Interview conducted by Jerry Katz
Dr. Gino Yu is currently an Associate Professor and Director of Digital Entertainment and Game Development in the School of Design at PolyU where he develops meaningful game projects at M-Lab, a commercially oriented digital entertainment laboratory he co-founded that provides consulting, research, instruction and develops new commercial opportunities. He also founded the Asia Consciousness Festival and hosted the 2009 edition of the Toward a Science of Consciousness Conference. His main area of research focuses on the application of media technologies to cultivate creativity and promote enlightened consciousness. Dr. Gino Yu received his BS and PhD at the University of California at Berkeley in 1987 and 1993 respectively and has over 60 conference and journal publications.
Gino has written several articles for the Huffington Post, which may be accessed here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-gino-yu
Speaking tour for Gino Yu and Friends through Europe from Jan 17 – mid Feb., 2014:
Jan 17 – Venice (H+ Farm – http://www.h-farmventures.com/)
Jan 19-22 – Munich (http://dld-conference.com/)
Jan 23-25 – Davos (http://www.weforum.org/)
Jan 27-29 – Berlin (https://www.uni-potsdam.de/en/)
Jan 31 – Paris (http://www.hec.edu/)
Feb 3 – Eindhoven (http://w3.id.tue.nl/en/)
Feb 4-5 – Breda (http://www.nhtv.nl/)
Tracks – Time Cues:
00:00 – 03:11 – Introduction. Chuck Hillig, Anamika, Science and Nonduality Conference mentioned
03:11 – 09:18 – Ariana Huffington, TED, entrepreneurship, innovation, self-discovery, the unknown.
09:18 – 11:50 – How do you communicate experience?
11:50 – 16:59 – Gino’s Master’s program on startups and innovation. Teaching a class on Recovering Creativity. Addressing the conditioned world view. The mind/body relationship to consciousness. Conducting this work in the academic world. Various other workers in the field mentioned.
16:59 – 21:41 – Gino Yu’s spiritual story. World travel. Family. “What is the commanality of man?” Chi Gong. Cancer work.
21:41- 27:28 – How the media influence world view and physiology. Where is this conversation happening? Mapping out one’s world view. Functioning from the conditional world and from the view of “It’s good to be alive.”
27:28 – 29:02 – Acting from the innate joy of being
29:02 – 31:56 – Definition of Enlightenment. How story is implicated in a neurophysiological perspective. Role of media. How do you use interactive media and biofeedback to facilitate personal transformation?
31:56 – 34:56 – Application of Moore’s Law, that digital technology improves at exponential rates. Mikey Siegel.
34:56 – 38:37 – Bruce Damer, psychedelics, Burning Man. The conditioned mind as regulating physiological energy. Bipolar Disorder as example of energy fluctuation. Intergrating media and art to “kick up” your energy state.
38:37 – 44:08 – Creativity. Entrepreneurship as a spiritual path. Passion as part of conditioned world view is an opportunity for transformation. Working with the existing belief system. Looking at the energetics of that which is. Forces mediating action and how the reality responds.
44:08 – 46:25 – Integrated vs dissociated forms of nondual awareness. Are you the light bulb or the light?
46:25 – 49:46 – Functioning in “the Zone” Peak performance. The regulation of intention. “Can you push a lot of energy through the physiology independent of context? Living from Enlightenment.
49:46 – 52:54 – Where does conflict arise? Emotional attachments and objective measures of enlightenment. Jeffery Martin.
52:54 – 55:31 – Gurudatta Dattatrey interview discussed. Taiwan Conference on Consciousness 2014.
55:31 – 58:48 – Who’s doing all this? Building community grounded in scientific, rational principles.
58:48 – 1:02:45 – Can your baby be your guru? Enlightened parenting. Can you surrender to another person? … to that which is?
1:02:45 – 1:05:27 – “Kicking up the energy.” Finding the context and the focusing on the energy and physiology, and somatic awareness.
1:05:27 – 1:06:54 – Using video games for transformation. Robotics and emotion. Measuring responses.
1:06:54 – 1:13:38 – Popular video games as the manipulation of hormonal activity triggering addictive response. Building community. Commercial opportunity in digital media for consciousness transformation.
1:13:38 – 1:17:04 – Nature of hope. Pink Floyd’s lyrics as scriptural. Having no idea of what any of this is.
1:17:04 – 1:23:34 – Nature of the cutting edge of Gino’s work. The higher the physiological energy generated, the more coincidences and sychronicities noted, especially when working with collaborators. The nature of luck. The four qualities of “I” and “me.”
