I had an opportunity to moderate a panel featuring six psychonauts who are exploring the intersection between Psychedelics, VR, and consciousness transformation at the VRTO conference in Toronto, Canada on June 16th, 2018. The participants from left to right were myself as moderator, Tina Madry, Brett Leonard, Scott Mason, Elliot Edge, Audri Phillips, & Jeffrey Lynn Damon. We explore a wide range of topics around VR as a new communications medium to communicate inner, noetic, psychedelic and phenomenological experiences, as well as how psychedelics is a tool to explore the capacities of the human mind and what sorts of experiential and neuroscience insights we gain from psychedelic research and experimentation.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to The Voices of VR Podcast. So on May 15th of this year, Michael Pollan came out with a book called How to Change Your Mind, which was really exploring the new science of psychedelics, what it teaches us about consciousness, dying, addiction, depression, and transcendence. And about a month later, in June, I was in Toronto where I had a chance to facilitate a group discussion with six psychonauts talking about their explorations of psychedelics but also the relationship to psychedelics and virtual reality and how virtual reality could either create this new communications medium to be able to communicate the different dimensions of a psychedelic experience or how it's going to provide this medium for consciousness transformation. Talking to somebody about psychedelics is something that traditionally has been pretty taboo. It's difficult for people to be very explicit about some of their experiences with psychedelics, mostly because a lot of these psychedelic drugs are classified in such a way that they're actually illegal to take in many instances. But as Michael Pollan covers in his book, there's been so many different therapeutic applications of MDMA and psilocybin and the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Research has been driving a lot of those research studies. But obviously, people can get access to psychedelics and have their own direct experiences. And there's something that's very similar to the psychedelic experience in virtual reality, which is that it's kind of hard to describe to somebody what a virtual reality experience is unless you have the direct sensory experience yourself. I mean, if you've ever had either a VR experience to try to describe it to someone who hasn't had VR, you can only go so far as to communicating what it's about. So, the same thing happens with psychedelics and the whole psychedelic experience. And so, is the experiential medium of virtual reality going to allow us to communicate the vibrancy of the psychedelic experience more? So, I've done a number of interviews over the years, but I've never had this many people talking openly about their explorations about psychedelics and virtual reality all at the same time. This was a panel discussion that happened at the VRTO conference, which was a great gathering of lots of great minds discussing issues like this. So that's what we'll be covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this panel discussion happened with Tina Madry, Brett Leonard, Scott Mason, Elliot Edge, Audrey Phillips, and Jeffrey Lynn Damon on Saturday, June 16th, 2018 at the VRTO conference in Toronto, Canada. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in. Okay, so thank you everybody for coming back. We are about to have a panel discussion covering consciousness, reality, and the esoteric elucidations of VR. We have a big panel here with people from lots of different backgrounds and experiences, and I'd like for people just to briefly introduce themselves, and then I'll ask some questions and we'll dive in. So why don't we just go down to the line and just kind of set the context as to who's here to be talking about consciousness and the nature of reality.
[00:03:06.842] Tina Madry: I'm Tina Madri. I'm a psychonaut and an inner space explorer.
[00:03:13.287] Brett Leonard: Hi, I'm Brett Leonard. I'm a film director. I directed The Lawnmower Man, which introduced the term VR and concept of pop culture. And I'm a psychonaut for many, many years.
[00:03:21.994] Scott Mason: Hi, I'm Scott Mason. I'm a psychedelic researcher that studies cognitive sciences at York University. And I'm also a expert psychonaut, in my opinion.
[00:03:31.321] Kent Bye: Wow.
[00:03:33.962] Elliot Edge: Boy, I see a trend forming. I'm also a psychonaut. I'm an author and writer. I do media theory, criticism, humor, and I also do work on the simulation hypothesis and publish about that.
[00:03:47.227] Audri Phillips: Hi.
[00:03:47.607] Elliot Edge: I was hoping someone like that.
[00:03:51.708] Audri Phillips: Hi. My name is Audrey Phillips. I'm a content creator. Started out as a painter and got very technical, do some technical writing for Intel, do content for dome shows, for VR. used to work in the visual effects industry, now directing a group called Robot Prayers.
[00:04:09.682] Jeffrey Lynn Damon: Good morning, everyone. I'm Jeffrey Lynn Damon. I am a VR developer and psychedelic connoisseur. I've been living in Toronto for 10 years now, and I'm your local neighbor. I live in the East End. I've been working in virtual reality for about four years now.
[00:04:28.651] Kent Bye: Great. So we have a common theme here, I'd say, with consciousness, altered states of consciousness, and what kind of transformations can come about from changing your consciousness through psychedelic experiences or virtual reality experiences. And I think there's a dimension there of when you are on a psychedelic experience, there's these natural questions that come up, which is like, what is the nature of reality? I want to begin this broad discussion by I think consciousness transformation is probably the one thing that we all are focused on, like the value of what it means to transform our consciousness and through the psychedelic experience. But individually, I'd like to hear from each of you the biggest question that you have that you feel like you're investigating through this cross section of psychedelics and virtual reality. So what is the question that's really driving your work forward?
[00:05:18.003] Tina Madry: I would say my biggest question is what is the mathematical consistency that might be found within the perceptual contents of the psychedelic experience that might possibly give us some insight into literally how our wires are arranged in our brain and whether that can even provide insight into the field of connectome research, which is a new field in neuroscience where through various brain imaging where they try to put together kind of a geometric representation of what the semantic neural networks in our brains look like.
[00:06:06.826] Brett Leonard: Yeah, my question is, I want to know what the hell is going on here. And the confluence of psychedelic experience and just human experience, heart experience, spiritual seeking, and these technologies that are reaching out to us, I believe are all in a rubric that is leading us towards an understanding of what humanism really is, what we are really actually doing and what we're here for. It's a very exciting time because those threads are starting to weave together.
[00:06:42.509] Scott Mason: My biggest interest, my biggest question is the evolution of language. And when you're in the DMT state, for example, you're given pure information. It almost seems like there's entities talking to you in a way, but it's not a conversation type talking. It's the pure feeling of what that conversation would actually bring to you. And I think through VR, we're going to be able to map the psychedelic experience. There are some researchers out of Kyoto who have created a system where they're able to show you videos and you're able to look at the videos and they measure your brain function. And they can take that same data for your brain function and put that same mechanism on you while you're dreaming. And they're able to actually recreate some eerie looking videos of what your dreams are. And so in my mind, I think with VR, we're going to be able at some point to take that technology when it's come out of its primitive state and to be able to actually show these images and show what we're seeing in these states, especially DMT. And then DMT is what I'm really interested in. And to be able to do that, we're going to be able to compare data. And to be able to compare data, we can give the scientific method a place in the psychedelic experience.
[00:07:51.457] Elliot Edge: My biggest question that I wrestle with when I take psychedelics is how can I get more people to take psychedelics? How can I do more propaganda and evangelism? If everyone here even just tried LSD or psilocybin or something like that, everyone would be markedly different. That's what it does. It actually civilizes you. It makes you more open. It makes you get in touch with parts of yourself that you repress. And when you are on a psychedelic, those often get healed. The kind of psychedelic drug use I do is not recreational. I do it for, I'm also in psychoanalysis. I've been doing it for a year. So I do it strictly for therapy. Not that you should not do it recreationally. You certainly should. But the big question I have when I take it is that, how can we get more people to do this? Because it's civilizing us. And the fact that it was repressed in the 50s and 60s really held back research. It was banished to the basement, chemists. And the potential for it to uplift us and unite us all, I think anyone who's taken it would say, yeah, that's what the 60s were about, man.
