March 2, 2017 • 48 mins
The mandalas of Tibetan Buddhism entice us as artistic expressions, meta symbols and conscience expressions of a complex spiritual cosmology. In this episode of the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast, Robert and Christian explore the nature of Tibetan Buddhism, the meaning within mandalic art and how this all connects to the western mnemonic system known as ‘the memory palace’ and the modern use of simulated worlds.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff to blow your mind. From how stuff
works dot com. Mind itself, this clear, void, all knowing,
all aware. It is like sky, primal clarity, voidness, indivisible
in the clarity of original intuitive wisdom. Just that determination
(00:27):
is reality. The reason is that all appearance and existence
is known as your own mind, and this mind itself
is realized space like in its intelligence and clarity. Hey,
welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My name is
Robert Lamb and my name is Christian Sager. I am
(00:49):
I have a terrible memory. I'm gonna I'm gonna confess
something here. Okay, I don't know about you, and you
don't need to admit to this if you don't want to.
But when we after we record episodes, you know, we
build them a lot of research. We record episodes, A
lot of it just goes right out of my head. Um.
I retain the basics and the of the knowledge and
(01:11):
the ideas that we convey, but the very fine details
like names or locations of things I lose almost immediately.
Oh yeah, I'm I'm I'm very similar in that regard
off and tell people that I have approximate knowledge of
all things because they cover so many topics. I do
not retain all the details. I certainly don't retain the numbers,
but I retain the basic essence. So yeah, we discussed yeah, um,
(01:37):
but today's episode is about a topic, or it's tying
two topics together that I think could help us with
that if we if we really wanted to write. Although
I'm now starting to think of the podcast as being
sort of a portable memory unit as well. Yeah, or
even a mandola exactly one of the topics here today.
And that's why the quote at the top of the
(01:58):
episode here was m the Tibetan Book of the Dead,
because though in order to unpack the idea of the mind,
although we have to discuss Tibetan Buddhism a little bit,
and and in doing that discuss Buddhism a little bit.
But from there, don't worry, we're gonna get into the
idea of the memory palace in uh Western and modern traditions,
(02:19):
as well as a little bit into the idea of
virtual worlds. Now, in putting this together, we look to
a number of different sources. One source that I particularly
enjoyed was Robert E. Fisher's Art of Tibet because Ultimately,
we're dealing with with an artistic tradition here, and it's
great to have some wonderful images to look at while
you're learning about it. So if you're if you want
(02:41):
to learn more about Tibetan art in general, uh, this
is worth picking up. You can find this online or
certainly at various museum stores. Yeah, I mean, I would
recommend to, like, if you're listening to this and you've
never seen a mandala before in in it's intriguing you, like,
go image search for them because they there's a lot
of variety first of all, but also just they're stunning.
(03:04):
There's and this is across there's so many different styles
of them too. That's one of the things we're going
to find out. Yeah, and we'll describe them in greater
detail later. But essentially, if you don't have one in
front of you right now, if you're not looking at
our our home page, then the mandola are are these
various Tibetan pieces, and they're also mandelas outside of Tibetan tradition,
(03:25):
where you have a figure at the center usually and
that figure is often a either a Buddha, buddhistattva or
a or a god or a goddess, and then there's
there's like concentric circles and they and even squares around them.
There's a lot of activity, their additional deities and figures
all just sort of flowing out from the central entity. Yeah. Yeah,
(03:48):
I mean I up until really, when you propose that
we do this episode, was familiar with them as sort
of just like the aesthetic trappings of Tibet or India,
especially from you know, my growing up overseas. I would
see stuff like this in Singapore occasionally, but like I
never realized how culturally and almost pneumonically important that they are. Yeah.
(04:13):
They I think I started learning about them in greater
detail a few years back when Emory University here in Atlanta,
they at least in the past, have always done Tibet
Week and they'll have some actual Tibetan monks come in
and make mandolas out of sand, out of colored sand,
which is this, you know, fabulous, you know, quintessentially Buddhist
practice of creating these wonderful works about art out of
(04:35):
individual pieces of sand and then you just destroy it
at the end. Yeah. I have some notes about that
that will go over later. The process is fascinating. All right,
So let's let's talk for just a minute about Buddhism
and the and the Tibetan version of Buddhism. So as ROBERTI.
Fisher explains in the Art of Tibet uh and and
this is also something that's come up in previous research
(04:56):
for me. I did a bit on sky burial for
House to Work few years ago and got to dive
into Tibetan history and Tibetan culture a little bit. Have
we have has stuffed abul your mind on the sky
burial episode, I don't know that we have. I feel
like Joe has also done research on that. Separate from this, Yeah,
it would be something worth it, uh tackling. There was
(05:18):
a recent War and Ellis comic that was all about
sky barrel. Yeah. I mean it's a fact. Just to
explain what we're talking about. It's an exposure burial where
one takes the body of the disease. There are a
few different burial practices Intobet, but this one is the
more famous because, especially to outsiders, it seems mccab that
(05:39):
they take the body, they break it down into pieces,
and then the vultures eat the pieces. But it is a.
This is a very remote region, very mountainous, there's just
not that much soil in which to plant a body.
So this is very much an option on the table,
and it falls well in line with the older shamanistic
(06:01):
animistic traditions, like the pre uh pre Buddhism traditions of
the bat. Yeah, and there's a which is very much
connected to what we're going to be talking about today,
although we did not intend to bring up sky burial,
but yeah, like the idea that you're sort of giving
back to the ecosystem, to the universe. Yeah. So again,
(06:22):
it's a remote region, it's framed by some of the
world's highest mountains, and it served as quite a fascinating
I guess you could say an incubator for foreign religion influences,
most notably that of Buddhism, which came from several different
directions into Tibet in the seventh and twelfth centuries see.
And to put that at all in perspective, the historical
(06:42):
Buddha Sidharta Gattama or the Shakya Mooney Buddha would have
lived in the fifth century b c. And these foreign
influences flowed in on top of pre existing shamanistic bond
religious ideas in Tibet. The shamanistic part is going to
come back around is it's important for me, But I
(07:03):
want us to get through the Mandalis stuff first. I
think there's some interesting connections here between modern storytelling and
shamanistic thinking. Now, the incorporation of a foreign religion is
not an overnight sensation, as it's not just like Buddhism
came and said, all right, this is our jam. Now,
as Fisher points out, we see cycles of royal import
(07:25):
and support for Buddhism, along with periods of persecution. But
eventually we reach this uh, this period of the Second Diffusion,
a seminal period into Beetan Buddhism in the last quarter
of the tenth century. Now, at this point, I want
to challenge everyone to to think about religion a little
differently for the purposes of understanding to bit and Buddhism,
(07:48):
or at least to understand it as much as an
outsider ultimately can. I want you to think about religion
as technology now, not meaning to directly invoke scientology lingo
here or to advocate equal footing between science and technology
and religion, but rather I want you to think of
religion as a system of rights, beliefs, and mental programs
(08:11):
intended to bring about one or more particular ends. You know,
just think about why people engage with religion, right, They
want peace, happiness, liberation, salvation, elevation to a higher human form,
what have you. You know what that reminds me of
cyborg is m Yeah, very much so, which we've discussed
at length before. If you go back, we have an
(08:33):
episode from last year, I think last year on cyborgs.
But we definitely I think we don't. You definitely get
with the philosophy of and in a sense kind of
into the religious idea. Yeah. So consider that the Mahayana
branch of Buddhism one of the three main branches and
the largest today. Okay, let's consider this one. This is
(08:54):
the the great path, as opposed to the lesser path
of Theravada Buddhism, which originated in Sri Lanka. The Mahayana
way of Buddhism focuses on ordered monastic life and rights,
and it offers a rather long term technological solution to
life's problems, a contemplative and intellectual journey to enlightenment. They
(09:16):
can take eons to complete through endless rebirths across time,
until at last all livings, all living beings, might be
free from suffering. Sounds good, right, But then this is
where the esoteric forms of Buddhism in or the picture
in particular the the vadrariana or diamond vehicle or thunderbolt vehicle,
(09:39):
the tantric corpus of Buddhism. Okay, sometimes I've seen this
referred to as apocalyptic Buddhism. So if Mahayana Buddhism was
a to put this in sci fi terms, if it
was a generation ship, a generation starship trudging its way
endlessly across space towards a distant exoplanet, then the vadre
(10:00):
Yana Buddhism is a warp drive starship. It promises a
means of individual liberation from the wheel of suffering within
a single lifetime. I feel like this came up when
we were talking about um mummification of monks. Yeah, I
bet bet it did, because we talked a little bit
about the bodhistoft for the future. Yeah yeah, yeah yeah,
(10:21):
And that bodhisoft certainly plays into a Tibetan Tibetan culture
a bit as well. But the crazy thing about this
is that this UH, this this idea of esotery Buddhism
is it's it's not a mere shortcut approach. So it's
not one of these to to sort of try and
throw it into like modern Christian terms. It's not like, Okay,
(10:44):
I just love Jesus and everything's gonna be okay, don't
worry about any of the steps. It's not something like
that where it's like, hey, don't do all this work,
just do this now. They're the approach here is is
is putting a tremendous amount of work into uh achieving
this end. The stakes are just as high, and the
amount of mental effort involved is staggering, entailing the study
(11:04):
and contemplation of of all these other roots, entailing additional rituals,
and the worship of two distinct pampions, the five Buddha
families of the celestial Buddhas UH each residing on one
of the pure lands, and the appropriated Hindu deities. So
you have all these different deities going on. It's um
(11:26):
like reading about it, I couldn't help but think of
it in terms of say a dungeons and dragons character
where you know, generally you just wanna you pick your
character class and you pursue it, and you you do
everything right, but you can dual class, you can multi class.
