Reflections - Costa Rica, Eating Light, & Nervous System Continuum
Updates, realizations, and things to ponder
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Personal Updates
I’m just over 2 weeks into a 6 month experiment living in Santa Teresa, Costa Rica with my family. So far it’s been a mostly good mixed bag. I love living in robust nature. My system feels in-sync with the natural world in ways it doesn’t in Austin. An example of this is that my body naturally wants to go to sleep around 830-9pm and wake up at 4am. It’s 10x easier not to invent work, want to be in front of a computer, and spend time with family and friends here without an undercurrent of wanting to be productive in the background. There’s also a much stronger recognition that I don’t need much. I wear the same clothes, have a shitty car, mostly do the same things everyday and I love it. I’m realizing that where you live has a big impact on how easy it is to stay aligned with what you tell yourself really matters to you. I think we underestimate the impact a bit of distance from consumerist culture can make.
An example downside is we had to go to a hospital within a week of being here. Everyone is fine, but this was all-in a 12 hour endeavor with the travel to get there. It was a good reminder of how convenient the infrastructure in the U.S is.
Creatively, I’ve continued to work on a bunch of projects that have not launched yet. A lot of people ask me whether I’m just chilling down here. Not really. It feels like I’ve been working as hard on my own consciousness work and creative projects as I’ve ever been. Some of the external projects include finishing up my book, getting the new company ready to launch, broader community projects, and continuing to create media that amplifies consciousness like the podcast. The fact that a lot of this stuff hasn’t seen the light of day yet has been a big growth mirror for me. It’s forced me deeper into learning how to love myself without the external feedback of “killing it,” which was my primary source of self worth for decades. I am certain life has positioned me this way in order to evolve and teach me how to love myself as I am (as it always has), and I am grateful for it. It still doesn’t mean it’s not hard.
Reflections and Musings
We mostly run on gross fuel today. I recently watched the movie In The Beginning There Was Light about breatharians as a follow up from my conversation with Jasmuheen. I enjoyed the documentary and generally love learning about people pushing the conventional boundaries of human potential. My favorite book on this topic Is The Future of the Human Body written by Esalen founder Michael Murphy. A theme mentioned in the documentary, that has come up multiple times through separate conversations with teachers and even scientists I have interviewed is that what humans actually need is light - not just sunlight, but the more fundamental cosmic light we are comprised of. We eat food to obtain light because we largely don’t really know how to harness this energy source otherwise at this point in human development. This is broadly consistent with the RenXue teachings about Qi. What they’ve taught me is that what humans really need is Qi (life force). We currently get it from gross ways through eating food and sleep due to ignorance. When you discover other ways to get this core sustaining life-force like Qigong, nature, or normalizing on a higher vibration, the gross ways are less required. This has played out in my experience. I feel like I eat half as much food as I did 5 years ago and I don’t really need a lot of sleep. Overall, I feel great and am excited to keep going.
The great awakening seems real. I probably get 2-4 messages a week from childhood friends, former business contacts and previous skeptical friends who now want to talk about consciousness. This has picked up from a year ago where at times I felt like I was banging a consciousness drum into a void. It’s exciting. I do believe there is an objective shift going on.
You can open yourself up to more than one teacher. I used to think that you find a spiritual teacher and mostly align to that person. My first teacher came into my life about 5 years ago, and it’s by far been the most transformative source of support in my journey. It seems like some people might just have one major teacher, in addition to the primary teacher which is life itself. However, what seems to be playing out in my experience is that others are coming in as needed. I think this happens to support specific developments that aid your mission or soul’s intention. I can’t say I was seeking these people out. I’ve just kept my head down using everyday to see myself more clearly and these people just showed up. If you’re seeking this in your own life, I’d just keep doing the work while keeping your eyes open. The drowning man story is a good reminder that you may already have been sent your teacher, but haven’t embraced it.
AI WILL HAVE A BIG ROLE on consciousness development. I’ll admit, I was skeptical, and even a bit arrogant when I saw all these people trying to apply AI to further consciousness through things like AI therapists. I hypothesized a lot of this stuff would be helpful for onboarding more people, but that they’d probably have diminishing utility the deeper someone was on their path. Recently, I built an AI workflow to provide analysis and synthesize information related to my consciousness patterns. I’ve been blown away at how insightful it is and now see the potential more clearly. Relative to our intellect, AI is better at holding all the information and making connections that can direct awareness in ways that would otherwise be difficult. I think I’m just scratching the surface with my own creation and excited to get more data. One thing I’m considering is teaching a cohort of people my practice and workflow to provide as a first step to maybe build a more scalable application. If you’re technical and interested in this kind of thing, hit me up.
