Limitless Mind
Limitless Potential
An Open Source, Venture Design Approach to Meditation & Consciousness
Abstract
The lineage of masters would agree: now is the time to free your mind. In this white paper, I aim to open conversation about what consciousness development means, why it is relevant, why open source information models are essential to adoption on a changing planet, how contemporary design theory overlays with profound experiences in unitive consciousness, and its central role in our unfolding present of human and technological evolution. We will begin by reviewing a brief history of modern — twentieth century to present — consciousness development and emerging rigorous and equally profound science in the United States, address inherited successes and failures, discuss the present reality of a rapidly expanding ($1.5 trillion+) wellness industry and its priming for disruption, parallel contemporary design theory in technology to consciousness development as a means to advance consciousness-directed applications (including, and most importantly, enjoying this beautiful life), open conversations to what lies ahead as we individually and collectively advance in consciousness, and conclude with an awareness that the future, perhaps more than at any other time in history, is here, now.
The magnificent wonder of Spaceship Earth, photograph by Archie Frink
Consciousness Development in the United States
Approaching a novel, honest, and accurate conversation reviewing the history of meditation in the United States can be either extremely difficult to accomplish, or extremely simple. It can well be argued that every human wisdom tradition has held meditation central to the acquisition of insight and experience of truth. It seems from historical record and feels readily true from anyone who regularly quiets the mind that humanity has been engaging within all along. Yet socially in the United States, consciousness development through meditation has taken its own unique form.
Likely the greatest human misfortune to the living continent has been (and is) the genocide of the Native peoples who have called this land home for millennia and have developed complex social fabrics centrally valuing rich inner worlds through consciousness development. Still, the value of quieting the mind to look within was woven into the nexus of the spiritual traditions of many common Anglo colonists. Literary artists including Henry David Thoreau, his mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, and poets such as Walt Whitman punctuated the veil of the material world to see Nature as pure essence in what came to be known as Transcendentalism. Out West, an Oglala Sioux holy man named Black Elk came of age during the convergence of two peoples, whose spiritual journey would later be recorded by John G. Neihardt (2014). Black Elk’s life continues to give voice to spiritual traditions of many indigenous North American people and resonates intimately within all who are graced with his life.
In 1893, Indian Vedantic scholar and speaker Swami Vivekananda arrived to the United States and spoke to hundreds of affluent urban audiences about Vedic philosophy and with it, Vedantic meditation (Vivekananda, 1989). Vivekananda’s influence in America helped lay foundation of thought among an audience ripe to the Vedic sciences. A generation later, Paramahansa Yogananda arrived in the United States, lecturing cross-country until arriving in Los Angeles, where he established a center, teaching consciousness development through Vedantic meditation (Yogananda, 1946). It should be noted here that while both Vivekananda and Yogananda taught the mechanics of Vedantic meditation, neither marketed meditation as theirs for profit, nor did they amass wealth from teaching. The combined influence of Vivekananda, Yogananda, and the emergence of quantum physics upon an affluent and intellectual elite audience was quite profound in the first trimester of the twentieth century, if siloed to those who had the means to participate.
During this time, Jesuit priest and evolutionary biologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin formulated thought on cosmological evolutionary order and biological life, marrying quantum physics with biology in an intelligent, conscious cosmos directed toward increasing order, complexity, and coherence. His life’s work, a monumental meditation upon humanity entitled, The Phenomenon of Man, was published after his death in New York (Chardin, 1959). His ideas laid groundwork for the coming generation and can be found in the DNA of our greatest thinkers to this day. Similarly, Aldous Huxley wrote a sweeping comparative analysis of thought on the nature of reality from across humanity, which, for the coming generation helped begin a full immersion into the nature of consciousness (Huxley, 1946).
Amid the cultural and societal explosion of the 1960s, meditation found a new home in the collective consciousness of youth and futurist architects of both technology and thought. Meditation teachers gained new audiences in greater numbers than ever before, but their execution had a fatal flaw that would scar not only their own longitudinal efforts but public perception en masse: the closed-ended motive of generating proprietary rights and accumulating wealth from millennia-aged human knowledge. Through this strategy, the business of meditation ran until the road wore thin, leading to cult-ish, self-serving organizations and goofy initiatives to attract new audiences. Simply, guru capitalism brought many gifts to a population discovering the nature and value of mind, but in creating a closed gate to funnel profit upstream and thought downstream, the model created a ghost in the machine that would ultimately doom its organizations to short-term gain and long-term dogma.