1:23:34 – 1:26:59 – Community building. Induced awakening.
1:26:59 – end – Sean Blackwell: Bipolar or Waking Up? The binding of the means that are in the realm of the mind with the processes of the physiology and the understanding of a person’s world view, coupled with engineering for transformation, is what the study of consciousness bears on. TEDx, coming together at Burning Man.
_______________________________________________________________
Please contact Gino through his Facebook page if you would like to see the complete articles from which these excerpts have been taken:
Shifting Worldview Using Video Game Technologies
Gino Yu,
Jeffery A. Martin and Paul Chai
Multimedia Innovation Centre
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Hung Hom, Hong Kong
Abstract
Interactive video games have become one of the most engaging forms of media today. Although video games are predominantly used as a form of entertainment, they are finding other application areas including education and training (serious games). The interactive and engaging nature of video games also makes them an ideal platform for creating experiences that facilitate personal transformation and psychological well-being (meaningful games). Conditioned behaviors and beliefs have a physiological basis and are related to and accessible through emotional stimulation and awareness. A video game situation engages the player’s awareness and mind, while their real-time response, including the decisions they make within the game as well as their physiological reaction to the situation, reveals their conditioned behaviors and beliefs (worldview). By stimulating reflexivity in the player at critical moments, games can illuminate the relationship between thoughts, feelings, sensations in the body, and behavior. As players become increasingly aware of the nature of their underlying beliefs, change occurs. This chapter presents a conceptual overview and framework for developing meaningful games as well as several approaches for designers to use in creating positive psychological change and transformation, including: transformation through narrative, cultivating somatic awareness, medication through gameplay, directly inducing experiences through non-traditional video game technologies, and facilitating introspection.
—————————————————————-
Toward a
Science of Consciousness
Budapest, Hungary
July 23-26, 2007
Conference abstracts
YU, Gino
Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong
DEVELOPING A
FRAMEWORK FOR COMMUNICATING EXPERIENCE
Poster
Communicating inner experiences represents a
tremendous challenge in education. External
“physical” characteristics are relatively easier to
communicate as objects can be reduced to more
primitive components to which a labels (syntax) and meaning
(semantics) are attached and shared. The repeatability
nature of physical-world phenomenon makes it easier to share
experiences and create the ”common semantic base”
(dictionary) necessary for communication. Modern science is
constructed upon
languages such as mathematics and logic that provide formal
mechanisms for describing relationships and models between
components. Personal “inner” experiences such as those
encountered along the path towards inner discovery,
however, are much more difficult to communicate without a common
semantic reference. Without a common semantic reference,
words become simply labels. Each person’s “path” or life
experience is unique and uniquely interpreted. Each moment in
time is a new and unique experience.
Lacking a common semantic reference presents a challenge for those interested in developing processes that facilitate personal evolution and growth. Although perception of the physical world through the senses (e.g., see, hear, smell, touch, taste) provide a rich palette for creating experiences that can be referenced and shared, the meaning of these experiences is subject to the interpretation. Art, media (including poetry and literature), ritual, and religion provide references which attempt to communicate inner experiences through metaphor. However, these often rely upon perceptual and subjective interpretations based upon the previous experiences of the viewer/reader/experiencer. The “map” is often confused for the “territory” and subtleties in meaning are not fully appreciated. This paper presents our work towards developing a framework for communicating experience. The purpose of this framework is to facilitate personal evolution and lifelong learning, a process of cultivating greater understanding including intellectual understanding (mind), emotional understanding (empathy), and direct awareness (being).
Keywords: experience, language, framework, emotions
—————————————————————-
Recovering Creativity: for Personal Evolution, Industry, and Society
Dr. Gino Yu,
Roy Horan
Dr. Michael Mamas,
Barbara Weisshaar
Abstract
This paper presents a process for recovering natural creativity based upon allocating time to balanced living, meditation, self-exploration, and the use of creativity exercises. Creative potential is lost as we construct our unique interpretation of reality through the process of conditioning. Negative distortions, conditioned early in our life, can have a dramatic impact upon our creative abilities later on. A case is made that historically prevalent behaviorist based teaching methodologies are out-dated in today’s information age and can inhibit creative development. Interactive multimedia technology provides a scalable platform for the development of individualized, student centered teaching that not only disseminates knowledge but preserves students’ natural creativity. The scalable nature of the platform makes it possible to achieve rapid global impact.