Introduction to Superlearning

How to learn everything faster, deeper, and beyonder.

Introduction

Sorcery cannot be taught. You find it yourself, or you do not.
   .Madeline Miller, Circe

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The goal of superlearning is to learn, mmm, everything.

All the important stuff, at least. How the universe works, top to bottom. Why conscious minds exist. Why you exist, pilgrim.

Superlearning is an all-in, all-encompassing approach to understanding reality. Any reality you find yourself in. It’s designed to enable any mortal to learn the Big Stuff in a lifetime, no matter where you start.

Any mortal, but not every mortal. Superlearning demands effort.

Superlearning is a total-immersion mental strategy. An all-the-time lifestyle.

You’ll do best at superlearning if you’re already a curious soul who enjoys learning. For autistic minds, superlearning can be especially potent. It harnesses your dark gift and organizes your quirky mental dynamics.

I suppose you could use the techniques of superlearning to improve your performance at school and work, to conquer homework and master job skills—but I was already pretty good at that sort of stuff before superlearning. If your primary concern is scoring A’s in Art History or leveling up on Javascript, conventional advice on learning and studying should do you fine. If you succeed at superlearning you may start to question what schools teach and the nature of careers as you press ever closer to the deepest cycles of reality, so superlearning isn’t necessarily the ideal tool for boosting your GPA.

Behind superlearning and its repertoire of methods lies a single core assumption:

The universe wants you to learn about it.

You are designed for learning about the Commonality, pilgrim—and the Commonality is designed to be learned about by souls. The cosmos aches for you to learn it and learn it right.

Don’t worry if you’re nervous you might not be capable enough for such ambition. Superlearning is about intent and will rather than raw intellectual power. My own brain tissue is spoiled with impairments and flaws. When I was young I couldn’t read, couldn’t write, couldn’t follow lectures, couldn’t understand advanced math, couldn’t remember names or faces or events, couldn’t draw, and couldn’t socialize in groups or obey authority.

This may not seem like a promising start for superlearning, but that’s the point: superlearning is designed to make use of your mind as you find it, not as you wish it to be. Any soul can superlearn, as long as you diligently exert the requisite intent and effort.

If you show the Commonality you are willing to give yourself over to unbridled revelation, the living universe will respond. For that is why we are here.

To learn the full nature of our presence upon the deep so that we may act right and true.

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What is the basic method of superlearning? As you make a study of the world, how do you know you’ve learned something vital and authentic about ever-treacherous reality?

The surest mark of progress in superlearning is the same as in science. A pragmatic and concrete milestone validating your headway:

Unifications.

A unification demonstrates that two distinct phenomena in mysterious reality that are believed to be independent and unrelated are in truth two facets of a single phenomena.

When you can unify the notions of apples and oranges within a single concept—fruit!—you’ve made a claim of genuine insight upon the world. You’ve attained honest knowledge of the Commonality: this thing here and that other thing there are really two distinct faces of one underlying thing. Seed-based reproduction, in this case.

Seed-based reproduction itself might still be an open mystery—tsk tsk, what is seed-based reproduction, really?—but whatever it is, apples and oranges are both examples of it.

Then you might go further and conjoin fruits and vegetables together within the unifying concept of produce.

All superlearning—and most forms of learning—attempt to establish unifications in your knowledge of the cosmos.

We commence our lives as newborn learners forging simple unifications, recognizing the two “eyes” and one “mouth” dancing about can all be unified as “mama’s face.” If we study our physical environment, we may eventually learn that eerie manifestations of electricity and magnetism are actually different incarnations of the same unified electromagnetic force. If we study the mathematical world, we may come to realize that even though the Galois groups and harmonic analysis seem completely unrelated, they can actually be unified mathematically.

This is how superlearning proceeds: by stitching together rags and fragments of reality until all the Commonality is quilted in marvelous union.

My first semi-formal conceptualization of superlearning was in the early 1990s, when I dubbed it the “Many Mountains” strategy.