It is very important not to place aggregate value judgment on the weaknesses of the past any more than its strengths. It’s not right, wrong, good, or bad: it’s our story. Over the last century, advancements in science, technology, and consciousness development as living, breathing investigatory experiences have brought exponentially greater evolution in theory, thought, culture, and technological innovation from energy generation to propulsion, medicine to the meaning of wellness, and beyond. These correlations cannot be underestimated. Nikola Tesla was inspired in his energy research and development by Vivekananda (much of which was ultimately seized and never brought to light). Carl Jung’s theory of Universal Mind parallels his relationship with Vedic science, which has been cited in the most unexpected places, including experimental energy research. Decades of research following the early Apollo missions opened the nonlocal mechanics of consciousness through meditative practices. Even Steve Jobs kept only one book on his iPad: Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi. Many of today’s greatest visionaries whose collective world we inherit came of age in the consciousness development explosion of the 1960s.
Open the Gate: The Inevitability of Open Source Consciousness Development
You know, a lot’s changed since 1967. — Special Agent Vanessa Kensington
A lot has changed in the last half century. The global human population has more than doubled, with the United States growing more than 70 percent since 1967 (Global Change Data Lab, 2023). Our collective actions as a species, namely holding onto reliance of destructive energy sources as the basis of the global economic system, is catalyzing feedback loops of climatic unpredictability and changing atmospheric conditions faster than living systems can adapt.
But it’s not all doom and gloom — far from it. Information has a relatively free (if unequal) fluid capacity for distribution, and never before has human knowledge been more materially accessible to everyone than in this moment. And perhaps most excitingly, we are collectively becoming increasingly aware and interested in our health, wellness, and consciousness development. Market reports annually value the global wellness industry at $1.5 trillion — the United States representing nearly one third of the share at $450 billion — and the entire wellness industry is expected to increase between 5-10% annually for the foreseeable future (McKinsey & Company, 2021, 2022). Increasingly, we are investing, sharing, and experiencing what Schrödinger called entanglement. Our lives are changing.
The need to create new playbooks in the wellness industry
Rapid industry expansion is not always a smooth ride. The share economy model by its virtue could not have succeeded had AirBnB, Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, and others taken chapters from “tried and true” ways of thinking in designing their business strategies rather than iterate through new ways of thinking with accelerator firms including YCombinator, among others. Despite the rapid interest in and growth of wellness services in the United States, we see everyone using outdated models based upon proprietary service products and other forms of gated knowledge. Never before have there been more expensive closed-source methods, mantras, and systems, priced accordingly to target markets’ willingness to pay. With a growing market, we even see mantras competing against one another. Even in 2023, the best publishers in conscious business send out product messaging with email subjects that read, “A Meditation System That Works.”
How can anyone truly interested in expanding consciousness hold onto gated, accumulation and competition-based information models of human expansion to contribute to our future as a species in this beautiful cosmos?
We believe, in 2023, that we find ourselves in the middle of a new punctuation in consciousness development. But unlike fifty years ago, we are in the midst of evolving new economic models to sustain and thrive with our planetary and cosmological environments. As has and continues to happen in industries across the human economic panoply, particularly information and service industries, when the market reaches a threshold of inflexible, gated actors, disruption transforms the landscape by necessity to expand and double down on purpose and outcome. We must elevate our levels of consciousness and creativity if Earth should remain a viable living system and organism to support life for our species and our present life-sustaining biodiversity.
Time not technique
Boundaries invite entropy. Expansion requires decentralization. When the fencing gets torn down, the wild return home to the range.
In our present state of access to modest technology, information is freely accessible and shareable. The previous models of gating information — such as methods, techniques, and systems — with trademarks and paywalls simply do not work anymore. We find in the present information ocean and collective population of 8 billion that closed-source models that rely upon competition for presence are here-today-gone-tomorrow, when we have a golden opportunity to unite and come together.
We have gained much over the last century in the science and application of consciousness development, and we have learned some lessons along the way.
The lineage of masters would agree: now is the time to free your mind. It’s time to open the gates — it’s time to innovate.
The Reflexive Mind: Venture Design As a New Way of Thinking About Consciousness Development
If you have worked near technology in the last fifty years, you have likely become familiar with the concept of design thinking (author’s note: It’s okay, I hadn’t until launching a tech startup in 2016). At its simplest, design thinking takes the scientific method and turns it inside out like a reversible jacket: rather than focusing on a problem to problem-solve, design thinking focuses on a solution (Lawson, 2005). Design thinking immerses one into the experience of the user, leading the innovator to experience an idea from the inside as they are creating it (Liedtka, 2018) — like a lucid dream, or in so many ways, our lives.
