Podcast & Conversations

so we're here today with Gino you the tenured professor at here here at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University yes um just tell me a little bit about your background and what kind of brought you here and what you're doing here and yeah so I have a bachelor's and electrical engineering computer science PhD as well - we used to teach at USC I met my wife who's from Hong Kong which is what brought me to Hong Kong

and for the last thirty years I've been in the area of digital entertainment so video games animation media and as a grad student I ended up by going around the world in 1989 I had three papers accepted to different conferences ended up travelling around the world and wherever I went I just meet different cultures and you look people in the eyes and you can kind of connect with them although your backgrounds and cultures are completely different

something about it allows you to connect with other people that led me to wondering you know what is it well actually that and I only have $1,000 cash at the time and no credit card and travelling for four months I've had an amazing time and through that made me wonder what is it it's what's the commonality of mankind what is it across all these different cultures that allows us to connect and everyone's born everyone dies and

while they're alive they have to deal with themselves mm-hmm and so they build a mental worldview and then they live out the world you know their views in terms of society their family's culture or society all a kind of a belief system on them that they act from and part of the process of kind of development is in engaging with people is what if you let go of all the police mmm what if you let go

of all the books and as you do that interest the interesting things happen it allows you to travel oh and have amazing magical moments and you can actually live the amazing amazing magical moments just by traveling mm-hmm and so that's part of the impetus for these the evolutionary caravan of being able to travel into the unknown and to kind of live from the unknown and from that well from that experience I've been in digital entertainment for

about 30 years but the last 10 years have been in the area of consciousness so understanding the mind-body relationship and so with the engineering background I look at the mind-body relationship kind of like hardware in the software in a computer physically I'm here physically you're here and physically you're somewhere right now but in this conversation we seem to be somewhere as well so what's the relationship between this mental space which is where our beliefs and our

worldviews are and the physical body and so if I mentioned say Hawaii and you know what I mean are there certain neurons in my brain that are wired like yours so what is that relationship and so where that relates to digital entertainment and media is arguably where we're at in this conversation is where you're at when you read a book watch a movie or play a video game and so how do things here influence how you

think and how you feel and there's a process of learning which is kind of the development schools universities but then there's also a process of unlearning mmm getting back into resting and not knowing which largely relates to kind of the wisdom traditions in religion etc what's your relationship with all of this ultimately who are you why are you here what is your relationship so you're gonna be kind of covering the the bases of this and some

of the science and the technology around this in your workshop 10 years or so actually since the experience of traveling around the world almost 30 years ago I suppose yeah thirty years ago time flies is developing kind of a theory of understanding what development is you know related to you know how we develop and then what happens advanced stages of development especially related to and so the talk that I've given in one of the workshops that

I'll be talking about is on it's called personal development mental health and human potential so personal development is the development process that we all go through mental health is when there's a mind and body in the emergence of this space and time when those are out of alignment especially the relationship between the symbols and the mind in the processes of physiology those can be mental health issues yeah um and physical health issues it creates dis ease

you know we're talking about the nocebo effect and the placebo effect all of these are contributing factors to how your thoughts affect your body exactly so Western scientific perspective is interesting because it and the neat thing about the way that we look at this too is it is kind of the mind and body in that relationship and it turns out that the high stage is when you have high energy coupled assembles that's where this mental bipolar

disorder is just the inability to regulate energy in the physiology the energy that you generate actually relates to how you're breathing and how you're holding their physiology and so a large part of what we're trying to do with this Caravan too is that a lot of people around the world are going through experiences in these kind of high energy situations and when you have a lot of energy the physiology you know Chinese call it Chi it's

called prana etc and when you're generating a lot of energy so a real ship can happen kind of disorienting for a lot of people mm-hmm and crashes happen in terms of depression etc and all of that a large part of it is a mind and body out of balance and part of well right now unfortunately the modern society will give you psychotherapy will give you drugs drugs and medication etc but I think there's another way and

there are a lot of practices that can be developed on this you myself have developed a lot of practices to help facilitate people especially people that may be going through like a Kundalini experience or you know have done psychoactives and the same and are just trying to understand who they are and what why they're here in their role relationship in the world today and we have now the exciting thing in terms of the work that we're