This would be like multi class in your dn D character. UH.
And and just setting out to achieve all of his
or her goals by just quadruple classing with wizard Presoorcerer Warlock,
(11:51):
all to just to take something that would normally take
lifetimes to achieve in a single lifetime. In the D
n D comparison, you're combining the arcane and the divine.
Fisher has a wonderful quote. I think that drives this home.
He says, belief in the awesome possibility of harnessing the
powers needed to achieve enlightenment in this existence inspired complex
(12:12):
and mysterious practices. Such secret doctrines, visualizations, and magical powers
were not things that could be easily spelled out in text,
and the Vadriana literature remains as complex and mysterious as
any of the world's religions. So, in other words, to
organize this vast system of beliefs and gods and ways
of thinking about life in the universe, UH, to make
(12:34):
it manageable, practitioners developed. Practitioners developed an enormous complex visual system,
an artistic tradition complete with a host of instruments, symbols,
and images. So all of this, if we take it
all together, it touches upon a lot of topics that
Robert and I have covered on stuff to blow your
mind in the last year. I'd say, like a theme
(12:56):
that we've been working upon is mythology, archetypes, uh sort
of cultural resonance of those things and how they allow
us to make sense of the world. Right Like a
very practical, objective standpoint, human beings need all of this,
whether it's Buddhism or Christianity or jedi Ism, UH, to
(13:21):
help them make sense of how the world works. And
this form of Buddhism just presents a an incredibly complex
and esoteric answer to that question. And in doing so,
essentially the practitioner is saying, Look, you're gonna need to
look at a lot of charts, a lot of graphs,
a lot of pie. This is kind of the equivalent
would be like a really in depth power point presentation.
(13:44):
We have to look at a bunch of charts and
graphs to get the meaning of what's going on. These
various symbols and artistic conditions play into that as well,
and among these one finds the mandala. Yeah, why don't
we take a break and then we come back. We're
going to define the basics of the man end to
look for you so you can understand how we're going
from power point presentation to the art. Alright, we're back.
(14:13):
So the basics here of the mandola. So when you're saying, like,
what is it literally, I've seen some people say have circles,
some saying arc. I've also seen it translated as quote
an essence protecting environment. They're ultimately though, nothing short of
a representation of the entire sacred universe. Yeah. The way
(14:33):
that I've read about it is that it's a symbol
of the entire universe, and it can be represented anywhere.
It could be on a wall, or on paper or
in the sand, like we talked about earlier, or entirely
in your mind. Uh, And its purpose is to represent
an imaginary palace that is contemplated upon during meditation. Yeah.
They can be two D, they can be three D
(14:54):
in the form of a sculpture or even architecture, or
they can be this this mental instruct and ultimately, I
guess the physical representations are about creating the mental constructed mind.
I really like the way that Robert F. Thurman explained
it in his translation of the Tibetanan Book of the Dead,
which I read from from at the top of this episode.
He said, they are three dimensional perfected environments Buddha verses
(15:20):
or Buddha lands, created by the enlightenment of an individual
individual as a place that expresses his or her enlightenment.
They are realms through which other beings can be incorporated
into that enlightenment perspective. So since it's kind of like,
here's a here's a picture, here's a physical representation of
my head space that allows me to make sense of
(15:41):
the complexities of reality. Here, gaze into it and pour
this into your mind. So I may be stretching this
a little bit, but let me continue on from what
we were talking about with Dungeons and dragons are okay
to me? What this sounds like is world building in fiction,
like science fiction or fantasy. Right that you're you're creating
an alternative to the real world, and you're giving it
(16:04):
its own culture and deities and economy and locations. Right,
And the mandola uh sort of encapsulates all of those
in one artistic representation. Yeah, I think I think that's
a fair comparison, because when you think of a fantasy
book in particular, or done as in Dragons Module, you
inevitably think of maps and in number, and there's a
(16:26):
there's a lot of map like structure in these as
we'll get into the basic cosmology of the Buddhist universe
with its Holy Mountain at the center, like that's very
much a part of it. Uh. But yeah, ultimately, their
their symbolic expressions, they're teaching devices, their externalizations of complex theologies.
You know. Way you can think of them as thumb
drives of the gods, I guess. Yeah, Well, I mean
(16:49):
one of the things I read about Tibetan mandolas in
particular is that the deities within them, they're represented as
embodying philosophical views. They serve as role models for us
to look at and remember, Okay, this is what has
come before me, these are the lessons learned by my ancestors.
What can I take from this to guide my life?
(17:10):
Getting entailed number of symbols and essentially metasymbols. Yeah, it
reminds me, Okay, this is what I think of this
idea that number one, culture is how we understand the world. Uh,
and number two, storytelling is our means of transmitting culture
to one another as human beings. And then third that
(17:31):
the arte types that are within such stories they teach
us lessons about the human experience from other people's perspectives. Right.
So this is where and I am sort of trying
to pull this together on my own. It's a little
bit of young and stuff from what we've talked about
mythology before, but I'm starting to see storytellers as modern shamans.
(17:53):
And the mandola seems to me like another expression of that.
It's just done with art instead of words. Yeah, I
think so words or sand even, Yeah, exactly. So we've
mentioned these sand mandolas. Um, the construction of them has
to be affirmed as a ritual, which is very shamanistic. Right.
(18:13):
In order for the mandala to transmit positive energy to
its viewers, it's drawn in a ceremony, and the ceremony
includes monks chanting and dancing. Uh. They use these metal
funnels that are called check per and apparently they vibrate
in such a way that it causes the colored sand
inside to flow out like a liquid. When they're making them. Yeah,
(18:35):
I want to say, they kind of tap them on
the side as they go with a little metal implement
and it causes the like almost the individual granules of
sand to come out, and they just make a line
with it. Yeah. And what's important to note about these
is they're not permanent. They're not meant to be permanent.
They're destroyed by these same monks. It serves as a
(18:55):
reminder that our lives are impermanent. Uh. And the sand
itself is rich turned to an urn, which is then
that sand is then placed in water. So they see
it again going back to what we were talking about
sky burial. They see this as a gift that goes
back into the environment, back into the universe. I see
some more accidental synchronicity between this episode and the other
episode we recorded this week that on Human Bound Human
(19:18):
flesh Bound books, because this, the creation of the sand
Mandola is an acceptance of impermanence, that anything that we
make is just not gonna last, whereas the flesh bound
book is more in the tradition of this will last forever,
This person's flesh will be will be immortalized in this
this tone well, or it's you know, I know that
(19:40):
I'll be gone and I will just become an object
at some point. So I want to give the parts
of my body uh to be used for other purposes,
such as holding these books of anatomy together object permanence. Uh. Now,
I do want to point out that the use of
art to convey complex religious ideas can be found many
other places. Well that the three faced Christs of medieval
(20:03):
art instantly come to mind. These were not super common,
but it was only a brief period of time, and
the Church eventually decided that they did not care for it.
But you have something like the Holy Trinity in Christian
Catholic traditions, how do you convey that to the lay person? Well,
one way is to have an image of Christ that
has three faces, essentially a monstrous Christ. But it tries
(20:28):
to encapsulate something that is very difficult to explain language. Yeah,
I'm thinking of these weird monsters from the Transformers called
the Quinto song. Oh yeah, I love the U They
had the three faces that rotated around. I wonder if
there's some connection there. I don't know, but if you
see that the picture of the three faced Christ, you
can't help but think of those guys, just no tentacles
(20:51):
now and then another example from Christian tradition will be
the crucifix and the cross itself. So think about this.
The prefrontal cortex as part of the mammalian brain. Uh,
this is responsible for relating symbols and abstract concepts. The
unconscious processing prior to perception usually takes around three hundred milliseconds,
(21:12):
So it's not that surprising that as a psychologist, Adam
Altar discovered Christians tend to behave more honestly, when they're
exposed to an image of the crucifix, even if they're
they have no conscious memory of having seen it, They're
just exposed to it and just the power of the
symbol helped inform their behavior. Literally, the power of Christ
(21:33):
compels you, yeah, or at least the power of Christian symbolism. Uh.
And in nine there was an experiment from the University
of Michigan that found that Christians felt less virtuous after
subliminal exposure to an image of Pope John Paul the Second.
And there have been some secular experiments with this as well,
people tending to think more creatively when exposed to the
Apple computer logo or an incandescent lightbulb. So that's just
(21:57):
just a few examples to drive home just the power
of symbols, the power of non linguistic information, uh, even
into small examples, and if you roll it all up
into essentially a meta symbol, as we see in the Mandala,
you can see how this does really help to to
to form the mindset of the the younger Buddhist trying
(22:18):
to learn how to perceive reality. Yeah, I think that
this is just a version of that that we here
in the West maybe aren't as familiar with. How to
go back to what we said ere there about about
maps um the kind of mandol as we were talking
about here, it's an organized system that explains the cosmos
in terms of the body, in terms of a building,
in terms of the physical universe. So they referenced the
(22:40):
notion of the Buddhist cosmos as centered by Holy Mount Meru,
which is the home of gods and Buddhas, and surrounded
by seven oceans and seven concentric mountain ranges. And beyond
these ranges you find another ocean, islands that include human habitation,
and finally a great wall of rock enclosing everything. Generally,
you know, square of shape because the image itself is
(23:01):
question interesting. So a mandola is spatial, it's symmetrical, and
it's the presentation of all of these ideas. Yeah, so
you've got an example here of sort of how you
would build out a mandala from the my understanding, as
you start at the center and you build going out. Yeah,
I don't. I think that's or at least that's the
way that I feel like we look at them, we
(23:22):
tend to process them. So you have a central deity,
you know, or Buddha or other figure. You have concentric
circles of guardian deities. You have square palace grounds featuring gateways,
you know, ways to get in and out, uh circle
of create cremation grounds representing the phenomenal world direction deities.