The process remains, but the attractor changes. This “positive attractor” allows methodology to be likened more as a moth to a flame than a person searching for keys in the dark, and — as it was originally adapted from architecture design — is an organic methodology for rapid innovation and creativity (Cross, 1982). Still, although a wonderfully inventive nonlinear process, design thinking is motivated by a target end result (Interaction Design Foundation, 2023; Rowe, 1987). This is close to what we are doing when we do meditative practices, but of course, if we as conscious beings seek a peak experience, we are most certainly guaranteed to come just a little short as long as we hold preconceived expectations of, as Ram Dass would say, what we think we are. We get caught.
A venture design model of consciousness development
In recent years, a rogue offspring of design thinking has come into emergence in the startup ecosystem: venture design. Venture design takes design thinking and its nonlinear, creative, rapid iterative process, and cuts the strings, so to speak, to the finessed end solution. In essence, venture design shifts reward from the material outcome to the process of creation itself (Imboden, 2016).
To further the depth of parallel, where design theory focuses on nonlinear material elements of method to arrive at solution, venture design focuses on flow and momentum, free to skip steps or, more accurately, behave organically to realize higher value in real-time. Where design theory focuses on one solution, venture design fluidly moves from one experience to another, building in momentum (Imboden, 2016).
What is exciting about venture design as a parallel to what we do in meditation, and how consciousness development works? It provides a simple, elegant mental model to help one rapidly develop one’s own map to nonlocal awareness. Any meditator, artist, runner, dancer, rock climber, or literally anyone with a passion will tell you, once you have had a spontaneous peak “high” experience in one’s craft, it becomes difficult for that experience not to become a material comparator to “recreate” or even “exceed” — in other words, to get caught outside when there is no outside in which to get caught. Once this happens, we separate ourselves from experience, and joy becomes struggle: we lose our childlike wonder and pleasure of our flowing, unitive being. Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne (among others in research in remote perception) have found precisely this in studies of anomalous, consciousness-correlated and -directed event success rates and statistical significance (Jahn & Dunne, 2011; Radin, 2010; Schwartz, 2007).
The above figure represents a nonlinear, natural attractor (process) focused model of meditative experience whereby one enters through practice of intent toward an organic, extremely simple positive feedback loop toward expanding awareness. One experiences pure, unitive consciousness, and through this, noetic (e.g., consciousness-correlated, -directed, psi) experiences may be had either spontaneously, volitionally, or both. In keeping with the venture design parallel, the process is organic, wavelike, and not dependent upon steps — as one experiences expanding awareness especially, each experience is unique, natural, and by nature, spontaneous. Further, this model is not technique or even modality-centered, but truly universal. We feel this model can equally represent one’s experience in seated meditation as rock climbing, mountaineering, or even in a lucid dream state. This is a truly open source model of consciousness development, as it aims to represent the mechanics of human consciousness, rather than one individual’s unique practice (or product).
Venture design, in a sense, reminds us that there is no end goal, only process (nouns are verbs and particles are waves, and so forth) — that, at the most fundamental level of reality, all diversity is but one cosmic resonant, moving process, and we are part of that process, equally as we are an expression of that singularity that bonds all as one, oscillating into order, complexity, coherence, and life itself.
Mind and Direct Experience Merge
What happens when we quiet the mind in meditation? Let’s begin from the qualitative — after all, we may just find that in a mental universe, quantitative perspectives may better be suited for engineering applications than arriving at more nuanced, implicate orders of clarity and truth. As we have discussed above, bringing the scientific method of experience into the heart of the subjective bears both measurable and immeasurable reproducible fruit, and can help us return to oneness.
As we go inward, the body settles into deep rest. As all the physiological and psychological kinetics reach their resting state, awareness begins to expand. Eventually, spontaneously, awareness seems to merge with cosmological mind, or better, realize itself. This expansive, aware state of consciousness is deeply silent, infinitely expansive. Awareness bonds with resonant coherence into unitive states of consciousness. In this suspended moment, observer, process of observation, and observed merge into one — and in this moment, the individual realizes the unitive essence of life and greater cosmological reality.
From this state of being, we realize through direct experience the unitive nature of all cosmological diversity, and with it, nonlocal mechanics of consciousness. As we become more familiar with this heightened state of awareness, returning more frequently from waking consciousness, it becomes more integrated into our waking lives. And as we permeate and thin this membranous threshold — the resistant mental cell wall, so to speak, of thought and emotion — through increasingly organic means we begin to learn we may apply nonlocality into our daily lives in wondrous, spontaneous and directed ways. Through this, we may extrapolate events through quantitative analyses far more reaching and provocatively than by simple material neurophysiological measurement (which many have rather dispassionately catalogued) — we may validate with overwhelming statistical significance noetic, consciousness-directed events (CDEs) independent of space and even time.
