Crumbs: February 22nd, 2019. Highly Alive
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I originally wrote this as an email to my yoga studio, but wanted to add, edit, and repost to Crumbs. It’s an insight I’ve been turning over in my head since September (when I started going deeper into my practice).
To preface the email a bit…
In startup-land, there’s a stark contrast between companies that move bits versus companies that move atoms. Informational versus physical. Companies that profit purely from moving bits around (Netflix, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Bitcoin) have nearly infinite scale and growth. Companies that profit from a combination of bits and atoms (Amazon, Uber, Nvidia) are much more limited. If a hurricane hits Amazon and Netflix distribution centers in North Carolina - Netflix simply shuts their servers down or moves them to NYC. Amazon must deal with the virtual and physical consequences.
This got me thinking about physical processes that are constrained by the underlying physical material, just like Amazon or Uber or Nvidia.
Purely informational companies are unconstrained. They can take advantage of a wonderful property of information (bits) — as far as we can tell, computation is substrate-independent:
There’s a vast variety of different computer architectures that are “universal” in the sense that they can all perform the exact same computations. So if you're a conscious superintelligent character in a future computer game, you'd have no way of knowing whether you ran on a desktop, a tablet or a phone, because you would be substrate-independent.
First, substrate-independence doesn't mean that a substrate is unnecessary, but that most details of it don't matter. You obviously can't have sound waves in a gas if there's no gas, but any gas whatsoever will suffice. Similarly, you obviously can't have computation without matter, but any matter will do as long as it can be arranged into logic gates, connected neurons or some other building block enabling universal computation.
Second, the substrate-independent phenomenon takes on a life of its own, independent of its substrate. A wave can travel across a lake, even though none of its water molecules do—they mostly bob up and down.
Third, it's often only the substrate-independent aspect that we're interested in: A surfer usually cares more about the position and height of a wave than about its detailed molecular composition, and if two programmers are jointly hunting a bug in their code, they're probably not discussing transistors.
However, Amazon isn’t substrate independent. It’s not a purely informational company. My recent Yoga excursion has revealed that my thoughts aren’t purely informational either — they occur in alongside body. They are constrained by my being — my underlying physical material. Like lasers.
Ok, enough preface — here’s the email:
I realized: the body is a laser.
Lasers are purely a function of the material on which they're built. Nothing else. Every material has a natural potential. If the material's natural potential is green photons, then you can only use it to generate green lasers. Once generated, this green laser will travel much farther than any lightbulb of similar wattage -- but it must be green. Anything else will be significantly weaker. For lasers, the material fixes the resonance.
How do lasers apply to bodies? Well, turns out, we Cro Magnon all share the same underlying material. We all grew from the same programming. Our joints and tendons and organs all positioned in the same places with the same ratios and connections, etc etc. This means there exists a good, a better, and a best way to recruit the human body's potential. Remind you of lasers? I hope so!
So, if we want to maximally recruit the potential of the body we're given, it means we have to give up significant control over the orientation of the effort. In laser-language, our body wants to be a green laser, and if you make it blue you're going to have to dampen the potential of the entire operation.
Unlike the neocortex, the laser potential of your body isn't something you create -- it's something you discover -- a property of the material at its most alive. People who misunderstand the principle at the individual level often develop irrational attachments to purist, aesthetically harmonized lifestyles -- but this is a low-recruitment-potential lifestyle designed around adopted beliefs rather than discovered resonances.
What I found out with Yoga: the dissonance between where your body wants to go versus the most resonant internal orientation can be quite large. Your habitual nature will put you where you’re most comfortable — in your heels or your toes; left or right leg; hips slightly askew; chest twisted forward or back. Often an odd combo of all. In order to get into a laser-body state, however, you must lose your habitual nature to find your laser-nature. The key is to mercilessly prune away things that inhibit the snowballing recruitment of body potential. Any speck of dust or crud turns exponential processes into linear or (ack!) even sub-linear ones.
In other words, focus is a property of the material, not your intentions about how to use it. In informational domains, the medium determines the message. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram are all different mediums with different communication dynamics. In physical domains, we're all working with the same body material. We are humans in search of our laser-nature. Like lasers, a single misplaced dissonance can dampen the whole show. But this is not fragility, since you can always identify, eliminate, and replace such false notes with effort. Do it enough and you get a laser-body condition.
The key to learning this art is being willing to make the recruitment-orientation tradeoff: tap more of a system's potential by letting go of attachment to preconceived notions of what the system is for. From the outside, a laser-like body looks like inscrutable magic. But there's no missing it -- you know it's highly alive.
Life happens in the body. We just pretend it happens in our heads.