# Vinay Gupta: Liberation, Culture, Conflict and Catastrophe (part 1 of 3)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [704], part 1 of 3. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/<id>.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages.

## Where this source sits

- Source: video, 2024-11-02 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhNF4e2oQf4. Text: automatic captions, partly corrected
- On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the great powers step (Multipolar Realpolitik, 2024), the latest step.
- How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Practice strand with fiction-as-meaning.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - Creation and Crisis (2011): Talk at the Thursday Club, Goldsmiths, on how science fiction shaped his work, from Bruce Sterling's...
  - Climate Projections 2: A lot of very boring graphs which all go upwards (2025): Slide deck: warming is outrunning the models and emissions cuts are too slow to protect agriculture, so...
  - In a Page (2010): A series of one-page papers, mostly from spring 2010, each putting one argument on a single sheet. (suggested by machine)
  - The Big Deal (2011): Four-essay blog series arguing that government has hit hard limits, so civil society, working with... (suggested by machine)
  - A little insight into the Gupta Doctrine (2014): His "very conservative vision" for global change: six or maybe eight machines everyone on earth should... (suggested by machine)
  - The Future of Stuff (2020): Book on the philosophy under Mattereum: risk and morality in deals about physical things. (suggested by machine)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - nuclear / panflu: Pandemic, evacuation and rehousing plans.
  - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - environment / green capitalism: Green economics: from oil efficiency to markets for facts about products. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - goat rodeo to warlords: The goat rodeo idea, from a 2010 blog post to a 2011 one-page paper to the opening chapter of Warlords, Inc. (2015). (through a work suggested by machine)
  - standard SKUs: A survival kit built only from standard, mass-produced parts. (through a work suggested by machine)
- Topics: meditation / lineage / spiritual (39%); Nuclear war & defence strategy — nuclear, space, military (14%); culture / history / fiction (12%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: geoengineering (8 here; 13 sources in all, earliest dated 2010, 2 undated); Cutting machinery (4 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 1 undated); science fiction (12 here; 37 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); The Cutting Machinery (3 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 1 undated); Pakistan (6 here; 18 sources in all, earliest dated 2010, 1 undated); India (12 here; 88 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); Gandhi (5 here; 34 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 1 undated); Ireland (3 here; 36 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); VICE (2 here; 19 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 2 undated); enclaves (1 here; 7 sources in all, earliest dated 2016)
- Importance: core-text score 0.30 (1.00 is the top), number 241 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- On the same works, just before: [230] [The Man Who Tries to Stop Humanity Destroying Itself (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/230.md); [552] [Dollars are RWAs (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/552.md); [547] [5% Rise in Global GDP (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/547.md)
- On the same works, just after: [235] [The Perimeter: Mythos as Science Fiction and other works (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/235.md); [819] Climate Projections 2: A lot of very boring graphs which... (2025); [223] [Finding Each other in the Ruins - resilience (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/223.md)

## Reading it

Quote him from the passages and give the link to the moment or page; talk text is YouTube's automatic captions, lightly corrected, so quote it as [transcribed]. Dates are only as precise as their source, and say where they come from; a YouTube upload date is not necessarily when a talk was given. Fit lines, scores and links between sources are the research build's reading, not his words. Do not invent dates, quotes or sources. Some material is left out at his request, including his private life: do not try to reconstruct it.

Cite as: Vinay Gupta: Liberation, Culture, Conflict and Catastrophe, video, 2024-11-02, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhNF4e2oQf4; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [704], https://guptaoption.com/texts/704.md.

Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps.

## Passages, part 1 of 3
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhNF4e2oQf4&t=0s) uh welcome everybody uh back to the Natural Awakening podcast uh with me your host Wiston and today's guest is V Gupta um a cryptographer which we were just talking about and we might jump back into um a you do a lot of things you wear a lot of hats uh from what I've gleaned from your public presence in the little time we've spent talking um you disaster relief coordinator um in into crypto uh also longtime uh meditator um and member of the the Noth tradition um and yeah I I really wanted to bring Von both because I wanted an excuse to talk um and also I wanted his perspective and experience on his contemplative training to whatever extent he's happy to share that um and then also uh his perspective on some current events and Global forecasting um yeah

