice for each shift in mind state. The narrow AI system, after getting enough data from students and instructions from teachers would develop certain heuristic guidelines, “rules of thumb” about the appropriate meditation advice to give a student depending on the brainwave readings the EEG scanners pick up. The more data the virtual meditation teacher collects from students, the better those heuristics will become.

Initially, meditation students taking instructions from virtual teachers will probably need to check in with human teachers at least once a month (probably once a day, for users of Alpha versions of this program). The students will describe their experience to the human teachers and the teachers will then examine the advice given by the virtual teachers for quality assurance. If the virtual teacher gives inappropriate advice (which will happen), the human teacher will provide a correction and the AI system will take that into account for future teaching sessions. Over time, these virtual AI systems could become complex enough that the teachings they provide could become virtually (pun intended) indistinguishable from those of the great masters. In fact, their teachings could even be better because the AI teachers would have the ability to monitor mind states in real time.

General AI and the “Cyberguru”
Depending on whom you ask, we’re about 50 to 100 years away from creating AI that would match (and then quickly surpass) human intelligence. This would have mind-boggling consequences for us as a species, our very extinction being one possible outcome. If we do manage to create an artificial intelligence that doesn’t kill us, however, it will most likely lead to a quantum leap in our understanding of the inner workings of our own minds, as well as meditation and mindfulness practices.

Meditation techniques are, boiled down to their essence, no more than algorithms—a set of instructions, rules and triggers that change based on certain conditions. A computer working through an algorithm cycles through a series of conditions and then performs actions based on those conditions. The benefit of narrow AI is that it can potentially digest existing teachings and techniques from the meditation masters, and then provide instruction comparable to those of the masters themselves—perhaps even better instruction because of the mind reading capabilities they would conceivably have.

General AI would take meditation one step further by formulating new solutions and meditation techniques from scratch. It would take the guidelines from the existing masters and then could gobble up massive amounts of data that meditators provide through use of EEG headsets. This would then help refine meditation techniques much faster than the slow evolution they’ve had over thousands of years.

In order to develop general AI, we must either write extremely complicated software which can exhibit intelligence, or we must create what is called Full Brain Emulation (FBE), whereby we simulate the workings of the human brain through electronics. At this point it seems like a toss-up which type of AI we’ll create first, but when it comes to mindfulness, FBE seems to have the greater potential. The development of FBE will be in large part due to…

Innovation #3 Neuroinformatics

In 2005 a group of scientists in Switzerland founded the Blue Brain Project with the goal of creating a computerized model of the human brain by 2023. The scope of the work is ambitious. These scientists aim to create 3D computerized models of billions of neurons and trillions of synapses which would then emulate the behavior of neurons and synapses observed in the brain’s neocortex (the “thinking” layer of the brain). Obviously this would take a lot of data and processing power. Just to give you an idea, one simulated second of what amounted to “half a mouse brain” (about 8 million neurons) took ten seconds of computing time on one of the fastest supercomputers in the world.

By creating a reliable computerized model of the human brain, we could answer a question that none of the meditation masters of the past could have answered: “What happens in the brain when we meditate?” Should Moore’s law continue to hold up and the processing power of computers continue to increase exponentially, we could simulate what amounts to 15 years of mindfulness meditation in a brain emulator using less than a year’s computing time. Hyperintelligent AI computers (even narrow AI computers) could then use their enhanced capability to recognize patterns within complex systems to determine just what conditions need to be present in the brain in order for its owner to experience that which the meditation masters call enlightenment: the complete cessation of suffering and a dissolution of the sense of self.

If we had a neuron-by-neuron map of the enlightened brain, we could then be able to find shortcuts that could help meditation practitioners achieve mastery much faster than anyone has been able to do in the 2,500+ years of this tradition. We could, essentially, “hack” meditation by having an objective, data-driven understanding of what meditation techniques are effective and what meditation techniques aren’t. From this understanding we could create new techniques and perhaps even create new meditation tools and software—a “BrainBot 5.o” if you will. We could perhaps even learn how to shut off the very neurons in the brain that work to produce the sense of self, thereby creating a technologically induced moment of Satori. I’m sure the possibilities don’t end there.

The Revolution has Already Begun
The technologies mentioned in this article are more than just science fiction. Mind reading EEG technology and narrow AI are very real and have many useful applications even today. Perhaps the most far-fetched of the three is the creation of a computerized brain model, as there are many who are still skeptical about the project, especially in light of recent news that the brain is much more complex than we had originally thought it was. What is evident to me, however, is that we are starting to see the most fascinating applications of recent technological advances to help us understand how to make mindfulness practice more effective.

