I'm glad I'm taking the Art Of Living class from someone I know and like. I've heard a few things that sound as though it can be cult-like. There's candid's story about someone who, on the first day of their course, was sent to the mall to recruit people to take other courses. (Uh...shouldn't you brainwash them before you use them to recruit?). And someone in my class had taken the course in India years ago, and while she liked some aspects of it (and kept up the daily meditation practice), she had been wary of taking another class because she found some parts of the previous course to be encroaching / pushy, although she wouldn't give details.

Given that it's an enormous NGO, I expect it depends quite a bit on the teacher.

Also, I judge the merits of the practice based partly on the teacher, a Googler. He is the first and only person I have ever met in my life who I feel is listening to me 100% when I talk. Not thinking about what he's going to say, not wandering, just listening - *every time*. On my best days, I might manage 50%, and I don't think I've met anyone else who is consistently above 80%. So that makes me optimistic that the techniques will help me become more in the moment like that.

I learned a fun game. At the end of a dinner out with a group of size N, everyone picks an integer in (0, 2N). The person with the highest unduplicated integer doesn't have to pay.

We talked about how secrets get their power from being secrets, and thus how wonderful it can feel to stop hiding a bad secret, which I buy. But they also said that this power could be used to make good things stronger. That, I have trouble with. I worry that secrecy is used to make weak techniques seem more powerful than they really are. I think good practices don't need secrecy. But I do buy that there is power in ritual - in taking something seriously, doing it 100%, and doing it the same way many times so that it is invested with the power of past experience.

We did an awesome exercise after our meditation where, with eyes closed and hand out, an object was dropped into our hands. First we felt it. Then we opened our eyes, and studied it "as if we'd never seen it before". It was a grape. We placed it into our mouth, and rolled it around, then finally bit into it and ate it, paying full attention to the process. It was the best grape evar! Many of the brief lessons of the class didn't work for me, but this one was quite powerful because I really experienced what they were trying to show. Ironically, I already knew that eating is a great time to practice being present, but I still haven't been doing it. But I had some chips & guac with Tovar at home afterwards, and I was able to stay 90% present, and it was yummy.

Anyway, there's a daily practice that I'm supposed to try, every day, for half an hour, for 40 days. I'm going to try, we'll see how it goes.

I am going to try to blog about this stuff less, because I think there are a lot of similarities between personal development and seasteading/libertarianism. Even though working on each of them feels very different, they fulfill the same goals for me: give people more choice and more freedom, so they can be more happy. I think it's best to "raise or fold", and concentrate my attention on only one such project at a time. But perhaps in years to come when seasteading is well established, I will change tacks and make inner freedom my main focus.