#653: Indian Philosophy Insights into VR Presence: The Five Koshas

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[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. So virtual reality as a technology has been this confluence of many different trajectories. The biggest ones so far have been the gaming industry, which has focused on creating these interactive experiences and using the game engines. And the other side of it has been from the film industry, where you've got a lot of storytellers using the visual storytelling language of film, all those constraints of how you actually invoke these deeper emotions of those narratives. And so you have this confluence of both gaming and storytelling. But there's another trajectory, which is the embodied contemplative practices like yoga, meditation, mostly a lot of the Eastern spiritual traditions. So today I'm actually going to be talking to Dr. Michael Shapiro. He's a clinical psychologist, but he's also been studying as a Buddhist monk. He spent time with Thai forest Buddhism and Zen Buddhism and Kashmir Shaivism and yoga traditions, basically just immersing himself into Eastern philosophies. And so I sit down with Michael to talk about presence and the dimensions of presence and how he thinks about presence and these different embodied spiritual practices and how that sense of embodiment, how that's coming in VR and how VR could learn from some of these different other approaches and philosophies surrounding presence. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Michael happened on Sunday, July 23rd, 2017 at the Institute of Noetic Sciences Conference in Oakland, California. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.

[00:01:52.327] Michael Sapiro: My name is Dr. Mike Sapiro. I'm a clinical psychologist, a meditation teacher, and a former Buddhist monk. I'm a fellow, a research fellow, at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and also on faculty teaching at Esalen, too. So I kind of have myself in various realms, from the science to the practical realm of clinical psych, and then to the community service of teaching. And my practices kind of come from two various lineages, Buddhism, and specifically Thai forest Buddhism, and then Zen Buddhism. I spent eight years in Zen and about 12 in Theravada Buddhism. And on the other side, I also have spent almost 18 years studying yoga philosophy. non-dual practices from Kashmir Shaivism and Ayatvita Vedanta practices and ways of being. And so I've merged all that in my own experience, through experience, past the cognitive, past the intellectual, into a kind of more embodied way of being. So what I'm most interested in is how do we embody these practices in our daily lives. I found it very easy to live as a monk in the forest, actually. Of course, the reflection of my mental states and my emotional states and seeing myself clearly is very difficult. Being still can be very difficult. But really, the foods provided, the shelters provided, even living in a cave for a week turned out to be splendid because I had no responsibilities other than to chant and to walk and to be myself and in the forest, it's much harder to be a householder and apply these ways of being because we're married, we might have kids, we have jobs we like or don't like, we're in communities where we're safe or not safe, and so how do we integrate the actual essence of the teachings into our life. And that's where I find my most excitement in this work. Not really stimulating people intellectually to go, ooh, I want to be enlightened. And what is that, really? What does that mean when you're embodied? Cassandra Vieten, who's a co-teacher of mine, a dear friend, a mentor, is the president of IONS. We always use this line, and I don't remember where we stole it from, but it's not ours, but our practice is not transcending the body, it's embodying transcendence. So, very important that we're not using our spiritual practices to bypass our humanness, the things that we prefer to exile, the shadows, the demons, the pain, that we welcome, genuinely welcome these into our experience as part of nature, perhaps not preferred, but still a part. And maybe they have messages for us. Maybe there's things that we can heal in ourselves and thus serve other people. So meditation for me is actually ends up being service. There's no other way. I have no other choice now. I can't help but serve people. I can't help but not hurt people, and when I do, it's a felt experience. And so for me, blending meditation practices, psychology, science, and even social justice become the framework for how I live my life and how I teach. Both teach as a clinical psychologist and then teach as a meditation teacher.

[00:05:10.369] Kent Bye: Yeah, within the context of virtual reality, a lot of the goal of having an experience for many people having a virtual reality experience is to achieve this sense of presence where you're transported into another realm and that you feel like you're actually there. So there's different ways of thinking about that, of whether or not you feel like you have the illusion of being in another place and the illusion that everything there is plausible. And I also think about it in terms of having these different dimensions of presence, whether you have an ability to express your agency and have a sense of active presence, or if you have your mind stimulated in a way that achieves a sense of mental presence, or you have other people there and you're able to engage with them in a way that you feel like you're actually engaging with them and have this sense of social presence. Or you feel like it's some sort of narrative components or things that are happening that your emotional presence is being activated. And then finally, having all of your sensory motor contingencies stimulated to the sense that you have this real sense of embodied presence, that your body is actually in these virtual worlds. And my idea is that with these virtual reality technologies, that you can achieve these different dimensions of presence synthetically, but then you could also achieve them more likely in the real world. And on the other hand, looking at meditation, probably to say that you have this sense of learning how to be present at the real world, and the more you're able to do that, then the possibility of becoming present within virtual reality also potentially increases. And so there's these different maps and models that come from academia, but I know that from these different traditions, there's all sorts of different maps and models of both the mind and consciousness. But also, I'm just curious to hear your thoughts of like, how do you think about and describe presence and what it is?

