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Discovering Bitcoin: Here, Now · Discovering Bitcoin

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I see the world through an entirely different lens.
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It doesn't just give you confidence, but it gives you.
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Hope. Take like we're squandering our
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energy, our life force. So Bitcoin is changing that.
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For me, it's like it's healing energy.
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It gives you a kind of of a stand feeling, right?
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Deep and deep and deep. In the immortal works of the
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doors, the time to hesitate us through.
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Discovering. All right, Happy New Year,
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everybody. Welcome back to discovering
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Bitcoin. This is the second week that
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we've interrupted our regular broadcasting schedule to bring
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you 2 indulgent readings written by yours truly.
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Only because I just didn't want to record any new episodes over
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the holiday break. You know, I don't want to
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subject a plebe to that kind of pressure.
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I certainly don't want to subject myself to that kind of
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pressure. So I thought instead that I
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would read a couple of essays, give some audible versions of
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some essays. Sinazo Guy Swan was unavailable
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and Walker's voice. It's just to, it's just not
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appropriate. You know, I feel like you should
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just read what you what you write.
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If you're going to, if you're going to read something out and
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release it into the public domain, we'll want to do it in
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your own voice, you know. So with that in mind, and given
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the reason of the season, the point in the year that we're
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find ourselves in the beginning of a new year, 2026, and all of
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the inherent hope that that tends to entertain, which I
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think we should lean into, you know, the world, the world is
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what the world is. And you know, as Ramdas's guru
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named Karoli Baba Maharishi, he said everything is perfect.
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It's all perfect. There's an infinite amount of
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potentials that we can look to observe collapse it and make the
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world a better place. And that's why we're here
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discovering Bitcoin, going on this journey together.
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And I got to thank once again all of the listeners that TuneIn
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each week, each fortnight, whatever it is, whatever your
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cadence is, it doesn't matter. I appreciate you lending your
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ears, spending some scarce time finite energy listening to
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people tell tales of how they discovered Bitcoin.
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And I'll iterate what I was talking about last week.
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If you are a pleb and you want to get on the pod, there's no
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hurdle, there's no barrier. I don't care how many followers
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you have on Twitter or on Oster or anything like that.
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If you've got a cool story and you'd like to share it or you
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think you'd like to share it, or even if you think I don't know,
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man, am I not even worthy or whatever, Trust me.
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The fact that you're here now having discovered Bitcoin, and
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no least of all discovered discovering Bitcoin, the
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podcast, which is as bad a matter as it gets, that
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qualifies you, you know, So I'm going to stop rambling.
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I'm going to wish everybody a happy New Year and I'm going to
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commend you throughout the year to remember, find your breath,
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find that still point between the inhalation and the
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exhalation. And remember to be here now and
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more specifically Bitcoin here now.
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An invocation from meditation to code.
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How RAM does his path to presence and the cypherpunk's
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quest for freedom meet in Bitcoins ethical architecture
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quote It is important to expect nothing, to take every
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experience, including the negative ones, as merely steps
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on the path and to proceed. We're all just walking each
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other home round us. In the late 20th century, as
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modernity fumble forward toward its own edges, a curious
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alignment began to form between ancient teachings and emerging
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machines. On one side stood rammed us, the
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turned Mystic emissary of a collapsing Western rationalism,
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carrying the scent of incense, silence and Sanskrit syllables.
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On the other stood the cypherpunks, architects of
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anonymity, pushing code through underground listservs, seeking
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freedom not through surrender but through entropy resistant
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design. They did not speak the same
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language, yet somehow they touched the same nerve.
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The story of Ramdas, the cypherpunks and inevitably
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Bitcoin is not one of direct influence.
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It is a story of convergence, of institutions meeting across
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domains, each recognised in their own idiom.
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The truth is not delegated, that sovereignty is not granted, and
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that once reality is perceived clearly, it demands
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transformation of both self and system.
