Reflections - The Power Of Unification, What’s After Mindfulness, And AI musings

Updates and riffs over the past month

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Personal Updates

• I recently went to a 9-day RenXue retreat hosted by the teacher, Norberto Rodrigues. Each time I go to one of these, I experience a major inflection point in my growth and understanding. This retreat was no exception. Norberto has a very inspiring story, and there was a documentary made on his enlightenment that I recommend. Below are two of my big takeaways from the retreat.

• Unification - to unify with something means to become one with it. Our consciousness has the capability to unify with anything. Up until this point, I've primarily been unifying with Qi during my Qi Gong practices as a way to gather and move energy. At the retreat, it became more clear to me that unification can be used during the transformation process. This feels like a natural evolution in my transformation journey and understanding how the capabilities of consciousness. Over the years, I have become very accustomed to facing and observing my inner world. This feels like being an open and welcoming suppressed emotions, patterns, memories, physical sensations, yada-yada. I realized that you can unify, or become one with, the actual thing you are facing. For example, if you uncover a pattern of not being enough, you can use your consciousness to actually become one with that energy and information. The benefit of unification is that it allows you to understand and transform things more comprehensively. When you become one with something, you know it more. Practically, this feels like becoming aware of a much greater breadth and depth of information of whatever you are working with. This creates the conditions for deeper and more rapid transformation. One way to think about it is that if you encounter a layer of a pattern or part, for those who like IFS/parts work, through making contact and observation, you might encounter five layers with unification. I've been playing a lot with unification and am excited about all the possibilities that it opens up for transformation and beyond. For example, you can unify your consciousness with a tree to learn more about it. It really seems like the possibilities are endless.

• Relaxation - One of the most underrated skills in spiritual evolution is relaxation. When you’re tense, you block energy (qi) from flowing freely. You may have experienced this where you start to face something, your body tenses up, and now that thing cannot be processed fully. This feels like an artificial cut-off of a process, but is often mistaken for completion. The challenge with relaxation is you often don’t know you’re not relaxed. Our states of tension have become so ingrained that we think they're normal. Norberto talked about states of relaxation so deep that he could literally hear a penny being dropped from a hundred yards away while directly feeling the vibrations from the sound. I've always known relaxation is important, but I've never treated it like its own faculty that could be intentionally cultivated. I now realize that it can be, and that it’s important for me to do so. Yo work towards this, I plan on performing periods of dedicated relaxation (think progressive relaxation) while also maintaining my awareness on my level of relaxation throughout the day. Ideally, you're using both methods to encourage yourself to relax more and more. This re-trains the body and nervous system so that qi and information can flow smoothly. As I write this, I kinda crack up a bit. At one point, I equated relaxation with laziness and complacency. Now I see it as the gateway to new ways of being in capacity.

• I recently went to a two-day immersive at my friend Ben Lee's new retreat/wellness concept Re-Center in Playa Hermosa, Costa Rica. Five entrepreneurs got together to focus on wellness, inner work, and masterminding. Experiencing this combination with in a beautiful setting was incredibly invigorating. I received a ton of clarity on things I’m working on and the fellowship was A+. It made me realize how much I long to be working with a team again. I also left with was excited about potentially creating these types of experiences for others. I might facilitate an in-person experience like this that combines transformation and tactical stuff for entrepreneurs at some point this year. If this sounds interesting to you, let me know.

  

Re:center retreat crew

• Projects update - My book is basically at the proofreading stage, which means I’m quite close to publishing. This has been a beast, but I sense it's going to help a lot of people. I'm beyond stoked to finally get it out there! We just finalized the brand for a new company I'm launching with my wife and the website is looking 🔥🔥 so far. Excited to share more on this soon!

Reflections and Musings

• What’s Directing Your Awareness? - Ever wonder why you see 1:11-2:22-3:33? Or perhaps why something catches your eye that afterwards you realize you were intended to see. There's lots of different perspectives on why this happens that I have explored like reality being a projection. Where I currently net out is that your true Self is both the source and director of your awareness. What we pay attention to is constantly being guided by our divine essence, yet the processing and interpretation often occurs at the level of consciousness patterns. This is why you just happen to look at the clock at the precisely right moment, or see something when you need to. I find this deeply comforting. There's no need to frantically worry about things. If you are intended to see it, you will see it.