(23:42):
And then the outer walls oceans, barriers at the very
edge of the image. So, in other words, we're talking
about a world generated his art so that it might
be simulated in the mind. A place where fortresses of
bone rise above a sea of blood, where a pantheon
of wrathful and serene the ease a symbol and precise arrangement.
You've got, you know, multi limbed beings, dancing cyclopean architecture,
(24:07):
mountains that bridge Earth to the cosmos. It's all present
and and we're serious about the seas of blood part
to Bettan art and iconography makes use of many dark
elements such as bone, blood, flamed skin. But here's just
to give you a taste of this. This is from
Himalayan art dot org uh and it's a description of
(24:28):
the mandola of the Yama Dharma. It describes the the
mandola in detail. But the more the most interesting part
here is all of this is encircled by a ring
of skulls, a sea of blood, and the eight Great
Charnel grounds again surrounded by a circle of Vadra's uh,
the bright orange flames of pristine awareness. So i am.
(24:51):
I go to a yoga studio here in Atlanta called
Tough Love Yoga, which is infamous for conducting was called
me a yoga. You do yoga listening to death metal. Um,
and the woman who started it there um she has
brought artwork like this to the st also because it
(25:12):
seems like it's incidental, but it's not. There's lots of
skull icronography and blood and things like that, things that
we associate with death metal in in artwork that connects
to yoga. Then they've got they've got this giant mandola
wheel painted on the wall by a local tattoo artist.
Is really cool, awesome. Yeah, I mean there's plenty of
(25:32):
very death mentally imagery on this. I mean, what we
just describe sounds like it could be a Slayer album
covers totally. Yeah. But in looking at these mandal as,
you'll find a great deal of complexity. Sometimes there are
mandal is within mandalas. And uh Roberty Fisher at one
point and his book refers to quote a remarkable visual
(25:52):
litany of deities, mostly female, a programmatic sequence that can
be traced back to specific tests. I like that descript
and because it really brings the technological and the technological
idea that this is. It's kind of like a program
that you're loading into your mind. And the study of
mandola art is a discipline to itself. But we can
explore a little more of their power and connection to
(26:14):
the human bind by considering a Western notion, that of
the memory palace. Yeah, so let's take a quick break
and then when we come back, we're gonna give you
a refresher on the memory palace. There's been a previous
Stuff to Blow Your Mind episode on it, but we'll
we'll dive into it a little bit and then we're
going to connect these two things together. All right, we're back.
(26:42):
So yeah, so you in previous host Julie did a
Memory Palace episode, is that right? We did, and then
we did rerun of it after you and Joe came
on board that featured an interview with a memory champion.
So there are two different versions of that podcast. I'll
try and link to the interview version the landing page
for this episode, because you get to hear from somebody
(27:02):
who uses memory palace um and uses the method of
Loki uh to a very high degree. Yeah. This came
up a lot in the literature of how memory contestants
are using this so that they can just memorize vast
amounts of information. But a lot of you out there
are probably thinking, well, there's a lot of pop culture
examples of this right now, I remember hearing about this
(27:25):
from somewhere. Well, uh, it's certainly in the BBC version
of Sherlock uh. And as previously discussed on Stuff to
Buil Your Mind, Uh, somebody who were interested in the
work of Maria Knakova. She has written a book on
how to Think like Sherlock Holmes. She talks about memory palaces. Uh.
In the BBC Sherlock it's called a mind palace, which
(27:46):
some people think was picked up from British illusionist Darren Brown,
or from Hannibal Lector in the novels or the TV series.
Now Thomas Harris, who you know wrote the original novels
that feature Hannibal lecteror he credits this idea back to
Francis Yates, who is the author of the Art of Memory.
(28:07):
And Yates traces the idea of the memory palace back
to uh someone named Bruno, a sixteen hundreds Dominican monk. Uh.
But that goes even further back down through the Medieval
and Renaissance era, back to the Greek poet simon IDEs Uh.
And Yates argues that the Seven Deadly Sins, or for instance,
(28:28):
Dante's Divine Comedy, the structures within those of Hell and
Purgatory and Heaven, those are all versions of memory palaces
and in and in turn memories of mindless. Yeah. If
I think there's a lot of comparison to be made, uh,
between a map of Dante's Inferno and the model. Yeah,
it's just different mythology. The theme of yates work is
(28:50):
that the Renaissance, which we view now with some skepticism
as superstitious, is actually full of quote, magical beliefs that
we now continue on into our scientific revolution. So for instance,
go cr two episodes on John d for more on
that and what we actually This is a theme that
comes up a lot for us, I think, but uh,
(29:10):
maybe also a little bit in the book Binding of
Human Skin that we're recording this week. But the same
idea here that um, there is stuff that seems like
it's uh superstitious or magical in nature that does actually
have some purpose to it in our current scientific methodology
(29:30):
of thinking. Yeah, I mean it basically the idea of
the memory palace. It basically all boils down to employing
spatial memory to memorize information by placing it all in
an imagine palace, uh, a palace filled with memorable symbols.
So you know, theres we've discussed on here before. There
are various forms of memory that we employed. There's not
just one bucket of memory, and this is essentially a
(29:53):
way that we tweak our mind and using spatial memory
to to remember often just sometimes numbers or or or
unimportant facts. The idea here is that humans have a
knack for remembering spatial layouts. Brain scans even show show
us that the spatial learning parts of the brain are
used by people who actually win these memory contests. It's
(30:15):
particularly useful for remembering things in a sequence or a list,
like groceries for example. Uh. It requires a lot of
time to establish, but once once you have it in place,
you can go back to you continue to walk through
that memory palace in order to remember the items and
the order. Yeah. And one of the things that I
saw that connects it back to the mandala is that, Uh,
(30:35):
someone pointed out that Buddhism uses a lot of sequence
and list type information in order to get across its philosophy.
So subsequently, the mandola's then translate really well into these
memory palaces. Now the origin Okay, so what I just
(30:56):
took us through brought us all the way back to
Greek poets simonade Uh. But it was first written in
the Rhetorica ad hereni Um, which in the eighties b
c e. Was written by unknown authors. Some people thought
that it might have been Cicero, but now they think
they don't know who it is. Um. Now, this is
(31:17):
the oldest surviving Latin book on rhetoric, and it teaches
the method of loci, which is the the the idea
of the memory palace, or the idea of using imagined,
well known locations like your home to remember things. Now,
this to me reminded me of my my schooling, and
in rhetoric it seems inherently connected to the Aristotelian idea
(31:39):
of the peripatetic learning system. Have you heard about this
at all? So basically the idea was that Aristotle, when
he was working with his students in his his quote college,
his school, that they would learn while they were walking
and talking. Uh. And the method of loca is essentially
a walk about, so you're be remembering what you learned
(32:02):
by going on an imaginary walk. But here's the thing.
Other sources say, actually it was invented by Greek poet
Simon IDs uh. And this was real morbid. Apparently, after
he stepped out of a banquet hall, it collapsed and
killed everybody inside, and he was left to identify their remains.
(32:23):
He had to put a name to each body and
that's how he invented the method of loci. So he's
he's thinking of and stuff. All right. So Jim was
seated over there, he had he had the chicken wings,
and then and then Joe he was over here. He
was to my left, and he's piecing this all together exactly. Yeah. Well, Cicero,
though was involved. He is celebrated as popularizing it. He
(32:46):
wrote something down basically because writing something down at that
time was expensive. Paper was expensive. Not everybody knew how
to write. Uh. It wasn't until the printing press that
it basically the method of Look how the memory palace
became obsolete. And we've continued to see that pattern as
we've changed the ways that we can externalize memory. We
(33:08):
have to rely on internal memory less. Now as we
said already, it's employing spatial memory. And it makes sense
that humans would have a robust ability for spatial memory because,
as I mean, that's what we do. We live in
this physical world. And even though most of us have
probably have our patterns you know down you know to
ultimately you know of just a few varied environments, and
(33:31):
you know how to get there and how to get back.
You know, we're we're programmed to deal with the broader world.
We're programmed to to to make spatial sense of the
world around us, to catalog its storied away. And so
this is just taking spatial scaffolding and applying it to
a list of facts, to a theological structure, to a
cosmological viewpoint. Um. So the memory palace is not a trick.
(33:56):
It's it's just how we think about the world, and
we're taken the way we think about physical reality, the
way we think about spatial environments, and using it to
to remember other organized systems. Yeah, it's almost like these
other older cultures had created a learning system around how
(34:17):
we naturally adapt to knowledge, how we how we observe knowledge,
and then we went and somehow broke that and created
this other learning system that, especially for memorization, that's far
more difficult and not how our our biology is set
up to learn. Uh. And now now we're sort of
coming back and we're going, oh right, right, yeah, this
(34:39):
is spatial learning is actually much easier. Yeah, and so
again we come back to this idea of the mandola,
and to see one of these and imagine it on
the wall, it makes perfect sense. You can't just write
out everything and have these notes for everybody who's trying
to to to learn the system. But you can have
someone guiding through it, refer to this work of our
(35:00):
and then you look at it, you take it in,
and you're able to use this as the memory palace
for the theological ideas. Now, the thought at work here
is that memory palaces harness our evolved skill at remembering
details of locations because as hunter gatherers we used to
recall what was edible, where to find it, or how
(35:21):
to avoid what was poisonous because of spatial memory. Modern
research backs this up. After people viewed thousands of images
for a few seconds each, studies found that, on average,
they could distinguish eighty percent of the images from those
that they had not seen. Uh. In addition, people can
usually recall objects they've seen after seeing hundreds of intervening ones,
(35:43):
showing our capacity for storing visual memories in the long term.