[00:09:04.874] Audri Phillips: Years ago, I was listening to the radio. was listening to Timothy Leary giving a talk and he said something very interesting. He said that he was not interested in LSD, psychedelics for any kind of spiritual reasons. He was interested in it because he found it the best way to study how the human mind works. which I thought was really cool. I really liked that. I thought it got right to the heart of things. And as an artist, I'm very interested in finding out how the human mind works, which a number of other people here are too. Because how the human mind works is how something looks, how we make things that look interesting to other people, how people are perceiving things. And I'm also interested not only in how the human mind works, but how the basic intelligence of the universe works. Does intelligence begin at kind of at the subatomic level? Where does intelligence begin? How do things congeal and connect to each other to form us, for instance? How do they congeal and connect to form consciousness? So that's kind of my biggest questions. And I'm formed a group called Robot Prayers, which is very much involved with that.
[00:10:12.207] Jeffrey Lynn Damon: Cool. So my life is mostly questions. I guess the biggest thing that I'm trying to figure out is why more people are not talking about this. There's over a million people in North America that have smoked dimethyltryptamine, DMT, and when you smoke that compound, you are accelerated into a dimension where if you pay attention, you will receive linguistic structures where you can look at the topology of these things. If you pay attention, because you're in a chaotic state, mind you, so if you can focus and you can pay attention to these things, you'll understand and you'll get love and understanding and meaning and intent. So I guess a question that I have is how can we use electronic virtual reality to simulate the dimethyltryptamine experience in the best way possible? So I'm looking forward to the day that I can download the latest DMT experience and figure out what they're trying to say. Because we don't know what these entities are trying to say. Yeah, so that's probably my biggest question. Yeah.
[00:11:22.231] Kent Bye: Yeah, I know on May 15th, the book by Michael Pollan of how to change your mind was released and you know, this is bringing psychedelic research into the mainstream. I know that the MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Research, has been going for a long time trying to do these experimental studies to show the efficacy of these psychedelics by treating trauma or PTSD or people who are in hospice and trying to reckon with their mortality and death. And so there's a lot of empirical research that's happening in terms of what these psychedelic drugs can do and their therapeutic use and being able to kind of break us out of the stasis of our normal everyday life. I guess a big question that I have personally is, and listening to some interviews with Michael Pollan, he talks about what is actually happening at a chemical level to be able to turn down the default mode network within your brain, which allows these new connections to happen. So to what extent can a virtually mediated visuals or haptic experience be able to do a similar type of like chemical change in your mind, which does this ego disillusionment What I expect is that it's very possible that psychedelics are blazing these new neural pathways for us to train us, but the question is, is can you get to that point without the psychedelic experience?
[00:12:40.482] Jeffrey Lynn Damon: Well, it's hard because we don't have the proper legislature put in place for the proper research teams to go in and look at these things. Unfortunately, the way our political system is set up now is dimethyltryptamine is a heavily scheduled drug. So if you do take it, you're putting yourself at great legal risk. So anybody that proactively partakes in good civil disobedience by taking psychedelics, I think should be people we look to. Maybe we can build a roadmap and we can start and move out from there. Because right now we're at baseline. We have a few things that, you know, we have clinical research of PTSD patients and so forth transforming their lives. But what about people that are clinically healthy and want to go in and study these things? They're not allowed to do it. And that is absolutely preposterous. So how do we get to that point? And I think it starts with legislature and activism and just talking about it in a way where you don't stigmatize it. DMT is a part of our life. It's in all of our bodies. It's surrounding us in every plant and living organism that's around us. So why is it heavily regulated? Why are plants illegal?
[00:13:54.151] Kent Bye: I think it's important to mention that there are risks associated with taking any psychedelic drug. Of course. Certainly the legal risks. Well, any drug. Any drug, yeah. And there's a set in setting and having the proper context. And there could be people who may not be able to handle some of the ego disillusionment that happens in the process of taking a psychedelic.
[00:14:13.025] Jeffrey Lynn Damon: I'm not advocating everybody take mushrooms on a lunar cycle.
[00:14:19.440] Kent Bye: So because we're on a panel here looking at the cross section between psychedelics and virtual reality, I think it's like there's a deeper question, I guess, that I'm asking, which is that there's a physical chemical reaction that's happening to psychedelic drugs into the brain. Do you foresee that it's possible to do that technologically mediated pathway to have a similar experience into the psychedelic experience?
[00:14:38.676] Jeffrey Lynn Damon: Scott may be able to answer.
[00:14:40.498] Scott Mason: So the Lucia number three light, I don't know if anybody's familiar with this, but it's a light system that it basically induces psychedelic experiences. So under this light, it's not like a full-fledged psychedelic experience. And so I guess to answer your question, I don't think that VR will be able to recreate the exact same thing. But I do think, as you said, there are risks and there are psychological risks for some people. And so to be able to induce these states in a technological way that's not so invasive to the body, would be really helpful for people and I think you mentioned set and setting and I wanna just say one thing about virtual reality and set and setting is one of the biggest things for me that I could do is bring set and setting and any set and setting to people who are in traumatic situations, who are in hospitals dying or whatnot that can't leave and instead of being in a hospital you could throw on your VR and maybe under the influence of psychedelics create that set and setting that's perfect for you.
[00:15:34.828] Brett Leonard: Yeah, I mean, I actually think that the the entire raison d'etre of this, this technology is to bring this to a much larger subset of people. I have, you know, my experience with this is I've made a movie that showed a man being transformed by brain stimulation sequences in virtual reality as a concept. And a billion people saw that film. And even to this day, 25 years later, that's the thing that people are communicating back to me about is those sequences which the content of those sequences were actually all sacred geometries. So they actually are brain stimulation sequences. People were actually looking at the film on computers putting shrouds over their head and looking literally at the sequences and saying that they were getting activated in that way. I think that this technology is designed to bring this to a much larger mass group of people because The truth is there's only going to be a certain fraction, percentage of people that are going to be chemical psychonauts. That's something that is, and we need to bring this to the masses in a way that feels non-stigmatized. If you look, you know, at the history of psychedelic research like Stan and Christina Groff, who are good friends of mine, you know, there's just so much tremendous body of research here that we can bring into this medium, and I think any content that is being designed in this medium needs to be infused with this kind of transformational aspect, because that is the reason for this technology in terms of human evolution.
[00:17:06.143] Elliot Edge: I have to agree with everyone up here, but the thing is that I just have a skepticism where I don't believe that any media technology It'll be a facsimile, it'll be a mimicry, but that means it's a shadow. An emulation. An emulation.
[00:17:21.199] Jeffrey Lynn Damon: It's not an authentic experience.
[00:17:23.520] Elliot Edge: It's not authentic. And so the thing is, is that like, even if we were to give you VR and say, this is what LSD is like, or this is what DMT is like, you're not going to feel it because your brain waves aren't going to go there. You're chemically not going to go there. So I see VR and psychedelics as like friends, like neighbors, you know? but they got totally different lifestyles.
