Superlearning 101: How to Learn More, Faster, Deeper so you can understand Everything

An Introduction to Superlearning Part 1: The Basics

He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. 
   .Thomas Jefferson, 1813

Almost every advanced learning system in the human brain operates on competition. Competition is necessary to recognize an object, competition is necessary to pay attention to an object, competition is necessary to learn about an object. It is the underlying clash of purpose embodying the dynamics of learning that gives rise to conscious understanding. 
   .Paraphrasing the entirety of Stephen Grossberg’s Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain, 2021

.1

I wish to sing of learning.

I wish to sing a song of superlearning, pilgrim. To call down the loftiest secrets of Creation.

I’ve devoted my life to learning. Quite intensely. It would be difficult to exaggerate how intensely. Or successfully.

In this article, I explain the basics of superlearning in modest detail. I’ve penned introductory articles before, this one holds more Prime beef.

Superlearning is a way of learning an extraordinary amount of knowledge within a human lifetime. The aim: to learn everything¹. More specifically: to attain grand unification of insight into the structure, flow, and purpose of reality—and your place within it.

Superlearning is a lifestyle. It’s all-encompassing, all-the-time. A way of being in the world designed to maximize your educational opportunity. It involves orienting yourself towards experience by adopting a situation-specific stance I refer to as a learning posture.

Superlearning is the twenty-first century equivalent of becoming a Renaissance Man——a Renaissance Human. 

The European Renaissance witnessed a fascinating period of high-intensity learning (proto-superlearning, perhaps!) when certain highly motivated individuals attained mastery of several disciplines in order to form a more complete understanding of existence, unlike the twenty-first century, where learning has been crippled by hyper-specialization and hyper-compartmentalization and knowledge silos. Michelangelo mastered architecture, painting, sculpting, and poetry. Renaissance Man Supreme was Leonard DaVinci, who attained world-class mastery of painting, engineering, anatomy, science, and general invention.

Today, in the twenty-first century, human culture and technology have once again arranged themselves into a remarkable state of opportunity for learning, when it is once again possible to become a Renaissance Human—a Renaissance Human of the Digital Age.

Except now, the stakes are higher, for there is enough knowledge available for humans to Transcend.

Superlearning is a lifelong process and therefore a lifelong commitment. It’s not something you do a while to achieve a particular end, like passing a test or completing a report. Superlearning will help you pass tests and complete reports, sure, but ultimately we’re aiming for something higher.

Far higher.

Superlearning is something you should start as young as possible and pursue down the entirety of your life. Though you will see effects from superlearning continuously in all arenas of your life, the truly extraordinary leaps in sentience, revelation, and wisdom only manifest after you’ve been superlearning for decades. It takes patience and discipline. Superlearning isn’t about short-cuts and cheat codes. The opposite. It’s about immersion and experience.

You are transforming your mind. More usefully, you are renovating your mind—restructuring the way you think and experience. It takes time to tear down walls, revamp rooms, build out new stairs and courtyards. But once your metamorphosis is complete, you will experience reality in a whole new way. An enlightened way.

If superlearning is successful, you will see the world as the gods see it. You will know whether or not there are gods, or a god, or something else entirely.

Whatever is out there, superlearning will help you find it. You will fathom the full breadth of the Commonality and your place within it, for this is the privilege and responsibility of all mortal minds who seek to know their nature.

.2

Here now the primary concept undergirding superlearning, the physical truth that makes superlearning so special, so cosmic:

All knowable knowledge is related.

Take this as one of the foundational assumptions of superlearning: all the different domains of human knowledge are interconnected and can be understood as a single system.

A quick aside—while pursuing superlearning, take nothing on faith. Let skepticism reign. You can and should try trusting, to see where trusting gets you—you’ll certainly need to make yourself vulnerable to superlearn! Learning is maximized when your vulnerability is maximized!²

So take this vaunted Unity of Knowledge as a conjecture, for now, to confirm or reject through superlearning. It is, in fact, possible to stitch together the varied modalities of human learning into a single seamless experiential tapestry—science, art, math, literature, engineering, philosophy, athletics—because the underlying universe that is the subject of these learning efforts is unified.