This is I I don't know if you've heard this
a lot, but when I was in academia it was
really starting to become popular with the idea of visual thinkers.
I'm a visual thinker. I can't I can't read that
text any something visual uh is something that's making its
way through sort of just the education system. Other studies
(36:08):
have shown that the memory palace, or the usage of it,
it doubles the proportion of people who can remember an
eleven to twelve item grocery list. So again, sequences and
lists work really well. Students who use it in economics
outperformed those who did not when they take an exam,
and medical students who used it learned more about the
end of crime system than those who did not. It's
(36:29):
apparently also useful for patients who have had treatments that
can potentially impair their recall or cognitive function. Hm. Well
that makes sense. Like again, they're again they're multiple forms
of memory, and if you can cap into another form
of memory to achieve the goals of one that's damaged,
then then you can find a good bit of success. Yeah.
(36:51):
As I was doing the research, I immediately thought to myself,
if as I become older, I start experiencing memory loss
and or dementia, gonna have to turn to a memory
palace and just really develop one. So we've already had
a number of the parallels here between the memory palace
and the mandala um, and you know, a number of
the parallels are just obvious. Again, it's all about using
(37:12):
um our spatial memory to to internalize either you know,
a long list of data or a theological system. Yeah,
and it's all really brought together here for us by
an East Asian scholar named Dan o'huigan uh, and he
provides interesting commentary on the concept of the mandala being
(37:33):
like a memory palace. He argues the mandalas serves the
same purpose as memory palaces that Roman orders used. Uh.
For instance, they used it to help monks organize their knowledge. Now,
keep in mind that in both instances, these people had
to rely on their memories more than we do, right, um,
they didn't have paper, they didn't have flash drives, they
(37:54):
didn't have smartphones. His primary example is Quintillion's use of
placing some Bolck items in his home to help him
remember things about law and the courts. And then people
like Robert flood Are Giordano Bruno who I mentioned earlier.
They went on to visualize memory palaces as imagined spaces
more similar to the mandola. Ohuigan though he thinks that
(38:17):
these techniques were developed independently from one another, even though
they're extremely similar. Uh, and the mandola allows them to
visualize something colorful to help you remember what's going on.
And it's similar to how Buddhism uses lists to help
you remember its tenants, so mentioning earlier. Yeah, and you
see this in in in really a number of different
(38:39):
Asian religions. But all of these various gods and artistic motifs,
like every detail of it is important. You know, what
is what is the deity or the Buddha holding, what
position is their their body in? Like all of it
tells you something. If you know what the symbols mean. Yeah,
if you can recall that visual then you can sort
of race your way back through what what Lesson is
(39:02):
trying to teach. Yeah, and you'll see descriptions for these
where they're like, all right, well this particular Buddha, Bodhist
for God, or their hand is like this that means
such and such they're holding this weapon or that and
this too is a symbol. So it all comes together.
It's not just pure, you know, artistic entertainment. So Huigan
points out that new monics and memory palaces are now
(39:24):
replaced by libraries, computers, and paper uh. And these function
as extensions of our brains, so we don't need tools
like mandalas or memory palaces anymore. And he he goes
so far to argue that this is an area where
he says, quote humanity scholars can justify their existence by
contributing something useful to the knowledge of our culture. So
(39:47):
he has a little bit of a lower esteem for
the humanities, uh just throughout the piece, and generally is
kind of dismissive of academia. That's okay, I get that
sometimes too, but uh so, anyway, he started bringing these together,
but at the ultimately at the end of the day,
he says, I don't think like there was some kind
of like hidden connection that we haven't discovered yet where
(40:10):
these cultures came in contact with one another and we're
sharing information like this. It's just naturally how these different
cultures of humanity developed. Now, in the past, Mandela creation
has been limited by human thought but also by the
limits of art and construction. So certainly we've seen some
epic attempts to reflect Mandala schema in architecture. But modern
(40:33):
technology makes something even grander possible. A complete simulation of
the Mandola of virtual world based on the Mandola which
I think is kind of beautiful because essentially the Memory Palace.
Take come, the mandola is a simulated world, a world
you simulate simula in your head, and you make the
world in your head conform uh to the the shape
(40:56):
in this other individual's head, and the virtual word old
is is the potential to do that in this this
third mind, the mind of the machine. Yeah. I couldn't
help but imagine that when Second Life was really at
its high, there must have been somebody in their building
a mandola within the virtual world there that somehow represented
(41:18):
multiple things. Yeah, I mean, because there's certainly have been
a several different virtual mandala projects creating three D simulations
of these meaning laden medicymbols. Yeah. One example I've got
here is from cal mel Chen's mapping Scientific Frontiers The
Quest for Knowledge Visualization, and he talks about virtual environments
(41:41):
being created that are based on the mandala and using
it as an organizing metaphor for shared cyberspace. He connects
this to the idea of the Memory Palace. Up there
we go. So there's another person who put them together,
and he says Cicero was the most authoritative advisor on
that subject. But basically Lee. He says, you know, you
(42:01):
want to begin by imagining an very well lit place.
Then once you get to know, then you store and
retrieve objects there. So I can see how you would
both do that within your imagination and within a virtual world.
One of the things that I'm interested in as we
reach the end of the discussion here is we're at
a current place where we have, as we said, we've
(42:22):
we've we've gotten to abandon these memory palaces for the
most part. We've gotten to the point where we can
abandon mondolas and other religious uh paintings and and and
meta symbols that give us this information. Instead we just
we go online, right, or we go to the book UH,
and we can find lists, we can find all the
(42:42):
data spelled out for us. But as we get more
and more into a virtual reality age, and I'm trying
to to say that not in a like mid nineties
law and more Man sense, right, but but looking at
some of the very real virtual reality applications that are
going on out there and trying to imagine a near
(43:02):
future in which the virtual use of cyberspace is more ubiquitous,
are we going to see a sort of return to
some of these what we see, for instance, could we
see spatial memory employed more as an educational tool maybe.
I think that what you might see before that is
(43:23):
creative types maybe trying to use the medium of virtual
reality or augmented reality in such a way that it's
representative like a mandala is uh So that like it
takes you through a virtual story and you you you
learn as you go through it. I mean, we're so,
(43:44):
I'm going to south By Southwest in a couple of weeks,
and I was just looking at the program schedule and
I can't tell you like probably like of the panels
there are about virtual reality and augmented reality. Uh So,
it is definitely something that's coming down the road. We
know Facebook is heavily invested in it. Our other colleagues
here at how Stuff Works have covered this at nauseum.
(44:05):
But the Oculus rift and Palmer Lucky and all the
work that's gone into that and Facebook buying it up
and stuff. So yeah, I think that that's going to
be like a new palette for people to create on.
It's gonna take a while, though, I think for education
to catch up to it, especially when you think about it,
like education hasn't really even figured out yet, Hey, maybe
(44:27):
we should return back to the spatial learning system that
seems to work so well for our spatially inclined brains. Uh. There,
we have a friend of the show, uh goes by
p K who runs kingle Lux Records out of Canada. Yeah,
he's involved in a project to build a virtual space
station for like, you know, for sort of artistic musical purposes.
(44:52):
And he'll occasionally seen send me some some videos or
some information on the project, and I see those and
and some of the really beautiful imentry is going on there,
And as much as I can tell without being like
hooked into some sort of VR rig, it seems very
immersive to whoever is controlling these characters. So so those
those videos, when I when I view them, it does
(45:13):
make me think about how we're going to make use
of that territory. And I feel like maybe we're gonna
make use of that territory in ways that we can't
connect to all that much now, but we can look
back to our use of purely spatial memory in the
past and see and see some sort of hint of
where we're going. Yeah, I think it would be nice
(45:35):
to see your return to that. I remember when I
was working at the university, I worked out here in town.
There was maybe like a six month window there where
they were super hyped up about Second life, and they
built an actual like version of the university in second
life where students, because they thought second life was going
(45:57):
to be like the next big thing, uh, they had like,
you know, students could go there and like interact with
f a Q forums and stuff like that. But not
only that, but they had like a Greek lecture hall
set up where theoretically a professor could come in there
with their avatar and give a presentation to all of
(46:17):
the second life avatars of students that were there. So
if you get that far and you're sort of just
taking the real world analogy and applying it into the
virtual world, I would imagine then when you get to
the spatial reasoning, uh, that you would say, hey, this
is actually here's a far better way for us to
do this. Let's build the university as a memory palace
(46:39):
rather than just like you know, have your little avatar
go and sit down on a fake bench or something
and watch an avatar deliver a presentation to you. Well,
you know, uh, we only have a limited knowledge of
virtual worlds out there. But I know that listeners of
the show have been out there explore worring. Perhaps that
(47:01):
you have some examples of of the of the Mando
law or other constructures that have been recreated in the
virtual world, maybe even in Minecraft. I didn't even think
about Minecraft, would be perfectly right. Yeah, you're right. Um,
that's interesting. So we would love to hear about any
of those examples or just your general thoughts on Tibetan art,
virtual reality, or the Memory Palace. Really, this is an
(47:22):
episode that opens itself up to various interpretations and tidbits
from your personal life. Yeah, you can hit us up
with information about that on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, or Instagram,
and you can always go and visit us at stuff
to Blow your Mind dot com. That's where we've got
me and everything, all of the podcasts, all the videos
(47:43):
that we've done, blog posts galore. Uh, it is full
of stuff, including links back to those social media accounts. Yeah,
and I'll make sure the landing page for this episode
includes links to some of the bits that we've talked
about here, including sky Burial, the previous Memory Palette episode,
and in any other little bits of related information in
the pop shop over the years, and as always you
(48:04):
can email us at Blow the Mind how Stuff Works
for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is
that how stuff Works dot com
Welcome to stuff to blow your mind. From how stuff
works dot com. Mind itself, this clear, void, all knowing,
all aware. It is like sky, primal clarity, voidness, indivisible
in the clarity of original intuitive wisdom. Just that determination
(00:27):
is reality. The reason is that all appearance and existence
is known as your own mind, and this mind itself
is realized space like in its intelligence and clarity. Hey,
welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My name is
Robert Lamb and my name is Christian Sager. I am
(00:49):
I have a terrible memory. I'm gonna I'm gonna confess
something here. Okay, I don't know about you, and you
don't need to admit to this if you don't want to.