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Ramdas, born Richard Alpert, Harvard psychologist,
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psychedelic pioneer and reluctant St. of the postmodern
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soul, held a mirror to the illusions of identity, progress
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and control. He never wrote a line of
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cryptographic code and never lectured on Austrian economics.
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Yet the cultural terrain he helped see, particularly the
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psychedelic post industrial counterculture of the 1960s and
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70s, became the moral and metaphysical groundwork from
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which new architectures of freedom would later emerge.
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His was a gospel of unbecoming, of shedding the roles, titles
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and scripts that promised fulfilment but delivered only
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momentum. After psychedelics cracked the
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shell of his psychological inheritance, he turned eastward
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not for answers but for practices.
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When he finally returned, it was not with a belief system but
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with a posture. Attention as sacrament,
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surrender as discipline, presence as an act of morality.
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Non dual sovereignty The journey from identity to integrity In
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1961, Richard Alpert was a rising star at Harvard.
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Tenured, well funded, and well dressed, he held degrees from
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Tufts, Wesleyan and Stamford and enjoyed the kind of pedigree
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that opened doors in every direction.
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A psychologist by title, his true vocation was proximity to
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power. Intellectual, institutional,
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interpersonal. He had what many wanted, but he
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didn't have peace. That fracture became undeniable
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when Alpert began working with Timothy Leary on psychedelic
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research. What started as a clinical
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curiosity soon spiralled into something larger.
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The collapse of professional boundaries, the emergence of
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altered States, and the disintegration of the self-image
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he had spent a lifetime perfecting.
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The Harvard establishment eventually expelled them, but by
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then something irreversible had occurred.
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Alpert had glimpsed beyond the story he was living.
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He left for India in 1967 with a busted compass and a backpack of
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LSD. There he met Neem Karoli Baba, a
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silent, blanket wrapped sage who neither cared to ask about
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Harvard nor flinched at acid. Instead, he offered love, vast,
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unconditional and precise. Albert didn't know how to
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process it. He cried, he surrendered, he
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stayed, and he emerged months later as Ramdas, servant of God.
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This was not a name change. It was a cosmological
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reorientation. Ramdas returned to America with
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a beard, mala beads, and a message.
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He wasn't selling enlightenment. He was extending an invitation
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to be real, to be present, to stop performing the self as a
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strategy for safety. Be Here Now, published in 1971,
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wasn't a book in the conventional sense.
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It was a transmission, part diary, part scripture, part
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visual. Cohen, arriving just as a
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generation, was reeling from the failures of politics, war, and
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consumer liberation. Ramdas didn't offer escape.
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He offered practice, a path from fragmentation to wholeness, not
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by rearranging the world, but by meeting it without illusion.
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And this is where sovereignty re enters, not as control but as
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alignment. Although he never used that
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word, his teaching rested on a simple truth.
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Autonomy without awareness is merely ego on a longer leash.
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For Ramdas, freedom was not the power to do anything, but the
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capacity to witness everything. It was this shift from
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identification to participation, the move from self as story to
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self as field, Meaning you are not your name, your role, your
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fear or your ambition. You are the awareness in which
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all of these arise. When you stop clutching at the
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illusion of control, you begin to act from a deeper centre, one
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that is not strategic but sound. Rudolf Steiner called this moral
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imagination the ability to act from the self that perceives
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directly, not abstractly. Abraham Maslow called it self
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actualization, the flowering that follows when fear and
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deficiency dissolve. Carl Jung named it
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individuation, the reconciliation of shadow and
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symbol, or the integration of the unconscious without being
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consumed by it. And Robert Persig, in his own
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metaphysical idiom, called it the pursuit of quality, the
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alignment between perception and action, form and value.
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None of these thinkers proposed a flattening into formless
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bliss. Quite the opposite.
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They insisted on resolving form via discernment and structure.
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Because freedom is not the absence of constraint.
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It is the presence of the right ones, those that reveal rather
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than distort what is real. Bitcoin, in its way, is one such
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structure. It does not care who you think
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you are. It records what you do.