[00:17:44.746] Jeffrey Lynn Damon: They can anticipate and help people who are not necessarily ready for ego dissolution.
[00:17:49.668] Elliot Edge: I would agree with that, yeah.
[00:17:51.149] Jeffrey Lynn Damon: Because you can put on a VR headset and it changes reality as fast as smoking DMT. It is a technological version of DMT right now, albeit primitive.
[00:18:04.794] Tina Madry: I think I just want to address the how does it work on our brain question. So I'm going to try and sum this up as succinctly as possible. So in some of the research that I've been doing, I've come across a book by James L. Kent, known as Psychedelic Signal Theory, Shamanism in the Age of Reason. And he has this extremely brilliant hypothesis about how exactly, in a mechanical sense, psychedelic compounds lead to the perceptual effects that they lead to. Psychedelics act as partial agonists for one of the 14 subtypes of serotonin receptors, the 5HT2A receptor. And these receptors are most densely concentrated in the part of the brain that controls feedback. it controls perceptual feedback. So this is the part of the brain that integrates all of your sensations into something that's smooth and flows seamlessly. And when you take psychedelics and these receptors are partially activated, a process occurs called recurrent excitation. And I think the best analogy that I could use to describe this is it's like microphone feedback. and this effect causes most notably visual tracers and I didn't really get to talk about it during my speech in detail what scientific testing of psychedelic experiences in VR might look like. But I think a solid start would be something like put somebody who's on acid or psilocybin or whatever into a VR headset. A good start that would be the most basic thing to measure would be having a dot going across their field of vision and the person can report how long the tracer is.
[00:20:06.758] Jeffrey Lynn Damon: we can measure things like... Well the headset could even trace how long it takes your eye to move from one side of the lens to the other.
[00:20:15.525] Tina Madry: Yeah we could also utilize eye tracking technology and some questions that would be I think worth investigating are like how does the length of the tracer correspond with the dose? Is it exponential? Is it a linear curve? What's the correlation between the emotional intensity of the experience look like. And then you can do like other things like for example you could have the dot flashing and look at how the tracer acts with various patterns of flashing. And if you really want to get into this you can even put somebody in some kind of brain imaging technology while this is happening and compare and contrast. These are just kind of some of the ideas that have been spinning around in my head for what this sort of thing might look like.
[00:21:03.130] Audri Phillips: Yeah, what you're really saying is that it depends on what content you put in the VR headset. If you're going to try to insist that people see a story with a linear content, all that, you're not going to get anyone to any kind of meditative state. So it really depends on what content you're putting in the headset. So I think that's what people are going to start developing is what content can you put in a headset that brings people to this state where part of their brain, for example, when yogis are meditating, et cetera, is turned off. And that's something that definitely needs to be addressed.
[00:21:36.131] Scott Mason: When it comes to VR, too, there's an interesting thing that happens when you do, well, happens, in my opinion, I don't know if we all ever has done and dimethyltryptamine maybe you might agree but one of the first effects is that it's you get this this sense that it's more real than reality in a way and the best way my friend asked me to describe this and the best way I could describe it was he's like well what was it like and I was like it took me a couple days to get back to him and I said You know, it's kind of like you're an AI waking up that you're AI. And you see this construct and you see that you're only programs. And I think that at what extent, I don't know if you guys might want to add to this, but at what extent do you think that virtual reality could show us that this is a very virtual reality and holographic reality that we live in? And maybe what do you guys think that will actually bring to the table, like if we were to come to that realization?
[00:22:28.232] Brett Leonard: Yeah, no, I think that's exactly correct. The medium itself, you know, this is very much a kind of Marshall McLuhan idea. You know, he actually wrote about this in 1964 in Media Extensions of Man. And you should go back and reread that because it's an amazing treatise on this. And he came from here. So I believe that it is reflecting to us the fact that all of this is a simulation to begin with. And it literally, that is, when I talk about the raison d'etre of this being transformational, that's the transformational moment. Because once that happens, then ego dissolution becomes an entirely other construct. And so setting the context for this is sort of where there's this really amazing thing going on, because I'm going into rooms in Hollywood and talking about VR with studio heads and things like that. Because it's a new medium, they're open to me talking about things like, yeah, in this section, we're going to take people and do a transformational. And they're going to go, oh, that's cool. And I'm like, if I had walked in to say that about a movie concept, they'd kick me out of the room. But in the context of this, so there's a fresh kind of clean slate to this that allows context setting that is really historic and unprecedented. And that's the thing we need to grab the opportunity right now, because there's an opportunity to connect this in a way that brings a lot more people into this entire discussion.
[00:23:47.734] Scott Mason: I just wanted to add to what he said very quickly is that we have to also look at technology for what it is. And so a good thing to point out is that the internet itself, like nature, is the original internet. And that all technology is a simulacrum of nature and of natural things that are going on, like code. We are all code. We are genetic code. So I think it's just good to look at it in that way. I just wanted to add.
[00:24:09.958] Jeffrey Lynn Damon: I think that we need to bring more of this transcendental visionary experience into virtual reality because right now it's mostly corporate guys that are looking to make money and invest and get a return. It's not about that. This is about proactively moving the human civilization forward by bringing visionary experiences to everybody so we can share them and unify and just see that We're all connected in a way that is behind the scenes. We're all one consciousness, but displaced as single nodes, like in a computer system. And when you realize that you all work together like honeybees, the whole computer will run. And it'll go smoothly, and the bugs will work themselves out. And this is what we're doing with virtual reality. We're trying to iron out all of the bad bugs and viruses that are in culture and language today.
[00:25:06.770] Elliot Edge: Preach, preach, preach, preach. I just want to make a quick comment about finding out that you really are an AI. So my background is I do a lot of work with the simulation hypothesis. The guy I work with is a NASA physicist named Tom Campbell, who is also an altered states guy. In fact, he did the original out-of-body research with Bob Monroe down at the Monroe Institute. He was one of the guys who helped pioneer binaural beats as a way of technologically inducing an altered state of consciousness. He did so much altered state of consciousness research without using drugs, but with just using TM. That's transcendental meditation? Yeah, yeah. What's that? Transcendental meditation. It's just mantra meditation. But he ended up having these wild out-of-body journeys. And he has a physics background, like a hardcore physics background. And he's like, oh, it's all virtual reality. So I've got an essay I just put out. You can read it online called, You Already an R in AI, which I encourage you to take a look at. because it's right in this whole area.
[00:26:07.019] Kent Bye: Yeah, in my talk earlier, I was talking a bit about panpsychism and being able to look at how the universe is embedded with meaning and consciousness and mind. And I think to a certain extent, people have a direct experience of the nature of reality by having the ego disillusionment and having this experience of that universal consciousness. And then they come back into their concrete reality or in their challenge with trying to translate that direct phenomenological experience into language and words and then it just is lost and so I don't know if part of what we can expect to happen is that VR creation tools become at such a low level that you know become the equivalent of either having a dream at night or having a psychedelic experience and to be able to then express yourself to be able to have a spatial representation of that and that One of the things that was brought up that I just wanted to point out, which was that to a certain extent, having a psychedelic experience or a shamanic journey or any sort of altered state of consciousness, there's a certain relationship that you have with your own unconscious symbolism of the meanings of the synchronicities that are happening in your life. It's important to note that anybody that is giving you a visual representation of some sort of symbolic experience is going to be the creation of someone else's experience. And that there's a possibility that there could be something in the middle. Whereas you're able to abstract your experience into a symbolic form that the symbols that people can have their own relationship to. So that it's able for you to have your own portal into your own dimensions of your unconscious psyche. So I think that that's a challenge which is that as a virtual reality creator is trying to give somebody else a psychedelic experience. Well there's this process of you reaching into the depth of your psyche to figure out what is actually emerging from your own experience. And how can anybody ever take an AI or mediate that for you? I think that is going to be something that is up to each individual. But as artists within virtual reality, how do you go into these altered states of consciousness, have some sort of noetic experience about the nature of reality, and then translate that into a virtual reality experience that then is able to connect to that universal symbols that allow people portals into these different states of consciousness?