When you manage to integrate all the forms of human learning within your consciousness, you will experience Transcendence.

Transcendence is the goal of superlearning, and it is quite real and head-spinning.

The other foundational assumption of superlearning—take it as another testable conjecture—is that the human brain is equipped to achieve such synthesis of comprehension within a lifetime. It may require special and extreme circumstances to achieve Transcendence, and perhaps not every brain is born equipped for it. It might require particular configurations of environment, biology, and purpose for a mind to attain unification of knowledge, but in principle it is possible for a human brain to learn everything.

Though you must start as young as possible. . .

In my own life, I put both conjectures to the test and found them valid.

There are THREE components to super-learning. Three branches of personal effort, all inter-related. This is what you’ll actually be spending your time doing during superlearning.

First, LEARNING ABOUT LEARNING. You must always be contemplating and evaluating the act of learning itself. What different ways can human minds learn? What are the strengths and shortcomings of each way? Are any forms of learning superior to all others, or does each learning mode nurse its own fatal flaw? You must think about the nature of knowledge in artificial intelligence, Wikipedia, academia, social media, Amazonian tribes, science, and any other institutionalized (or non-institutionalized!) forms of human learning.

Second, LEARNING HOW YOU LEARN. The most crucial key to superlearning success is identifying, understanding, and improving how your own brain learns best—and how it learns worst. You must know yourself as a learner, inside and out, to achieve Transcendence. Superlearning demands optimizing yourself as a learner, which involves both changing your brain and changing your environment and changing your lifestyle, all to maximize your learning ability. You must harness the untapped potential of your brain (and learn what it means for your brain to hold untapped potential) and reconfigure your mind into the Ultimate Learning Soul, tricked out to Transcend.

Finally, the (SUPER)LEARNING TRACKS. Your program of study. The basic activity you will engage in during superlearning is learning new principles, connections, and skills across all forms of knowledge. This is the bulk of the superlearning labor, what you will ultimately spend the most time doing, though in the early going you should spend equal or more time LEARNING ABOUT LEARNING and LEARNING HOW YOU LEARN.

Once you have a basic understanding of the varieties of knowledge and the varieties of methods for mastering the knowledge, as well as a strong sense of which learning postures produce the most efficient mastery of knowledge for you, then go all out pursuing the SUPERLEARNING TRACKS.

.3 LEARNING ABOUT LEARNING

You must always be seeking to improve the efficiency of your learning—the speed and volume of knowledge acquisition. To do this, you should always be thinking about the process of learning itself.

How do minds learn? How do children learn? How do dogs learn? What are the varieties of knowledge? How do humans decide what is true? How can you decide which knowledge you can trust?

You might find that learning operates quite different than you initially expect. The ways human beings decide something is true are not necessarily related to the truthness of the contention.

Let’s quickly review some prominent sources of human knowledge.

Let’s start with the most illuminating and useful fact about human knowledge. A truth crucial to superlearning that anyone pursuing superlearning will crash into, no matter which direction they go. A deep truth about how Homo sapiens learn.

For humans, Tribe is Truth.

Our brains are designed by evolution to socialize and imprint. Humans feel an inescapable need to think like others think, act like others act, and believe what others believe. We feel a powerful compulsion to join the tribe and live in harmony with the tribe. Our brains are very willing to make sacrifices, compromises, and accommodations in order to harmonize our own thoughts with our community.³

The tribal circuitry in healthy human brains generates a potent bias in human thinking that gives shape to human society—and to human knowledge. Mindscientists sometimes call it the intergroup bias, which actually incorporates two biases: us and them. Human brains tend to view those like us as smart, decent, and honest. Human brains tend to view those like them as ignorant, degenerate, and deceptive.