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It does not flatter, negotiate or praise.
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It is, in the moral sense, a mirror, revealing through time
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and cost whether your action is sincere, not because it watches
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but because it is indifferent. Like karma, like Dharma, like
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the Dao. This is no coincidence.
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The architecture of Bitcoin reflects a principle found
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throughout Ramdas's life and work.
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When the self is no longer defended, it can finally act.
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Not react, not perform, but act. This is non duality in motion.
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Not the dissolution of difference, but the liberation
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from false separation. Ramdas didn't build networks, he
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cultivated presence. And presence, it turns out, is
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the prerequisite for meaningful participation, whether in
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consciousness, community or code.
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Cypherpunks, code and consciousness.
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By the early 1990s, another culture was just setting 1 of
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cryptographers, hackers, and network idealists united by a
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suspicion of surveillance and moral drift.
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They didn't quote sutras or chant the names of Rahm, the
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universe, or God. Nonetheless, they were building
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something sacred, a structure that did not praise, a system
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that demanded honesty, a tool that returned consequence to
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action. Bitcoin, when it arrived in
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2009, was not merely an economic event.
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It was a new ritual of trust. The link between Ramdas and the
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cypherpunks is not doctrinal, and it is not about shared
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beliefs. It is ontological.
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It concerns the very nature of being itself.
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Both movements arose from the same dislocation, a loss of
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trust in institutions, ideologies, and inherited
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authority. Both sought a return to what is
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real. Ramdas offered breath, mantra,
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and silence. Bitcoin offers protocol proof
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and consensus. Neither is a shortcut.
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Both are practices that require presence.
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In that sense, the late 20th century witnessed 2 parallel
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awakenings, one spiritual, one digital, each responding to the
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same civilizational wound, the transmission of integrity.
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Few at the time would have linked Ramdas to the
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cypherpunks. Yet when the lens widens, the
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resonance becomes audible not in vocabulary but in atmosphere.
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The cypherpunk worldview was allergic to centralised control,
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suspicions of imposed consensus, and devoted to voluntary
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association. It reflected the same interior
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shift Ramdas had embodied 2 decades earlier, the movement
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from conditioned identity to conscious participation.
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That resonance was not merely theoretical.
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That resonance was not merely theoretical.
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It was lived in San Francisco during the 1980s and 90s.
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Ramdas, Timothy Leary, Ken Keesey and other countercultural
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figures often spoke at the same events as early tech pioneers,
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passing the philosophical baton to a younger generation of
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builders. Gatherings like the Digital BN
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made this exchange explicit, assembling Grateful Dead
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lyricists, LSD researchers, and Internet architects into a
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single civic experiment. The shared message was not
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uniformity but interoperability. You could use different tools
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and still build from the same values.
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One of those tools was Pretty Good Privacy PGP, released in
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1991 by Phil Zimmerman, a form of public key encryption that
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allowed private communication without central authority.
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It was elegant, decentralized, and difficult to corrupt.
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It resembled a kind of technological yoga, a
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disciplined practice for maintaining integrity under
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pressure. The ethos spread.
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Cipher punks like Tim May, Eric Hughes, and John Perry Barlow
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began drafting manifestos. Their tone could be blunt and
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abrasive. Yet beneath the technical
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bravado lay a moral claim that human beings deserve freedom not
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only politically but informationally, that the right
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to consciousness implies the right to private expression, and
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that systems which record without consent are not just
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inefficient, they are anti human code as devotion.
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Of course, it seems strange to place Ramdas alongside these
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cryptographic radicals. And yet both confronted the same
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problem. How does one stay awake in a
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system designed to put you to sleep?
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Ramdas framed the answer through silence and surrender, the
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cypherpunks through code and structure.
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Their expression was different, but their orientation was the
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same. Because for all his mysticism,
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Ramdas never asked his students to withdraw from the world.