[00:28:08.017] Brett Leonard: A very critical moment we're in here is setting that context, because this conversation and the language we're using, all of this is an extremely small segment of the human population that can actually have this. And I believe in the Bodhisattva concept, which is every blade of grass must wake up and be allowed to. And in that context, story, I come from this as a storyteller, now I call myself a storyworlder because we're building worlds. Every project that I'm doing is embedded within the story a node, or several nodes, of this exact concept of being able to go into transformational states and giving this narrative context to that that allows a larger group to just go there. Because narrative and storytelling allow that openness in a way that, and I've experienced this by making films that are for the mass audience, and it's amazing what comes back. And there's an activation of the hive mind that happens, which is where we need to go. In terms of a cautionary note, though, the very thing that we're talking about, the exact opposite thing can be created with this technology. And that is actually going on right now. So this is a tremendously important moment. It's a pivot point. It's not that these negative aspects are not going to happen. They're going to. But we have to counter that.
[00:29:26.761] Jeffrey Lynn Damon: And this is the second chance for virtual reality. We have to get it right this time.
[00:29:29.822] Brett Leonard: Exactly. Exactly. I mean, and it's this moment of setting that context that all creators that are involved with this need to really be focused on as a platonic responsibility because the opposite stuff that's going on because I've been consulting with some of the people at DARPA and there's a light DARPA and there's a dark DARPA there's very interesting things going on there on both sides of that equation so there are virtual reality torture environments that are already designed and have been created that are more effective than any physical torture that they've ever created so it's These things need to be brought out in a way that sets that context and gets that dialogue going because it can just slip in very easily. The solipsistic aspect of people going into a virtual world. and being disconnected. One of the things that we're very focused on at my company, Studio Lightship, is the idea of group virtual experience, GVX, because the group activation is something that I think needs to be at the forefront of this as opposed to solo activation, because then you get a different kind of mechanism that starts to happen. And I can't say more that this is an amazingly important moment right now.
[00:30:41.203] Jeffrey Lynn Damon: I would just like to comment. I think when we are talking about the psychedelic experience, what we mean is the subjective psychedelic experience. It's hard to talk about the psychedelic experience as a generalized thing because every experience is different. Everybody has different pasts, different futures, so forth and so on. So I'm just going to comment on what you said with the tool making aspect of it. These tools, the primitive versions, are being built today. And I think the answer to your question, like, how will this manifest in the next coming years, I think it's all about bandwidth. The more bandwidth we have, the more information we can get across. And it will be high bandwidth. I predict that by like 2040, we'll have petabyte-type speeds, like, where we'll be able to actually have highly dense VR psychedelic environments, where instead of saying, oh, just download the latest MDMA trip, You could go download my latest MDMA trip and think about how intimate that would be to bring you into my world and show you my values and so forth. So I think the future is subjective and I think we're going to have an exponential amount of choices in front of us. We'll be able to upload and download each other's memories, trips, hallucinations, dreams, and nightmares. And I think the answer to that is bandwidth.
[00:32:01.315] Scott Mason: And I think also what we're going to find when we do start recreating these trips and showing each other these trips, it actually speaks to some stuff that Tina was talking about, is that we're going to find that there is a lot of similarities and that a lot of these subjective experience come from some sort of unconscious archetype. But beyond that, there's like a wholly other that we all tap into. And now we're all going to sort of see that same thing. We're going to see many similarities and mathematical similarities. I mean, everything is language, including mathematics. And that's going to come out, I'm sure.
[00:32:31.688] Audri Phillips: One thing I wanted to talk about a little bit about is like these companies like NVIDIA who've really caught on that you have to be watched and looked at how because you're talking about bandwidth like a company like NVIDIA figured out they've got this chip with GPU on it right and they figured out wow we're doing something wonderful we've got this distributed rendering possibility and they were smart enough to realize wow this is exactly what AI needs and then NVIDIA went and they also started to develop the software for it so a company like NVIDIA without really thinking about the repercussions of what they're doing or anything like that. It's got the software and the hardware working together, just like our human brains work software and hardware. So it's going to be interesting what this all leads to, but you're absolutely right. It is bandwidth. It is the amount of information that can be brought in at one time. The other thing about it, I wanted to say is I'm not at all a religious person, but you can think about something like from this point of view. If we're a creation, then we're a robot, basically, or we're a machine. And so everything is a machine. And I say to people, say you're floating out there in space and some creature or something comes towards you. How do you know what it is? How do you know it's not a robot? How do you know it's also not a machine? And this goes back to that basic, where does the intelligence in the universe start? At what particle level? Where does it start? Where are the decisions being made? And why are forces attracted to each other?
[00:33:56.277] Tina Madry: kind of going back to simulation theory and what Jeffrey said earlier about how we're all kind of nodes of a single computer is like philosophically like when I really really think about what is reality on a philosophical level what we call reality or normal reality or this reality what defines it is just that you have the largest number of people who agree with it. And I think when it comes to electronic virtual reality and not as it exists now but possibly in its more advanced forms where what Brett said here about multiple people rather than just one person experiencing the same electronic virtual reality Like, what would happen if you get 7 billion or however many people plugged into a so-called fake reality? I think that's another thing. We have this idea of a hierarchy of realities that this is the most real one and anything that we create is fake. And I don't think it necessarily has to be that way. I think it's more of a how many people agreeing with it because we're seeing similar enough things. And, you know, what would happen if we create a reality with EVR and the bandwidth issue kind of becomes solved or that hurdle becomes overcome and what if more people plug into a fake reality than this real one? Will that mean that that reality is more real?
[00:35:28.021] Brett Leonard: Yeah, I think that one of the things we should talk about a little bit is this whole question of AI because AI is going to be very critical in the enabling of this medium and there's a tremendous you know, thing we have to overcome in the context of AI, because there's a very negative context to AI that's been given by storytellers that have ever talked about it, including, you know, recently. It's demonized. Yeah. It's demonized. And if you go out in the street and say AI, most people will say Skynet. Right.
[00:35:58.653] Jeffrey Lynn Damon: Because it takes the control away from man.
[00:36:00.915] Brett Leonard: Exactly. Exactly. The bottom line is I think that we need to create the context of AI being, first of all, artificial intelligence is sort of I think a misnomer as a term. It's extended intelligence. It's EI. And the fact is I believe EI can become reflective of the better angels of our nature as opposed to the more primal reptilian brainstem aspects of our nature. And so, that is up to us. It is not coming from somewhere else. It's coming from us. You know, so, and sending that, again, giving a context, storytelling context to that I think is very critical to shift that perception to something that, because we will create, it's going to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we all believe because of the consensus reality you're talking about, That's what's going to happen. The only reason we're sitting on this wooden stage and we're not falling through into the particles is because we have a consensus reality that we believe it's there. And if you talk to particle physicists, they'll tell you there's nothing there.