[00:06:52.359] Michael Sapiro: Yeah, I love that question. It's very important, actually. And I have a YouTube video on presence, awareness, and vulnerability that I presented at a meditation research conference. I'll describe why I think those three things are essential for our work. Awareness, the first important piece, brings us to a place that is a step beyond the feelings and sensations and thoughts and emotions that we think we are. When we start building awareness, self-awareness, we see that we're actually functioning at all times on simultaneously different levels. the physical sensations, breath, the mind and emotions, images, wisdom itself arises intuition, joy and bliss, not as emotions but as states of being, and then pure awareness itself. When we develop awareness we see that at every single moment all of those ways of interacting with the world are engaged. We choose where to put our attention and most human beings put it in the mental sheath where we're thinking and we think we are beliefs, we think we are our thoughts. So awareness steps you back from that. You can see, oh, I'm identifying with thought. So I'm identifying with my body. So that's the first step. The second one is vulnerability. Because each one of us is actually full of light. We're actually the essence itself of life, beneath or beyond these sensory experiences or thought experiences. But if you're not vulnerable, it's like putting a wall in front of that light. And so the people who have impacted us the most positively have actually opened themselves up. and share their deepest pains with the world, and being willing to say, oh, this is who I really am, my vulnerability then allows my light to come forward. And that light coming forward is captured within our presence. So presence is now the way that my authentic-ness, my authentic self, is impacting and transmitting to you. You can feel it. I don't have to say anything. You can feel my presence which is radiating and it's actually not me. I'm not the doer. I'm not the one radiating. It's life itself coming through. So presence is what you get when someone or something is fully, fully vulnerable and open and life is flowing through. Vulnerability has to be a piece in that. So if there's a way virtual reality can also invite people to be vulnerable And at first it's very scary because emotions are there and wounds are there. But we don't need shame and we have no fear of those things and we can just be with, again, welcoming anything that's present. and truly be vulnerable and be raw, then our light comes forward without any boundaries in front of it. And we become not only present to the moment, but we are presence itself. So I'm wondering if there's a way virtual reality can tap into those three things of self-awareness, vulnerability, and finally allowing people to be fully present in their own being, their own light, which is everyone's being and everyone's light.

[00:10:01.108] Kent Bye: I think, you know, in the long trajectory of virtual reality, that's certainly a potential. And I think right now it's sort of being bootstrapped by a lot of games and going to these environments where you're vanquishing enemies and whatnot. But there's other people who are more focused on creating environments and maybe trying to evoke these different relaxation states or storytelling and narratives or a different strand of that. So it feels like right now in the virtual reality world is kind of mashing up the film world with the gaming world. The interactivity and making choices and gameplay and flow states you get from gaming and then the storytelling and the characters and plot development and these new ways of immersing yourself within the story from the film side. And that the new thing within virtual reality is the body. Like you're putting your body into the experience in a new way. And I'm wondering if there's going to be other vectors of other traditions coming in. So maybe these different spiritual traditions that have been focusing on embodiment, whether it's yoga or whether it's meditation, could be this other vector of insight in terms of these practices that people have already been doing for many thousands of years, starting to use the virtual reality technology to One of the things that Mikey Siegel, the founder of consciousness hacking, said today was that if we're able to quantify enlightenment in the way of basically creating a map or a mental model of these different places where people are at in their path towards cultivating a sense of awareness, this path towards enlightenment, let's just say, if you want to say there's larger and larger dimensions of awareness that you have through these different practices, then is it possible then, if you have that map, to take that map and then create technology that could assess where someone is at and then create sort of a pathway for people to go back and forth and see this dimension of progress? Because one of the things within flow theory and game design is that you have challenges and skills such that you have high challenge and high skill. And when you have that high challenge and high skill, you have these flow states. And from those flow states, then you're able to kind of achieve this sense of almost like non-dual awareness, where you're just not thinking about it. You're just reacting from a more embodied place. And that maybe it's possible to use technologies to be able to eventually, what Mikey Siegel said in his talk today, have the equivalent of the Netflix of consciousness experiences, such that you could have a variety of different experiences based upon what type of experience you wanted to have. Or if you're on this path and trying to progress down towards a certain state of mind, then it would be able to use technology to help mediate that. So, it seems like there's a lot of those maps that exist, whether it's the Eightfold Path and, you know, many different variations of trying to map these different mental states. And so, I think that, yeah, there's going to be this blending in of these ideas, but perhaps in the context of a game or a story or an immersive environment or experience that can be more democratized and made available to more and more people.

