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That story\\xa0about the blockchain-based dating site gets better: its designer is an enlightened being.

I got this from\\xa0Vinay Gupta\\u2019s wiki, which describes some of his thoughts and experiences. Since reading\\xa0Mastering The Core Teachings Of The Buddha, I\\u2019ve been looking at a bunch of this stuff, and it\\u2019s interesting how it does (or doesn\\u2019t) converge. For example, from the MCTB review:

If you really, really examine your phenomenological experience, you realize all sorts of surprising things\\u2026one early insight is a perception of your mental awareness of a phenomenon as separate from your perception of that phenomenon.

And from\\xa0Gupta:

The real process of meditation is paying real close attention to what is happening around you without passing it to the mind immediately for analysis\\u2026the mind becomes perceived to be another sense. You see, you listen, you hear, you smell, you think. Once you are aware that you are not your mind and your mind is basically a sense organ, it\\u2019s a thing that brings information to you, you enter the real work of enlightenment, which is: what is this me that the mind is bringing information to? And that\\u2019s the big one. That question is at the heart of everybody\\u2019s enlightenment process.

From the MCTB review:

The main point of [mindfulness] meditation is to improve your concentration ability so you can direct it to ordinary experience. Become so good at concentrating that you can attain various jhanas \\u2013 but then, instead of focusing on infinite bliss or whatever other cool things you can do with your new talent, look at a wall or listen to the breeze or just try to understand the experience of existing in time.

From Gupta:

Building the instrumentation to keep your consciousness stable enough to put the attention on the thing, is about three or four years work. It\\u2019s like grinding a mirror if you\\u2019re going to make an astronomical telescope. It takes years to grind a perfectly smooth reflector. Then you silver coat it. Then you point it at the sky and now you can see the moons of Jupiter. It takes you years to design the microscope, you look into the water, now you can see the microbes and you just discovered germ theory. Building the instrumentation takes time. Years and years and years because you need long periods \\u2013 35, 40 seconds minimally \\u2013 when there are no thoughts in the mind to be able to begin to turn the awareness onto itself. So lengthening the gap between thoughts means lowering the mental background noise.