The nervous system has a continuum (slave -> partner -> master). People start off as an unaware slave to their nervous system. Then they can learn to build capacity and regulate it through things like breathwork, somatics, etc. This is great, but you’re still kind of a subject to the whim of the nervous system at this point. I believe the next evolution is your consciousness becomes the true master of the system. The way you can think about this, is you, as consciousness, provide instructions for it to follow. There is a lot of reprogramming that needs to be done because it largely operates on inherited instructions. But more and more, you can just start to command the body by telling it what to do. For example, you can tell the body to go to sleep. If this topic interests you, you will probably enjoy the recent podcast I did with Supermind. This journey is still unfolding for me, but the trend is very clear.
Changes in the body with consciousness still feels like a grey area. One thing that there’s not a lot of great, consistent information on, is how the physical body evolves with metaphysical and consciousness changes. I feel like I’ve been in the middle of this for the past few years. I can feel my physical structures are changing and seem to be driven by the kundalini energy doing it. Yet there isn’t a clear anatomy guide that I am aware of that outlines expected physical evolution in detail. Amongst what I’ve encountered, Yogic wisdom and teachings seem to talk the most about the specifics of how the physical body evolves with changes in consciousness / energy. However, the information still feels all over the place vs. a widely agreed upon continuum of what happens. This probably exists and I am just ignorant of it. I imagine one day we’ll have a science of physical / metaphysical evolution that outlines this in clear detail
It’s not just about environmental toxins. It’s also about environmental outputs. I brought my EMF and air quality monitor down to Costa Rica. Living in a less toxic place was a big reason I was excited to come down here. My initial testing is that the air quality is MUCH better here and that the EMF situation is better, but also more home dependent. In my home in Austin, the first time I tested the air with this meter, the readout was not good. High concentrations of CO2 are associated with decreased cognitive functioning. I started opening my windows and the general quality was around 1000 after that, but I had to regularly open my window. In Costa Rica, it’s always hovering at or below 500. See the comparison between the first time I measured my CO2 in my office in Austin vs. the readout in our kitchen here.
Apparently, I’ve been functioning at 50% cognitive capacity for the past few years!
The EMFs here are less, but I’m also living in a house with Wifi and Starlink. My home in Austin is hardwired and wifi is turned on sparingly. But when you compare the baseline “wifi on” state here vs. wifi at my house, the numbers are in the 100 range vs. 1,000-10,000+ range in Austin. I measured this a few days ago.
Interestingly, the iphone video camera function seems to emit a lot of EMF. See this video and how the EMF spikes each time I press recrord
I think the main reason my system feels remarkably better is less about Wifi, and more because the frequencies of nature all around me are bringing the body into a natural state of resonance. So it’s not just about less pollution, it’s also about how supportive the broader field you are in is and the strength of the broadcast. Right now my system is revealing that living in a jungle is kicking the crap out of the 2 trees in my front yard in Austin…though this type of EMF reader is not capable of measuring that.
German new medicine leading the way. German new medicine is probably doing the best job of building a field or movement around psychosomatic health. I lost my health for multiple years and through my suffering, eventually realized that the body is a physical expression of your consciousness. It’s not that things like eating healthy and vitamins aren’t useful. There’s just a more fundamental input which is why you see people get sick even though they’re doing everything right like I did. Currently we chalk it up as bad luck or genes instead of realizing we’ve been looking at health from a very fractional understanding. Even though more people are starting to understand this, it seemed to me that this understanding largely lived in a bunch of desperate books (i.e. The Anatomy of the Spirit, Pyramid of Health, The Divided Mind, When The Body Says No) rather than within a broader field of medicine which meant it would be hard to spread. I kept hearing about German New Medicine and recently did a podcast on it with Dr. Melissa Sell that’s coming out soon. They’re definitely the best organized discipline I’ve seen around psycho-somatic health. I generally agree with their ideas on a consciousness first understanding of human functioning.
Anyways, this was fun to write. Till next time ya’ll.
-Scott
P.S. as I write this, its the morning of Super Bowl Sunday …go Eagles!
If you like my writing, feel free to click the ❤️ or 🔄 button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack 🙏
GNM is based on a sound principle that yes our psychology impacts our health and body greatly but other than that it is a deeply flawed model and approach on many levels both in diagnosis and treatment. It consistently has spectacular failures on both fronts that far outweigh any successes. Psychosomatics is still in its infancy. I have been in the trenches in this space for many years. Practitioners of GNM virtually all greatly overstate its capacity and cherrypick their success stories while not adequately representing those who were not meaningfully helped. The success stories also don’t usually have adequate controls for other variables and so they typically cannot be ascribed to GNM anyways at which point the success rate becomes very questionable…
Man, this post hits deep. It’s wild how location subtly rewires our entire way of being... sleep, consumption, even self-worth. The part about ‘not needing much’ really resonated. There’s a reason so many high-performance cultures (from monks to deep thinkers) embrace simplicity. Also, your point about AI in consciousness work is fascinating. Feels like AI is moving from optimizing the external (productivity, work, efficiency) to optimizing the internal (awareness, growth, self-reflection). Looking forward to seeing how your AI consciousness project evolves.