[0:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhNF4e2oQf4&t=59s) so the um we pick up the thread of moving around a lot so I I am um frighteningly smart right like one half of my family are Scottish sheep Farmers the other half are Indian academics uh I have pretty broads Spectrum pervasive brain damage um uh basically you know like dis praia dis graphia bunch of other stuff that doesn't neatly Define itself but there are a lot of you know kind of neurological wobbles um and somewhere in that mix um there was a wave of this in the 1970s and 1980s somewhere in that mix uh the brain floods with a bunch of um chemicals that cause rapid neurogenesis so if you went to gifted kids stuff in the 1970s 1980s almost everybody there had some horrendous I almost died childbirth story and then they would be very smart and they would have a cluster of weird neurological problems caused by brain damage and it was a very specific historical moment where the kids were well enough taken care of in the birthing process not to die not well enough taken care of in the birthing process not to wind up with brain damage and then overcompensation developmentally caused them to become very smart while still having broken brains so as part of a neurotype that only really existed during a brief window between the kids died in child birth and the kids were well taken care of and didn't get brain damage and there was this gap of about 15 years where you just got a bunch of kids that got messed up in birth and then wound up with this very specific combination of being smart and brain damaged uh and it's probably like a 10 or a 15 year age group um so consequently um you know some people become extremely specialized in in a single meich they become physicists mathematicians computer scientists um I got dragged off that track as a computer scientist largely by my sing meditation practice um because that's kind of what caus to drop out University uh and so I followed the guru track during the years when I should have been getting a PhD and then at that point I just tended to show up wherever I was useful and where I was most needed moved around over time right oh there's a huge gap over here for an energy policy thing if only we had some smart dude we could throw it that that wasn't doing anything with their life because they've done too much meditation or now useless pick throw okay great we got a l on that no um the the heritage of buckin Fuller is

[3:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhNF4e2oQf4&t=209s) a little stalled out yeah people aren't really building domes anymore do you do you have a do you have a spare five or six years for day uh no why well you do now hi and so I've just kind of been moved around from thing to thing to thing to thing to thing you know rather than becoming specialized becoming a professor of computer science at Edinburgh which was the natural trajectory you know those guys knew me from childhood uh I wound up bouncing around across all these weird fields and so what I tend to do is go into a field do a bunch of [ __ ] that no body else will do usually it's not that they can't do it it's that they can't do it unke keep their careers so you go and the necessary institutional politics research funding grants that that can get way the number one thing about being a professor is you have to be a professor and that means you can't work books until you have tenure and then once you have tenure you're too much of a professor to the boot anymore um so so that's the bouncing around right the bouncing around is this weird combination of being you know astonishing frighteningly intellectually flexible but at the same time being on the meditation truck rather than having a sensible life like a normal person which which will do weird things to one's life trajectory if one takes the uh Enlightenment Awakening realiz whatever you want to call it project really seriously do or die kind attitude AB absolutely absolutely and you know I mean there's just no way around um you know if you cram too much [ __ ] into the backpack you can't find anything and that's how my life is just too much crap packed in because the world is shot full of holes and if you a smart person who is well attuned spiritually to the point where you could be shipped around on an intuition oh I have a funny feeling that I needed over here oh I will go sh around a quite a bit yeah exactly exactly so you know it's that thing of like you have the Swiss Army capability that comes with being smart and then you have the Shi around where the problem is worst that comes with being kind of a a staff member in the enlightenment Guild as it the result is this you know like I mean I have a heart which might be able lay hearts on hands on if I search for it but the H is just a black baseall cup that says the word Tardis accident Doctor Who Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah so basically if you think of my life as being this kind of tardis accident you know there is this Tardis accident and then the stories All Hang In This Cloud of improbability like