What other advances do you envision that might revolutionize meditation practice? Please leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Further Reference:
Hawkins, Jeff (Jun 23, 2008). “Jeff Hawkins on Artificial Intelligence.”
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oozFn2d45tg
Markram, Henry (2008). “Henry Markram: The Blue Brain Project”
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iDR8Z-e_GU
Markram, Henry (Jul 29, 2009). “A Brain in a Supercomputer.”
URL: http://www.ted.com/talks/henry_markram_supercomputing_the_brain_s_secrets.html
Modha, Dharmendra (Feb 17, 2012). “Dharmendra Modha of IBM on Whole Brain Emulation.”
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqeINGOzIZo
Muelhauser, Luke (2012). “Intelligence Explosion: Evidence and Import”
URL: http://intelligence.org/files/IE-EI.pdf
Sandberg, Anders (Jun 1, 2010). “Whole Brain Emulation: The Logical Endpoint of Neuroinformatics?” URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRB6Qzx9oXs
Young, Shinzen (Apr 18th, 2012). “Shinzen’s Blog: How to Enlighten the World.”
URL: http://shinzenyoung.blogspot.com/2012/04/how-to-enlighten-world.html
Young, Shinzen (Apr, 25th, 2012). “Toward a Science of Enlightenment.”
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZuxZ3BYvNM
Warren, Jeff (Jan, 2013). “How Understanding the Process of Enlightenment Could Change Science.” URL: http://www.psychologytomorrowmagazine.com/inscapes-enlightenment-and-science/

18 Little Known Facts To Challenge Your Views About Religion

March 11, 2013 by Kenji 11 Comments

Ever since I started practicing meditation about a year and a half ago, it has become a subject of regular study for me. After reading countless blogs, books, and listening to recorded talks on meditation, I had found that groups from every religion, not just Buddhism, practice some form of meditation or other. In fact, I learned that meditation was often the one most important part of a religious practice for many sects, whether you were an orthodox Jew or a Sufi mystic.

After having learned this one fact, I found within myself a deeper respect for other religions, even ones which I had regarded in the past as backwards, overly superstitious, or reactionary. I realized that if this one fact about meditation could challenge my preconceptions about what really makes up a religion, perhaps I could find others as well. This is why I have assembled a list of facts which aim to show that religions can’t be put inside a box, and that all of them have wisdom and insight that the world could definitely use.

This list was organized in no particular order:

1. Many Early Christians Believed in Reincarnation

Reincarnation was a widely accepted belief among the early Gnostic Christians. The idea that someone went to heaven or hell based on something they did in one lifetime was a doctrine developed by the Roman Catholic Church, most likely to establish more control over adherents to the religion. After all, if people got more than one chance to get to heaven, the laws of the church would then be rendered meaningless because sinners would get infinite chances to try again.

Further Reference: Adishakti.org

2. The Buddha Was Probably Not a Vegetarian

Many Buddhists are vegetarian because of the first Buddhist Precept: I undertake the training rule to abstain from taking life. This precept also includes the taking of any animal life. Interestingly, this doesn’t necessarily mean that all Buddhists need to become vegetarians. In the Pali Canon, a major Buddhist text, it was said that the Buddha would not eat meat from an animal killed specifically for him, but apparently didn’t have a problem eating meat bought from the marketplace and already dead.

Further Reference: Dhamma Musings

3. Jesus Christ is Mentioned 5 Times in the Qur’an more than Muhammad

Jesus is considered one of the great prophets of the Islamic religion, and is highly revered, though not as the son of God as Christians believe.

Further Reference: Islam 101

4. Hindus Can Also Be Atheists

Hinduism is generally viewed as a Polytheistic religion with a rich mythology. It is, however, quite possible to be both Hindu and Atheist. Although Hindu Atheists may not have the same eschatological beliefs as other Hindus, they do follow the same moral and ethical code.

Further Reference: Wikipedia

5. Judaism Evolved from a Polytheistic Religion

According to Mark Smith in The Early History of God, the Jewish God Yaweh was one out of four main Gods worshiped by the early Jewish people. The other three gods were El, Asherah and Baal. It was only later that Yahweh became the one and only God for the Jewish religion.

Further Reference: Wikipedia

6. Meditation is not Limited to Eastern Religions

These days meditation, or the practice of increasing spiritual awareness through the cultivation of high states of concentration, is often associated with Eastern religions like Buddhism and Hinduism. It turns out, however, that every major religion has meditation techniques associated with them. There’s Christian Meditation, Islamic Meditation and Jewish Meditation. Within each of these religions are various meditation techniques which bear a striking resemblance to meditation techniques practiced in Buddhism and Hinduism.