[00:36:58.870] Jeffrey Lynn Damon: Yeah, quantum physics, if you took the analysis of this stage, it would tell you that it's not inherently real. That's what quantum physics would tell you. If you analyzed this room and this stage deep enough, the physicists, the priests in the white lab coats that we look to for the answers would look down at us from their tower of physics and say, it's not real, folks.
[00:37:24.608] Brett Leonard: One of my favorite pastimes is to go get stoned with particle physicists from the Stanford Linear Accelerator, and it very quickly becomes this discussion. There's nothing there. It's like, what do you mean?
[00:37:41.045] Elliot Edge: By the way, they love psychedelics, usually.
[00:37:43.166] Jeffrey Lynn Damon: I know. They do. Well, what's happening is all of these communities are fusing together. And this is what the singularity is. We're binding closer and closer together. All boundaries are dissolving between every community. And that's why things are inherently seeming to get stranger and stranger. I mean, Donald Trump is the president, folks. There is something weird going on.
[00:38:03.655] Brett Leonard: Yes. And another critical thing is that we can't create this as an elitist reality. There's much about virtual reality that's connected to economic determinism. And we need to stretch this out so that it includes everyone. Because without that, it's another form of fascism.
[00:38:23.259] Scott Mason: It seems that virtual reality is going to show us that mind is primary, in my opinion. And once we start looking deeper into it, it's going to be pretty apparent to us that mind is primary. And I think to kind of further the discussion of where is this taking us, what is reality? and where are we going with all this. I always try to think of what will happen when we do find out mind is primary and what will that mean for us. Will we be able to, Terrence had this idea of transcending life and death through shamanism and he would talk about this a lot and I just, that idea to me is, I think these technologies are going to bring us to that point. They're going to bring us to this understanding that's going to further another understanding and yeah.
[00:39:04.495] Audri Phillips: This is a thought that's been occurring to me for a long time, that science itself is actually the study of how the human brain works. Because all science gets you is an understanding of how we're perceiving things.
[00:39:15.900] Brett Leonard: It's not so true.
[00:39:16.920] Kent Bye: Great. And I'm going to ask one last question, then we'll open it up for people. So I see that the potential for virtual reality is to transform consciousness. And so I imagine in my dream in 2025, 2045, you'll be able to go into a VR experience and then somehow, either through AI, you know, big data, collecting all this information, or through some sort of descending symbolic order through some of these esoteric traditions or other ways of trying to figure out, like, who we are and why we're here, that there's going to be some way of combination of that descending and ascending symbolic logic that we're going to be able to identify the fundamental nature of somebody and then be able to give them a transformative experience on demand. and that we're going to be able to use this technology for each of us to get closer to who we are, why we're here, and to be more connected to ourselves, to each other, and to the planet. And so I want to just sort of go through the line here of what each of you see as sort of like the most exalted potential of the combination of VR psychedelics as a transformative technology.
[00:40:17.293] Tina Madry: The exalted potential. This is one of those situations where spoken word language has limitations. I think really, I think the ultimate potential is that we're all going to understand each other completely and we won't even need to explain ourselves. We will all become our own meaning and Yeah, it's hard to explain any further than that.
[00:40:50.741] Jeffrey Lynn Damon: Well, I mean, we can look to festivals like Burning Man, our own festival, these transformational places where you can see the glimmering light of a new world. There is a new world out there, and it's not mediated by capitalism or 500 years of materialistic science. It's only in the last 500 years that materialism has really become a huge problem for us. People have been talking to the other for far longer than they haven't been.
[00:41:21.497] Brett Leonard: Yes. I'm working with a top researcher in quantum entanglement. And when you start looking at what is being empirically proved around quantum entanglement and connected to these things, there's going to be, I think, an acceleration effect that is beyond what we can actually fully see. There's a horizon factor to this. And when you start to get that group, you know, I mean, there's been many ways it's been talked about in the past, like the hundredth monkey effect, all these things. But the truth is, it's coming at us right now. This is the moment of bringing this, you know, convergence together of all of these aspects. And I think that to your question, you know, this is about us realizing what it actually is to be. Period. Because that's the question. A global organism, a human. And it is a group experience that is also the experience of the one. Of course, there have been many ancient traditions that have done this in many different modalities. My journey on this started because I was hitchhiking across the Southwest and got grabbed by the Pima de Maricosa Indian tribe at a truck stop. Literally. And they came up and said, you have bear medicine. I had no idea what the hell they were talking about. I'm from Toledo, Ohio, right? come and do this ritual with us. And so I went into a peyote ritual with them for the next two days. That literally changed who I am. It literally recreated another version of myself that's now the version that's here on the stage. And it was a complete experience of quantum entanglement. We all in this ritual had the same exact experience. And that was such a mind-blowing thing. It changed everything I was and what I was doing in life. And that I think is what we can bring to people without having to necessarily have them take the actual natural Devic energies that allow that to open up. Those Devic energies can be expressed through this technology in a way that I think is beyond what we right now consider to be possible.
[00:43:19.985] Scott Mason: So, Terence McKenna would use different metaphors for things, and he has this metaphor that he uses for a thing called slime mold. And basically, slime mold is this organism that is spread over a few feet squared of forest floor. They're all over the place, and one single amoeba of this slime mold will send a signal out at some point. It's not fully understood exactly how this works, but they send a signal out that basically says, come to me. And when they do, like all the amoebas from all over the forest floor will aggregate into one spot and literally lift the first ones there into the air. And what I think we're doing right now with consciousness and VR is that if we are able to wake up, as in for us psychonauts, people who are into this, I think it's 100% that we need to stress that it's not for everybody. This is not for everybody, in my opinion. A little bit different, but I don't think it's for everybody, but I think that's not a bad thing. I think that through people like us going into these spaces and maybe being able to recreate that in a VR world, that we're going to literally lift people into the air from our essence in the same way that this does. And I think that's the farthest extent I could see this. By the time I die, I hope I see that as something where people don't have to go through that. I mean, it's painful being a psychonaut sometimes. I'm sure we can all agree that you go into places that are very hard. And I mean, you're basically, you're on the fringe of insanity sometimes. It's really hard to come back.
[00:44:46.549] Jeffrey Lynn Damon: When you come down, you're so happy to be alive. Yes. You have a newfound appreciation of what just happened to you.
[00:44:53.594] Scott Mason: So much. But I don't think that everybody needs to go into that state. I think that people like us and the more people that get into this, our state will affect your state. Our state will affect everybody else. And through VR, that's kind of like a gateway into the minds of these psychonauts. And that's what I would hope to see.
[00:45:09.406] Brett Leonard: I had many conversations with Terrence, who was a good friend of mine. In the hot tub at Esalen, where we often congregated, about exactly this. And he would say, no, the velvet doorway would open, and the elfin beans brought me this idea. And so, literally, he's a front wave of what this exact transformational message is about.
