Going Wild

HTB Lab Notes

Someone asked me last week whether I had a specific message to convey with HTB, or whether I was throwing thoughts out just to see what happened. After launching my quest for clarity last week, I knew I couldn't let that question go unanswered. I thought quite a bit about it, and I realized my intent had been somewhere in between. So the real question is what do I want to do with this column NOW?

Hacking the Buddha is a young endeavor. I've got plenty of room to play. I'll try different things, see what catches on. I know that many of you reading this have been forwarding HTB to people you know, and the subscription list is growing day by day. You must be reading this for a reason, so give me some feedback - let me know what experiments seem to work, which don't, and what questions you'd like addressed. I can go anywhere with this, and probably will.

Thoughts From a Mall

I visited the mall this week. It was like walking into a science fiction movie. The walls and floors were white and clean. Everywhere you looked in the food court, huge television monitors were showing advertisements. The whole place was filled with a quiet rumbling of footsteps, voices, air conditioning and recycled music.

I watched the girls for a while, but they all looked alike. I started watching the guys watching them, and realized no one was looking. In fact, no one seemed to be noticing much of anyone. It added to the sci-fi theme: MALLWORLD SIX - PLANET OF THE ZOMBIE SHOPPERS.

Mall people never made much sense to me... Consumers, I mean. The idea of going in to a building with no outcome except to spend money just seems weird. I think it's hypnosis. Mental note: try jumping in front of a mall shopper and shouting "Wake up!" to see what happens.

The consumer mentality annoys me, because it's such a waste of human resources. High schools annoyed me for the same reason. So did middle school, and most offices in which I've worked. It's almost as if much of this country has gone stale.

Genius shouldn't be the exception to the rule. Great people who create new ideas and technology should not be hard to find. What would the world be like if creativity and genius was the norm?

Going Wild

The more immediate question is how can I be more ingenious? The only thing I can come up with is to start doing more things that I don't normally do. It stands to reason - nobody gets called a genius for doing the same things everyone else does, day in and day out.

Genius happens in the wild. It's a product of our venturing into the unknown. It happens when we begin to do things that we've never done before, when we explore the things we don't understand, and confront the things which scare us. To borrow a phrase, genius happens when we do our ten impossible things every day before breakfast.

What's out there, in the wild? Well, it depends. Everyone's wilderness is different. Everyone lives in a different box. Ask yourself, what have I not been able to do yet? More importantly, what have I been afraid to do? Then do it. You'll understand going wild.

Accelerated Culture

In NLP, there's talk of a phenomenon called Time Distortion. There are times, such as waiting in line, when most people feel like time is moving very slow. Elsewhen, time seems to speed by, as in the phrase "time flies when you're having fun." Time distortion means flipping the processes around, so good times last forever, and the bad ones slip right on by. It's a hot commodity in neurospace, and everyone wants to do it.

The thing is, It's happening all the time. The world is changing at an incredible rate, yet so many people act as if it's standing still.

I remember two or three years ago, some friends of mine and I wanted to put together an online magazine. We liked the hypertext concept, but there were no good hypertext programs available. We wound up writing our own viewer for the magazine, which got modified every issue. To get it distributed, we had to upload it to individual BBS's, and just hope that someone out there would download it and respond. There were about ten of us working on the project. It was a lot of work, and we only put out a few issues.

Now, technology has changed so much that anyone can run an online emag (or eColumn, in my case) just by learning a little bit about email, mailing lists, or the web. Every week, because readers forward this to their friends, or people surf to manifestation.com, more and more people subscribe to HTB, and yet all I have to do is write it.

I remember on my first trip to the Chicago library, I found a book called "Guerrilla TV", which talked about the power of expression that video gave to average people. The argument was that the technology existed for anyone to put together a video production and distribute it to the world.

The book was about twelve years old when I read it, and I remember thinking about how little had come of it. Even with the popularity of camcorders, there was still not much one could do to reach a worldwide audience (except perhaps America's Funniest Home Videos.).. But I also knew that there was this massive THING coming called the internet - I'd played with it a little, but I knew there'd soon come a day when the internet - or at least email - would become available to anyone with a computer.

Finally someone came up with HTML - a hypertext markup language - and the web was born. Suddenly the internet had pretty pictures, and that meant two things. First, cyberspace could have billboards. Second, anyone could use it.

People began to publish their ideas. Home pages sprang up everywhere. The amount of information available on the web is expanding like crazy. We've reached a point where we can think with each other's brains. Yes, We can learn from the experiences of people we've never met, but books did that too. The difference is that not only does the internet present us with thoughts - it presents us with the thinkers.

The hallmark of the information age is interactivity. Documents don't just sit there anymore. They sing and dance and do tricks. They ask us questions, and answer ours. But there's one type of interaction that perhaps doesn't get enough credit - interaction with the author. We can learn so much from each other through our technology. The only thing standing in the way is the mall-person mentality.

Accelerated Learning

I had the opportunity this week to attend a teleclass on memetics by Richard Brodie. Memetics has to do with the way ideas spread throughout a culture, and how the human brain gets influenced by the ideas it encounters.

I like to think of memes as choices - particular ways to think about the world. It seems that the more ideas/memes/experiences we encounter, the more ways we have to think about the world. That leads to flexibility, and flexibility, according to cybernetics, leads to greater control of the situations we encounter.

When we think about ideas as memes instead of just ideas, we add the dimension of movement. We can ask, where is this meme coming from? What sort of memes am I spreading to the people with whom I speak? How is it different from the meme's I used to use, and does it suit me better? Thinking this way sets up a filter - it allows us to try new things and take the good out of them, and throw away the garbage.

So let me introduce a meme. Don't worry, I know where it's been - in the heads of some of the most accomplished people on the planet. It's very simple: People learn quickly.

I talked last week about beginner's mind - about using "I don't know" as a starting point for new learnings. I asked myself what I wanted to do that was new, and I realized I wanted to build a biofeedback machine as a control for my computer.

Now, I didn't know very much about electronics. What I knew was that people learn quickly. I have books on accelerated learning, nlp, mind machines, photo-reading, image-streaming, mind mapping, and just about anything else you can think of, and all of it tells me one thing. If I want to build something, nothing's going to stop me from learning how to build it.

There was a time when I would have dismissed my idea. I would have thought, "I don't have time to take two years of electronics classes"... Now I think, who needs it? There are probably only a few simple concepts necessary for this particular circuit, so why not learn those? I bought a little electronics kit, a "getting started" book and played around, building circuit after circuit. I used image streaming, the meta model, and a little bit of mind mapping.

Since I've got a lot of other projects to work on, I've probably accumulated less than six hours of fiddling with electronics. Yet, I've been able to create an initial sketch of my circuit. I've built several circuits following other people's schematics, and made up even more on my own (and managed to blow up an LED in the process! Isn't learning great?) That's total ignorance to understanding enough to begin designing in under six hours.. So much for two years of classes!

My point is, if you're reading this, you've probably read quite a bit of other stuff about learning and how the mind works. (If not, start!) The question is, what have you done with it lately? If you can honestly answer, "quite a bit, thank you," then why not do even more?

What timing! As I wrote that, Lori called me in to watch the press conference about the rover on Mars. Now THAT'S exciting. People did that. Just people, and the tools we've created. Kinda makes you wonder, eh?

Links, Etc.

OUAIS MEC, the emag that my friends and I put together, is now on the web if anyone's interested. I've got a short story there as well as an article about lucid dreaming and brain-based virtual reality. The URL is http://flash.net/~wilkinso/om/index.htm