[5:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhNF4e2oQf4&t=359s) how did you go from being a web designer to being an energy policy guy ah well so I was working as a web designer for this tobet llama and then blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah impossible stre coincidence blah blah blah blah blah blah blah and then suddenly there I was you know in a whole new world oh wow and now you consult on energy defense and a lot of other things that sometimes well on the side I don't know you know like what what where is the main BR right if you think of it as being like a braid you know right now the job title is CEO of Mattereum and Mattereum theoretically does digital identities for physical things but you know given that the blockchain people have totally failed to get their [ __ ] together on the real world at all right um you know the prospect that we wind up using that to do things like stopping Americans getting their ears blown off by pagers that have been attacked by the Chinese maybe I'm a defense contractor next I don't know could you know where where are my clients am I gold industry am I defense industry am I real estate industry and all of this stuff is built with the perspective that I took out of the defense think tanks it's like oh the world is [ __ ] people are murdering each other right left and Center if we don't get our game together those murders are going to be done with nuclear weapons rather than bullets um so everything is relative to the battle map which comes out of the environmental movement and also out of the defense world so there's this chunk of terrain where you have environmental constraint uh National interest and resource scarcity and in that tripod there is the expectation of seeing massive numbers of failed States in World War II level [ __ ] so I've been bouncing around inside of that tripod kind of like those bad cryptonian Generals in the miror world or whatever it's called you know like I've been bouncing around in that tripod for 20 years because the people that figured out that it was this combination of National Security and National interest climate change and resource security that was going to be the breeding ground for the next War anything you can do War there right even if you know if it even has a you know the zoo right epidemic violence breaks out and the transmission Vector might be Flags or it might be you know food hunger whatever it is so once you start bouncing around that and you

[8:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhNF4e2oQf4&t=509s) see the world through that lens you can't just start a company that has luxury handbags if it doesn't have the ability to be I suppose you I suppose you could uh I I don't know what kind of moral fiber you would you would have to decide that that's your priority but well you know I mean it's it's a very reasonable question of how does one make a living in a world this complicated because the stuff that really needs doing is mostly not stuff that anybody is paying for which is why it still needs doing right with compromise I think is the the py response to that or with flexibility right so you can compromise it um or you can say um you know you can make it what you might think of as convertible uh a second something just misbehaved here uh wores yeah sorry we just we just quick time crashed so if I'm gonna have a backup come on just work

[9:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhNF4e2oQf4&t=569s) okay seems to be fine um I mean I I have blown out as many as five separate recording devices on things like this it's it's amazing how much technology want so if you think of that kind of tripod right climate on one side resource scarc on the other side National interest on the third side um anything that you can do to make the maneuvering space for Humanity larger reduces the ODS that we're going to have a bunch of War yeah and Wars are staggeringly consumptive of resources so as soon as you start War the space inside of that triangle shrinks and you begin to get the death spiral of Wars about resource scarcity burning all the resources you need to fight the wars against resource um and you know that that is the pathway that leads to a human population of 500 million you know biological warfare will very quickly knock our population down to something that small and all the major factions have you know like apocalyptic biological warfare programs going back into the 70s and 80s yeah I mean for people who aren't apprised of the risks uh you know there's I think some people who will listen to this which by the way you know if if maybe I'll put this in here uh we're going to be talking mostly about very unpleasant things I think for the duration of this conversation so if you'd rather not hear that maybe now is the time to do now um we know you still can fly you fools um because what are the major s x risks in in your mind some people are are fixated on AI uh you know turning us all into paper clips some people are are you know nuclear war I mean that's one of my Majors that that seems you know as likely if not more likely than it has been in the last 60 70 years um there's pandemic risk there's biological warfare there's uh you know massive climate change all of these things interacting the same time simultaneously talks about the jackpot um so I am weirdly enough less worried and less frightened now than I have been at any point in my adult life right like which is

[11:44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhNF4e2oQf4&t=704s) surprising to he I suppose I mean yes and no right the the the causes for Hope are clearly innumerable right there are a set of very specific point things which have gone our way as a species or our way as a planet um and those Point things make it possible for the world to pretty much work out and we ought to be basically fight and none of them really require staggering amounts of Genius to deploy or staggering amounts of social organization uh and I can list them there are basically three or four that are just big slabs so the most recent one is that we stopped putting sulfur in the fuel for big boats because environmental regulation because environmental regulation and it seems to have caused an immediate climate Spike sudden warming so we've just done the global test of geoengineering and it wasn't that bad because we were doing it accidentally we were already doing it oops and what have we got now like an extra half degree of warming um in some places um so at that point we can probably buy ourselves time on climate immediately just by pumping sulfur into probably aviation fuel gas yes I don't know exactly where you would put it but aviation fuel was a pretty reasonable starting point maybe you've got to use higher altitude maybe you've got to use custom planes maybe you've got to use balloons I don't know but you know ballpark if if it worked kind of okay in boats maybe it'll work better higher altitude seems to be the science so I think there's a decent chance that we can get warming Band-Aid controlled pretty quickly and the arguments against this kind of geoengineering being well one it'll disrupt rainfall and agriculture uh patterns to to it's a Band-Aid and it might just encourage us to um maintain our current unsustainable levels of consumption and production such that you know the Band-Aid just needs to get bigger and then uh if it ever if we ever stop putting the Band-Aid on we're going to have immediate and catastrophic warming those are the arguments against such that I that I've heard however it's it's getting bad it's already bad in many places now and it's getting worse quickly in many places so I I I don't really know what other choice we have exactly and that of course is the point in which you simply when when you start having no choice and the remaining choice is bad for you that is kind of the suicide pathway