I understood I would need to learn a prodigious quantity of knowledge in order to fathom the scientific and mathematical revelations that intex was so generously sharing with me, to say nothing of unriddling the fantastical nature of contact itself. I initially conceived I would need to learn many discrete mountains of knowledge just to get a handle on my strangely unspooling existence.

I presumed I would need to climb to the peak of neuroscience, the peak of literature, the peak of physics, the peak of cinema, and so on. Each peak representing mastery of a broad domain of scholarship or skill.

Mastering entire disciplines of knowledge—discipline-s, plural—was one of two key components of the Many Mountains strategy. The other was “Connecting Valleys.” I presumed I would eventually conjoin the disparate mountains of knowledge I learned (such as physics and literature) into an integrated mountain chain of knowledge. I presumed I would find deep connections between the various disciplines I studied.

But I ran into a problem. I couldn’t seem to form any Connecting Valleys. I could ascend to the peak of a mountain of knowledge, and then another, but I could not connect them together.

I’d learn one mountain—the science of computer algorithms, say—but as soon as I moved on to another mountain of knowledge (film-making, for instance) and started hiking up the new slope I’d forget almost everything I’d learned about the first peak. My new film-making knowledge would overwrite, overshadow, or otherwise render my computer science knowledge inaccessible.

For years, the fact that I could not couple and unite the mountains in my mind was a major weakness of the Many Mountains strategy.

A weakness that would have been lethal, but eventually I finally figured out how to interlink my mountains into a seamless Alps of knowledge. I will share what I learned in these articles. This is a fundamental strategy of superlearning: to learn deeply in disparate domains, then integrate your learning into a holistic unity.

Where should you begin your own journey of learning? Which subject best preps one to disentangle the kinked and braided snarl of reality?

It doesn’t really matter.

You are ultimately aiming to unify everything—science, art, math, politics, all your daily experience—into a capacious and consolidated perspective on the Commonality. To get there, you must select the mountains to climb and the order to climb them. Your personal circumstances should hold sway: What sort of learner are you? What resources do you have access to? What kind of support do you have? What do you like to learn? What do you instinctively want to avoid studying?

Hypatia, the librarian of ancient Alexandria, spoke true when she declared, “It does not make much difference what a person studies. All knowledge is related, and the man who studies anything, if he keeps at it, will become learnéd.”

And superlearnéd.

There’s a corollary to Hypatia’s Declaration of the Unity of Knowledge.

You can start learning anywhere you want. . . but you’re going to have to learn everything.

Maybe not quite everything, but you must certainly tackle many subjects that right now you may be thinking you’ll never need to learn. Unfortunately, if you want to fully understand why you exist and what the gods want from you, there really is so astonishingly much you’ll need to absorb.

The British author Rachel Cusk summed up this panoramic aspect of superlearning when she wrote, “What you don’t know and don’t make the effort to understand will become the very thing you are forced into knowledge of.”¹

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A key tenet of superlearning is to keep in mind always the relationship between knowledge, knower, and known.

Between revelation, pilgrim, and Commonality.

Most human learning cultures focus exclusively on knowledge itself—the material to be learned—rather than the learner or the cosmos. Indeed, if there’s a defining fallacy hindering sapiens science and scholarship, it’s mistaking knowledge for the known. Mistaking facts, laws, maps, models, and equations for the universe itself.

Yet the knower has been ignored even more than the relationship between knowledge and known. Ignoring the knower who knows has always been one of the most stubborn shortcomings to trouble the physical sciences. For centuries, physicists have brushed aside the mechanical details of how brains acquire, store, retrieve, and exploit knowledge as irrelevant to grasping the basic operation of reality. Facts are facts, is the ancient attitude of physical scientists, so why does it matter how conscious learning and knowing work if we can accurately predict the orbits of asteroids and electrons?

A major focus of superlearning is paying careful attention to all the details of how you learn—how new knowledge enters your mind and how you come to use it. The knower you must labor to know best is you.