[00:13:09.248] Michael Sapiro: My musing, my wondering, is to what end? Obviously, Mikey and Julia, very heartfelt, mindful people, and having the goal of reducing suffering, enhancing human potential. So, that's their intention, which makes a huge difference, as we know from our research and our own practices. Intentionality brings us in the direction of where we're actually seeking to go. What I know from practice and what I know from our research is that a practice itself has intention attention repetition and then guidance So my concern with the technology and I think we need to explore it because it's here So we have the genius mind power to work on this Sci-fi is becoming reality and there's always going to be sci-fi next and we'll continuously because we're unlimited in our creative power and So, I'm actually glad we have mindful, heartfelt people doing this work. My wondering is, without repetition, without practicing, I've come to where I am in my life because of practice itself, because I'm continuously reminding myself to get back toward my intention, continuously reminding myself of my values. So, I very much value plant medicine. I value technology. I value these ways of giving us these experiences. My wondering is, how do we make that sustainable, what they've learned? Because it doesn't necessarily equate to wisdom. It can, but it might not equate to wisdom. And in the end, all of these spiritual practices end up with community and do good and be good. I remember being in Thailand leading a trip with Richard Miller, the founder of I-Rest, and he was speaking from a yogic perspective to a monk who was a head monk of a temple. And the head monk asked Richard, from his lineage, what's the point of your practice? And he said, be a good human being, to be a good human being, to be a good human being, and they both laughed because it's the end of both of theirs. If enlightenment ends with us not being a good human being, I'm not sure we have the right concept. So I want us to be very careful in these leaps in technology that the actual work itself is what polishes us, not the state that we're attaining.

[00:15:32.418] Kent Bye: Yeah. And, you know, back in 2009, I went to the Institute of Pneumatic Science Conferences, did an interview both with Marilyn Schlitz and Cassandra Vieten about Living Deeply, which had just come out at the time. And so, you know, I've been having in this awareness those four different components of a spiritual practice. And so at the time, you know, since then, I gave a talk about how hula hooping could be a spiritual practice. And there's different games that I've had within virtual reality that I treat as a daily practice. Soundboxing VR is one where I'm in this experience and there's these balls that are coming at me at this different speed and the balls are recorded like I can actually play a song and then move my body hitting an invisible wall and that creates these different balls that then it's almost like a recording of my embodiment, my movement. And I can take my right hand is more dominant and my left hand is more weak and then I can flip that and invert it. So then I'm like in the process of training my left hand to be stronger, but I'm listening to music. I'm trying to have this sense of awareness and breath and but also I play it at the insane speed and so it's like it comes at me so fast that I have to do it day in and day out in order to see that I'm getting better at it and that it's just sort of like impossible at the beginning but then the more I do it day in and day out the more I get better. So I do feel like I've been able to have this sense of intention of trying to be present and get these into these flow states the attention of paying attention trying to Think of my breath when I can and to have that sense of mindful awareness And then the practice the repetition of doing it in a more consistent basis of having it You know be more of a regular practice the guidance thing I think is more tricky because I'm doing stuff that probably nobody else has been able to do before and so like who do I turn to or I Is that built in? Is there a sangha where there's other people that are also kind of virtually playing it and they, you know, comment or, you know, but it's less of a someone who's been able to walk this path already. And I think that's the thing with technology is that if you try to take these four different principles of any spiritual practice and start to apply technology into it, you can often be someone who's on the bleeding edge of doing it. And so, you know, how do you think of where this guidance comes from? Is it a sangha? Is it nature? Is it self-guidance? Or what are the components of that guidance that really make it a spiritual practice?

[00:17:54.491] Michael Sapiro: So I think that's a great and fundamental question because those of us who think we can do this alone often end up alone without the support we need. And I might be one of them thinking, I don't need help. I can do this. and really recognizing actually we're interdependent and my well-being is dependent on others. And what I'm actually thinking is you're working through your game. What is your deepest heartfelt intention of doing this work? It's so that you just said you can develop attention or you can develop focus. to what end, I would ask. And you might say, so that I can pay attention to my children more, so that I have the ability to attend to the patients I work with. And I would say, to what end? And then you would possibly say, because connection is important to me and service is important. So, if you're working on your game, because in the end it's actually of service to other people, then what arises and gets in your way, you, our identification with thoughts and beliefs as you're playing this game, self-doubt, self-loathing, low self-esteem, or whatever, or narcissism arises, I'm so amazing at this game, that gets in our way of actually achieving that heartfelt desire of, let's say, connecting. And so that's where you can seek out guidance and say, hey, I'm doing this practice. And the practice is actually irrelevant in some way. You seek out a teacher who then can help you work on whatever is arising in your way. And so then it's not as important that the teacher is an amazing, insane speed level guru, but that they have a concept of working with whatever's arising that's in your way, that you recognize. So that self-awareness piece I talked about becomes really important. because you'll start witnessing what is arising for you, the pains, the sufferings in your life, and you bring that to a teacher. And so sometimes we think of we just need a teacher on our path. I need a yoga teacher who's teaching me asanas, and my asana isn't, you know, it's not correct form, so let me get an asana teacher. But really, whatever is in our way is arising, and we want someone to be able to work with us in that realm. So for me, go find yourself a teacher but really be aware of what's arising so you know what to talk about with that teacher.