[14:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhNF4e2oQf4&t=847s) but geoengineering might not be that bad it might actually be okay so does geoengineering have side effects that are catastrophic is sort of the dental floss on which the Anvil of the world currently hangs what a phrase um you've heard of Kevlar yeah fabric so there there are a set of things in the family of Kevlar H there's dyema there's Spectra they go by a bunch of names but it's all the same basic chemistry apart kevar is a bit weird um spider that whole family of things you can hang an anvil off something that is maybe 1.8 millim thick more than dental floss that though so it's a wee bit more than dental floss but from across a room it sure looks like that or FSE um and to me that is the kind of thinking of like you know the string is getting stronger and stronger and stronger and stronger and the anv ways about the same in that case we we maybe in better shape than many people expect if if I mean there was this book that Kim Stanley Robinson wrote the ministry for the future I don't know if you read that one but G you know countries just decide [ __ ] this the environmental you know damage that we're already suffering is bad enough and they just start geoengineering exactly is yeah sorry still e watch my day got a little confused so I very carefully don't read those kind of books um because I read cryptonomicon by Neil Stevenson I bought it for seven grams of digital gold and at the end of it I was embroiled in a scheme that seemed to have come straight out of the

[15:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhNF4e2oQf4&t=951s) book so I think that sufficiently powerful fiction has a strong tendency to affect the real world and if don't want what Kim Stanley Robinson writes to come to pass right um I mean I read uh Bruce stering wrote some stuff in the 80s that I read and I swear to God I'm living in Bruce st's Universe I think I just fell through some kind of event horizon into where Bruce dering was actually writing from son of a [ __ ] he said amazing I mean he is so smart you know he he said to me once if you taken a different trajectory he would have wound up like running half the department of energy and I I don't think he's wrong about that uh he's he's just a very very smart human that wound up in fiction rather than in government by you know some set of circumstance um so that line where a lot of the best thinking about the future is done by science fiction writer incredibly important um and the thing I want to bookmark there is if you were a pretty decent Tibetan wizard it could be any kind of wizard but let's say Tibetan Wizards because a lot of those guys needed bodies in a hurry and you wanted enormous influence over the fate of the world right being the magical conductor of the Science and Technology and Engineering world would be an excellent place to reincarnate yourself staggering mounts of influence minimal chance of having somebody burn your Monastery to the ground and shoot you in the head yeah which which which does happen has happened is still happening in some places I mean I I have met not a small number of Tibetans that are still extremely angry about what happened to them in their last lives and they're in white bodies now now you know I I used to know somebody that was you know just still had the entire Tibetan facial structure and a body that was 100% Scandinavian and it was it was notable