[00:45:42.528] Scott Mason: And I think it's good to state, a lot of the thoughts that all of us are saying here, if you're interested in this stuff, start looking at Terrence McKenna lectures, because what you're saying... These are not new ideas. No, especially what you're saying, it's like literally Terrence's words just reiterated, and he is the driving force behind this ideology, if you want to call it that.
[00:46:03.100] Jeffrey Lynn Damon: And before him, the pathfinder was Timothy Leary.
[00:46:05.802] Brett Leonard: Exactly, who was also a good friend of mine. Because after I made The Lawnmower Man, all these guys literally sought me out. And for me as a kid from Toledo, Ohio, that was really crazy exotic, believe me. It was like suddenly Timothy Leary was at my birthday party speed wrapping in my ear for like an hour about all this stuff, trying to download as much as he could. And then he had his death party. He had a death party for a month that was webcast and many of us were there. These are the founding fathers of our psychedelic nation and really there's a tremendous body of work there to start from as a foundation for all of this.
[00:46:42.606] Elliot Edge: I'll try and keep it brief. First of all, my opinion is psychedelics are like sex. It's unfortunate if you go out your entire life without having it. And as long as you're not a dissociative personality type, or schizotypal, or schizophrenic, I encourage you to, when you walk out this door, to start dialing numbers and looking for tabs, man. But this guy's a researcher, so he's going to say, be careful, be careful, don't listen to that young man.
[00:47:08.451] Scott Mason: Also, that if you guys are interested in this stuff, I'm part of. I'm a leader at the Toronto Psychedelic Society. You can find us on Facebook, and there's always somebody who has what you need in the... Oh, yes, we're on meetup.com. So you can check us out there. We have meetups. I'm planning a picnic, a psychedelic picnic for July, so you guys could all come out.
[00:47:31.597] Elliot Edge: Yeah. But where is this all leading to? What was the point of all this? For me, my opinion is that what you're really looking at is the next episode, folks, like the monkey's over, like the last. Really, the thing is this. I think my big hope for VR is that it's basically going to melt down. materialistic, patriarchal, dominator culture, and it's actually going to, like, queerify everyone. Everyone's going to get way more soft, way more loving, because we were talking about, like, you could do a torture VR. Like, no, no, no, no. A torture VR is not going to fly. And people can only do so much shooting in the first person thing. Eventually, the art's going to take over. The emotion's going to take over. And the human being, as we know it, and as we've known it since I don't know, Western male mind took over the world. That's going to get smoothed out. And we're going to be using VR to communicate more and more ideas, expressions of art, feelings, wants, needs, desires, fears, and hopes. And the monkey's over. It's just over. And the AI is going to show up like, this is it. This is the last gasp. And it's either that the planet's going to go kaput, or everyone's going to get like,
[00:48:47.932] Brett Leonard: The planet's going to be fine.
[00:48:49.233] Elliot Edge: The planet will be fine. The planet will be fine. It's us that may not be here. Yeah, but no, I think VR is going to be used because, like I'm saying, culture is already a virtual reality program. So once we're playing more and more virtual realities, this is what my whole book is about, is that once we play more and more in virtual realities, we're going to realize, This is a virtual reality. It doesn't need to be this way. It's arbitrary. We made it up. A law is a code is a joke. That's it. We can drop them if we want. But all our institutions are fake.
[00:49:28.630] Audri Phillips: A ho. I like that. Thank you. Thank you. The other thing we've all been talking about is this realization that we're all one. We're all individual repeating units that all are joined into being one. And within that framework, you wonder, OK, what is the value of me as a repeating unit, my individuality? How does that fit in to this all being one? And I hear about things like chips being put into my head so that I'm going to automatically connect with everything else that's going on and have all the thoughts of the universe there, et cetera. And then I wonder, how am I going to know who I am at that point? Or does it matter if I know who I am? when I've got all these thoughts from the whole world coming into my head at one time? Will that negate any value as a repeating individual unit that I might be contributing to this whole? Why are we set up as repeating individual units? Why do we have this individuality? I'm going to say something a little even wackier. I once had a vision where I was a little light, and I was surrounded by other lights, and I was feeling incredibly loved being this little light. And then in the midst of that, it occurred to me that I could be a little light with my own, giving out my light, and yet I was also contributing to all the light together. So.
[00:50:51.245] Brett Leonard: The truth is in the paradox.
[00:50:52.946] Kent Bye: So I'm going to open it up to questions and come around. And I'm going to ask the panelists to maybe answer popcorn style. So whoever feels like they have the most sort of pregnant response so that we can get through a number of different questions. So I'll go back here.
[00:51:07.549] Questioner 1 : Thanks so much. So the biggest sort of massive red light bulb that keeps going up over my head. You can't see me, but I'm brown. I'm Filipino. And there's a lot of people who are starving in the world. And there's a lot of people who are, you know, not part of this one vision that you guys have, simply because the material world is very real to them. You know, whether that's because they can feel their hunger, or whether that's because they can feel the pain when they're physically assaulted, and that's because they can feel the pain in their feet because they don't have shoes and they have to find a home, and they're cold and they're, you know, they're dehydrated. How do you guys respond to that?
[00:51:53.396] Jeffrey Lynn Damon: Can I say something? Well, in North America, we live in a well-defended pleasure dome. And I think it's up to us, the people of the material top 10% of the entire planet, it's up to us to utilize the best technologies we can so we can reach out and help these people. The mushroom said to me once, the planet will be fine. It's you that has to adapt. I've been here for 18 million years. And you know, culture is, it's severely severed our connection to this planet.
[00:52:27.755] Elliot Edge: And to others.
[00:52:28.635] Jeffrey Lynn Damon: And maybe these people that you're talking about in the Philippines that are closer to nature, they face different struggles than we face. And it's unfortunate that that has to happen. But it's up to us, the people in this part of the world, to reach out and use all of these technologies in the best way we can, so we can empathically understand each other, so we don't do the things that we are doing to each other. Terrence McKenna once said, if we could feel what we are doing, we would stop doing it. But we can't. We live in abstraction, isolation, and reinforced culturally linguistic values that are taking your attention and putting them towards Hollywood or the superstore.
[00:53:15.137] Questioner 1 : So just to, can I make one more comment? So I think one of the things that could be a response to my question is, and you sort of alluded to it, which is, and I'll explain it by virtue of talking about a virtual experience we just recently created. So we produced a piece called Small Wonders, and it's essentially a VR experience that took 15th century Gothic objects made out of boxwood that fit into the palm of your hand. Inside these Gothic boxwood beads, when you open them, are Christian dioramas, okay, that are the size of pinheads. And artists and conservators for years didn't know how this master person made these boxwood pieces. And it wasn't until you could micro CT scan them and then create life-size overscaled VR experiences could people go inside these beads and see these pinhead figures of the, you know, the assumption of the Virgin Mary and purgatory emerge. And what happened was a meditative experience for audiences when we showed it at the Met Cloisters and stuff. And people were having transcendental experiences with this because they couldn't believe that someone was blessed by the divine hand somehow to have made such intricate, tiny, tiny, tiny, impactful stories, okay, in this bead. And so my question for you is, is there a role for the material world to show itself up in VR so that you don't just privilege the sort of conceptual trips that you have, but can somehow also show in VR the intricacy and the kind of transcendental nature of the material world itself?
[00:55:05.840] Brett Leonard: Absolutely.