doing is we're really looking at Western Approaches of science but then also looking at Eastern practices as well - in terms of breath meditation different forms of meditation and understanding this behavior from the perspective of developmental psychology the autonomic nervous system and the endocrine system and giving people a framework for really investigating what's actually going on with them to help kind of debug you know their their psychology and so the exciting thing is for our trip

right now we're planning I'm going to Europe in January or in discussions right now to do kind of the United States and kind of the main June timeframe and then also in Asia in October or will have that consciousness science technology and society conference again yeah it's all part of this what we're looking for are people that are trying to make sense or building community that hey no one really understands me in the modern world but

you know I think we're people that that develop understandings and can understand and appreciate them and I think we're a point where it's transitioning more and more that way there's more people doing spiritual practices like yoga is one in itself yeah where you can bring around Kundalini experiences people are now tapping into our psychoactives and meditation which start on locking things which once there looks like holy and so a we're looking for people that are going

through these experiences we're looking for other teachers people that have developed unique practices based upon their unique gifts and so here's something where we're developed we're actually identifying people with special abilities which is the third part of this so it's personal evolve and mental health and then human potential and so a lot of people that have developed like empaths intuitive's seers people that we have one person that can physically move you you know just with his

mind energy other people that can fill the room with quite a lot of really interesting people that we've come across and so we're identifying other people like this and we're also trying to build a network of academic researchers and scientists that are researching this as well too and so it's really threefold you know what this trip is about that and also really looking at influencing influential people as well too so this trip will actually be Davos

of the world like form looks like we're going to be collaborating with hub culture too so we'll actually have a space there to be doing things which is pretty exciting mm-hmm because always you know delving into this kind of area of consciousness it can be a very ethereal subject for people you know what is consciousness you know what does it mean what how does it affect us and statistics like you know they say round about a

95 percent of the day we spend unconscious in other words were acting from experience and story and just programming you know this is where when we start to unlock those things we start to undersell understand ourselves and our lives in so much more detail and how to influence in terms of defining what is consciousness mm-hmm exactly yeah so arguably consciousness is just the thing that's aware of all of this that which enables the awareness of all

of this and this is where again coming at it from a more open perspective you know the Western perspective is is consciousness is something that's somehow some process that happens in the brain or at the quantum level that goes through the brain and cetera but the Asian perspective is that consciousness is primarily and everything is built upon that and so technically you know from an Asian perspective and from a non dual perspective who you are and

so there are a lot of different framings of all of this and the framing that part of the challenge for communicating experience is the lack of a common language for describing you know these kind of things which is why having workshops and having developing an experiential understanding is really important which is yeah yeah you've got to get it out to the people and let them experience it for themselves you know and you know it does seem

that actual Western science is catching up with the Eastern philosophy things like certain consciousness research work we're looking at non-local consciousness and how experimentation and science is now showing that actually some of this philosophy is true in some ways to the physical mmm yes so I mean this kind of also comes into the the next step of the evolution of this whole project with the mind expansion Academy and creating a platform to provide various styles of

training various video training programs and giving people more access to this kind of thing because not everybody is going to be able to come along to some of these events and they're gonna need access to this kind of training and information long term opportunities but again there's a difference between knowing something conceptually mmm-hmm so do you think that some of the content that we can produce through video programs could actually be experiencial as well to actually

give people you know at home an experience or exercise that they can do and actually find this sat in their own home potentially and then that's where things like video games and virtual reality are really exciting we're doing a lot of work in the trans tech space as well too pal therapy with with biofeedback quantify itself there's a lot that can be done that ultimately it's about cultivating greater somatic awareness the challenge in all of this

in the problem with video and always the challenge isn't in learning the challenge is in unlearning and how do you get back people back to and knowing to intuition in the inside and so hard to again very very difficult I was just kind of one of the people that may be joining us diction actually has been talking to me and he's looking for guidance and it's like well you're looking for guidance out here but ultimately it's

community is important but then ultimately it's about you know an experience well not only not like finding your own inner compass mm-hmm what is your relationship of all of this and each person is unique yes yes Mon definitely we all have a different viewpoint and different perspective a different experience to come from but then the beautiful thing is what if you let go