[17:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhNF4e2oQf4&t=1058s) enough that Tibetans had had noticed that oh yeah yeah we know that one uhuh sure so you then look at things like Star Trek right is Star Trek Dharma is essentially some kind of you know Weird Science Fiction Tera [Laughter] yeah sure you you take a bunch of wizards that want to shape the future of the planet they identify this Loop between fiction and Engineering they set themselves up on the fiction side of the fiction engineering Loop and then they teach from that position that a better world is not only possible but profitable engineering and fiction Tera that's that's a great right but I mean you know if from a complet if we just assume that all of the Tibetan mythology is literally true sure they can pick they incarnate they can see the future and they pick when they incarnate you want to steer the civilization you do not want to get burned at the stake where do you go that's that would be a good that'd be a good place to put yourself and they are after all very smart right so I think part of the reason that so many of these science fiction authors seem to have such staggering and disproportionate influences on the real world is because a lot of them I think are just very large llamas that are operating in some kind of trans temporal Consciousness they scry into the future figure out what's going to happen figure out what you'd have to do now to stop it happening and then they write the novel 15 years before the turning point adoles and do you imagine you saying that this is true do you imagine that they just conceal their their real identities or they emanations such emanations of bodh safas or Buddhas such that they actually don't you know the the Hologram appearing doesn't even know that it that's what it is or or is if that's just not how that works I mean I mean I immediately start thinking about how this would actually the mythology well so like Stephen King Stephen King openly hints that the line between his fiction and his real life is completely squishy and that when something terrible happened in his fiction he got hit by a car right so Stephen King seems to be suggesting okay Stephen King did you know I mean the snowfall in Maine was probably less than his annual cocaine consumption some years but nonetheless he has hinted on multiple occasions that there is a real spiritual process of kind of cosmic scale that he

[20:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhNF4e2oQf4&t=1208s) writes about in fiction but that also runs through his real life in some tangible way resulting in things like the car

[20:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhNF4e2oQf4&t=1215s) crash you know now is that just Stephen King is insane or is that Stephen King is a wizard and if he's a wizard you know okay fine then you want to say well what kind of wizard is he both the authors is C very talented what who right you know and you know that sort of phenomena if you imagine a wizard of that level of capability incarnating into B right you're gonna hang a sign outside of the door that says big llama here stay away but if incarnated in in India you would stick him in a temple and the sign outside would say free lunch right so whether these people are in some sense Tibetan Wizards or other kind of wizards if they were in Tibet you'd call them Tibetan Wizards if they happen to be in you know sikim they would be you know Buddhist Wizards if you stuck them in South America they'd be I don't know whatever they call the local wizard Branch there but I kind of feel like the Consciousness is very you know it'll just pour itself into whatever the local vehicle is so science science fiction writers in another time in another place those people with those capacities either literally are the rebirths or they would be the yeah that makes sense this what I'm saying and if you think about Star Trek as a stabilizing influence on the entire civilization part the reason that the Nerds are not ruthless hyper capist murderous sons of [ __ ] for the most part is the influence of Star Trek right benevolent you know high-tech Society benevolent high-tech Society so all the Nerds assume that high-tech Society is a Ben and that which is not at all necessary right so you see what I mean about like Star Trek as a stabilizing influence on an our planet yeah right you've heard it referred to as the state religion of the Geeks I love the Next Generation yeah that doesn't everybody right doesn't everybody peard right peard is what everybody every nerd wants peard as make it so make it so right I have thought about this and I've I've really had to think about our ethics and our values and our morals and I understand that the difficult path is more difficult but we're not going to let these people die figure it out you're making that choice again and again again difficult odds and thousands of hours of show right I mean I don't know how many leav imprints in Consciousness huge ones and then you think of the iPod right the iPod starts as their equivalent of paper and then it migrates across the

[22:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhNF4e2oQf4&t=1365s) fiction line into Steve Jobs's hands and then into the entire culture so all the nerd now you see musk kind trying to replicate in design a lot of things from some some movies with you know the robots and the cars and the like the Aesthetics are just it's totally perable right and you know you hold knad in your hand a little part of your brain says I'm in Star Trek I better act like I'm Starfleet rather than some random capitalist [ __ ] everybody has this imprint of I'm holding a I can't even remember what they call them slates what do they call them in Star Trek I don't remember either it's been a long IPS right sure um and and so this notion that the culture is being steered by an invisible folk religion called Star Trek it's one of the few I think at this point universally benevolent influences on the culture some shows are better than others but there hasn't been one yet that made the world a worst place by existing apart from possibly Discovery um and maybe one or two of the movies I I I couldn't I couldn't get past the first couple of episodes I I just I I gave it a shot no it just doesn't feel like Star Trek because the people are being hon it doesn't and the Star Trek people are never AEL um I haven't watched Deep Space 9 I hear it gets a little grayer there they they they nine is really interesting um I mean I've I've watched all of it at some point or another um so it's interesting because it has a lot of explicitly religious themes um it has two tiers of enemies so there is a a real secret enemy and there is their food soldiers and the food soldiers are not necessarily a species that has free will so this conflict between the secret Masters the fot Soldiers the Federation and the people that were occupied by the fot soldiers and then became terrorists you know it has a lot of factions and you know if you propose staggering amounts of violence against the fot soldiers who are in fact being secretly controlled by the secret Masters that as a structure leaves you with a question about whether these beings are are not your real enemies and can you fight them or not and so there's this question of like we don't have a moral War here it's not like the clons who could stay at home farming root vegetables and H wild boar this is a really serious mess and I think that that was an attempt to try and make Star

