[Epistemic Status: playful, informal travel log]

How I spent the 11 hour flight from London to San Francisco just now (apparently flying over Iceland and Greenland, if the map on the little screen in front of me was to be believed):

In essence, three interconnected things:

1. Metta meditation (“unconditional love for all beings”),
2. SU(3), and
3. Flat Earth

First of all, doing metta on a flight is always a good idea. Radiating lovingkindness from the sky is beautiful (whether we live in a Flat Earth or Round Earth, metta still radiates spherically at the speed of light). By doing metta on a flight you get to “touch” a lot more beings (or more of “being”, from a non-dual point of view) through the sheer diversity of physical proximity you get to experience (did I mention we flew over Iceland?).

But I’ve done metta on flights in the past. What was special this time around?

I watched a lecture on “The Strong Nuclear Force as a Gauge Theory” (go Richard Behiel!) that left me thinking about how to modify Kuramoto systems to incorporate QCD features.

In practice, thinking about this, combined with the metta, meant I was essentially playing around with heart shapes in my mind & energy body for 8 of those hours.

Imagining a big heart at the center of reality. Imagining a small heart at the center of reality. Filling it with metta. Imagining a big metta-filled heart rotating clockwise. Imagining a big metta-filled heart rotating counter-clockwise. Getting smaller and larger.

And then in 3D… a heart that grows and rotates and shrinks and changes orientation, and reflects itself (and sometimes looks like the Endless Knot when it does so from a certain angle).

Now imagine a field of hearts. Each point has a 3D heart. It’s ok if it’s a symbol. Eventually it should be abstract: just the qualia of love. But for now, imagining a heart is helpful. Each point has a heart that can rotate, reflect, grow, and even “invert” itself.

Let the hearts touch each other.

By which I mean, let their phase angles become entangled with their neighbors. Create a gigantic field of hearts spinning however they want… so long as unitary and Hermitian. For the SU(3) part. We want strong hearts (by which I mean, capable of emulating the Strong Force).

I was a bit sleep deprived and overclocked (fun fact: when they ask you: “coffee or tea?” you can say “both, please!” and you’ll get two cups, one of each – must clarify: do not make a mixture of the two, or the math will get messed up), so things were a bit conceptually fuzzy and not quite coherent enough to my sober taste. But it was good qualia engineering in line with a Glass Bead Game aesthetic.

I kept thinking: Every rotation is a sequence of shears. A well-coordinated rotation feels good. Poorly done, and you get uneven sheers. Shearing is potentially scary. So shear carefully. That’s why emergent geometric transformation from the superposition of harmonic amplitudes (think degenerate eigenmodes used as a basis for rotation) is of hedonic significance. Only when you coordinate well can you avoid unnecessary shears and jump straight to a proper rotation. If asymmetrically “shearing the fabric of reality” is to be “unkind” to it, SU(3) is the way by which metta is baked in at the base level of phenomenal space.

How does Flat Earth come into play? I started the flight with the question: “how would a von Neumann type justify belief in Flat Earth?” (how I got to that question… I can’t quite remember, and it was probably a followup to a politically incorrect question I won’t touch in public anyway). And I got all kinds of beautiful recreational metaphysics confabulations during the flight. Things involving Donald Hoffman’s take on the nature of reality mixed with abstract cuts of other people’s in-flight movie-watching entertainment experiences (binging classics like Zoolander and Addams Family Values is a perfectly valid, alternative, way to spend your 11 hours, which is what my neighbors cheerfully chose to do instead of messing with SU(3)-rotating imaginary hearts). The main thing being: we could potentially come up with a model of reality that accommodates a truly Flat Earth if we take into account the multiple timelines of the multiverse as part of the geometric metric of intersubjective spacetime itself – only on a “given history of the universe” the world appears round, but that’s only something that happens to be the case from a specific subjective point of view that “glues together” enough perspectives that are consistent-enough to cause a kind of “narrative closure” on the sense of reality. Gravity and the center of mass is emergent from the many frames of reference / points of view that are integrated into a stream of consciousness. But in reality, at the base, the geometry is perfectly flat and Euclidean, like a Lattice QCD (ok, taking a poetic license here, bear with me).

The Flatness of the Field of Hearts seems to be indeed something that gives it high valence. Implementing lawful energy-preserving (for a certain notion of energy) transformations on a field of metta was especially delightful. The more detailed the imagination of this phenomenon, the stronger the seeming neural field annealing that would result of it.

I’ll leave you with a quick vibe-coded reconstruction of this in-flight meditation entertainment experience. No drugs involved (except for a coffee+tea mixture), just strong meditation and imagination.

Enjoy, and please keep sending metta while flying <3