Humans instinctively tend to take as true what other members of their tribe believe, and instinctively shy away from the beliefs of other tribes.

For superlearning, you must learn to eliminate tribal bias from your thinking. This is one of the most vital tasks for superlearning. Indeed, one simple way to sum up superlearning is to say that it replaces tribal learning with direct learning. Unfiltered learning. This is difficult to do. Especially if you are not autistic. Even if you are autistic, it still takes great toil. Those of us fitted with the dark gift have it somewhat easier, but it’s never easy.

Eventually, you’ll come to understand that most of the game of superlearning is finding large collections of knowledge that humans have generated (science being the premiere example, literature is another), identifying the tribal biases that shaped the knowledge and constrained its perspective and truth, and adapting the knowledge for your personal pursuit of Transcendence.

In the early going, you’ll likely notice tribal biases pertaining to race, gender, sexual orientation, the conventional stuff from academic social science and Western politics, but after you’ve worked through those, you may begin to notice there are far more tribal biases at play in the celebrated archives of human knowledge then you find in academic and partisan discussions. You may notice deep principles of tribal bias, different than those acclaimed by the competing tribes.

Then you will enjoy the golden opportunity to separate TRUTH from TRIBE and your superlearning will advance by leaps and bounds. . .

. . . though you will also, of necessity, move away from your tribe by leaps and bounds.

Superlearning is solitary. You will understand why when you confront and grasp tribal learning and its limitations. Indeed, this is a core tradeoff in learning. It’s utterly profound.

Tribes can learn far more and far better than any individual humans.

But individual minds do possess inherent advantages over the supermind, if you can free yourself from tribal bias. It takes time for good ideas to circulate through a supermind and get adopted. But you can adopt good ideas instantly and move on to the next good idea.

The challenge is evaluating ideas without tribal involvement. That’s what superlearning is designed to do: to help you deal with the uncertainties and challenges that emerge when you must work with principles and discoveries that have not been adjudicated by the tribe of science, art, math, engineering, literature, etc.

The goal of superlearning is to learn exactly that which the tribe is not capable of learning. 

If you are successful, you will be alone.⁴

You want to align yourself with Nature, not humankind. You want to learn from Nature as raw and undiluted as you can. Our tribal circuitry makes it so very hard to imagine it’s possible to learn anything relevant or profound outside of human institutions, outside of academic science or corporate engineering.

That’s why freeing yourself from tribal thinking is a core maneuver of superlearning. A defining maneuver. Because it’s a transcendent act with many implications for attaining unification. Not only are you liberating yourself from the false and unnecessary constraints on thinking imposed by the tribe, you will begin to assert your own individuality as a learner in a manner that will facilitate Transcendence. Free from faction, you can adopting learning postures that place you in direct contact with reality, instead of orienting towards communities of learning.

Wikipedia provides a wonderful illustration of the nature of learning in the cosmos, as well as the nature of tribal learning. It’s useful to compare Wikipedia knowledge to the “knowledge” of digital AI.

The knowledge in Wikipedia is wholly the product of competition. Intense, daily, everlasting competition. Just like in the human brain. If you’re not aware, Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, and most editors have a bone to pick, a wrong to right, or a point of view to impose. A great many tribes of humans edit Wikipedia to impose their tribal point of view: conservatives, liberals, young people, old people, women, men, black people, Asian people, Hispanic people, college-educated people, uneducated people, paid shills, and unpaid dreamers. Their ideas about what is true and relevant are often contradictory and adversarial.

Knowledge fights it out on Wikipedia, red in tooth and claw. The most contested and controversial pages with the most edits and counter-edits reflect tribal conflicts about knowledge: George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Michael Jackson, Islam, the Catholic Church, the United States of America.

At any given moment, the knowledge encoded in Wikipedia represents the front lines of a neverending Battle Royale of competing opinions.