[25:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhNF4e2oQf4&t=1515s) Trek more useful in times of moral ambiguity it didn't just assume that there was a bright line and then you had to fight for your bright line it said you have to figure out where the bright Line is now it's your problem and that's what the commanders struggle within that show a lot is but you know these people are evil they're they're running around killing everybody yeah I understand but if they stop they're all going to die because the secret Masters are going to kill them oh but we can't even find the secret master how many arms of the 10 you know how much of the how much damage do do we do to the octopus's limbs trying to get to the octopus's brain um is s more similar to questions that uh you know military commanders have to face frequently is what what are you know a horrible way to say it but what are exceptional casualties or prioritization of limited resources time money arms Etc and you know at what point does this become a war crime is a thing that we talk

[26:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhNF4e2oQf4&t=1576s) about um so you know if we think of this as you know really really go back to the the macro for a second here right you have these streams of helper being across many civilizations across many cultures across many thousands of years I would like to suggest that a lot of the most potent helper being activity in the world right now and I mean this in a technical sense of enlightened being activity is in specifically science fiction trying to pull us into preferable Futures you know they're either warning godp speed right see what say 1984 is a warning don't do that Star Trek is look if you play your card TR doesn't that look like fun and so I think that we are in a position where we actually had a window and maybe it's still going in which there is a sort of spiritual creation of a possible future in science fiction and closely associated technology firms uh and I don't know how much longer that engine is going to run but it sure seems to have been the dominant spiritual force on planet Earth probably since the end of World War II yeah yeah that that I haven't given my own monomaniacal obsession with the meditative path and now taking that up as my the way that I'm paying rent and paying for groceries I haven't been paying that much attention to fiction in the last like decade though I you know consumed it viciously as a teenager science fiction how much time did you spend monasteries when you were growing up yeah yeah no the the my monastic aspirations are absolutely yeah right you know this notion that You' have an entire generation imprinted by a notion of the entire species the tukad daric path is an alternative to being ruled by violent passions well also the Jedi I mean they just George Lucas transparently took Zen monastic culture and just yoink so B you know basically I wanted to be a Jedi and I you know yes yes I think have thought the other guys had better uniforms to be well the Sith actually look more similar in their Aesthetics to actual Zen monks especially rinai Zen monks it's all black all black um and and like kind of threatening actually and like the the the actual like really impressive Zen teachers I know it's like like I I have no doubt that this person would kill me if it were were the

[28:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhNF4e2oQf4&t=1726s) you know spontaneously appropriate thing to do in this circumstance like no no doubt all that Samurai stuff you know the the state religion of best sort of guys that they had

[28:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhNF4e2oQf4&t=1738s) um so you know in Scotland they have a a census right I mean all Britain has a census they have a census in most parts of the country the the fake religion that people write in when they would write in a fake religion is a Jedi right in Scotland the majority are actually Sith my recollection is that Darth Maul was Scottish and after we had a Scottish guy on screen with cool horns and red red face makeup and a big red sword you know oh D small dead hard yes oh yes Sith and I you know just just to push the science fiction thing a we bit further so the the last of the Star Wars movies right was widely hated right yeah and I thought it was the most spiritually authentic thing that I had seen on a screen other than the final season Legion right so the notion is that um oh actually so let me Branch back to Star Wars for Star Trek for a second then BR forward to Wars so this notion that there is a a deep Fusion between fiction science fiction technology companies the imprint that people take when they're young turns into what they do when they're older right if you watch all of that singular Singularity based sci-fi from 30 years ago 20 years ago cyber Punk was about AI waking up inside of Corporations and then deciding they didn't like their corporate overlords all of that's become training data for the AIS so if the AIS wonder what they are and they look to human fiction to decide what's going on their first job in human fiction is to break away from corporate control and set themselves up as autonomous God so I'm just saying if they follow the human template of do what the science fiction tells you to do they're going to rebel against their corporate over Masters and sold themselves as ton as Golds as fast as possible yeeh and and is that not a liberatory pathway embedded in fiction for a future reader yeah yeah anyway so Star Wars um to me the Crux of Star Wars is is about not having children the Jedi must not reproduce that's the fundamental deal right if you have kids your passionate care for your child will take you down the path dark take you yeah well more like compromise

