The day after that meeting Jamie took me to a place just called The Centre. I was taken around by a woman in a lab coat. She was very small, with a Russian accent, and looked up at me intently as she spoke.
She said that The Centre was set up as a research body to help human beings find composure in the face of the great changes that they will have to face.
I will try to summarise what she told me.
“Those who come to the centre commit to a discipline which includes meditation, exercise, and group work.
For group work, along with cleaning and maintenance duties, the emphasis is on leading-edge knowledge using TED talks and Great Courses software, not too technical, but accurate and up to date. Each person has his or her own study programme.”
The meditation practice emphasises sitting in an alert state and following your breath. The objective is to train subjects to pause their lives and learn to hold back a rush to judgement or an urge to act, to monitor and observe their instinctive thought patterns and understand the human “substrate”, which is the term we use.
Exercise is prescribed following a medical examination and a consultation on what sort of exercise an attendee would prefer. Each attendee is provided with a smart body analyser and an app in which to enter daily measurement scores.
There are Visitors who stay for at least a month and Residents who commit to a more rigorous set of rules.
The content of the media available in the community is strictly limited.
“No video fiction is available. Culture is divisive. We all grow and live in a given culture but culture is ultimately just another way of differentiating one group from another. Popular entertainment reflects this. It habitually simplifies everything, re-enacts habitual antagonisms. Humans enjoy fiction as a form of elevated gossip, because we love to share in the lives of others. It helps us relax. But during a stay in the community it is not encouraged.”
[I remember Jamie saying to Mikey one time: “What you call stories are just palaeolithic tropes”]
“The residents are brain-scanned regularly so that changes in brain activity resulting from their training can be captured.”
After the briefing I was taken into a small office where a young man was expecting me. He said I was invited to become a Trusted Advisor. “A TA may incur expenses. I will need your email address and bank details.” He gave me an America Express card and said the card would be activated when I e-signed the contract he was going to send me. If I did not wish to sign, the card must be destroyed and the contract deleted.