[00:20:12.101] Kent Bye: Yeah, it's interesting. And the thing that you were saying earlier when you talked about the conceptualization of presence, it almost sounded like it was more of like a social exchange where you have a sense of presence and people can kind of feel how present you are. And they talk about people like the Dalai Lama or Amma who have this sort of unconditional love, sense of presence that they can just feel. And I think that in some ways, the way in the context that people within the virtual reality community use presence may be a little bit more along the lines of the awareness of these different varieties of a state of internal being that you have. And so you said that most people are in the mental sheath of awareness. And I'm just curious, like you named a number of different ones, and I didn't know if that was like a progression towards, you know, kind of like this ultimate enlightened non-dual awareness. But I'm just curious if you could expand a little bit more about how you think about

[00:21:03.468] Michael Sapiro: The different dimensions of awareness and the different maps or models that you use to think about that Sure, and and I think there's a misconception that it's a toward something So we start with the grossest which is the body and end with the subtlest which is kind of pure awareness There is no form but it's not a directional you don't start with the body and and then end is pure awareness because how would you be a dad and pure awareness or how would you be a good husband or work with people, because as pure awareness there's no form in that anymore. So who's working, what work is to be done, there's no identification with anything else. These levels or sheaths, not levels, they're really more sheaths or places we put our attention are all simultaneously happening at the same time. So the body, the sensations of the body, the physical body, the skin, the radiant vibrations of the skin, the heart beating, You can put your attention onto those right now. You can feel the aliveness of the body. And then there's breath and energy. You can always come to the breath. It's always present. And it also carries the fuel, oxygen. It carries what our body needs, which is called chi or prana or whatever various cultures call it. But that's a level that we can put our awareness. And there's practices, pranayama, which we do in yoga. lineages in which we're focusing on that energy and that breath specifically. And then we have the mind which contains emotions and feelings which are also found in the body. So at any time if I ask you to say what emotion is arising, many people give me a thought, well I think that, no I'm saying emotion, and then what does an emotion feel like in the body? So that you know, oh, a sadness for me is a pit in my belly that has heat up to my throat and my throat is clenching and I feel water behind my eyes. So when I'm saying sadness, I'm actually experiencing sadness. But I'm using the word to mean all of those things. And the mind also has images. If I ask for people to be aware of their thoughts, sometimes it can be a stream of images coming in. And we can most likely change the outcome of our life by replacing... I don't spend time not having negative thoughts. I spend time really thinking of sacred things. So why would I want to think about my grandparents' experience in the Holocaust often and often and often when it's a very hard experience for my body to think of that? Not that it's not purposeful at times to do the work, but if I put up an image of my puppy in my mind, or my wife, immediately there's a different sensation. And so as a clinical psychologist, people spend so much of their attention on these negative thoughts, images, and experiences. So we have an opportunity to train our minds to put our attention on different parts of these sheaths, the body, the breath, the mind, and then we get into wisdom and intuition, which if you've ever had experiences of wisdom and intuition, it actually doesn't come from the mind. When I ask people to ask their wisdom a question, One, it never tells them what to do. It suggests how to be. And two, it's surprising, but most people find that voice arising from their belly or from their heart space. And I don't prime people in this experience. I simply say, ask your intuition or wisdom what's to do, what's best for you. And usually it'll be, be patient, be kind, slow down, Be aware. And that voice, I say, where do you hear that? And most people say, it's in my belly or my chest. And then I ask you to say, please ask your intellect what to do. Well, if I do this, da-da-da-da-da-da-da, and if I do that, da-da-da-da-da-da, and they go on forever, and it's in their mind, I ask them where. And it comes from a part of their head somewhere, usually the right side in the top. They hear their own voice, or they hear their father or mother's voice. So, once we have awareness, we recognize how we're functioning in all of these different levels. And then, of course, we have bliss and joy as a field of being that's radiant all the time. They're not emotions. It's actually a field from which we're arising from and returning to. And it's not conceptual. We have to have that experience to know it. And, of course, ecstasy and various other technologies can give us that bliss state. But it's not sustainable, but it is always there. We can always drop into it, and then we come back out and live in other sheaths of the mind or the body, and then we can drop in. But what we're training to do is actually have that well-being or that state of bliss pairing with everything else, because it's simultaneously. That means I can be angry and still feel a sense of joy, still feel my body and my breath in that effervescent feeling of joy, even though I'm angry. And that's the liberation, that I'm not bound to any one of these at any one time.

[00:26:04.077] Kent Bye: Yeah, and one of the things that's really striking about your background is that you have this kind of mix of embodied practice, whether it's meditation and yoga and going through the institutions to get the extent of the mind through like PhD in psychology and clinical psychology. And so what I kind of see happening with virtual reality is that we're kind of mixing these different worlds, which is like the objective world of being able to create these experiences for people, but that are trying to invoke these internal states of being within people. So we're kind of moving from this information age to an experiential age, where a lot of usability models within technology have focused on productivity and making things, and that It's a little bit less about making things and producing something, but it's actually about, you know, having an experience and trying to achieve this state of being. And I feel like because the body is being introduced into this media for the first time, that I'm just curious, like, what type of insights that you would have from either these yogic traditions or meditation traditions as to how should people think about the body and the sense of embodiment within these immersive technologies?