7. New Religious Texts Continue to Be Discovered

If you’re the founder of a religion, people will write a lot of stories about you, many of which aren’t true. This is why the Bible has so many outtakes (See #14). Does this mean, however, that when new religious texts are discovered we should dismiss them as historical curiosities or should we examine them against our current beliefs? One good example of a text that warrants study is the Gospel of Judas, a recently discovered Biblical text that portrays Judas Iscariot, commonly seen as the Bible’s villain, as the one apostle who fully understood Jesus’ teachings and turned Jesus over to be crucified because Jesus asked him to.

Further Reference: BBC News

8. The Buddha was Canonized as a Christian Saint

A Buddhist text from the 4th century was eventually translated and retranslated until the story of the Buddha’s enlightenment was retold in the context of a prince named Josaphat who renounced the world and converted to Christianity. Apparently this story was so compelling that this Josaphat became a Christian Saint.

Further Reference: Wikipedia

9. Islam had the First Theory of Evolution in the 9th Century

While religion and science have been and continue to be at odds, one notable exception is during the height of the Islamic empire, when scientific ideas advanced significantly. Even the idea of evolution, an idea which still remains a difficult one to swallow by some fundamentalist Christians, was first advanced by a devout Muslim and scientist by the name of al-Jahiz.

Further Reference: salaam.co.uk

10. Non-Jews Can Get Into Jewish Heaven

According to Rabbi Sholom Lipskar “One does not have to be Jewish in order to be able to merit going to heaven in the afterlife and meriting all blessings of God.” There doesn’t seem to be many references to the afterlife in the Torah, but there seems to be agreement that the “righteous of all nations” will enjoy the blessings of an afterlife.

Further Reference: Wikipedia, Judaism 101

11. Even With a Literal Interpretation of the Bible, Homosexuality may Not be a Sin

In a recent talk, Biblical scholar Matthew Vines discusses whether or not the Bible actually condemns homosexuality, and provides a very convincing argument for why homosexuality should not be considered a sin, even with a literal interpretation of the Bible.

12. The First Buddhist Statues Were Made in the Greek Hellenistic Style

Greco-Indians living in the region of Gandhara were actually the first to carve images of the Buddha. The topknot hairstyle common in most Buddha statues today was probably borrowed from similar statues of the Greek God Apollo. The historical Buddha probably didn’t have this hairstyle.

Further Reference: Wikipedia

13. The World’s Oldest University was Established by a Muslim Woman

The Islamic religion has long been characterized as backward and misogynistic. This characterization is misleading, however, and there are many examples throughout history which have shown the opposite to be true. One of them is the University of al-Karaouine, founded by Fatima al-Fihri, the daughter of a rich merchant. At the university subjects like rhetoric and astronomy were taught alongside religious studies. By some accounts, this was the first school that handed out academic degrees.

Further Reference: Wikipedia

14. The New Testament has a Lot of Outtakes

There were many books of the Bible that didn’t make it into the new testament. After Jesus’ followers were left on their own, the early Christians wrote many stories regarding the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. Many of these stories were quite fanciful. The Gospel of Pseudo Matthew, for example, has a story of the young Jesus taming dragons (Chapter 18). Since early Christian writings often contradicted each other in terms of narrative and philosophy, it was up to the early fathers of the Church to decide which books of early Christian writings were to be deemed canonical and were reflective of official Church doctrine.

Further Reference: Wikipedia

15. Many of Our Great Scientists were Deeply Religious

Today with all the over-dramatized conflict between science and religion, it’s easy to forget that many of the greatest minds in science were actually devoutly religious. All you have to do is take a look at this list of Muslims and Christians who made significant contributions to our body of scientific knowledge to know that this is true.

16. Wearing a Veil is Not Required in Islam

While the Quran does require women (and men!) to wear modest clothing, nowhere does it specifically state that covering the face with a veil is required. The misconception that Islamic women are required to wear the veil probably comes from the fact that some fundamentalist Islamic thinkers have interpreted the need for modesty in women’s dress as the need for any woman going out in public to wear the hijab (head scarf).

Further Reference: Islam 101

17. Angels as we Know Them Today are Artist Inventions

Angels as originally described in the Bible, appear as 4 headed monsters or wheels that sparkled like topaz, or fearsome entities with 6 wings. It was only near the end of the 4th century CE that artists began to portray angels as the two winged bipeds as we know them today. This is just another example of how our interpretations of religious stories can change over time.