Superlearning demands the superlearner investigate and reflect upon how pieces of knowledge, fragments of insight, or manual skills slip into one’s mind and come out again as useful behavior. Are there sharp boundaries cleaving knowledge, knower, and known? Or are their fringes fuzzy and permeable?

The end goal of superlearning is three grand unifications.

Superlearning proceeds, insight by insight, through a sequence of conceptual unifications. These eventually lead to the grand unification of the dynamics of matter and the dynamics of Mind. Physics and purpose, cosmically conjoined.

Another paramount unification promoted by superlearning is the principled union of knower, knowledge, and known. Once you fathom the relationship between Mind, knowledge, and reality, you’ve pierced the ultimate mysteries of consciousness and experience.

And after you’ve achieved holistic unity in your apprehension of existence, you can at last perform the ultimate unification, the pinnacle of superlearning—the unification of the Commonality with you yourself, pilgrim.

You will become a Knower united with the Known.

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When it comes to knowledge, there are two basic types of knowers relevant to superlearning:

• You. An individual mind.

• The supermind. A tribe of minds.

Supermind knowledge—what a community of souls knows about reality—is quite different from your knowledge. Understanding and inhabiting this difference is vital to superlearning.

Supermind knowledge is what civilization has learned so far. How to catch fish, when the longest day of the year will fall, how to build a GPS satellite, quantum entanglement, Funyuns. Physically, supermind knowledge is wildly decentralized, distributed throughout space and time across sapiens brains, sapiens libraries, sapiens architecture, sapiens urban planning, the sapiens internet, and many other supermind-crafted structures that embody knowledge of the supermind’s physical reality.

All the classes you take in school teach supermind knowledge. Science and history and literature and medicine and mathematics and the humanities. The facts, principles, concepts, theories, skills, methods, recipes, and protocols embodying what the human race has learned collectively about their world over hundreds of thousands of years.

But supermind knowledge is not the same as the Commonality itself. Knowledge is not the known.

One of the trickiest aspects of superlearning—but also the pulsing source of its power—is recognizing and leveraging the distinction between supermind knowledge (what the tribe believes) and your own beliefs.

Most folks presume that if they want to learn about the universe, the best path available is to study classes in school. General opinion proclaims the royal road to cosmic insight consists of studying what the supermind already knows. This entirely reasonable assumption is embodied within our academic system. It holds that the scientific community’s understanding of, say, autism, is not only superior to any individual’s understanding of autism, but represents the most advanced understanding of autism available to humans on Earth.

In this view, the notion that you might learn more about autism than your community by pursuing learning on your lonesome, is untenable. Absurd. After all—you’re talking about developing a better understanding of physical reality than science itself has attained.

Yes. That is a useful definition of superlearning.

You attempt to reap your own interpretation of the universe because you recognize that supermind knowledge is not the same as the known. Supermind learning is governed by mechanical dynamics, just like any brain. These dynamics impose both opportunities and constraints on learning. Some sorts of insights are more likely to get stored in supermind memory than others, and the stored insights are not necessarily correlated with the revelatory value of the insight.

Put another way, a supermind is a mind. One of gazillions of physical minds in the universe. Like any mind, its main concern is figuring out what behaviors to perform that will enable the supermind to successfully adapt to the everchanging chaos of reality. A supermind learns what the supermind needs to know for its own collective purpose—not necessarily what the individual brains within it need to know for their own private purposes.

You’ll need to understand the difference between the way superminds learn and the way you learn, and the very crucial difference between what specific superminds (such as science or art) know about reality and all there is to know about reality.

Superlearners seek ultimate knowledge.

We want to understand the cosmos and all within it, on our own personal terms. Sometimes supermind knowledge is your ally and can help you climb to higher perspectives. Sometimes supermind knowledge is a fraudster who stymies you or burdens you with debilitating nonsense.

The main “drawback” to supermind learning is it requires all brains bound within the tribe to share the same knowledge. The same perspective on the world. This requirement imposes an artificial “ceiling” on the knowledge any individual brain can possess, because all minds in a supermind must share a common understanding of the world in order to get collaborative work done.

