Vishen LakhianiFounder of Mindvalley | NYT Bestselling Author | Transforming Lives Globally

Can Spirituality And Technology Co-Exist? | Vishen Lakhiani and Mikey Siegel

10 May 2018 · 2 min

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1:34

The speaker (Mikey Siegel) defines "consciousness hacking" as applying innovation to spiritual practice—secularizing and scientifically adapting ancient practices for the modern world. He argues for honoring past spiritual traditions while also being willing to discard or rework them, and describes concrete technology candidates (virtual reality, wearables, implants, feedback games) as tools to accelerate transformation, wellbeing, emotional connection and interpersonal connection. He even posits building technologies "a thousand times more potent than any form of meditation."

Chapters

There is this idea that technology and meditation need to stay the hell away from each other. So consciousness hacking for me is applying innovation to the spiritual path. And what that means is we all know what the typical idea of spirituality looks like, right? It's like sitting on a cushion, it's meditating, it's people chanting, it's yoga. It's these things that for the most part have existed for two or three thousand years, right? Consciousness hacking is asking this question, what does spirituality look like when it's secular, when it's science based, and when it's adapted, perfectly adapted to our rapidly changing modern world, right? Because for me, I believe that if we really want to support modern humanity, we need to, on one hand, honor what has been there in the past and be willing to completely throw it out. We need to be able to look fresh and say, how can things like virtual reality, wearables, implants, feedback games, how can these things actually be not just in support of transformation, of well being, of connecting to our emotions, of connecting to each other, but I would even take it further. I would say, how can we create technologies that are a thousand times more potent than any form of meditation that has ever existed? And then how can we package that.