Today’s science of consciousness is anomalous — more on this to come.
Applying Singularity: All Points Are Connected, Local & Nonlocal Are One
The total number of minds in the universe is one. In fact, consciousness is a singularity phasing within all beings. — Erwin Schrödinger
It can well be argued that every human wisdom tradition has held meditation central to acquisition of knowledge and experience of truth. It seems from historical record and feels readily true from anyone who regularly quiets the mind in meditation, that humanity has been engaging within all along. In recent decades, quite remarkable findings have proven true of the power of consciousness to nonlocally — that is, irrespective of any spatial or temporal limitation and thus without any resistance or drag — access information (e.g., remote perception), sense probable near-future events (i.e., precognition), influence matter (i.e., psychokinesis), and even communicate (I.e., telepathy) (Jahn & Dunne, 2011, 2012, 2017; Mitchell, 1974; Radin, 2010; Schwartz, 2007; Targ, 2012; Tart et al., 1980).
This author, along with virtually all scientific investigators and event percipients, believes that this is not some superhuman ability, or even highly advanced level of mental skill, but rather, our natural conscious state. We may even take this one step farther toward normalization to say with high confidence that this nonlocal state of conscious operation is how we govern our lives at all times. The only difference between a meditator influencing a physical target, engaging in remote perception, or communicating nonlocally and anyone in any given circumstance is that one becomes in a moment aware of the mechanics of this primary faculty by which we are conscious, and interacts with consciousness from this state of heightened, foundational awareness. Through overtly simple and equally reliable exercises, we have seen individuals with very little meditation experience find they are capable of influencing “inert” material object behavior in a controlled environment in under an hour of effort — and once the moment arrives, that individual comes to better understand how that experience arrives for them. From that first teachable aha moment, experiment turns to exercise, and the process becomes familiar, like any other meditative experience.
Concluding Remarks
I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process — an integral function of the universe. — R. Buckminster Fuller (1970)
We began our discussion here reviewing the recent history of consciousness development in the United States. From here, we opened dialogue on the value of open source information as essential for free and optimal expansion of ideas, thought, and practices within a rapidly expanding human experience and corollary industry dedicated to serving our human family and by proxy, ourselves, in unitive, entangled consciousness. We paralleled contemporary design theory from the technology sector to consciousness development to reveal a methodology that celebrates both direct pathways to consciousness development and open source models of information flow in the present, rapidly expanding wellness industry. We arrived into the science of consciousness, unitive states of consciousness, and began, if ever briefly, exploring nonlocal, noetic applications of consciousness and its implications upon our human experience.
We are living in the most wondrous moment in humanity. Echoing Buckminster Fuller and other modern visionaries, we, as one species, one planet, and one cosmos, are becoming experientially aware of our place in the cosmos on Spaceship Earth and our infinite, nonlocal potential in this very moment to automatically connect with the intelligence of the cosmos and its intelligences therein. The questions that naturally arise are, who do we want to be, and where do we want to go?
Consciousness & Humanity: Our Noetic Future
Noogenesis [the crossing point whereby consciousness becomes energy] rises upwards in us and through us unceasingly. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1959)
It naturally follows that if consciousness is that ineffable intelligence of singularity phasing within all things, and matter is but densely kinetic energy in coherent order and resistance patterns, then a) things are less things than conscious processes, and b) evolution is consciousness-directed toward greater complexity, coherence, and order. For us humans, consciousness development provides us our own exponent factor to evolutionary expression, meditative practices their vehicle to expanding awareness and directing energy flows. It matters less what technique you practice, so long as you get there — or more accurately, here.
We believe these thoughts, practices, and resulting tangible applications coming to greater realization are adding to an evidence base suggestive that many of us are sharing similar, even collective, experiences. As time continues, we will perceive these fantastic noetic, consciousness-correlated and -directed events as increasingly normal in our lives, and — we can hope — sustainable, over-unity technologies will exponentially evolve through their adoption in research and development over time. We collectively feel in this wakeful moment we are riding the crest of a magnificent wave of humanity’s self-awareness of our omnipresent conscious evolution in the greater cosmological family of intelligence.
But it really is much simpler than all the wild fruits of lucid experience and attractors of probable futures. All we have to do to experience limitless mind and create limitless potential is close the eyes, quiet the mind, and expand.
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Alaskan Aurora, photograph by Archie Frink