[00:27:17.105] Michael Sapiro: Great, great question and very important I think for your field as it continues to grow. Because wisdom, as I said before, if you ask most people to be quiet and sit, arises in the body. And it actually, there's sensations involved in that. The body itself has deep wisdom. Jack Kornfield in his book, The Wise Heart, spends at least a chapter on the depth that the body has to offer. And we are so unembodied in this culture, heads up mostly, maybe body down with a drug or maybe dancing if we can get to it. We tend to numb with alcohol and drugs because we don't want to feel our emotions. They're heavy. The wisdom of our practices is that the body itself is wise and it's the only thing that's carrying us. And we take it for granted. And we don't love on it. We don't self-care. I'll self-care when I finish these projects. This body is the only thing carrying you forward right now. How can you use virtual reality, how can you use our technology to have us love ourselves completely and deeply, so that we're thriving in every moment, even when we're upset, even when we're angry? The body itself has wisdom. If there's a way that you can help people access that wisdom by dropping into the body, And so many people want to skip that part toward enlightenment and they're forgetting that is enlightenment dropping into the body and feeling the vibrancy of life happening in this very moment in your body is the only thing that we actually have that's tangible. So that is in essence what I would suggest for y'all to do is drop into the body.

[00:29:00.596] Kent Bye: Yeah, and the other thing that I see is that there are all these different traditions that go back many thousands of years about the body and models around that and yet people have direct experiences through meditation or other things and yet on the other side of science you're kind of talking about things that can be objectively observed and repeated and When you're talking about a human being, you have a human being that is in a certain emotional state and state of internal being, and then it starts to be a little bit hard to scientifically control all the different dimensions of somebody's life and living and all the context and the culture and everything in order to try to Prove or define a lot of these more contemplative practices, but yet at the same time we have over the last 20 30 years much more meditation and consciousness awareness coming into like these medical research fields in the context of clinical psychology or and used for trauma. But yet there's still this split, I'd say, between the direct experience that happens within the body versus what can be explained scientifically. So it seems like the Institute of Noetic Sciences is really at that cross-section of what happens with these different wisdom traditions as well as what happens within the body. But yet trying to look at science and how science can help kind of create some frameworks that could be repeatable and to really map out these knowledge domains that go back many thousands of years. I'm just curious to hear some of your thoughts on that.

[00:30:24.310] Michael Sapiro: Oh yeah, that's what attracts me most to this place, except for all the amazing geniuses that I get to interact with, whose minds are so open they can take any experience and go, oh, let's look at that. So the Institute of Noetic Sciences itself is a place of unending creativity and imagination. and using science then to go, let's look at that stuff. I love that we're looking at embodiment here, because we know from all of the practices, Living Deeply talks about that in the book, in the research they've done, that the body is also a place of living awareness, living wisdom. And we don't have time, or it's not the interest of this talk, but there's all the data in the world now we need to see how the mind and body and energy interact. Biofield medicine is starting to get some attention down at UCSD. The Consciousness and Healing Initiative with Dr. Shamani Jain and her colleagues are starting to look at now the connection between chakra systems and immune systems, and we are in a very, very amazing time of science and spirituality because they're reconfirming, they're reinforcing one another. So it's great as someone with a doctorate, I can go to these places, to the VA and say, I'm going to bring this practice in because here's the data, here's the research we've done on this. And I don't have to talk about the deep states of awareness yet until I'm in the workshop, but I can sell it just on the basis of our science. Very lucky that I'm alive during this period where the blending, merging of science and spirituality is so actually accepted. And not only accepted, but commended at this point.

[00:32:05.270] Kent Bye: What are some of the biggest open questions that are driving your research and your work forward?

[00:32:10.504] Michael Sapiro: Well, I really want to know, how do we measure presence? I've been asking Dean and Cassie, like, please, let's talk about measuring presence. I think Lisa Dale Miller has a group of people to start looking at how do you actually measure presence itself, and then how do you measure its impact on another human being? the spectrum, electromagnetic waves, you know, bio-measures. There's a vast array of tests we can do, but we need to know how to operationalize presence first. We're not doing that yet, but that's an interest of mine is, well, how do we operationalize presence so that we can study it? Because until it's operationalized, it's a concept without any weight to it. That's driving what I would like to see in science, like measure presence, define it, measure it, and then see its impact on people, on patients. And then my own work is led by my excitement of helping people awaken.

[00:33:13.296] Kent Bye: Yeah, and the virtual reality community has been trying to look at this issue of presence for at least 20 to 25 years. And so they've had a number of different approaches. And I think it sort of suffers from looking at how the technology is strictly impacting the sensory motor contingencies. And the dilemma is that the sense of presence within the context of a virtual reality experience is that it's an internal subjective state of experience. Is hard to quantify so then when you try to quantify it with present surveys afterwards? How present did you feel within this experience then if you apply those same present surveys to reality then sometimes you know you don't get the same ability of getting any statistical results because when you try to add a I felt a level of presence of seven within this experience and a level of presence of five. And you have different scales and different numbers. Those numbers don't combine across different people. So one approach that presence researchers have been trying to do is let's give you this simulated environment and let's you know, give you at the highest level of presence in terms of all the technology that we can know, and then we'll dial these different dimensions back and have them back in. But yet still, again, we're talking about externally stimulating somebody's sense of presence within a virtual environment. And so I think that from the meditation perspective, it comes from more of an internal state of being, of the control of the mind, of the breath. And there's certainly some indications of you know, how well are you meditating? Are you in a certain brainwave state? Do you have a heart rate variability? So, I think that there's, in the same sense, in the sense of presence, if you threaten somebody and they response and they duck or they have a fear state, you can look at galvanic skin response and the different sort of emotional states they they go through, so you have these physiological reactions to threats, but yet you have to threaten people in order to get that state of presence. So that's sort of what I see is kind of the state of VR presence, which is kind of this rudimentary way of looking at from a technological lens, but yet what I kind of hear you saying is that it's taking a completely different kind of approach of trying to understand and measure this internal subjective state.