But when we after we record episodes, you know, we
build them a lot of research. We record episodes, A
lot of it just goes right out of my head. Um.
I retain the basics and the of the knowledge and
(01:11):
the ideas that we convey, but the very fine details
like names or locations of things I lose almost immediately.
Oh yeah, I'm I'm I'm very similar in that regard
off and tell people that I have approximate knowledge of
all things because they cover so many topics. I do
not retain all the details. I certainly don't retain the numbers,
but I retain the basic essence. So yeah, we discussed yeah, um,
(01:37):
but today's episode is about a topic, or it's tying
two topics together that I think could help us with
that if we if we really wanted to write. Although
I'm now starting to think of the podcast as being
sort of a portable memory unit as well. Yeah, or
even a mandola exactly one of the topics here today.
And that's why the quote at the top of the
(01:58):
episode here was m the Tibetan Book of the Dead,
because though in order to unpack the idea of the mind,
although we have to discuss Tibetan Buddhism a little bit,
and and in doing that discuss Buddhism a little bit.
But from there, don't worry, we're gonna get into the
idea of the memory palace in uh Western and modern traditions,
(02:19):
as well as a little bit into the idea of
virtual worlds. Now, in putting this together, we look to
a number of different sources. One source that I particularly
enjoyed was Robert E. Fisher's Art of Tibet because Ultimately,
we're dealing with with an artistic tradition here, and it's
great to have some wonderful images to look at while
you're learning about it. So if you're if you want
(02:41):
to learn more about Tibetan art in general, uh, this
is worth picking up. You can find this online or
certainly at various museum stores. Yeah, I mean, I would
recommend to, like, if you're listening to this and you've
never seen a mandala before in in it's intriguing you, like,
go image search for them because they there's a lot
of variety first of all, but also just they're stunning.
(03:04):
There's and this is across there's so many different styles
of them too. That's one of the things we're going
to find out. Yeah, and we'll describe them in greater
detail later. But essentially, if you don't have one in
front of you right now, if you're not looking at
our our home page, then the mandola are are these
various Tibetan pieces, and they're also mandelas outside of Tibetan tradition,
(03:25):
where you have a figure at the center usually and
that figure is often a either a Buddha, buddhistattva or
a or a god or a goddess, and then there's
there's like concentric circles and they and even squares around them.
There's a lot of activity, their additional deities and figures
all just sort of flowing out from the central entity. Yeah. Yeah,
(03:48):
I mean I up until really, when you propose that
we do this episode, was familiar with them as sort
of just like the aesthetic trappings of Tibet or India,
especially from you know, my growing up overseas. I would
see stuff like this in Singapore occasionally, but like I
never realized how culturally and almost pneumonically important that they are. Yeah.
(04:13):
They I think I started learning about them in greater
detail a few years back when Emory University here in Atlanta,
they at least in the past, have always done Tibet
Week and they'll have some actual Tibetan monks come in
and make mandolas out of sand, out of colored sand,
which is this, you know, fabulous, you know, quintessentially Buddhist
practice of creating these wonderful works about art out of
(04:35):
individual pieces of sand and then you just destroy it
at the end. Yeah. I have some notes about that
that will go over later. The process is fascinating. All right,
So let's let's talk for just a minute about Buddhism
and the and the Tibetan version of Buddhism. So as ROBERTI.
Fisher explains in the Art of Tibet uh and and
this is also something that's come up in previous research
(04:56):
for me. I did a bit on sky burial for
House to Work few years ago and got to dive
into Tibetan history and Tibetan culture a little bit. Have
we have has stuffed abul your mind on the sky
burial episode, I don't know that we have. I feel
like Joe has also done research on that. Separate from this, Yeah,
it would be something worth it, uh tackling. There was
(05:18):
a recent War and Ellis comic that was all about
sky barrel. Yeah. I mean it's a fact. Just to
explain what we're talking about. It's an exposure burial where
one takes the body of the disease. There are a
few different burial practices Intobet, but this one is the
more famous because, especially to outsiders, it seems mccab that
(05:39):
they take the body, they break it down into pieces,
and then the vultures eat the pieces. But it is a.
This is a very remote region, very mountainous, there's just
not that much soil in which to plant a body.
So this is very much an option on the table,
and it falls well in line with the older shamanistic
(06:01):
animistic traditions, like the pre uh pre Buddhism traditions of
the bat. Yeah, and there's a which is very much
connected to what we're going to be talking about today,
although we did not intend to bring up sky burial,
but yeah, like the idea that you're sort of giving
back to the ecosystem, to the universe. Yeah. So again,
(06:22):
it's a remote region, it's framed by some of the
world's highest mountains, and it served as quite a fascinating
I guess you could say an incubator for foreign religion influences,
most notably that of Buddhism, which came from several different
directions into Tibet in the seventh and twelfth centuries see.
And to put that at all in perspective, the historical
(06:42):
Buddha Sidharta Gattama or the Shakya Mooney Buddha would have
lived in the fifth century b c. And these foreign
influences flowed in on top of pre existing shamanistic bond
religious ideas in Tibet. The shamanistic part is going to
come back around is it's important for me, But I
(07:03):
want us to get through the Mandalis stuff first. I
think there's some interesting connections here between modern storytelling and
shamanistic thinking. Now, the incorporation of a foreign religion is
not an overnight sensation, as it's not just like Buddhism
came and said, all right, this is our jam. Now,
as Fisher points out, we see cycles of royal import
(07:25):
and support for Buddhism, along with periods of persecution. But
eventually we reach this uh, this period of the Second Diffusion,
a seminal period into Beetan Buddhism in the last quarter
of the tenth century. Now, at this point, I want
to challenge everyone to to think about religion a little
differently for the purposes of understanding to bit and Buddhism,
(07:48):
or at least to understand it as much as an
outsider ultimately can. I want you to think about religion
as technology now, not meaning to directly invoke scientology lingo
here or to advocate equal footing between science and technology
and religion, but rather I want you to think of
religion as a system of rights, beliefs, and mental programs
(08:11):
intended to bring about one or more particular ends. You know,
just think about why people engage with religion, right, They
want peace, happiness, liberation, salvation, elevation to a higher human form,
what have you. You know what that reminds me of
cyborg is m Yeah, very much so, which we've discussed
at length before. If you go back, we have an
(08:33):
episode from last year, I think last year on cyborgs.
But we definitely I think we don't. You definitely get
with the philosophy of and in a sense kind of
into the religious idea. Yeah. So consider that the Mahayana
branch of Buddhism one of the three main branches and
the largest today. Okay, let's consider this one. This is
(08:54):
the the great path, as opposed to the lesser path
of Theravada Buddhism, which originated in Sri Lanka. The Mahayana
way of Buddhism focuses on ordered monastic life and rights,
and it offers a rather long term technological solution to
life's problems, a contemplative and intellectual journey to enlightenment. They
(09:16):
can take eons to complete through endless rebirths across time,
until at last all livings, all living beings, might be
free from suffering. Sounds good, right, But then this is
where the esoteric forms of Buddhism in or the picture
in particular the the vadrariana or diamond vehicle or thunderbolt vehicle,
(09:39):
the tantric corpus of Buddhism. Okay, sometimes I've seen this
referred to as apocalyptic Buddhism. So if Mahayana Buddhism was
a to put this in sci fi terms, if it
was a generation ship, a generation starship trudging its way
endlessly across space towards a distant exoplanet, then the vadre
(10:00):
Yana Buddhism is a warp drive starship. It promises a
means of individual liberation from the wheel of suffering within
a single lifetime. I feel like this came up when
we were talking about um mummification of monks. Yeah, I
bet bet it did, because we talked a little bit
about the bodhistoft for the future. Yeah yeah, yeah yeah,
(10:21):
And that bodhisoft certainly plays into a Tibetan Tibetan culture
a bit as well. But the crazy thing about this
is that this UH, this this idea of esotery Buddhism
is it's it's not a mere shortcut approach. So it's
not one of these to to sort of try and
throw it into like modern Christian terms. It's not like, Okay,
(10:44):
I just love Jesus and everything's gonna be okay, don't
worry about any of the steps. It's not something like
that where it's like, hey, don't do all this work,
just do this now. They're the approach here is is
is putting a tremendous amount of work into uh achieving
this end. The stakes are just as high, and the
amount of mental effort involved is staggering, entailing the study
(11:04):
and contemplation of of all these other roots, entailing additional rituals,
and the worship of two distinct pampions, the five Buddha
families of the celestial Buddhas UH each residing on one
of the pure lands, and the appropriated Hindu deities. So
you have all these different deities going on. It's um
(11:26):
like reading about it, I couldn't help but think of
it in terms of say a dungeons and dragons character
where you know, generally you just wanna you pick your
character class and you pursue it, and you you do
everything right, but you can dual class, you can multi class.
This would be like multi class in your dn D character. UH.