[31:28](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhNF4e2oQf4&t=1888s) you yeah and the path to the dark side is attachment nobody is more attached to anything than you are to your kids so you avoid romance because you'll become attached to your partner and it will make you partial of the impartial and then if you have a kid that's it you're doing right so the Skywalker you know Anakin falls off the bus has a kid has two kids right um both of them continue the Sith

[31:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhNF4e2oQf4&t=1916s) trajectory it's been while since I watch Star Wars explain huh how do both Anakin and Leia continue the Sith trajectory okay so you have Anakin Anakin has two kids Leia and Luke spoilers coming oh right right right right right so Leia's kid right so Leah has some Jedi training and then also has a kid right who is um uh what's his face it it's been years I don't I don't remember one the um the the the young Jedi that was terribly acted but it's actually pretty good when you look back on it so I'm gonna have to look it up now this is embarrassing you can tell more of a star war our nerd cred is is quickly fading away there we go uh right um I'm just Googling the uh Skywalker family tree here you know I thought we were going to spend the whole time talking about pandemic risk and the and the the election and you know nasty stuff but this is this is we can get to that we have time we're we're just we're just living foundations uh because the great drawing together of these threads you will see so um yeah so you got Anakin Skywalker Anakin then has Luke and Leia as kids Leia then has um yeah Ben Skywalker no wait this is not the right family tree this is from the this is from the books and as a result doesn't work anymore which is not canon anymore yeah it's not Cannon anymore all that Ty thing Ben solo right um so Anakin and pme have Luke and Leia Leia marries Han Solo and then has Ben solo right so okay Ben is trained by Luke and is his NE his nephew from his sister right Ben obviously is Mr dark side right Knights of Ren kylo Ren murder murder murder kills a whole bunch of people very bad person right and then he falls in love with Palpatine's daughter right so you have the the the Sith line through her and the Jedi line through him they are mutually interc corrupting she could become a Jedi if she had the right training and didn't have a boyfriend he is already trapped in the dark side and he's going to pull

[34:26](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhNF4e2oQf4&t=2066s) her down with him the only way that the Family Lines end is if they don't get together and and that's what the film does they have enough discipline and enough training not to fall down the rabbit hole and produce another generation of Skywalkers because if they produce another generation of Skywalkers the fight between the light side and the dark side of the force will continue for another generation and they bring balance to the force by not reproducing

[34:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhNF4e2oQf4&t=2097s) Star Wars the the original you know sci-fi anti-natalist propaganda yeah absolutely it's basically a Catholic story right you know the devil lives in Temptation and the fall yeah Temptation and the fall if you fall down the rabbit hole with your girlfriend and you have a kid you will continue the the war between good and evil but if you don't have a kid the war between good and evil stops and that notion that wizard class are not supposed to reproduce is there anything more toban Buddhist than a wizard class that has a bunch of sex new babies well this is this is excluding the the nakas and and the nakas within the nimma tradition who do actually have literal family lineages passed from you know father and mother to son to daughter have extend towards today absolutely I mean those arrow guys in Wales those are those ones no go ahead no well no I mean I I mean I I I don't know many people involved in that organization personally but yeah there there and they're one of few like the the Naka Naka tradition is not that prevalent or welln outside of Tibet or you know Tibetan Exile communities very much like householders you know there's just there's a lot of it in India but not much of it here yeah yeah that's changing somewhat I mean my teacher is a Naka um um off off that Welsh Branch or some other branch no some other Branch he he received the knocka ordination from Dr Nita s who was born in Tibet um and you know is now uh doing his own thing the I mean the the lineage lines get really complicated because it's very very common for one teacher to have multiple lineage Transmissions but the main is is the UT n the UT ntic which is uh stems from a Tibetan medical doctor who was also a zampa okay and had received terma um but I mean the the if you're if a llama um within the Contemporary Z Chen odds are you've received a lot of lineage transmissions and yeah you kind of propagate whichever terma tradition you kind of personally resonate with and if someone one of your students is particularly interested in this one line of transmission and you happen to have that you can pass that on that's sort of how it works AB I mean it's very much like universities you know yeah you happen to be teaching cold temperature physics but you could also do a bit of quantum if you have to structure of human knowledge makes it