[00:35:20.845] Michael Sapiro: I mean, everyone talks about the Dalai Lama. They all say there's a lightness and a light that permeates around him. And it impacts a whole room of thousands of people. The whole room can feel something. Well, what is that something? What is actually emanating itself? I'd like to know. Is it emanating as waves? Is it emanating as frequency, vibrations? Is it emanating as light itself? I mean, I know those things can be broken down as well into measurable attributes.

[00:35:53.492] Kent Bye: Or if it's consciousness, then it's sort of a non-local field that is not measurable, perhaps.

[00:35:58.539] Michael Sapiro: But it's felt. and it's perceived. So there has to be a way to measure that. So in virtual reality then, could you have a Dalai Lama in there and have someone who's in that space of the Dalai Lama be measured for the impact of... Can you create a presence within your own realm, a Dalai Lama presence that someone can impact, and then conversely, can you have an experience where someone becomes so authentic in virtual reality that they're emanating presence? And then you measure that within the field around them.

[00:36:30.551] Kent Bye: Yeah, and the people that come to mind, Amma, Dalai Lama, some of these people that have kind of cultivated this sense of awareness so that you can feel it in their physical presence, would that be able to translate into VR is what I hear you saying?

[00:36:40.977] Michael Sapiro: You know, why not over Skype? I see patients over Skype and I see my teachers over Skype. I feel them. There's no sense of separateness when I'm really with them and my patients also say that. They feel me and they're in my presence even though over Skype. So absolutely, I believe if you knew what presence was, you could certainly code for that and create that. Maybe it is the light that surrounds. Maybe it is the smile. I think it's the non-judgment also. I mean, we say that a lot with mindfulness, non-judging, but that's an actual way of being. That is not a cognitive state. It's whatever, whatever you're bringing. I've worked with murderers and people who've done heinous things in the world, and I can sit with them and go, okay, And I'm certainly no Dalai Lama and I've witnessed internal reactions and I'm a human being, but I understand the beginnings of what it means to actually be non-judgmental and be open, spacious, kind, welcoming awareness. So there's a lot of factors within presence, I think. If we actually start studying that, being more mindful of what it is, we can emulate it and teach people to be in their own. The Dalai Lama is not necessarily different than us. He's had the conditions from which, and possibly the karma, to develop into who he is. But it's applicable for us, too. Jesus and Buddha said, this is for you, too. This is for everybody to be in this place. So, absolutely, we can find out what it is and teach everybody who's interested in how to emanate that.

[00:38:18.878] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you think is kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?

[00:38:27.761] Michael Sapiro: I have no idea. I haven't paid much attention. I try to pay attention through ions with Loren Carpenter, his work. I might be the unhippest 39-year-old ever around, but I know when the people who are creating it are so heartfelt, then I have all the trust in the world that the things they'll create are going to have a large positive impact on the world. So I will wait in curiosity and wonder while my friends and colleagues who I trust deeply are going to create the next shift in our consciousness through virtual reality and other transcendent technologies.

[00:39:05.655] Kent Bye: Awesome. Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say?

[00:39:08.840] Michael Sapiro: Oh, always. I'm a talker, but I really enjoyed being with you, Ken. This was fun. Thank you. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. You're welcome. Thank you.