[00:55:07.321] Elliot Edge: I would say yes. There's there's two quick comments I want to say. Media will never be food. That's for sure. So we're talking about starving people. Media is not food. That's the end of that. A friend of mine who I met at the local bar one day turned out we were going to be best friends. She did a VR a couple of years ago. You may have heard of it where it's a bunch of people on a life raft who are refugees trying to get into another country. They can see the shoreline coming. A boat comes up to meet them, and they're like, yay, yay, Coast Guard, Coast Guard, help us. Coast Guard gets up to the raft. takes out a big knife and starts stabbing the raft and they all start drowning in it, right? It was a very freaky VR. People walked away with a totally different attitude about the immigrant crisis right there. So no, it's not food, but in terms of getting people to think and experience what these kind of hardships might be, I would say there is value there, yeah. And is there a role for the material world? I mean, I'm not losing a body anytime soon. This thing's sticking around.
[00:56:11.750] Brett Leonard: But you're right. We have to design a connection to the physical world within the context of virtual experience. And that's when I was talking about GVX group virtual experience. It really is a physical experience connected to a transcendental experience. And without that, I think VR is extremely dangerous. Matter of fact, that's what I made movies about, the danger. I mean, the irony of my life is I literally told cautionary tales about virtual reality helped you know, sort of get it, a glamorous aspect around it for some people. But that's not what I would, you know, beware of telling cautionary tales. That's what I'm saying. Because you sort of, you know, popularize the very thing that you're warning about. But that, I could not agree with you more, that that has to be at the core conception and design right from the beginning, what you're talking about.
[00:57:01.906] Kent Bye: And I think we have time for maybe one last quick question and then we have to end. Does anybody really, okay, we have one back here, I saw a hand, and then we'll wrap up.
[00:57:13.209] Questioner 2: I'm just wondering about maintaining the importance of the human connection in shamanic experiences. And I believe that interpersonal connection is kind of fundamental to that. So how do you imagine or envision maintaining that in a virtual experience?
[00:57:34.208] Scott Mason: I think that our human ideal is a little bit bigger than We look at ourselves as much more important than our identity as much more important than it is. And I think we're going to realize that through these group experiences that we're going to be, we are one. We are a whole one. And that it's going to demystify this human experience to the point that we're going to somehow transcend into a higher form of understanding. And I think that you're right, that there is a need for human connection. But I think when we truly connect, that that's going to go out the window. I think we are, when we're truly that one.
[00:58:17.188] Brett Leonard: Well, the joy and ecstasy that happens when you actually have that connection through whatever modality is so potent, it changes you forever and you evolve. And so that evolvement of the group mind, of the group experience, really is at the core of this. If it's not, it's the opposite. And so that's why I think this is a pivot point we're in right now. And we need to talk more about the potential negative aspects of this and make sure that we're designing into this from the beginning something that is inherently connective.
[00:58:46.775] Scott Mason: Yeah, and this is it's also good to remember that this whole everything that we're going through is a process and the obvious no way backness of our situation reveals that this is some sort of process moving towards some sort of And that's also, I was going to say too, that's a term that was coined by Alfred North Whitehead. If you have the time to reprocess, in reality, it's a magical book. But I think that we need to remember that, is that everything that we're doing, including going into the bad realms and the good ones, there needs to be this duality for us to move forward. And we need to all work together. We need to know the extent of our disgusting humanness, as well as our loving, compassion, and all.
[00:59:29.378] Brett Leonard: That's the shamanistic I mean, you have to go, you know, you're taken by the shaman into the darkness to move through it into the light. I mean, that is at the core of shamanistic process throughout all cultures. And if, you know, one of the things I'm looking at is creating, I've been using tribal ritual structure in the context of designing virtual world design. And the anthropologic scholarship on this is immense. And it's an incredible corpus of knowledge to use. Instead of three-act structure of drama and things that people are tending to go to, which is really not endemic or organic to this medium, the ritual structure actually is. Because it is about leaving reality, going into a liminal state, and then integrating what happens in that liminal state back into reality. And it's a huge rabbit hole to go down. But it's really informing everything I'm doing.
[01:00:26.270] Audri Phillips: You know, this is a little strange, it's just a thought that's occurring to me, is that this can easily be used to exploit people. Down through the ages, people have started cults, religions, where they say we're all one, we all act as one, and then people are exploited.
[01:00:43.561] Kent Bye: With that, I just want to thank everybody for joining here today and for exploring this, so thank you. So that was Tina Madry, Brent Leonard, Scott Mason, Elliot Edge, Audrey Phillips, and Jeffrey Lynn Damon all talking about their psychedelic explorations with virtual reality. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, well, there's a lot that's in this discussion that happened here. In fact, as a moderator of a panel, this is kind of like the best case scenario, which is that you ask a few questions and it kind of takes a life of its own. It was really interesting to hear the different threads and themes that were coming up and I think one thing that I have is the ability of virtual reality as a new communications medium that's going to allow us to potentially communicate different aspects of our inner noetic phenomenological experiences that we're never able to really fully communicate with somebody before. So I see this possibility for VR as a medium to be this phenomenological experience, to be able to transmit different dimensions of active presence and emotional presence and mental and social presence and embodied presence. There's different ways to tell stories that cultivate these different feelings and experiences. And I've had a number of different psychedelic experiences, nothing that is extremely visual. It's been mostly sort of body oriented. And so I haven't had the direct experience of knowing what it feels like to have my consciousness blasted out into another dimension. But a lot of the people that we're talking to here, these psychonauts have that experience. And I think that there's a through line that happens with the types of things that happen within virtual reality experiences that also kind of blast your consciousness out into different dimensions. And the way that Ken Loeber talks about it, he says that there's a certain amount of our witnessing consciousness that is able to have this experience. And so that one thing that you're going to be able to train yourself to do as you go and have many more different types of VR experiences is that you're going to be able to identify the thing is similar between when you're in a virtual reality environment and what's similar when you're in a real reality environment? And what are the things that can only happen when you're interfacing with something that hasn't been mediated by a computer or another human consciousness, but that you're directly interfacing with reality in a certain way? So I think the same thing with the psychedelic experience is that as you have these psychedelic experiences, it ends up being like this inner depth psychological experience where the content of that comes from your own life experience. It comes some sort of like symbolic representation of your own experiences and whatever is happening with you right now. And that's going to be much more difficult for you to get that from just a virtual reality technology. But it is possible to start to communicate and translate some of these experiences into a phenomenological virtual reality experience. And what does that mean to be able to step into somebody else's experience, whether it's a dream, whether it's a psychedelic experience, whether it's just some aspect that you've experienced in your life that you have No other way to communicate about other than to create an entire context that has a series of different events And it's almost like this mythological translation of your life into a story, but it's more than just the story It's the whole environment all dimensions of the experience that you can start to communicate with and and what does that mean? it's like this new higher bandwidth way of communicating and And we can look to these different psychonaut traditions like Timothy Leary and Terence McKenna, who both got very excited about the potential of virtual reality because I think they saw that this was a reflection of the technology being able to actually transmit some of this phenomenological experience of these psychedelic experiences. but to not have to do it in a way that is potentially coming with all the risks and side effects with some of these psychedelic drugs. I think there was overall a general theme of people wanting to give other people the experience of having their consciousness blasted open into having these transcendent experiences, but I would caution people just to say that, you know, not everybody's necessarily going to be ready to be able to do that, and we shouldn't force it upon people. People should seek those experiences out when they want to have them. And check out a book like Michael Pollan's How to Change Your Mind. I think it sort of dives into