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Instead, he asked that they try to see through it, to act from a
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place not reactive but responsive, not fearful but
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grounded. That same injunction, to act
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from source, not from fear, animates the best of the
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cypherpunk tradition. In a world addicted to
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surveillance, disinformation and moral drift, the refusal to
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externalise trust is not nihilism.
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It is a kind of devotion and a defence of the sacredness of
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responsibility. And so, born from that lineage,
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Bitcoin is not an escape from consequence.
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It is a reassertion, a digital instrument that, like a mantra
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or meditation practice, returns you again and again to the
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centre of your own responsibility.
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A new block of transactions is added roughly every 10 minutes,
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in a rhythm deliberately slow compared to the frantic pace of
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traditional finance. Like a heartbeat, this interval
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enforces a kind of mindfulness in digital commerce.
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Just as Ramdas guided students to return to the breath and rest
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in presence, Bitcoins protocol quietly guides it's users to
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accept the natural pace of a decentralized process, to stay
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with what is the cypherpunk facing.
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The entropy of centralized systems makes the same move.
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Don't run, don't fight. Build something better, freer,
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truer. In either path, freedom is not
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granted. It is chosen and then built line
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by line, block by block, breath by breath.
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It is tempting to describe Bitcoin as a purely economic
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technology, yet this is insufficient.
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While it functions as a monetary protocol, it's deeper resonance
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lies not in what it does, but how it does it and what that how
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reveals with respect to value, time, and trust.
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Bitcoin is less an answer to Fiat currency than a
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confrontation with the metaphysical architecture of
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civilization itself. To encounter it honestly is to
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face the same questions Ramdas spent his life asking.
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What are you depending on? What are you avoiding?
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What is real and what is illusion?
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These are not financial questions, they are existential
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ones. Bitcoin as spiritual structure.
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Bitcoin, though formless in essence, insists on form.
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It is a hard coded act of restraint in an age of
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improvisational power. It introduces consequence where
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convenience once ruled. It demands work and preserves
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memory. It cannot be bribed, rushed, or
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sweet talked. There is no central server, no
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priesthood, no exception clause. In this sense, it is a moral
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structure, not because it makes one good, but because it refuses
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to let one hide. Ramdas might have recognized the
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symmetry. His spiritual journey from the
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collapse of institutional identity to the embrace of
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radical presence rested on the insight that freedom is not a
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state of exception but a relationship with reality.
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He never said be free. Rather he said be here now,
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inhabit the actual face. What is, meet it cleanly.
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Bitcoin does the same in machine language.
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It encodes a world view in which meaning is not performed but
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proven, where time cannot be skipped and consensus cannot be
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coerced. As Scott Dedtles writes, Bitcoin
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is the Dow of money not for its fluidity, but for its refusal to
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deviate from its own nature. Unlike the price, which is a
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distraction, in essence, the network neither follows the
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market nor mirrors the mood. It simply proceeds, block by
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block, through its own unfolding alignment of form and spirit.
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In Hermeticism, one of the world's oldest esoteric
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traditions, a simple maxim endures, as above, so below,
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meaning that structure and spirit reflect one another.
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If our systems are distorted, our perceptions will be too.
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If our money is dishonest, our relationships, whether economic,
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political, psychological or cultural, inherit that
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distortion. The early Bitcoin adopters may
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not have quoted Hermes Trismegistus, but they intuited
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the same principle. Corrupt money corrupts meaning.
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Thus, sound money is not a fetish, it is alignment.
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Similarly, Taoist philosophy speaks of Wu Wei, action without
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force, effort without strain. This is not passivity, but
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congruence, the harmony that arises when form and function
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are no longer at odds. Bitcoins design embodies this
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virtue. It contains no unnecessary
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parts, no central arbiter, no top down interference.
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It doesn't govern, In fact it makes large scale governance
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unnecessary. This is not merely efficient, it
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is ethical. Ramdas too taught that true
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order arises not from control, but from depth.