And and just setting out to achieve all of his
or her goals by just quadruple classing with wizard Presoorcerer Warlock,
(11:51):
all to just to take something that would normally take
lifetimes to achieve in a single lifetime. In the D
n D comparison, you're combining the arcane and the divine.
Fisher has a wonderful quote. I think that drives this home.
He says, belief in the awesome possibility of harnessing the
powers needed to achieve enlightenment in this existence inspired complex
(12:12):
and mysterious practices. Such secret doctrines, visualizations, and magical powers
were not things that could be easily spelled out in text,
and the Vadriana literature remains as complex and mysterious as
any of the world's religions. So, in other words, to
organize this vast system of beliefs and gods and ways
of thinking about life in the universe, UH, to make
(12:34):
it manageable, practitioners developed. Practitioners developed an enormous complex visual system,
an artistic tradition complete with a host of instruments, symbols,
and images. So all of this, if we take it
all together, it touches upon a lot of topics that
Robert and I have covered on stuff to blow your
mind in the last year. I'd say, like a theme
(12:56):
that we've been working upon is mythology, archetypes, uh sort
of cultural resonance of those things and how they allow
us to make sense of the world. Right Like a
very practical, objective standpoint, human beings need all of this,
whether it's Buddhism or Christianity or jedi Ism, UH, to
(13:21):
help them make sense of how the world works. And
this form of Buddhism just presents a an incredibly complex
and esoteric answer to that question. And in doing so,
essentially the practitioner is saying, Look, you're gonna need to
look at a lot of charts, a lot of graphs,
a lot of pie. This is kind of the equivalent
would be like a really in depth power point presentation.
(13:44):
We have to look at a bunch of charts and
graphs to get the meaning of what's going on. These
various symbols and artistic conditions play into that as well,
and among these one finds the mandala. Yeah, why don't
we take a break and then we come back. We're
going to define the basics of the man end to
look for you so you can understand how we're going
from power point presentation to the art. Alright, we're back.
(14:13):
So the basics here of the mandola. So when you're saying, like,
what is it literally, I've seen some people say have circles,
some saying arc. I've also seen it translated as quote
an essence protecting environment. They're ultimately though, nothing short of
a representation of the entire sacred universe. Yeah. The way
(14:33):
that I've read about it is that it's a symbol
of the entire universe, and it can be represented anywhere.
It could be on a wall, or on paper or
in the sand, like we talked about earlier, or entirely
in your mind. Uh, And its purpose is to represent
an imaginary palace that is contemplated upon during meditation. Yeah.
They can be two D, they can be three D
(14:54):
in the form of a sculpture or even architecture, or
they can be this this mental instruct and ultimately, I
guess the physical representations are about creating the mental constructed mind.
I really like the way that Robert F. Thurman explained
it in his translation of the Tibetanan Book of the Dead,
which I read from from at the top of this episode.
He said, they are three dimensional perfected environments Buddha verses
(15:20):
or Buddha lands, created by the enlightenment of an individual
individual as a place that expresses his or her enlightenment.
They are realms through which other beings can be incorporated
into that enlightenment perspective. So since it's kind of like,
here's a here's a picture, here's a physical representation of
my head space that allows me to make sense of
(15:41):
the complexities of reality. Here, gaze into it and pour
this into your mind. So I may be stretching this
a little bit, but let me continue on from what
we were talking about with Dungeons and dragons are okay
to me? What this sounds like is world building in fiction,
like science fiction or fantasy. Right that you're you're creating
an alternative to the real world, and you're giving it
(16:04):
its own culture and deities and economy and locations. Right,
And the mandola uh sort of encapsulates all of those
in one artistic representation. Yeah, I think I think that's
a fair comparison, because when you think of a fantasy
book in particular, or done as in Dragons Module, you
inevitably think of maps and in number, and there's a
(16:26):
there's a lot of map like structure in these as
we'll get into the basic cosmology of the Buddhist universe
with its Holy Mountain at the center, like that's very
much a part of it. Uh. But yeah, ultimately, their
their symbolic expressions, they're teaching devices, their externalizations of complex theologies.
You know. Way you can think of them as thumb
drives of the gods, I guess. Yeah, Well, I mean
(16:49):
one of the things I read about Tibetan mandolas in
particular is that the deities within them, they're represented as
embodying philosophical views. They serve as role models for us
to look at and remember, Okay, this is what has
come before me, these are the lessons learned by my ancestors.
What can I take from this to guide my life?
(17:10):
Getting entailed number of symbols and essentially metasymbols. Yeah, it
reminds me, Okay, this is what I think of this
idea that number one, culture is how we understand the world. Uh,
and number two, storytelling is our means of transmitting culture
to one another as human beings. And then third that
(17:31):
the arte types that are within such stories they teach
us lessons about the human experience from other people's perspectives. Right.
So this is where and I am sort of trying
to pull this together on my own. It's a little
bit of young and stuff from what we've talked about
mythology before, but I'm starting to see storytellers as modern shamans.
(17:53):
And the mandola seems to me like another expression of that.
It's just done with art instead of words. Yeah, I
think so words or sand even, Yeah, exactly. So we've
mentioned these sand mandolas. Um, the construction of them has
to be affirmed as a ritual, which is very shamanistic. Right.
(18:13):
In order for the mandala to transmit positive energy to
its viewers, it's drawn in a ceremony, and the ceremony
includes monks chanting and dancing. Uh. They use these metal
funnels that are called check per and apparently they vibrate
in such a way that it causes the colored sand
inside to flow out like a liquid. When they're making them. Yeah,
(18:35):
I want to say, they kind of tap them on
the side as they go with a little metal implement
and it causes the like almost the individual granules of
sand to come out, and they just make a line
with it. Yeah. And what's important to note about these
is they're not permanent. They're not meant to be permanent.
They're destroyed by these same monks. It serves as a
(18:55):
reminder that our lives are impermanent. Uh. And the sand
itself is rich turned to an urn, which is then
that sand is then placed in water. So they see
it again going back to what we were talking about
sky burial. They see this as a gift that goes
back into the environment, back into the universe. I see
some more accidental synchronicity between this episode and the other
episode we recorded this week that on Human Bound Human
(19:18):
flesh Bound books, because this, the creation of the sand
Mandola is an acceptance of impermanence, that anything that we
make is just not gonna last, whereas the flesh bound
book is more in the tradition of this will last forever,
This person's flesh will be will be immortalized in this
this tone well, or it's you know, I know that
(19:40):
I'll be gone and I will just become an object
at some point. So I want to give the parts
of my body uh to be used for other purposes,
such as holding these books of anatomy together object permanence. Uh. Now,
I do want to point out that the use of
art to convey complex religious ideas can be found many
other places. Well that the three faced Christs of medieval
(20:03):
art instantly come to mind. These were not super common,
but it was only a brief period of time, and
the Church eventually decided that they did not care for it.
But you have something like the Holy Trinity in Christian
Catholic traditions, how do you convey that to the lay person? Well,
one way is to have an image of Christ that
has three faces, essentially a monstrous Christ. But it tries
(20:28):
to encapsulate something that is very difficult to explain language. Yeah,
I'm thinking of these weird monsters from the Transformers called
the Quinto song. Oh yeah, I love the U They
had the three faces that rotated around. I wonder if
there's some connection there. I don't know, but if you
see that the picture of the three faced Christ, you
can't help but think of those guys, just no tentacles
(20:51):
now and then another example from Christian tradition will be
the crucifix and the cross itself. So think about this.
The prefrontal cortex as part of the mammalian brain. Uh,
this is responsible for relating symbols and abstract concepts. The
unconscious processing prior to perception usually takes around three hundred milliseconds,
(21:12):
So it's not that surprising that as a psychologist, Adam
Altar discovered Christians tend to behave more honestly, when they're
exposed to an image of the crucifix, even if they're
they have no conscious memory of having seen it, They're
just exposed to it and just the power of the
symbol helped inform their behavior. Literally, the power of Christ
(21:33):
compels you, yeah, or at least the power of Christian symbolism. Uh.
And in nine there was an experiment from the University
of Michigan that found that Christians felt less virtuous after
subliminal exposure to an image of Pope John Paul the Second.
And there have been some secular experiments with this as well,
people tending to think more creatively when exposed to the
Apple computer logo or an incandescent lightbulb. So that's just
(21:57):
just a few examples to drive home just the power
of symbols, the power of non linguistic information, uh, even
into small examples, and if you roll it all up
into essentially a meta symbol, as we see in the Mandala,
you can see how this does really help to to
to form the mindset of the the younger Buddhist trying
(22:18):
to learn how to perceive reality. Yeah, I think that
this is just a version of that that we here
in the West maybe aren't as familiar with. How to
go back to what we said ere there about about
maps um the kind of mandol as we were talking
about here, it's an organized system that explains the cosmos
in terms of the body, in terms of a building,
in terms of the physical universe. So they referenced the
(22:40):
notion of the Buddhist cosmos as centered by Holy Mount Meru,
which is the home of gods and Buddhas, and surrounded
by seven oceans and seven concentric mountain ranges. And beyond
these ranges you find another ocean, islands that include human habitation,
and finally a great wall of rock enclosing everything. Generally,
you know, square of shape because the image itself is
(23:01):
question interesting. So a mandola is spatial, it's symmetrical, and
it's the presentation of all of these ideas. Yeah, so
you've got an example here of sort of how you
would build out a mandala from the my understanding, as
you start at the center and you build going out. Yeah,
I don't. I think that's or at least that's the
way that I feel like we look at them, we
(23:22):
tend to process them. So you have a central deity,
you know, or Buddha or other figure. You have concentric
circles of guardian deities. You have square palace grounds featuring gateways,
you know, ways to get in and out, uh circle
of create cremation grounds representing the phenomenal world direction deities.