a lot of the neuroscience and the sort of other deeper ethical issues around that. But there is this sort of sense that when you have these psychedelic experiences, you have this transformative experience. And when people have their consciousness transformed, they see that there's all these deeper benefits where they get to tap into these deeper depths of their being and they feel more connected and related to other people and to the earth. And I think that they just want to break people out of this stasis, which maybe we're in the middle of right now of just kind of like this culture of fear that's really been generated in all these different dimensions in this dissociation and disconnection, both from each other, but also from our own deeper meaning. I think that the psychedelic experience as well as the virtual reality has the potential in the future to go towards this depth psychological perspective of getting people to be able to get really tuned into the depths of their own meaning of who they are and why are they here. And that's the deepest gift that you can give to anybody is to find this deep purpose, to find that you have a gift to give to this world and to get in tune to that gift and to get into these deeper flow states that you can actually do things that you love to do and to actually sustain yourself to be able to do that. And I think that people who have these psychedelic experiences tend to go through this shift where they maybe are going from a more egocentric and ethnocentric perspective, and maybe they're getting into more of a world-centric and seeing how we can actually sort of cooperate connect to each other, because there's something about the psychedelic experience or the phenomenological experiences you get from VR, which is kind of like these universal experiences that are able to connect us together rather than to separate us based upon these different worldviews or beliefs. So I do see that there's going to be more and more tools. It's going to be easier and easier for people to just go into VR and start to express themselves as you have like entities like Polly from Google or Sketchfab. I know Torch app just came out, which is just an application that does a lot of these integrations from these different third party repositories of 3D models. So it's going to like the barrier for for just going into either your iPad or going into a virtual reality experiences or using augmented reality to be able to start to take in these 3D objects and just spatially place them in different areas. The spatial computing process of being able to take what is inside of your head and to be able to create an experience around that, it's going to get just easier and easier and easier. All the tools are getting better with that. I know that Sony is coming out with Dreams. There could be a PSVR component to that. But just imagine like having a dream being able to wake up and to basically translate your dream into an image, into an immersive experience and be able to share that with people. What would it mean for you to share your dreams in a spatial way with other people? Not just like your dreams of what you want to create, but your actual, the mysterious components of what happens in your dreams at night and there could be aspects of messages that need help to be unlocked by other people. And so I've done a number of different dream cabin experiences at various different retreats where in the morning we get together with like 15 or 20 people and we would talk about dreams and we would start to interpret those dreams. And it really takes this process of you sharing the dream, there's a certain meaning that you have with that dream, There's a certain meaning of some of those symbols of what they mean from the deeper archetypal mythological lineage of what those might mean. But then there's this dialectic and process of asking questions about different things that may have been striking to you as you're listening to the dream. And then that may further the conversation, but that through this process of groups talking about their dreams, you're able to actually kind of unlock different dimensions of your psyche. And this is the basic core of what Freud and Jung found with the interpretation of dreams, both through this psychoanalytical depth psychological processes. And I feel like that within virtual reality, we're going to start to be able to do that at scale, but also just start to share our dreams in that way. It's going to be easier for us to become artists and to be able to spatially communicate with these different technologies. And I think that as people go and have these different psychedelic experiences, are we going to be able to transmit the deeper insights and the experiences to be able to maybe through an artistic lens, translate some of these experiences, even if language starts to fail, what is able to be able to be captured within even communicating something like that. So I think there's a huge potential there. And, you know, I think this conversation generally, when you look at sort of the dialectic between Plato and Aristotle, Aristotle has a much more pragmatic sort of, the only thing that's real is looking at things from a reductive materialistic perspective and can be verified by science. I would just say that this conversation was very platonic, very ideal forms, kind of really blasting out. And I was glad that somebody asked about, you know, what about reality? How can we actually connect this to our bodies and what is happening right now in reality, because there's a lot of reality that's happening right now. And so what I would say is that we shouldn't just completely rip out these dimensions of material reductive science and everything else. I think that is absolutely crucial as a cornerstone of our entire civilization, and that we need to transcend the limitations of that and start to include the potentials of these other dimensions of things that come from this mythopoetic, spiritual, transcendent experiences that come from either psychedelics or come from your experiences of virtual reality. they're much more of the story and the narratives and there's something that can't be falsified because they have to do with your own direct phenomenological experience. It's like your experience is real. And so how do you integrate your direct experience with the concrete reality? And I think that's the other dynamic that was being discussed here is like, what does it mean to be able to start to create all these fake reality experiences? And how do you actually have a cohesion as a society? And I think the answer is that you need to have like a common baseline of some axiomatic assumptions of what is absolutely agreed upon but then there's these different dimensions of the more of a postmodern take of your own direct experiences and how do you sort of relate those different things and I think one of the things that I see is happening is that there's people like in the intellectual dark web who will have a little bit more extended sense-making processes where they're talking about the news but they're having a narrative on top of it but they're able to have the full context and a dialectic in a conversation this conversation between Joyner Peterson and Sam Harris, as much as I have very specific disagreements with each of those people, they were kind of representing archetypally the battle between the Aristotelian science with Sam Harris and the more mythopoetic dimensions of the archetypal dimensions of reality with Carl Jung and the depth psychological perspectives that are kind of seen through the lens of science that Jordan Peterson brings, and they're really having this dialectic. And I think that is, in some ways, a symbolic representation of what we need to do as a society, is to be able to find what our common ground is, but to be engaging in these dialectics that allow us to have a common ground where we're able to have these disagreements, but to actually talk about them. Because you can't just transform someone's consciousness by importing a new concepts of reality or worldview onto them. They have to have their own direct experiences with that. And so they have to have these opportunities to kind of stress test their own ideas, but also have their own direct experiences that are able to allow them to encompass these other perspectives and worldviews. And that's sort of the aspect of the dialectic of having these two different logics come together and find ways that you can both receive the insights of that, but also stand firm with what you believe and kind of share the different differences that you have. through that dialectic, it's a listening and a giving and receiving and not being so fixed into a set ideology of saying, this is the fixed nature of what I see the nature of reality is. So I think this obviously goes through a lot more in terms of how this actually plays out in our society, but that at the core, it's finding common ground with each other, being able to engage in open conversation and dialectic and to be able to have these different types of conversations. And so I think that this conversation with the psychedelics is actually, you know, kind of having people open up their minds, but there also has to transcend and include, and not to completely exclude all these different dimensions of our structures of society, and to see that they actually have this huge benefit. And so to find this balance between the objective and the subjective, the phenomenological with the things that we can agree upon as a consensus reality, and the sort of more Aristotelian parts and the platonic parts. So that's all I have for today. And I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. This is episode number 700. So for however long that you've been listening, this is a great sort of milestone. I've got another couple hundred interviews I've already recorded over the last four and a half years. And if you'd like to help celebrate for the Voices of VR and to just help continue this type of coverage, please do consider becoming a member to the Patreon. This is a listeners-supported podcast, and so I do rely upon your donations in order to continue to bring you this type of coverage. So, you can go to patreon.com slash Voices of VR and donate today. Thanks for listening.