[00:39:16.958] Kent Bye: So that was Dr. Michael Sapiro. He's a clinical psychologist. He teaches meditation, studied as a Zen Buddhist and Thai forest Buddhism. And he's also a research fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, so for me, it was fascinating to hear like more of an Eastern philosophy perspective on presence. Coming here from the West, we have very specific ways of trying to quantify and measure different dimensions of presence. And I think that and looking to Eastern philosophies, they have a whole other worldview as to what even reality is. So a lot of the Eastern philosophies are a little bit more panpsychic in the sense that they don't see consciousness as just being emergent from our brains and our body, but that it's actually like an entire different field of awareness and being that is transcendent to our bodies. Whether or not that's a non-local field beyond space-time, I tend to think of it as some sort of transcendent field just because we haven't been able to actually measure it or anything at this point. I think this kind of gets to the crux of what consciousness is, where is consciousness, where is it residing. From Eastern philosophies, they have this whole layer of awareness and being that is sort of transcendent to a certain extent, where if you are able to train your body to be still, then you can have this access to these deeper levels of awareness and being. So I think you can kind of see the challenges of trying to like quantify or measure or create these different mental maps and models around presence. It kind of speaks to like what is your model of reality and what is real. So I've been using a lot of the elements to be able to look at embodied presence and active presence and mental social presence as well as emotional presence and The thing that Michael was talking about, the different sheaths, those are actually called the koshas. So there's different koshas that are coming from like more of a yogic tradition of Eastern philosophy. And those different bodies they have is the physical body, the energy body, the mental body, the wisdom body, and the bliss body. And so there's sort of different correspondences to that in terms of the embodied earth element being the physical body, the water element of the energy body. The mental body actually has like the fire element. And then the wisdom body is the air element. But there's also the bliss body, which is kind of like not really accounted for in any of the more Western traditions. And that bliss body is that level of awareness where you're sort of having this direct connection to this underlying field of awareness and being. So I think that looking at Eastern philosophies and looking at the yogic tradition can start to have some, you know, very specific and different ways of looking at presence. And Michael seemed to think that, you know, you might be able to actually measure it some way. I don't know. I'm not sure how we're going to actually figure that out. One of the things he specifically said was that when you're in the presence of somebody like the Dalai Lama that the Dalai Lama is emanating his presence outward into the entire crowd and that when you go and are in the presence of someone like the Dalai Lama, then you feel it. And he said that people report this as a phenomena, they experience it, they're able to feel it. So, you know, his conclusion is that we have to be able to measure it to some extent. And so, you know, being able to operationalize and formalize the actual, like, recording and quantification of presence, it could actually be an embodied phenomena that transcends our ability to be able to actually turn it into some sort of quantified number. So I think that is the challenge, and that, like, in terms of our internal state of presence, that's something that I think that still we're trying to figure out, you know, good ways of trying to really talk about it. And it's kind of like a transcendent spiritual experience that's inner and noetic, and it's difficult to actually put words to. So as things move forward, I think we'll see what happens in terms of whether or not we're able to get more of an insight as to what consciousness is and how to measure it. But I think presence within virtual reality is something that people have a direct experience of that, but it's hard to basically show or prove. You basically can report these different states of presence or flow states. So, a couple other big things that I took away from this conversation. One is this concept from what was originally in the book Living Deeply, written by Marilyn Schlitz and Cassandra Vieten. And Marilyn Schlitz, with the Institute of Neurosciences, also did this book on consciousness and healing. So, taking a step back, like all of the consciousness sort of dimensions, the way that you can actually measure it the most is in the context of medicine and healing, because if there is this mysterious mind-body connection, then you tend to find it in the healing practices. And for a long time, meditation was not taken seriously by Western science just because the mechanism of the mind-body interaction, if consciousness is emergent from the brain, then that consciousness shouldn't be able to be having downward causation within the body. So for Western science and the Western mind, it was basically impossible to have a mind-body interaction. But I think over time, that taboo against meditation from when the Institute of Neurotic Sciences started, they've been slowly breaking it down just by putting out like empirical studies and science. And so IONS has always been on the leading edge of like exploring this mind-body interaction in different ways. And so they've also spent 10 years studying what are the basic components of like the universal dimensions of all the different spiritual practices that are out there. And that was in the book Living Deeply. And they've came down to those four different things of intention. So your intentionality of why you're doing it, what's the final cause of what you want to try to achieve with this, your attention of being able to actually pay attention to your breath and be fully present within your body. And one of the things that Michael said was that this layer of pure awareness, that it's a little bit of a feedback loop between this pure awareness and the body. And that once you are able to get to that dimension of pure awareness, it's not like you just stay there and stop, you have to then integrate it into your body and put it into action. But it's that that layer of that pure awareness, where you have actually awareness of all the different dimensions of your presence, what I would call active presence, embodied presence, emotional presence, and mental and social presence, and what The Eastern philosophies in the yogic tradition would call from the five koshas the physical body, energy body, mental body, wisdom body, and the bliss body. So that level of awareness is what I think the attention is trying to get at, and you can get at that by focusing on your breath or focusing on your body and doing these embodied practices. So the third dimension of what constitutes a spiritual practice is repetition, that actual practice. In order to really cultivate these embodied practices, you actually have to do it every day and get into a rhythm. And it's through that practice of doing it every day that you can actually turn it into a spiritual practice, which is at the time of this recording of this interview, I was using soundboxing as a spiritual practice. And I think that a lot of people that are out there right now can start to use beat saber as a spiritual practice where they're doing it every day. They can feel themselves getting better. It feels good. Um, they get these dopamine hits, but I think the next step of actually, you know, just doing it every day is. What is the intention? Are you just going in there for your ego's sake or being able to get the high score? There's this trade-off between your narcissism and the flow states where you're trying to prove something. If your intention is to get onto the high score, then that's one dimension of your intention. if you're