This is the same dynamics and design as human consciousness. Any knowledge you experience consciously represents the front lines of a neverending Battle Royale of competing neural opinions. Like the American government as enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, knowledge in your brain and knowledge in Wikipedia are both consequences of a dynamic system of checks and balances.

Knowledge in AI is quite different.

If you’re a superlearner early in your journey, use Wikipedia rather than AI. They are both pretty awful for superlearning, as there are more holes and problems than useful knowledge in each of them. Never, ever, ever take the knowledge in Wikipedia or AI as accurate—it’s usually not, or even if it’s technically correct, it misses the main point or highlights minor or irrelevant details.

But the reason Wikipedia is more useful than AI is because with Wikipedia, you can view the edit history and pull back the curtain on the battles over knowledge, which will not only provide you with greater insight into the page’s topic, it will help you grasp the dynamic structure and substance of knowledge itself.

.4 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Avoid AI and chatGPT if you’re just getting going with superlearning. It’s poison to your aims.

Let me share a brief overview of my perspective on artificial intelligence. I will be writing far more detailed articles about AI soon, as this is a core interest of mine.

Digital AI—all existing AI—is truly nothing special. It’s just more software.

Digital software.

Digital data mining software. That’s really what it should be called—data mining (or maybe super-data mining)—not artificial intelligence, because it doesn’t have anything at all to do with intelligence.

There is nothing new or magical inside digital data mining software. Its math is the exact same information theoretic math as all software running on 0s and 1s.

AI is nothing at all like a brain. It is the exact opposite of a brain.

There are no dynamics in AI. No purposeful dynamics. No competitive purposeful dynamics battling it out. No recursive hierarchy of purposeful dynamics battling it out.

Therefore, (Digital) AI will never ever be conscious or anything close to it. (Digital) AI will never become a singularity or take over the world. These are silly naive ideas, suited for teenagers and Hollywood. You’re demeaning your own soul spouting nonsense like that.

The greatest trick the Silicon Valley bros pulled is calling their data mining software “artificial intelligence” and bringing in “psychology” talk to characterize AI, like “hallucinations,” “introspection,” and constantly teasing the possibility of self-awareness. There is absolutely nothing mind-like about AI. It does not experience hallucinations. It is not capable of introspection. If we draw a picture of the moon, we are not pulled into its powerful lunar gravity. AI has precisely the same odds of attaining sentience as a Twinkie.

AI does not learn knowledge.

AI does not learn knowledge because its processes and dynamics are entirely unlike biological thinking. Learning and knowledge is competitive and dynamic. Everything your brain has learned about the world, it learned through dynamic competition within itself—and this knowledge is stored in your brain through dynamic competition.

Digital data mining software learns in the most stupid, slow, inefficient way possible. Which is why it’s draining away our water and electricity for its unfathomably inefficient stupidity.

Because AI is not purpose-driven like our brains—it is not comprised of physical agents competing in material reality—it does not incorporate any of the myriad dynamics that biological minds have evolved and developed to error-check knowledge. AI operates on statistics and probability, which is not how the brain operates. It uses non-biological approaches to check its non-biological learning.

It uses sawdust for its beef.

As you develop as a superlearner and start to gain some confidence, you should use AI as a benchmark. You should be able to start recognizing AI’s mistakes, and how it makes its mistakes. (You can and should use Wikipedia for training yourself too—most articles are pretty awful in terms of knowledge accuracy and focus, and you should always be thinking about why.)

Here’s one trap you should never let yourself fall into. It won’t be a trap once you start making progress with superlearning.

Do not ever think there is a “known truth” out there for most questions, and AI (or Wikipedia) will give it to you.

Yeah, sure—Paris is the capital of France. But, what is an electron, what is a gene, what is a planet—you might think these are all known truths, but these are all human attempts at understanding the Great Mystery, and you must figure these out yourself.

Both AI and Wikipedia offer windows onto how other ignorant and biased humans perceive their world and how they choose to learn about it. In particular, they offer windows onto tribe-endorsed knowledge.