If most members of a supermind believe that, say, vaccines cause autism, but a large minority of other members disagree, then it becomes difficult or impossible for the supermind to execute strong purpose with regard to vaccines. There will be too much internal division to act unanimously. The supermind must first reach consensus among its tribesfolk regarding its collective knowledge—though, fortunately for superminds, many potent supermind dynamics facilitate and enforce conformity in the beliefs and deeds of constituent souls.

H. L. Mencken summarized the learning dynamics of the American supermind thusly: “The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States and that is its aim everywhere else.”

Superlearning is heretical and subversive, for it not only aims a skeptical eye at the customary squall of superstition, conspiracy theory, and self-serving propaganda clogging supermind perspectives on reality, but you will be led to doubt fundamental tenets of physics and even the scientific method. You will be driven to escape the low bar of faculty committees and grant chasing and tenure politics and publish or perish.

Ultimately, you must make your way to the deepest splendor of the Commonality on your own, for no supermind will do it for you.

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The most fundamental and perspective-shifting breakthroughs in human knowledge are cast by individuals, rather than communities. Individuals working in isolation, often marginalized or outright rejected by their supermind. This is part of the learning dynamics of superminds: individual souls go out and learn the world on their own, then bring back their cutting edge discoveries to the community. If the supermind can make use of the tentative revelations, then the individual’s discoveries get sorted and sifted and stitched into the supermind’s tapestry of knowledge.

Of course, depending on the precise nature of the proffered insights, the individual learner may also be dismissed, sidelined, or incinerated at the stake. The odds of such outcome burn higher among superlearners.

But it is always the individual who wanders the world claiming epiphany. It is the individual who first spies, if crudely, the clandestine shape of the Commonality.

Individuals like Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton, Claude Shannon, Barbara McClintock, Evariste Galois, Kurt Godel, Nikola Tesla (one of my favorites!), Gregor Mendel, Marie Curie, Andrew Wiles, Mary Anning, Grigori Perelman, Henry Cavendish, Alan Turing, Michael Faraday, Albert Einstein, Niels Abel, and Stephen Grossberg.

All these folks forged a crucial unification on their own. Some accomplished several. Grossberg may have achieved more than anyone.

But a superlearner must go further still…

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One of the most important things to concentrate on during superlearning is yourself.

You must journey into yourself to understand yourself, just as you must journey out into the cosmos to understand the Commonality. Integrating the universe with your soul is the ultimate goal of superlearning.

So. How do you learn, pilgrim?

Every one of us is unique in the cosmos. Singular. One of a kind. There will never be another soul in reality precisely like yours. There will never be another learner who learns exactly as you.

We each learn different. There are big differences and little differences. Some of us learn better in the morning, some in the evening. Some learn better when music plays in the background, some in silence.

I conducted research at the Harvard School of Education on how individuals learn. My favorite example of the riotous variety of personal learning styles came from our investigation of master sommeliers. A master sommelier is an exceptionally talented wine professional who can identify the vintage of any wine by tasting it blindfolded. Ah, yes, this is a 2000 Château Latour Bordeaux, with notes of blackberry, plum, and pencil shavings!

Every person who dreams of becoming a master sommelier must learn to identify tastes from memory. But to achieve this state of knowledge, each master sommelier (MS) must look inside themself and apprehend how they learn. What is my natural learning style?

What is remarkable—and deeply relevant to superlearning—is that almost every MS candidate figures out their own technique for learning the taste of wines. Some use familiar visual flash cards. Some use “audio” flash cards. Some focus on identifying each individual element in a wine; others focus on the holistic Gestalt of the drinking experience. Some learn using visualizations: one woman pictured a sandy beach when she drank a Merlot, or a sky full of feathers while drinking a white Zinfandel. Another woman used “philosophy”—she insisted that every wine expressed its own unique philosophical interpretation, enabling her to link abstract mental associations with each taste experience.