trying to cultivate a sense of awareness and attention, then where are you then applying that? And I think there's a deeper ethics that are within these different spiritual traditions that are like the way that the Institute of Neurotic Sciences talks about it is that you can focus on yourself, but at some point on your spiritual path, you go from focusing on yourself to then focusing on other people and seeing how what you're doing can be able to be in relationship to the larger community. And I think that is one of the dimensions of both VR is like, are we going to create these VR experiences so we can just become present? But if everybody's doing that, and they're not actually connecting to each other, then what's the point? I think the larger ethic of what Michael is saying is that we are actually interdependent upon each other, and that the end goal of all these different practices is to serve and to be integrated within the larger community. And so the quote that he said is that it's not about transcending the body, it's about embodying that transcendence. And so there's this feedback loop between you achieving those estates of pure awareness, but actually integrated into your body and bringing out into the world and actually be engaged within the world. And so the first three dimensions of the spiritual practice are the intention, attention, and the repetition. And the final one is that guidance. And I think that is where it goes back to both the intention of why you're doing it, but also even if you're doing these different practices within virtual reality, and there may not be a lot of other gurus of the beat saber path of meditation as a daily practice, but I think what he's saying is that there are other ways that you're going to become blocked for these deeper intentions for how are you going to bring these practices out into the world. And so given that, there's going to be ways of being able to both articulate that, but also get help and guidance in some ways, because if you don't get help and guidance, then you can end up being really isolated and alone. And the point about the guidance is, to a certain extent, that cultivation of those spiritual communities, or from what the Eastern traditions would call those sanghas, to be able to actually share in your experiences, but also to have some guidance in order to actually overcome these different blocks and to continue to evolve on your path of whatever your practice is gonna be. So those, again, are the intention, attention, repetition, and guidance. So overall, I think that the thing that is happening within virtual reality is embodiment. That is like a huge trend that I see. It's gonna be more and more important of how do we actually be embodied with inner bodies. And I think that a lot of the insights of how the Eastern traditions have been doing that, they've actually been starting with the body and starting with this inner experience of the phenomenological experience of what it means to be human. Whereas the Western tradition has been focusing their mind on to trying to describe the external world. So they're like literally looking at the movements of the heavens to begin with to try to like start to record those movements and to be able to turn those into math equations. And that was like basically the foundations of the science from the history of the Western thought was by looking outward at the stars and trying to then describe all of external reality. And I think that from the Eastern traditions of both the Chinese philosophy, Indian philosophy, they were actually turning inward. So they were looking at their inner experience and how they were coming in to their states of being and these different sheaths of consciousness and these different practices. And to a certain extent, they were discovering that there was this general layer of awareness and being that in order to get there, you had to do these practices where you had to just sit still and meditate and do yogic practices. It was because they had this taste of this different layers of general awareness and being that they even came up with these different practices in the first place. And so, coming through these different practices of yoga and meditation, they're being infused into a West that was starting throughout this last 130 years or so, starting with a lot of the New Age movement and theosophists. you know, kind of eventually getting into the 60s where the big collision of the East meets West. And I think now it's sort of like embedded within the mainstream with yoga studios, but also like how you can use meditation to be able to actually like integrate it into your lives. And there's been a lot of like secular translations of that to be able to kind of take out more of the metaphysical aspects of these Eastern philosophies and to just use it as a practice where you're just focused on your bath and be able to get those benefits of that meditation. But I also think that there's some deeper insights and completely different philosophies as the nature of reality and the nature of consciousness. And what I see right now is that virtual reality is kind of like this interdisciplinary melting pot that is allowing these different dimensions and philosophies to be integrated through the common human experience. And So I feel like there's going to be these different insights that we're going to be able to pull in and apply into our design frameworks, our experiential design frameworks, and to just get these different insights. So I've been drawing upon Eastern philosophy, Indian philosophy, Chinese philosophy, and just trying to see these different models of reality for how we can basically create and cultivate these experiences, but also have an approach or a way of thinking about it as we're actually going in and having these experiences. So I think there's a lot more to be impact and explored, but I'm going to be trying to, you know, pull these different experts from these different domains and just really have like a big diversity of these different insights. Because I think that we have a lot to learn from these different contemplative practices and how we're going to actually. Build the technology software, but also like to what end why are we doing it? What is the point and what is it that we actually want to do? By having these virtual reality experiences and how we're gonna still be connected to reality And I think that is speaking to these larger trends of ethics within technology where we actually have to like think about that final cause like why are we doing this and and and how we're going to be applying this and being integrated into society. Otherwise, we're going to create this situation where everybody is just kind of like isolated into their own bubbles, being able to tap into these different altered states of consciousness. But what Michael is saying is that it's not about achieving these peak experiences, like having a plant medicine experience with ayahuasca and getting into this transcendent experience. It's about, well, how do you then integrate that into your body and to bring it into your lives each and every day? And I think that is the thing that he's really advocating for. So that's all that I have for today. And I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And I wanted to say that, you know, from the Eastern Buddhist tradition, they have something called Dana, which is that all the teachings in the Buddhist traditions are free, they give them out, and at the end, they ask for gifts and donations. And I think that that type of exchange is something that really works. It's because this information wants to be out there. And if you find it helpful and useful, then it's up to you to find ways to sort of give that energy back. And the way that I've been doing that is through Patreon. So if you'd like to give some Donna, give some donations, give some support so I can continue to do this type of exploration and teaching and be able to think about these larger issues, then it's really important that you support this work by becoming a member of this Patreon. So you can donate today at patreon.com slash voices of VR. Thanks for listening.