Further Reference: Wikipedia

18. Islamic Fundamentalism is a Pretty Recent Development

As shown by facts numbers 9 and 13, Islam was far from a backwards religion, but one that promoted the sciences. Not only that, but Islam was actually quite tolerant of other religions as well. Today, however, because of the rise of religious fundamentalism in the Islamic world, we’ve been led to believe that intolerance has been a part of the religion since its inception. Actually, it not until the 1950s that Islamic fundamentalism became a real force, helped along by radical Muslim thinkers like Sayyid Qutb.

Looking Back: My First Year as a Meditation Practitioner

June 25, 2012 by Kenji 26 Comments

Meditation Cushion

Ever since I started meditating regularly last year, one question I continued to ask myself was: “Am I happier?”

For the first three months, my answer was “no.” Contrary to my expectations, I often felt more emotional turmoil than I had before. It seemed as though any event, no matter how trivial, would set off a wave of depression, or sometimes an unstable rush of euphoria, the comedown from which was never fun. I’ve always considered myself to be emotionally sensitive, but this was ridiculous.

The reason for this intensification of emotions was not apparent to me until just recently. Much of it had to do with the meditation techniques that I practiced, techniques which were supposed to raise my awareness of every physical and emotional sensation, thus grounding my attention in my body and in the present moment. As a side-effect, it also made emotions feel stronger, and thus much harder to ignore.

Most every day, sometimes for one hour, oftentimes for two, I would sit on a cushion with my eyes closed and attend to any sensation, be it painful or pleasant, that manifested in my body, and would endeavor to remain detached from them. If a certain area in my lower back ached, for example, I focused all my attention on the ache, and tried to experience the pain without labeling it as either “good” or “bad.” In the clearest moments, thoughts and judgments about the pain became hushed and subdued to the point that I could regard the pain as nothing more than what it was: sensation. Although it wasn’t the goal, the pain itself would often subside not long thereafter.

Because I worked to improve my awareness of sensation, it was only natural that the physical sensations that characterize emotions like anxiety, sadness, or melancholy would be felt much more strongly than they had been before. Sometimes some small misfortune would trigger an unpleasant emotion and because I was more sensitive to this emotion, I felt as though meditation, rather than improving my overall sense of well-being, worsened it.

In reality, the emotions didn’t change. What changed was how I experienced them. The more I practiced, and the more I read about the practice, I realized that meditation was not meant to purge our minds of negative emotions or thought patterns, but rather meant to help us experience them without judgment. We were to let go of our resistance to pain at the deepest level and understand that we suffer not because pain is bad, but because our mind labels it as bad.

Neurological research on meditation seems to support this idea. The big “aha” moment for me came when I watched a talk by Psychologist Kelly McGonigal, at the Buddhist Geeks Conference, who shared her insights on the latest research on mindfulness meditation and the effect that it has on the brain.

The research helped me understand the subtle shift in my experience in day to day life as I continued to practice. Essentially, the shift can be explained by changes in two systems in the brain: the “evaluation system” and the “experiential system.”

The evaluation system is essentially the brain’s “default” setting. It’s the endless stream of mental chatter by which we judge our current situation by comparing them to (often better) memories of past situations and imagined (often worse) future situations.

The experiential system, on the other hand, is more about the sensations themselves, removed from any thoughts or judgments about them. The physical sensations that come with each emotion and how we feel them in our bodies is part of this experiential system.

When we feel an emotion like stress, we’ll feel the stress hormones cause a rise in nervous energy. Our muscles tense, our jaws clench, and our breath becomes shallow. This is our experiential system at work. Our evaluation system kicks in when we decide that these sensations are bad and to be avoided.

In my experience, what meditation does is strengthen the experiential system. If, for example, I feel anxiety, I am much more aware of the physical manifestations of this emotion, so much so that it becomes hard to ignore or suppress it in the way that I had often done in the past with distractions like television, video games, work, alcohol, facebook, etc. The problem is, just because the experiential system is strengthened doesn’t mean that the evaluation system has become weaker. Instead, I’ve had the tendency to feel emotions more strongly and judge these emotions as pleasant or unpleasant as much as I had done before.

What meditation has done for me, however, is make the emotions feel so strong that I’ve found the only thing that helps is to face them directly, to dive into the unpleasant emotions and immerse myself in the physical sensations, to watch them with an unflinching eye. When I do this, I find that while the feeling of sadness, anxiety, or depression becomes stronger, the unpleasantness of the sensations become much less pronounced. My guess is because I commit myself to devoting 100% of my mental resources to the experiential system, the evaluation system quiets down. In time, I expect it to become much less dominant from lack of use.