For knowledge of the world as it sits, you need superlearning.

.5 SCIENCE

In twenty-first century human civilization, science is the closest thing to a gold standard of knowledge we have, though looking out across human civilization right now it’s pretty clear that science has lost much of its sheen.

Let me briefly address science here, as this is a core interest of mine and I’ll be writing plenty of articles about science and the philosophy of science over the coming years.

Science is the most useful and impressive body of human knowledge we’ve attained—so far. It is breathtaking and wondrous. We’ve entered the first moment in human history when superlearning is possible, a consequence of all the advances in scientific knowledge over the recent dribble of centuries.

Science is great and powerful. Let’s be clear about that. Here and in other articles I point out some of its grievous problems and limitations, but nobody is denying the unparalleled success of science for acquiring useful knowledge.

Look, science isn’t magic. It’s not tablets handed down on the mountaintop. And yet, many folks treat it exactly like that, as holy secularism. Science is another human tribe, nothing more, nothing less, with all the same biases and limitations as any community of souls.

When you’re starting with superlearning, your learning posture toward science should be, Yes, I will accept all this academic science as true and useful. You do need to travel quite a distance before the limitations of science start coming into play. Until then, there’s plenty of wonderful stuff to learn.

So swallow down as much science as you possibly can—but your attitude should never be that Science is the very best way for humans to learn about reality! This might be true—is probably true—for superminds. For tribes. Science is a great way for a tribe to learn about its environment using collective methods. Science consists of tribal learning dynamics—not individual dynamics.

Superlearning is a learning system for individuals designed to be more powerful than science.

.6 LEARNING HOW TO LEARN

When you kick things off with superlearning, what you should focus on the most is how you learn.

We all learn different. Wildly, insanely, dizzyingly different!

Some people can study with music on. Some cannot. Some people can visualize shapes in their mind. Some cannot. Some people can remember every face they’ve ever seen. Most of us cannot.

Some people learn better when it’s hot than cold, when it’s bright than dark, when it smells like the ocean than when it smells like the desert.

There’s a frantic diversity of quirks and twists and subcategories and asterisks when it comes to individual learning. You might learn better when your eyes are closed, when there is a weight pressing on your lap, when you’re in the shower. You might have an easy time remembering historical facts, but a hard time learning ballet. You might naturally have an easy time identifying birds, but a hard time identifying basslines.

Your aim should be to always improve the speed and quality of your learning. (Later, you will also aim to link new learning into your existing framework as tightly and broadly as possible.) To optimize your learning, you always want to be setting yourself a learning posture that takes advantage of your learning strengths and limits the exposure of your learning weaknesses. The more you understand what kind of learner you are, the better you’ll be able to put yourselves into the contexts that suit your learning strengths, and avoid contexts that play to your weaknesses.

Eventually, you should try to set up every aspect of your life so that all your daily activities are part of superlearning.

You might find stuff online about different learning styles, maybe professors or experts talking about multiple intelligences, how different personalities learn. Feel free to use such lists to explore your own learning styles, but don’t take their categories as gospel. You will surely find some things about the way you learn that doesn’t match anything you read online. Don’t feel limited by others’ lists of learning styles.

It’s your brain! It’s your purpose! The thing you are re-fashioning through superlearning is your own soul. Your mind is one of a kind in the Commonality, utterly unique, according to some of the deepest math and physics in science. There will never be another soul that learns precisely like you.

Keep in mind that humans apply different learning styles in different contexts. The way we go about learning tennis, for instance, might be very different than the way we learn Spanish. We might have a distinctive style for learning engineering skills, with a distinctive mindset and approach, but a very different mindset for learning foreign languages. The reason is clear: different modules in our brain handle different mental tasks, and each module in each person develops its own unique modular learning style.

A corollary of this is that you shouldn’t get intimidated when you see other people learning something much faster than you can. That person surely has a great many things they struggle to learn, as we all do.