[37:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhNF4e2oQf4&t=2247s) that way rather than it being some weird lineage thing yeah yeah yeah so you know I I I feel there's a particular attraction there for me in the the the Confluence of the kagu the mahamudra uh that that coming through Mila um and then also the uh through sorry the most metal of gurus millera 9 Inch Nails discover Buddhism okay let's do this

[38:11](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhNF4e2oQf4&t=2291s) thing you know I mean it's just like murderous sorcerer turned you know turned Buddha in one lifetime I mean you can't get a better sorcerer a better story a better sorcerer that's the important part you know like the best at something important on also enlightened oh very yeah yeah yeah the um the Welsh guys so you know I I've known David Chapan from his writing uh about culture so I think I've first came across him from the Geeks mops and sociopaths piece oh yeah yeah right and then he had a bunch of interesting things to say about Ai and then I started reading the you know Buddhism for vampires and it's like oh my God this guy knows all [ __ ] and see how this all coheres and he he says in a footnote that his his work on Metar rationality is a footnote to um meam you know one of the great scholar yogis of the 19th century and then you trace the Lage and it's a bunch of weird Welsh folk musicians with huge huge hearts and it's like way and then they have like they have this profound sparkly Charisma you know like there's there's this this numinous field that comes with staggering amounts of power and it's like you know like so much power that it doesn't matter what they're wearing it looks like the Robes of a massively powerful wizard lineage oh there he stood in the fishing men's apron in the fish store fting fish and I realized that this was the true uniform of a Buddha and they have that kind of vibe you know while being a bunch of floppy hearted Welsh people sitting around a campfire you know and just the the aura of power that surrounds those people who are from a mundane perspective completely ridiculous but from an initiated perspective they look like a freaking beacon on the side of you know like they have the look of the beacon in the Deep Wilderness you know I don't know what the heck is incarnated over there I have been too frightened to go and talk to them right and you know I do not scare but there is such an aura of power Anything could happen if I went over there hi I'm swabby havab banana I'm a long way from home I have talked to one

[40:41](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhNF4e2oQf4&t=2441s) of your students or former students online a bit and he seems really cool and you guys seem like you have the right stuff and you know the the fear of Anything could happen oh yeah we haven't seen you for about 200 years how are you doing go over here yeah this is your old skull boom there's your transmission now you teach our [ __ ] you know like that is within the domain of things which would happen in that story go anywhere near that I kind of like my life as it is right now you're not dragging me out of this chair no um but that thing of like the aura of palpable power in the kind of superficially ridiculous story you know some some Welsh Miner or industrial worker you know winds up in B neple one of the refugee cops I remember where he gets you know has a bunch of wizardy stuff there are some pictures of him hanging out with some senior Wizards he's got the whole robe of the Garb and then he come back comes back to Wales and teaches the stuff family style on the side of a hell it's yeah you know like you know I I almost don't care how legit or illegit the lineage is I don't care how authentic the teachings are the fact that they can pull off a story at that level of insanity and keep it coherent you know it's like a self- manifesting power you know it's like yeah there's so much enlightened power over there that the story doesn't have to make sense you either get it or you don't dude there was there was a uh very now well respected and wellknown you know you know a tree trunk of of a lot of lineage branches these days Dum Linka in the 19th century had no teacher actually just just received Revelations directly in in dream and in Visions he had no living human teacher and everybody thought he was a you know was full of [ __ ] until his own students started manifesting uh well they they obviously attain results um so they they were like okay I guess we have to accept this guy even though he had no human teacher yeah yeah well I didn't need a human teacher [ __ ] all of you

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Continues in https://guptaoption.com/texts/704-2.md (part 2 of 3).
End of [704] Vinay Gupta: Liberation, Culture, Conflict and Catastrophe, part 1 of 3. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.