• How Will Intelligence Be Defined In The Future? One thing that's become really obvious to me is that we are moving away from an intellect-dominated paradigm. When I think about most of the things that I learned in school, so much of it was about expanding the intellect through memorizing things and facts. This was kind of useful I guess, but in a world of AI where we all have the best answer to any question at our fingertips 24/7, there isn't going to be a strong motive to continue to develop ourselves the same way. Whether I'd like to admit it or not, I see this trend in my own personal use of AI. Instead of thinking about things or researching, I just go to the command line more and more. Humans just naturally gravitate towards simplicity and ease. So where does this leave us? I believe this creates room for a new paradigm that much more meaningfully embraces sources of intelligence beyond intellect. Capabilities like developing intuition and connecting with information from other sources (like spirit guides) will become way more interesting to people. It's part of the reason why I created the Guided Intuition course two years ago. A system like the intellect that has inherent limits based on how much you consume only has a certain level of utility. There's an ability to go beyond it for new types of information that exist outside the realm of exposure. This has always been the case. In fact, it's been the basis of many innovations and breakthroughs throughout history. It just seems like it hasn't been that popular based on the current paradigm. I believe that when the playing field is leveled by everyone having the best available intellect at their fingertips, humans will still want to grow. This is one reason why I hypothesize a greater interest in these things. The evolution will be an involution.

• AI’s Role In Consciousness Development - The burning question that so many of my friends have when it comes to consciousness transformation is, "What will the role of AI be?" Some people believe it will be a panacea of change where everyone will have their own AI spiritual master or guide. Others are less bullish. What I keep reflecting on is at a certain point, the transformation process can evolve so that it is led by your inner wisdom or true self. You don't need some guide prompting you because the guide is within and can perform transformation on your behalf…I guess it's not really on your behalf because it is actually who you are. So having an AI guide is not needed. Despite this, I've still had a few instances where AI has helped me become aware of things that otherwise would have been difficult. This probably happens once every one to two months through some type of unique prompt that I find on X. However, this is very much a condiment on my awareness journey vs the main course. For this reason, I see AI being really supportive in helping many people start and advance the early stages of their journey. I'm still yet to be sold on how it helps someone who's been at this for a long time. And even if it never does, this is still something I can see as being really supportive for humanity.

• Mindfulness Vs. Personal Evolution - I think it's interesting to consider the difference between mindfulness and personal evolution. Right now mindfulness is in the mainstream culture. We do things like meditation and breathwork to become more mindful. Personal evolution is distinctly different. It is a natural progression of mindfulness that pushes us to reconsider the very definition of who we are and what is possible. Whether or not you make this transition is likely directed by your karma. It seems like we're in the early, nascent days of moving from mindfulness to personal evolution culturally. Probably the most glaring example of this is the recent popularity of the Telepathy Tapes. It's not like this is some new thing. Telepathy has always been around, and there's been many people that have talked about it. It just seems like in this moment of time there's enough momentum and openness for people to care about it.

• Humility - I view humility as seeing all things as equal. It currently feels like I'm being called to deepen my humility. Over the past month, it's become clear to me that reality is orchestrating itself so I see where there is still pride. This has been painful as hell, but I see the gift in it. I've noticed that humility and the opening of the heart also have an interesting relationship with power. The more humble and loving you become, the more spiritual gifts come online. This seems to be an intelligent design of the universe that ensures the powers can be used in a way that supports the development of the whole. There's obviously some counterexamples to this, but on trend, it seems to be true.

• Popularity Does Not Imply Depth - It’s easy to think that just because something is popular, it means its better. When I evaluate certain wisdom lineages, I look at the people who have been studying them. The student population, particularly at the top, always seem to be the most direct indication to how deep a certain path or teaching is. One thing I've noticed is that a lot of the people whose path I admire have been following a super esoteric paths or lineages within a larger tradition that’s aren’t popular. I find this fascinating, but it also kind of makes sense in some ways. The more mainstream teachings will reflect and attract the predominant level of consciousness. Stuff that is more on the edges will naturally attract a smaller subset. I notice a lot of people in these more niche camps trying to fight the reality of their path not being more acknowledged. They seem dumbfounded and frustrated that more people don’t know about the wisdom of their lineage. I appreciate and honor the desire to spread the information, but expecting it to be different doesn't really seem to be aligned with how reality works. Popularity is a proxy for where the population is at on a consciousness level. I wrote an article on this in the early days of this blog. When it comes to spreading teachings, I find it most productive to simply try my best to take right action and trust that things will unfold as they are intended.

Here's a few things I've listened to recently that I enjoyed:

• Remerge AI Tutor Apocalypse w/ Zak Stein - This is a conversation with my friend

  Daniel Thorson
  and Zak Stein. They discuss how AI assistants might develop in both harmonious and counterproductive ways for humanity.

• Unleashing Creativity Through Consciousness and Spirituality ft. Ian Gardner - Ian is a newer friend and fellow entrepreneur who is deeply committed to his consciousness. I finally got around to listening to this interview on his journey, and found it incredibly inspiring. It's one thing to go all in, and it's another to go all in while also prolifically creating in the world and being a parent.

That's all folks! I hope you're doing amazing.

<3 Scott

P.S. if you like these style of posts, you can view past reflections here:

• Reflections - Costa Rica, Eating Light, & Nervous System Continuum

• Reflections - 2024, How You Ask, and Soul Attractors

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If you like my writing, feel free to click the ❤️ or 🔄 button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack 🙏