Once you have a solid understanding of how your mind operates, you will use the stronger parts of your mind to compensate for the weaker. Sometimes you can even replicate an impaired form of learning using other forms of learning.

Eventually, you’ll use the integrated powers of your entire mind to learn—to superlearn.

.7 SUPERLEARNING TRACKS

To superlearn, you need to grapple with and deploy ALL the modalities of learning available to humans:

• Science

• Philosophy

• Math

• Art

• Literature

• Engineering/Design

• Athletics/Bodywork

You will need to understand the sort of claims each modality makes upon reality, the sorts of knowledge each modality can produce, and the limitations of each modality.

You should devote yourself to mastering all these tracks. You should reach PhD level on at least 3 tracks, including science and either art or literature, and never stop climbing the rest.

You certainly don’t need to learn ALL of a given track! Just pick one subdiscipline or genre to master.

For example, you don’t need to learn all of science, but you really must reach PhD level on something—reptile mating, quantum entanglement, the sociology of murder, computational thermochemistry. The point isn’t to become the world’s greatest expert on reptile mating (though you should strive to be world’s greatest expert on as many things as possible). The point is to see what it takes to achieve a PhD level of understanding on a scientific topic. What did it take? What was surprising? How did it relate to other learning experiences? Is this what other folks in science are experiencing? Is that what human science is experiencing as it pursues knowledge?

But what’s truly best is making an original scientific discovery. It doesn’t have to be major, though the bigger the better for superlearning. If you can solve a problem that others have tried to solve and failed, then you will enjoy exquisite first-hand experience of how knowledge is acquired. You will know the assumptions that guided previous learners, which assumptions were wrong (or right), and how to identify and overcome faulty assumptions (a big part of free-yourself-from-your-tribe superlearning!) You will know exactly how much work is involved, and the kind of work, and what an answer to a mystery even looks like.

Keep in mind, you’re aiming for grand unification of everything, which itself will be an enormous discovery, so it’s helpful to make smaller ones on the way to the jackpot.

Art, this is all forms of creative expression outside the written word. For art, choose whatever medium fascinates you personally—Irish step dancing, ice sculpture, fingerpainting, soapstone carving, perfume fabrication, reggae, moss graffiti, sand mandalas, digital sound design.

You really want to reach a level where you can sell your artwork, even for a modest sum. You are learning what it takes to achieve mastery of an artform, an expressive human craft. Love the details of your art, and always think about what it’s like working in your medium compared to other mediums.

Comparisons and contrasts are the heart of learning, and superlearning. Whenever you learn something new, compare both the process of learning and the content of learning to other things you’ve learned. This is how you develop the perspective and depth you’ll need for Transcendence. How does fashioning things creatively with your hands compare to solving abstract scientific puzzles?

I certainly know many scientists who are dismissive of art as a mode of learning about reality, but I disagree vehemently. If you don’t understand the creative process, if you don’t understand how things get put together to deliver an experience, if you don’t understand how to engineer purpose, you’ll never understand the cosmic cycle that flows through all the Commonality.

Now, math.

Look, I sure don’t like math. I thought I tested out of college math in high school and wouldn’t need to do any more after I graduated. I do not possess a natural affinity for doing math, and when I spend too much time doing math, it can bring out antisocial strains of my personality because of the voracious focus it demands (because I must work hard at it). Many people have trouble with math—but everyone has trouble with at least one of the superlearning tracks, and usually several of them. I did!

Sorry, you can’t really afford to skip any tracks. Not if you want to achieve Transcendence. This isn’t classwork. The goal is to transcend the mortal coil, and half-measures won’t do.

The formidable nature of the superlearning challenge is part of the puzzle. Something to think about. If Transcendence is possible for mortal minds, but it’s incredibly hard, and requires a total commitment, and most people aren’t even aware of this, what does that tell you about the design of reality?

