Today I'm at Princeton University's Institute for Advanced Study, an interdisciplinary research center which once counted Einstein himself as a faculty member, to give a brief lecture on Second Life. My talk was put together by Piet Hut, an IAS astrophysicist who has an asteroid named after him, and also has a Second Life avatar: Pema Pera. (As I've written before, Piet conducts some of his work in SL, simulating Newtonian physics in Second Life, and running MICA, a scientific and educational non-profit based in SL.) Yesterday he told me about another Second Life-based project he initiated, which has already developed a fairly large and diverse community around it:
Play as Being, a meditation/communal focus group that meets several times a day to share their practice. The practice itself is very novel: Nine seconds of meditation or focus, every 15 minutes. In those nine seconds, the idea is to pause all your daily activity, focus on your breathing, and write down anything that comes up during this mental pause. "Instead of spending half an hour a day on tai chi or yoga or something, you can spend nine seconds every 15 minutes," Piet tells me. "Even if you do it throughout the whole day it'll be less than 10 minutes [total]. The idea is to give a very persistent and penetrating way of dropping everything you do and... letting more air into your life, so to speak." (Personally I like it. I joked to Piet that whenever I do go to yoga, I end up rushing to the gym, fighting through traffic while screaming I HAVE GOT TO GET TO FRICKING YOGA!)
The Play as Being groups meets four times a day in Second Life to share this practice communally and exchange notes. "A very grassoots, organic way of exploring the nature of reality together," as he puts it. Also, diverse: the 70 member group includes a female medical student in Saudi Arabia, a retired Taoist practitioner in Hawaii, a Franciscan lay monk, Hindus, Buddhists, and other folks across the entire spectrum of belief or tradition (or just secular.) According to Piet, most people say the practice has a positive impact within the first few days; for a sense of that, here's some conversational excerpts from the Second Life meetings.
The next in-world meetings are at 1pm and 7pm SLT. If you feel like joining Pema and his Play fellows in-world, here's the direct teleport link.
Ack, the time zone shift threw me off and originally wrote the next session is at 4pm, but that's EST. For SLT, it's 1pm. (Corrected post accordingly.)
Posted by: Hamlet Au | Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 12:25 PM