Creative endeavors change a lot, especially in their early formative days. So I wasn’t surprised to find that as the InterbeingDAO meme’d itself into existence, others who shared in a similar vision of wise open-source psychotechnologies began to reach out and connect with me.

https://twitter.com/omniharmonic/status/1514371672836493314?s=20&t=7l4mqQflus3rwXJA9nhyfQ

Over the last few weeks, and after several conversations, I’ve come to understand that the ecosystem around wise open-source psychotechnologies is already co-arising! This is good news, because it means that I don’t need to do all the heavy lifting myself, and that’s not how genuine movements arise anyway, so doubly good news, this appears to be a real movement!

As a result of recognizing I’m already part of this larger co-arising movement, I’ve decided to let go of the original purpose of InterbeingDAO and instead pivot the purpose of InterbeingDAO toward increasing the reach of our own unique open-source psychotechnology, Social Meditation.

Making Meditation Social

Meditation–in the modern era–has been conceived of and practiced, largely, as an individual affair. Yet in the early days of the Internet era many are beginning to realize that the Network, not the Individual, is a better orienting model for who we are. Modern meditation needs an upgrade. Social Meditation is an open-source psychotechnology for the networked age.

More specifically, social meditation is a form of interpersonal contemplative practice in which each participant is invited to verbalize their practice aloud with others. Social Meditation is a peer-2-peer format of practice, one that was developed by pioneering meditation teacher Kenneth Folk. It can be done just as effectively in-person as online, and it can either be facilitated by a human, or if the instructions are sufficiently simple, automated by a program.

🆕 Increasing the Reach of Social Meditation

From this point forward the InterbeingDAO exists to increase the reach of social meditation. Here reach is best described as the span, or number of people that are reached, multiplied by the depth at which they’re reached, such that:

Reach = Span * Depth

Fortunately, thousands of practitioners have been cultivating the depth dimension of Social Meditation, since it was developed over a dozen years ago. As a broader community of practice we’ve learned how to go deep into these practices, both in-person & online. We’ve learned how to safely plumb the depths of social meditation on retreat, as well as in our daily lives. Hundreds have learned how to facilitate these open source practices in a variety of different contexts, roles, relationships, languages, & cultures.

As a result of the last dozen years of collective practice, some of the hard problems around how to facilitate & practice social meditation have been resolved. The big challenge before this DAO–as I see it–is in how to help set-up an ecosystem model that encourages open collaboration, shared governance, and well-aligned economic incentives for all participants of the ecosystem. If we can seed such an ecosystem properly, and the starting conditions are fertile, there’s no telling how many beings could be touched by the practices of interbeing. May it be so!

Written By @VinceFHorn

“Interbeing is the understanding that nothing exists separately from anything else. We are all interconnected.” – Thich Hant Hanh

The Interbeing DAO is a purpose-driven Decentralized Autonomous Organization.  All DAOs that wish to link up to the Interbeing DAO must demonstrate that their core purpose overlaps with the Interbeing DAOs, namely that they are also in the business of sharing open source psychotechnologies that support the maturation of human wisdom & compassion.

What is a Psychotechnology?

I first learned the term psychotechnology from professor John Vervaeke, in his series on Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. There he describes the way that humans have crafted psychological “tools” that have completely re-shaped how we process information and make sense of the world.  Vervaeke defines a psychotechnology as “a standardized way of doing information processing that improves and enhances your cognition by linking brains together.”  Think of the development of human language, or of shamanic rituals (dancing & drumming), or the collective practice of meditation, as examples of human psychotechnologies.

Why Open Source?

“Open Source promotes universal access via an open-source or free license to a product's design or blueprint, and universal redistribution of that design or blueprint.”

We believe that the potential positive impact of a psychotechnology depends on its ability to be suitably adapted to its environment. In other words, to reach others where they are. Most original innovations are quickly privatized. But imagine if Tim Berners-Lee hadn’t shared the original code underlying the World Wide Web, or if the Buddha hadn’t offered his teachings freely… Neither the Web nor Buddhism could exist without an open source attitude, a willingness to generously share what is good for all to have access to.

An open source approach enables the most collaborative potential & rapid spread for new psychotechnologies.  It does this by creating a space of permissionless innovation, where no one has to ask for permission before using, remixing, or adapting other innovations within a shared wisdom commons.

Our Crisis of Interbeing

We won’t be able to grok the interlinking crises that humanity faces–from the ecological crisis, to democracy being in crisis, to the crisis of global inequality, to the meaning crisis–without upgrading our collective sense-making.  This meta-crisis is our crisis of Interbeing. We’re in crisis because of both our collective & individual lack of capacity to understand the interconnected whole and act appropriately.

“Because this wisdom operates freely, without self-referential obstructions, it responds skillfully to the needs of sentient beings.  This is called great compassion.” - Guo Gu

This upgrade to our human sense-making systems cannot afford to be value-free or virtue-neutral!  It must be animated by the virtues of wisdom & compassion.  These are the frames of mind that allow us to see how things are connected (i.e. wisdom) and how to respond in kind (i.e. compassion).

In the digitally-networked-exponential age we need to boost human wisdom & compassion faster than we do aggression & delusion.  If we can do that then we’ll be entering into a regenerative relationship with our selves, each other, and the environment, where we can each thrive within limits.  If we don’t rise to the moment, we’ll continue to overshoot our planet’s natural boundaries, further destabilizing the ground on which we all stand.  The choice, at this point, is dead simple: Either we inter-are or we inter-aren’t.

—————

Are you developing an open-source psychotechnology of wisdom & compassion?

Want to be part of a larger ecosystem of contemplatives, makers, & technologists working together to respond to the meta-crisis?

We are open to potential collaborators.

The first open source psychotechnology project we have involved in the Interbeing DAO is Social Meditation. A 10+ year old growing body of peer-2-peer protocols & practices, social meditation is a perfect fit for Web3. We plan on beginning in the Seeds Ecosystem launching using Hypha’s DHO tools.

Written by Vince Fakhoury Horn