So, math. The most important thing about the math track is to always be thinking, What IS math?? Understanding human mathematics as a mechanical phenomenon in physical reality, in the end, is more important than being able to do sophisticated mathematics, though I don’t think you can reach Transcendence and total integration without knowing some.

You should strive to get good at some form of math, try to reach Master’s level or better on some mathematical subject, preferably one that relates to something else in your life. You need to feel math, develop intuition about math, learn to think mathematically—though, for Transcendence, you need to know the ultimate nature of human mathematics as a physical phenomenon in the cosmos.

Literature is another track. This is about books. If you hope to Transcend, you’ve got to read, read, read. Always be reading! Always be optimizing your reading on every dimension you can! If you’re young, it will pay to spend some time pondering reading itself. What is reading, what is writing, what is getting communicated through the act of reading, how does it all work?

Try to speed up your reading. Sometimes this is possible, sometimes not, it depends on a great many factors. At some point, try to see if you can read 25% faster, 10% faster, see what’s involved. But you should do everything you can to set up your life to facilitate efficient reading during spare moments.

Reading helps you learn the huge quantities of knowledge you need for superlearning, but equally as important, reading helps you learn about the nature of stories and narrative, even if you’re reading nonfiction.

Understanding story is an absolute necessity for superlearning and Transcendence. You will find story interlaced throughout the fabric of the cosmos. You will find story in the uttermost quantum depths and story in smashing galaxies. You will find that STORY nurses a mechanical eminence within the Commonality as fundamental as subatomic particles.

As with all superlearning tracks, there are alternates to printed books, if your circumstances don’t afford you the ability to read. Audiobooks are an acceptable substitute. They will help you acquire knowledge and think about story. Movies and TV shows also can help with learning about narrative, though books are far superior for superlearning. They simply contain denser knowledge. Books are like rocket fuel and movies like kerosene when it comes to developing your brain, but movies aren’t bad for superlearning.

Spend enough time with philosophy to see how its style of learning and knowledge differ from science, art, math, and literature. The history of human philosophy is deeply useful for discovering how humans have learned about the world since ancient times. Today, because of the contemporary success of science, art, math, and literature, philosophy is much more useful as a chronicle of the history of human learning and understanding than a means of acquiring useful knowledge about reality. But maybe you’ll decide different!

Try to develop some “athletic” or “body-focused” expertise in something, like running or yoga or tennis or bicycling or soccer or hiking or archery or free-soloing. Something where you are developing your physical skills and/or body-eye coordination⁵. To Transcend, you must possess some intimate knowledge about your corporeal self. Your material presence in the Commonality.

What does it take to develop athletic skill? How is this different from developing science skills, painting skills, reading skills? How is it the same?

Finally, engineering or design. One superlearning knowledge base you must develop is a sense of how small parts are assembled together into a machine, system, or work. You can usually develop a sense of engineering and design from the other superlearning tracks—science, art, and math all involve constructing larger entities out of smaller ones. So you may not need to explicitly study engineering or design, as you will likely imbibe them from other superlearning tracks, but it’s important to recognize that understanding the process of creating complex structures for human use is essential for Transcendence.

Superlearning takes time. A lifetime. It’s not the work of years, but decades.

.8

Why is superlearning possible, now?

The human race has finally acquired enough knowledge, and rendered it freely available, for individual brains to attain Transcendence. Motivated individuals can build a (mental) rocketship to the stars out of the available salvage of human scholarship.

Our species is now in possession of massive science, massive art, massive math, massive literature, massive engineering, massive history, massive philosophy, all stored and freely distributed through the mind-goggling Internet. It’s like the Precambrian explosion, when there was massive genetic material floating around the gene pool, ready to be assembled into dazzling new life. By tapping the vast libraries of humankind, an intrepid sapiens soul now has access to enough knowledge to Transcend.