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The soul, the psyche, the structure, all must align.
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Not symbolically, but operationally.
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And so, strange as it sounds, Bitcoin can be read as a
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spiritual artefact. A protocol that aligns
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incentives with consequence, participation with
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responsibility and time with trust.
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Does not care who you are, it responds to what you've done.
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In this way, it resembles karma, not as a cosmic punishment, but
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as casual clarity. The Ledger, like the soul,
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forgets nothing. Of course, Bitcoin is not
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perfect. It is a beginning, not a
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culmination. Yet it introduces, amid
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accelerating noise, a signal that cannot be faked.
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Bitcoin is a pattern of integrity and a scaffold for
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remembering not of the past, but of what truly matters.
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And in that remembering, Bitcoin joins the lineage Ramdas helped
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open, a lineage in which liberation is not abstraction
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but action, in which technology and spirit are not rivals but
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reflections, and in which freedom is not just a slogan but
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an architecture, coherence and consequence, the turning toward
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what is. Ramdas once said that suffering
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does not come from what happens, but from resistance to what is.
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This was not an invitation to passivity, but to alignment, to
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act from a place that no longer denies reality and meets it
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without distortion. For him, the spiritual path was
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never an escape from consequence.
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It was the reintegration of consequence into consciousness.
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To be free, one must stop pretending.
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The cypherpunks, in their own idiom, came to the same
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conclusion. In a world of surveillance,
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manipulation, and institutional drift, they recognized that
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freedom without structure is fantasy.
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Their task was not to overthrow the system with slogans, but to
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build an alternative, one that could not be captured,
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corrupted, or confused. A system that did not promise
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utopia but restored reality. Bitcoin is such a structure.
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So too is meditation, and so is the act of choosing truth when a
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lie would be easier. All of these, each in its own
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way, are disciplines of coherence.
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They do not erase suffering. They simply remove one layer of
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it. The suffering that comes from
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contradiction, from saying one thing and doing another, from
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wanting freedom but outsourcing responsibility, from demanding
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truth or tolerating illusion. This is where the teachings of
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Ramdas and the moral architecture of Bitcoin
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converge, not in metaphor but in demand.
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Both insist that if you want peace you must be willing to
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participate, that if you want integrity you must practice it.
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The world will not become coherent by chance, only through
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choice, and if that choice is to mean anything, it must cost
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something. This is what the Spiral of
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Sovereignty sought to surface, a framework in which economic
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psychology, spirituality and sovereignty are not competing
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disciplines, but nested expressions of a single
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principle of truth lived through form.
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Indeed, it is the principle which links Steiner's moral
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imagination to Hayek's emergent order, Jung's individuation to
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Percig's quality, Maslow's actualisation to bitcoins.
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Proof of work. Ramdas belongs in this
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conversation not because he foresaw Bitcoin, but because he
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practised what Bitcoin encodes the difficult, beautiful work of
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being human and therefore accountable to reality.
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He refused the luxury of illusion.
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He did the work. Where Ramdas offered silence,
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story and surrender. The Cypherpunks offered code
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consensus and cryptography, different languages, same
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calling, both pointing to the same human task to live so that
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one's systems, both inner and outer, do not fracture under
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pressure, to curate attention as carefully as one designs tools
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to make peace. Not a desirable refuge, but a
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real and sustainable pattern. And so the question is no longer
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whether Ramdas influenced the Plethorpunks or whether Bitcoin
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is spiritual. Asking those questions misses
27:55
the deeper point. The real question is coherence.
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Is what you believe reflected in what you build?
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Does your architecture of ethics align with what you claim to
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value? If it doesn't, what will you do
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about it? That is not rhetoric, it is the
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root of responsibility. Ramdas framed it in the language
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of the soul. The cypherpunks framed it in the
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language of protocol. Bitcoin expresses it as code.
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Nevertheless, the choice remains the same, either to deny what is
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or to live in alignment with it. Only one of those will lead you
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back home.