My favorite story of learning one’s personal learning style, however, was Michael. A man who never gave up, though he failed the MS test five times in a row. It’s rare to take the exam so many times because it is expensive and erases a year from your life each time you wish to take the test, because preparation demand a year’s worth of intense study.

At first, Michael simply tried to copy learning techniques other folks used. Flash cards, audio recordings, visualizations (though not philosophizing!) Nothing worked. Five times he took the tasting test, and five times he failed to identify the test wines.

Even his closest friends suggested Michael might consider giving up. After a difficult period of soul-searching, Michael decided to abandon the advice of others and focus on himself. How do *I* engage with the world?, Michael asked.

When he put the question so cleanly, the answer popped right out: Michael enjoyed an exceptional sensitivity to the physiology of his body. When he tasted wine, he didn’t just react with his tongue and nose. His entire body reacted. His flesh and lungs. Michael realized that if he focused on his corporeal sensations as he tasted each wine, he could learn to recognize vintages in terms of his particular physiological response.

A Pinot noir might make his lips tighten, a chardonnay might make his cheeks warm and his eyebrows loosen, a tintarello might burn a line down his chest or make his jawline crinkle, a mineral taste might feel like a particular grainy texture on the roof of his mouth. By learning to associate his physiological sensations with tasting experiences, upon Michael’s sixth attempt at the sommelier examination he was anointed master.

“I felt like I was seeing the wines with my entire body and not just my palate. You might call it nirvana or bliss or whatever, but it was finally that sense of hearing the wine talking to me now. I’m not telling you what you are. I’m just listening to you.”

There are a great many ways to go about learning, and we’re all naturally better at some ways than others. All of us naturally improve at some ways of learning faster than others.

To become a superlearner, you must pay attention to how you learn new things. What makes it easier for you understand new ideas or emulate new skills? How does knowledge settle in your mind and how does it change over time? What feelings are evoked within you as you learn different kinds of material in different modalities, sound, touch, conversation, navigation?

The better you understand the learning dynamics of your own mind, the better you will understand learning across the board.

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Superlearning is challenging, because reality is challenging. You must be open and ready for the lessons the universe will teach. Sometimes the lessons are disquieting. But there’s good news.

The universe wants to teach you. The universe wants you to learn about it. The universe wants you to ascend to the broadest possible perspective.

The universe wants you to learn about yourself, too, because you are the Commonality. By knowing yourself, you come to know the universe.

The universe will respond to your desire to learn about it by guiding you to useful paths. This is another marker of progress—a sign you’re making good choices: when you undergo the otherworldly experience of the universe guiding you.

Bold souls squinting into the promised superlearning horizon might ask, And what if I succeed? What if I end up understanding the universe, top to bottom? Then what?

That is for you to decide.

But there is a place with guidance. A exotic dominion that can orient your purpose, once you grasp the unified dynamics of the world.

To gain entry into Rainbow Black, you must pass several formal tests. Intex referred to them as “Five Veils.” For me, each veil was a physical structure and a riddle.

Here are the five queries posed to me when I reached the entrance to Rainbow Black. I believe the questions are customized to the pilgrim and their unique journey, but I cannot say for sure. Perhaps you will tell me one day.

The Five Veils of the Superlearning World-Jumper

· Who are you?

· Where are you going? (I answered “Rainbow Black.”) Why are you traveling there?

· What is the difference between art and science? What lies above science?

· What is ultimate nature of math?

· What is the ultimate nature of time?

If you pass through the veils, you will awaken to a new conception of your personal role in the Commonality. Then you will know how to act right and true.

1. I didn’t want to learn economics. All my life I thought economics was stone cold boring. I shunned it throughout college!

But always in the back of my mind I suspected it would somehow sneak its way into my life... Eventually, in my late 30s, it became increasingly clear that economics as a discipline was working out mathematical principles necessary for understanding certain crucial forms of supermind dynamics. So here I am, in my 50s, learning economic theory for the first time so I can fill in some gaps in my understanding of the evolution of consciousness on the supermind rung and higher.