Si

Si has been experimenting with self-improvement for more than 20 years. He is constantly finding better (more efficient, more effective) approaches.

He believes enlightenment is possible in this life time – and even if wrong, that every step in that direction leads to a better life, both for himself and those around him.

So far, that’s exactly what he’s seen.

In this sense, enlightenment doesn’t mean perfection (after all, who’s ever perfect?), merely two things:

  1. unconditional positive regard for everything and everyone
  2. effortless peace regardless of external circumstances

It’s more a case of being ever more peaceful and loving – the journey – than some mystical end point – the destination.

Small steps taken every day can and do lead to gigantic shifts over time.

Si kicked this journey up a notch when a more informed friend mentioned that the average life expectancy (not including major medical breakthroughs) for people in their age group was 120-150. After doing more research (longevity, yo!), not only does this appear true, but the first person to live a thousand years has already been born.

Upon hearing this, Si realised a) he was going to live another hundred years b) he didn’t want to spend that time with the same miserable shit that had been echoing through his head the first thirty years of his life.

He’d spent his entire life coding (programming computers – everything from Z80 assembler to Python and 30+ other languages in between), while pushing to optimise his brain for this task – both to be more effective AND more efficient.

So, starting from basic management approaches (GTD, time & task management, goal setting etc), he realised emotional state strongly correlated with mental performance (and thus coding effectiveness). Thus, better emotional state would make him a better coder. The more he delved into improving emotional performance, the deeper he got into the spiritual realm. He then realised that energetic state (easily visible by observing mental clutter and physical tension) strongly correlated with emotional state. After enough of this kind of discovery, he popped out the other end right into hardcore spiritual mumbo jumbo. Hence, talk of enlightenment.

On a practical basis, he’s simply aiming to be less of an asshole (to himself, and especially others), and better at coding (which he adores).

What’s on this blog is primarily techniques he’s stumbled across that cover the basic tests of empiricism (which is inherently difficult given the subjectiveness and difficulty of reproducibility when making permanent changes to one’s own brain and internal state), but specifically:

  1. reproducibility (does a technique help most/every time you use it)
  2. significance (are the effects noticeable?)
  3. simplicity (is it just the functional core, with minimal wasted energy/namby pamby nonsense?)

This blog is primarily a record of the more useful approaches he’s found. Hopefully you’ll find bits of it useful too – but if not, that’s cool. After all, everyone truly is on their own journey.

some other places I exist (or used to):