Nobody’s provided a roadmap to superlearning and Transcendence, yet, because there’s never been a road before! Congratulations, pilgrim—you’re born into the first human generation that can Transcend! All the conventional roadmaps that claim to navigate educational terrain, liberal arts programs, were worked out pre-Internet and were rooted in older tribal modes of learning. Superlearning is designed to help you learn when no road map is available, exactly when you’ve entered a whole new world of knowledge, which you will be doing as often as possible.

If you’re a superlearner, you’re here to learn! That’s your warrant and solemn ambition: to learn everything about your existence. What the universe is all about. Who’s in charge. How you fit in.

Superlearning is about learning! Not diplomas. Not degrees. Not research grants or awards or publications. Certainly not celebrity.

If you’re superlearning, blazing your way to Transcendence, everything gets subsumed by the ascent. One of your life tasks is to optimize your life for learning. This takes a lot of time and adjustment. An early superlearning goal: how can I support my learning habits while doing as little non-superlearning toil as possible?

If you want a comfortable, stable life, superlearning is not for you. These days my life is stable and peaceful, because at this moment in my life I find that calm and consistency optimize my own superlearning, but this certainly wasn’t the case in the past and I have no expectation that things will remain so serene in the future.

One can learn very efficiently in stability and calm, but some forms of learning—some of the most vital forms of learning—only unfold amidst chaos and conflict.

You want to experience uncomfortable situations and learn from them. You want to experience all kinds of situations, as many as possible, as wild as possible! Get out of your comfort zone!

During superlearning, you are developing your sense of self and mind and your relationship to other humans and Nature.

Your brain is an exquisite learning machine whose powers you have no concept. When you understand all the ways your brain learns and realize you can start to harness that capacity in a disciplined directed manner, it will be a revelation.

You must make yourself a rocket to blast out of human perspective to new horizons. You must place learning opportunities above all else. And no matter how much you learn, no matter how expansive your perspective, begin each day with humility, as the lowest student in the class with the most work ahead of you. For you will find that no matter how much you learn, there are other minds who know more, so much more. Let go of familiar human yardsticks concerning intelligence, talent, education. You must aim higher than your fellows. Uncountable minds across the breadth of the Commonality have pursued superlearning and Transcended and there is a place you can go to encounter them you will discover when you Transcend.

What you are learning, above all, is how you fit into the Commonality. How your own mortal physics and purpose fits the universe.

You are learning the cosmic nature of your soul.

1. Let’s define “everything”. The goal of superlearning is to know the structure, flow, and purpose of the cosmos at all possible scales. To know how everything works and how it’s all connected together. It doesn’t mean you will know each and every possible “fact.”

For instance, to know everything about basketball, you would need to know the entire rulebook, you would need to know the basic physics of rubber balls bouncing off floors and backboards and hands, you would need to know the basic configuration of human anatomy and its degrees of freedom and basic metabolism (the harder players play, the more tired they become), you would need to know about the motives of players.

But to know everything, you don’t need to know, say, the color of a basketball player’s liver, or how much a hot dog costs at a New York Knicks game, or the relationship between dogs and basketball.

The real goal is to have a strong, principled understanding of what sorts of behaviors you can and cannot see in a basketball game, loosely corresponding to what mathematicians refer to as the game’s “state space”: you should develop both your intuition and your ability to perform practical analysis of what is possible in a basketball game, and what future basketball activities are likely to flow out of any given basketball state.

Ultimately, you want to achieve the ability to make useful predictions about the future flow of the game better than luck, no matter the game’s current state.

2. An implication of this: you learn the very most when you are at your most very vulnerable—that is, when you die. No greater learning experience stalks the cosmic halls than that!

3. This is supermind circuitry.

4. Thus, depending on your particular personality and emotional constitution, you may wish to take actions from the start to mitigate the inevitable seclusion and solitude you will experience once you start blazing a trail outside tribal comprehension. I will discuss some techniques I use in a future article.

5. I suppose there is an athletic track through sexuality, developing your sexual skills and getting in touch with your body sexually could possibly provide you with the corporeal dimension of knowledge you’ll need for Transcendence.