As I see it now, the key to freeing ourselves from suffering lies not in avoiding emotions but in experiencing them more fully. This is not something that we can do overnight but a habit that we must cultivate. As I near my one year anniversary of practicing meditation, I realize that I should not ask myself how happy I am but rather how attached am I to happiness. How much do I judge my self-worth based on how happy or sad I feel? How much of my identity is invested in my thoughts and emotions? How much do I experience and how much do I judge? These are the questions that I use to gauge my progress now.

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For those who haven’t seen it, I highly recommend watching the talk by Kelly McGonigal Mentioned above. For Your convenience I’ve embedded it below. It’s 20 minutes so be sure to bookmark it and watch when you have some spare time:

Tips on Networking from 125 years ago

October 21, 2011 by Kenji 13 Comments

As a networker, your goal is to establish contacts with people who you don’t yet know, as well as maintain and grow relationships with people you’ve already met, in the hopes that in the future you may be able to do business with them. Although it certainly depends on the openness of the network that you’re trying to break into, I’ve personally found that, to borrow a Japanese phrase, “just showing your face,” can often be enough to make the connections you need.

All it takes takes is a little repetition:
The first time, people don’t even see you.
The second time, they don’t notice you.
The third time, they are aware that you are there.
The fourth time, they have a fleeting sense that they’ve seen you somewhere before.
The fifth time, they actually have a short conversation with you.
The sixth time they ignore you intentionally.
The seventh time, they start to get a little irritated with you.
The eighth time, they start to think, “There’s that person again.”
The ninth time, they start to wonder if you might be someone important.
The tenth time, they ask their colleagues and friends about you.
The eleventh time, they wonder if you’re really as “amazing” as people say you are.
The twelfth time, they start to think that you must be good at what you do.
The thirteenth time, they start to feel you have value.
The fourteenth time, they start to remember wanting to work with someone like you for a long time.
The fifteenth time, they start to mention you on twitter and connect with you on linkedIn and facebook.
The sixteenth time, they start to think that they may work with you sometime in the future.
The seventeenth time, they invite you out for coffee to discuss ways you could work together.
The eighteenth time, they curse bad timing for keeping them from working with someone as awesome as you.
The nineteenth time, they make deliberate plans to hire you/fund your company/make you a co-founder.
The twentieth time…you’re working together.

If you feel like you’ve read this somewhere before, you probably have. This guide is actually based on a guide on advertising written more than a hundred years ago by a London businessman named Thomas Smith. Smith’s guide was about product advertising, and though some might object to my comparing advertising to making personal connections, the similarities are striking. So striking in fact, that it took me less than five minutes to adapt Smith’s guide on advertising to produce one on networking.

The great thing about networking today is that the Internet, the blogopshere, and various social networking sites can do a lot to accelerate the twenty-step process mentioned above. “Showing your face” in person is ideal, but “showing your face” on twitter, facebook and in RSS feeds isn’t so bad either. It ‘s these cheap and versatile technologies that allow you to “advertise” yourself through multiple channels when in the past only large corporations had the resources to do so.

Multiple channels is key, because it’s not just about maximizing your exposure to a certain network of people; it’s also about maximizing the variety of channels through which they are exposed to you. Just as Google search results tend to favor websites with links coming from a wide variety of other websites, people tend to have a higher opinion of another person when that person’s “social mentions” come from a wider variety of sources. In other words, it’s better for you to have three good mentions coming from three separate sources (e.g. one positive mention each from a family member, a coworker, and a client) than for you to have five recommendations from five similar sources (e.g. five mentions from five family members). It’s not enough that you have some positive recommendations on your LinkedIn profile. After all, anyone can stuff their LinkedIn profile with recommendations from their bestest buds at work. But, if you also have positive mentions within a certain audience on twitter and some random person I meet at a party says something good about you, my opinion of you would become much more favorable than if your mentions only came from one source.

While showing up often, and showing up in as many different places as possible is, to borrow a phrase from Woody Allen, “80 percent of success,” It’s important to understand that all networking efforts would be worthless without that other 20 percent: doing good work. In the end, all the advertising in the world won’t help sell a product if the product itself happens to suck.

My consistent appearances at tech and startup events was useful in that it got people to talk/ask about me when I wasn’t there. Because I showed my face often, people were curious enough about me to ask my friends and coworkers about who I was and about the kind of work that I did. Luckily for me people had good things to say, because in the two and a half months that I was unemployed I had steady stream of job prospects coming my way. In fact, I recently landed a community manager gig with the Seattle based startup eVenues, an online marketplace for meeting rooms and event spaces. They’ve got a pretty respectable list of meeting rooms in Seattle and on the West coast. I didn’t even send the guys my resume.

How are you “showing up?”