(23:42):
And then the outer walls oceans, barriers at the very
edge of the image. So, in other words, we're talking
about a world generated his art so that it might
be simulated in the mind. A place where fortresses of
bone rise above a sea of blood, where a pantheon
of wrathful and serene the ease a symbol and precise arrangement.
You've got, you know, multi limbed beings, dancing cyclopean architecture,
(24:07):
mountains that bridge Earth to the cosmos. It's all present
and and we're serious about the seas of blood part
to Bettan art and iconography makes use of many dark
elements such as bone, blood, flamed skin. But here's just
to give you a taste of this. This is from
Himalayan art dot org uh and it's a description of
(24:28):
the mandola of the Yama Dharma. It describes the the
mandola in detail. But the more the most interesting part
here is all of this is encircled by a ring
of skulls, a sea of blood, and the eight Great
Charnel grounds again surrounded by a circle of Vadra's uh,
the bright orange flames of pristine awareness. So i am.
(24:51):
I go to a yoga studio here in Atlanta called
Tough Love Yoga, which is infamous for conducting was called
me a yoga. You do yoga listening to death metal. Um,
and the woman who started it there um she has
brought artwork like this to the st also because it
(25:12):
seems like it's incidental, but it's not. There's lots of
skull icronography and blood and things like that, things that
we associate with death metal in in artwork that connects
to yoga. Then they've got they've got this giant mandola
wheel painted on the wall by a local tattoo artist.
Is really cool, awesome. Yeah, I mean there's plenty of
(25:32):
very death mentally imagery on this. I mean, what we
just describe sounds like it could be a Slayer album
covers totally. Yeah. But in looking at these mandal as,
you'll find a great deal of complexity. Sometimes there are
mandal is within mandalas. And uh Roberty Fisher at one
point and his book refers to quote a remarkable visual
(25:52):
litany of deities, mostly female, a programmatic sequence that can
be traced back to specific tests. I like that descript
and because it really brings the technological and the technological
idea that this is. It's kind of like a program
that you're loading into your mind. And the study of
mandola art is a discipline to itself. But we can
explore a little more of their power and connection to
(26:14):
the human bind by considering a Western notion, that of
the memory palace. Yeah, so let's take a quick break
and then when we come back, we're gonna give you
a refresher on the memory palace. There's been a previous
Stuff to Blow Your Mind episode on it, but we'll
we'll dive into it a little bit and then we're
going to connect these two things together. All right, we're back.
(26:42):
So yeah, so you in previous host Julie did a
Memory Palace episode, is that right? We did, and then
we did rerun of it after you and Joe came
on board that featured an interview with a memory champion.
So there are two different versions of that podcast. I'll
try and link to the interview version the landing page
for this episode, because you get to hear from somebody
(27:02):
who uses memory palace um and uses the method of
Loki uh to a very high degree. Yeah. This came
up a lot in the literature of how memory contestants
are using this so that they can just memorize vast
amounts of information. But a lot of you out there
are probably thinking, well, there's a lot of pop culture
examples of this right now, I remember hearing about this
(27:25):
from somewhere. Well, uh, it's certainly in the BBC version
of Sherlock uh. And as previously discussed on Stuff to
Buil Your Mind, Uh, somebody who were interested in the
work of Maria Knakova. She has written a book on
how to Think like Sherlock Holmes. She talks about memory palaces. Uh.
In the BBC Sherlock it's called a mind palace, which
(27:46):
some people think was picked up from British illusionist Darren Brown,
or from Hannibal Lector in the novels or the TV series.
Now Thomas Harris, who you know wrote the original novels
that feature Hannibal lecteror he credits this idea back to
Francis Yates, who is the author of the Art of Memory.
(28:07):
And Yates traces the idea of the memory palace back
to uh someone named Bruno, a sixteen hundreds Dominican monk. Uh.
But that goes even further back down through the Medieval
and Renaissance era, back to the Greek poet simon IDEs Uh.
And Yates argues that the Seven Deadly Sins, or for instance,
(28:28):
Dante's Divine Comedy, the structures within those of Hell and
Purgatory and Heaven, those are all versions of memory palaces
and in and in turn memories of mindless. Yeah. If
I think there's a lot of comparison to be made, uh,
between a map of Dante's Inferno and the model. Yeah,
it's just different mythology. The theme of yates work is
(28:50):
that the Renaissance, which we view now with some skepticism
as superstitious, is actually full of quote, magical beliefs that
we now continue on into our scientific revolution. So for instance,
go cr two episodes on John d for more on
that and what we actually This is a theme that
comes up a lot for us, I think, but uh,
(29:10):
maybe also a little bit in the book Binding of
Human Skin that we're recording this week. But the same
idea here that um, there is stuff that seems like
it's uh superstitious or magical in nature that does actually
have some purpose to it in our current scientific methodology
(29:30):
of thinking. Yeah, I mean it basically the idea of
the memory palace. It basically all boils down to employing
spatial memory to memorize information by placing it all in
an imagine palace, uh, a palace filled with memorable symbols.
So you know, theres we've discussed on here before. There
are various forms of memory that we employed. There's not
just one bucket of memory, and this is essentially a
(29:53):
way that we tweak our mind and using spatial memory
to to remember often just sometimes numbers or or or
unimportant facts. The idea here is that humans have a
knack for remembering spatial layouts. Brain scans even show show
us that the spatial learning parts of the brain are
used by people who actually win these memory contests. It's
(30:15):
particularly useful for remembering things in a sequence or a list,
like groceries for example. Uh. It requires a lot of
time to establish, but once once you have it in place,
you can go back to you continue to walk through
that memory palace in order to remember the items and
the order. Yeah. And one of the things that I
saw that connects it back to the mandala is that, Uh,
(30:35):
someone pointed out that Buddhism uses a lot of sequence
and list type information in order to get across its philosophy.
So subsequently, the mandola's then translate really well into these
memory palaces. Now the origin Okay, so what I just
(30:56):
took us through brought us all the way back to
Greek poets simonade Uh. But it was first written in
the Rhetorica ad hereni Um, which in the eighties b
c e. Was written by unknown authors. Some people thought
that it might have been Cicero, but now they think
they don't know who it is. Um. Now, this is
(31:17):
the oldest surviving Latin book on rhetoric, and it teaches
the method of loci, which is the the the idea
of the memory palace, or the idea of using imagined,
well known locations like your home to remember things. Now,
this to me reminded me of my my schooling, and
in rhetoric it seems inherently connected to the Aristotelian idea
(31:39):
of the peripatetic learning system. Have you heard about this
at all? So basically the idea was that Aristotle, when
he was working with his students in his his quote college,
his school, that they would learn while they were walking
and talking. Uh. And the method of loca is essentially
a walk about, so you're be remembering what you learned
(32:02):
by going on an imaginary walk. But here's the thing.
Other sources say, actually it was invented by Greek poet
Simon IDs uh. And this was real morbid. Apparently, after
he stepped out of a banquet hall, it collapsed and
killed everybody inside, and he was left to identify their remains.
(32:23):
He had to put a name to each body and
that's how he invented the method of loci. So he's
he's thinking of and stuff. All right. So Jim was
seated over there, he had he had the chicken wings,
and then and then Joe he was over here. He
was to my left, and he's piecing this all together exactly. Yeah. Well, Cicero,
though was involved. He is celebrated as popularizing it. He
(32:46):
wrote something down basically because writing something down at that
time was expensive. Paper was expensive. Not everybody knew how
to write. Uh. It wasn't until the printing press that
it basically the method of Look how the memory palace
became obsolete. And we've continued to see that pattern as
we've changed the ways that we can externalize memory. We
(33:08):
have to rely on internal memory less. Now as we
said already, it's employing spatial memory. And it makes sense
that humans would have a robust ability for spatial memory because,
as I mean, that's what we do. We live in
this physical world. And even though most of us have
probably have our patterns you know down you know to
ultimately you know of just a few varied environments, and
(33:31):
you know how to get there and how to get back.
You know, we're we're programmed to deal with the broader world.
We're programmed to to to make spatial sense of the
world around us, to catalog its storied away. And so
this is just taking spatial scaffolding and applying it to
a list of facts, to a theological structure, to a
cosmological viewpoint. Um. So the memory palace is not a trick.
(33:56):
It's it's just how we think about the world, and
we're taken the way we think about physical reality, the
way we think about spatial environments, and using it to
to remember other organized systems. Yeah, it's almost like these
other older cultures had created a learning system around how
(34:17):
we naturally adapt to knowledge, how we how we observe knowledge,
and then we went and somehow broke that and created
this other learning system that, especially for memorization, that's far
more difficult and not how our our biology is set
up to learn. Uh. And now now we're sort of
coming back and we're going, oh right, right, yeah, this
(34:39):
is spatial learning is actually much easier. Yeah, and so
again we come back to this idea of the mandola,
and to see one of these and imagine it on
the wall, it makes perfect sense. You can't just write
out everything and have these notes for everybody who's trying
to to to learn the system. But you can have
someone guiding through it, refer to this work of our
(35:00):
and then you look at it, you take it in,
and you're able to use this as the memory palace
for the theological ideas. Now, the thought at work here
is that memory palaces harness our evolved skill at remembering
details of locations because as hunter gatherers we used to
recall what was edible, where to find it, or how
(35:21):
to avoid what was poisonous because of spatial memory. Modern
research backs this up. After people viewed thousands of images
for a few seconds each, studies found that, on average,
they could distinguish eighty percent of the images from those
that they had not seen. Uh. In addition, people can
usually recall objects they've seen after seeing hundreds of intervening ones,
(35:43):
showing our capacity for storing visual memories in the long term.
This is I I don't know if you've heard this
a lot, but when I was in academia it was
really starting to become popular with the idea of visual thinkers.
I'm a visual thinker. I can't I can't read that
text any something visual uh is something that's making its
way through sort of just the education system. Other studies
(36:08):
have shown that the memory palace, or the usage of it,
it doubles the proportion of people who can remember an
eleven to twelve item grocery list. So again, sequences and
lists work really well. Students who use it in economics
outperformed those who did not when they take an exam,
and medical students who used it learned more about the
end of crime system than those who did not. It's
(36:29):
apparently also useful for patients who have had treatments that
can potentially impair their recall or cognitive function. Hm. Well
that makes sense. Like again, they're again they're multiple forms
of memory, and if you can cap into another form
of memory to achieve the goals of one that's damaged,
then then you can find a good bit of success. Yeah.
(36:51):
As I was doing the research, I immediately thought to myself,
if as I become older, I start experiencing memory loss
and or dementia, gonna have to turn to a memory
palace and just really develop one. So we've already had
a number of the parallels here between the memory palace
and the mandala um, and you know, a number of
the parallels are just obvious. Again, it's all about using
(37:12):
um our spatial memory to to internalize either you know,
a long list of data or a theological system. Yeah,
and it's all really brought together here for us by
an East Asian scholar named Dan o'huigan uh, and he
provides interesting commentary on the concept of the mandala being
(37:33):
like a memory palace. He argues the mandalas serves the
same purpose as memory palaces that Roman orders used. Uh.
For instance, they used it to help monks organize their knowledge. Now,
keep in mind that in both instances, these people had
to rely on their memories more than we do, right, um,
they didn't have paper, they didn't have flash drives, they
(37:54):
didn't have smartphones. His primary example is Quintillion's use of
placing some Bolck items in his home to help him
remember things about law and the courts. And then people
like Robert flood Are Giordano Bruno who I mentioned earlier.
They went on to visualize memory palaces as imagined spaces
more similar to the mandola. Ohuigan though he thinks that
(38:17):
these techniques were developed independently from one another, even though
they're extremely similar. Uh, and the mandola allows them to
visualize something colorful to help you remember what's going on.
And it's similar to how Buddhism uses lists to help
you remember its tenants, so mentioning earlier. Yeah, and you
see this in in in really a number of different
(38:39):
Asian religions. But all of these various gods and artistic motifs,
like every detail of it is important. You know, what
is what is the deity or the Buddha holding, what
position is their their body in? Like all of it
tells you something. If you know what the symbols mean. Yeah,
if you can recall that visual then you can sort
of race your way back through what what Lesson is
(39:02):
trying to teach. Yeah, and you'll see descriptions for these
where they're like, all right, well this particular Buddha, Bodhist
for God, or their hand is like this that means
such and such they're holding this weapon or that and
this too is a symbol. So it all comes together.
It's not just pure, you know, artistic entertainment. So Huigan
points out that new monics and memory palaces are now
(39:24):
replaced by libraries, computers, and paper uh. And these function
as extensions of our brains, so we don't need tools
like mandalas or memory palaces anymore. And he he goes
so far to argue that this is an area where
he says, quote humanity scholars can justify their existence by
contributing something useful to the knowledge of our culture. So
(39:47):
he has a little bit of a lower esteem for
the humanities, uh just throughout the piece, and generally is
kind of dismissive of academia. That's okay, I get that
sometimes too, but uh so, anyway, he started bringing these together,
but at the ultimately at the end of the day,
he says, I don't think like there was some kind
of like hidden connection that we haven't discovered yet where
(40:10):
these cultures came in contact with one another and we're
sharing information like this. It's just naturally how these different
cultures of humanity developed. Now, in the past, Mandela creation
has been limited by human thought but also by the
limits of art and construction. So certainly we've seen some
epic attempts to reflect Mandala schema in architecture. But modern
(40:33):
technology makes something even grander possible. A complete simulation of
the Mandola of virtual world based on the Mandola which
I think is kind of beautiful because essentially the Memory Palace.
Take come, the mandola is a simulated world, a world
you simulate simula in your head, and you make the
world in your head conform uh to the the shape
(40:56):
in this other individual's head, and the virtual word old
is is the potential to do that in this this
third mind, the mind of the machine. Yeah. I couldn't
help but imagine that when Second Life was really at
its high, there must have been somebody in their building
a mandola within the virtual world there that somehow represented
(41:18):
multiple things. Yeah, I mean, because there's certainly have been
a several different virtual mandala projects creating three D simulations
of these meaning laden medicymbols. Yeah. One example I've got
here is from cal mel Chen's mapping Scientific Frontiers The
Quest for Knowledge Visualization, and he talks about virtual environments
(41:41):
being created that are based on the mandala and using
it as an organizing metaphor for shared cyberspace. He connects
this to the idea of the Memory Palace. Up there
we go. So there's another person who put them together,
and he says Cicero was the most authoritative advisor on
that subject. But basically Lee. He says, you know, you
(42:01):
want to begin by imagining an very well lit place.
Then once you get to know, then you store and
retrieve objects there. So I can see how you would
both do that within your imagination and within a virtual world.
One of the things that I'm interested in as we
reach the end of the discussion here is we're at
a current place where we have, as we said, we've
(42:22):
we've we've gotten to abandon these memory palaces for the
most part. We've gotten to the point where we can
abandon mondolas and other religious uh paintings and and and
meta symbols that give us this information. Instead we just
we go online, right, or we go to the book UH,
and we can find lists, we can find all the
(42:42):
data spelled out for us. But as we get more
and more into a virtual reality age, and I'm trying
to to say that not in a like mid nineties
law and more Man sense, right, but but looking at
some of the very real virtual reality applications that are
going on out there and trying to imagine a near
(43:02):
future in which the virtual use of cyberspace is more ubiquitous,
are we going to see a sort of return to
some of these what we see, for instance, could we
see spatial memory employed more as an educational tool maybe.
I think that what you might see before that is
(43:23):
creative types maybe trying to use the medium of virtual
reality or augmented reality in such a way that it's
representative like a mandala is uh So that like it
takes you through a virtual story and you you you
learn as you go through it. I mean, we're so,
(43:44):
I'm going to south By Southwest in a couple of weeks,
and I was just looking at the program schedule and
I can't tell you like probably like of the panels
there are about virtual reality and augmented reality. Uh So,
it is definitely something that's coming down the road. We
know Facebook is heavily invested in it. Our other colleagues
here at how Stuff Works have covered this at nauseum.
(44:05):
But the Oculus rift and Palmer Lucky and all the
work that's gone into that and Facebook buying it up
and stuff. So yeah, I think that that's going to
be like a new palette for people to create on.
It's gonna take a while, though, I think for education
to catch up to it, especially when you think about it,
like education hasn't really even figured out yet, Hey, maybe
(44:27):
we should return back to the spatial learning system that
seems to work so well for our spatially inclined brains. Uh. There,
we have a friend of the show, uh goes by
p K who runs kingle Lux Records out of Canada. Yeah,
he's involved in a project to build a virtual space
station for like, you know, for sort of artistic musical purposes.
(44:52):
And he'll occasionally seen send me some some videos or
some information on the project, and I see those and
and some of the really beautiful imentry is going on there,
And as much as I can tell without being like
hooked into some sort of VR rig, it seems very
immersive to whoever is controlling these characters. So so those
those videos, when I when I view them, it does
(45:13):
make me think about how we're going to make use
of that territory. And I feel like maybe we're gonna
make use of that territory in ways that we can't
connect to all that much now, but we can look
back to our use of purely spatial memory in the
past and see and see some sort of hint of
where we're going. Yeah, I think it would be nice
(45:35):
to see your return to that. I remember when I
was working at the university, I worked out here in town.
There was maybe like a six month window there where
they were super hyped up about Second life, and they
built an actual like version of the university in second
life where students, because they thought second life was going
(45:57):
to be like the next big thing, uh, they had like,
you know, students could go there and like interact with
f a Q forums and stuff like that. But not
only that, but they had like a Greek lecture hall
set up where theoretically a professor could come in there
with their avatar and give a presentation to all of
(46:17):
the second life avatars of students that were there. So
if you get that far and you're sort of just
taking the real world analogy and applying it into the
virtual world, I would imagine then when you get to
the spatial reasoning, uh, that you would say, hey, this
is actually here's a far better way for us to
do this. Let's build the university as a memory palace
(46:39):
rather than just like you know, have your little avatar
go and sit down on a fake bench or something
and watch an avatar deliver a presentation to you. Well,
you know, uh, we only have a limited knowledge of
virtual worlds out there. But I know that listeners of
the show have been out there explore worring. Perhaps that
(47:01):
you have some examples of of the of the Mando
law or other constructures that have been recreated in the
virtual world, maybe even in Minecraft. I didn't even think
about Minecraft, would be perfectly right. Yeah, you're right. Um,
that's interesting. So we would love to hear about any
of those examples or just your general thoughts on Tibetan art,
virtual reality, or the Memory Palace. Really, this is an
(47:22):
episode that opens itself up to various interpretations and tidbits
from your personal life. Yeah, you can hit us up
with information about that on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, or Instagram,
and you can always go and visit us at stuff
to Blow your Mind dot com. That's where we've got
me and everything, all of the podcasts, all the videos
(47:43):
that we've done, blog posts galore. Uh, it is full
of stuff, including links back to those social media accounts. Yeah,
and I'll make sure the landing page for this episode
includes links to some of the bits that we've talked
about here, including sky Burial, the previous Memory Palette episode,
and in any other little bits of related information in
the pop shop over the years, and as always you
(48:04):
can email us at Blow the Mind how Stuff Works
for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is
that how stuff Works dot com
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