Torkom Ji tells the story of how he used Resident Evil 7 VR as a form of fear resistance training, and transformational shadow work to overcome his fears. He’s also a co-founder of Visual Reality, which is bringing psychedelic culture and visionary art into virtual reality. He’s a sound healer & music producer who has been performing his Quantum Harmonics for the last couple of years in the Visual Reality section of VRLA, and he tells me about the process of cultivating ambient soundscapes that explore aspects of time, and how cycles of nature can be experienced through the polarities of expansion/compression, rise/fall, and a tonal field of basic harmonics in the overtone series. I found this to be a fascinating exploration of remediating fear through virtual simulations of the horror genre, how psychedelic culture is blurring the boundaries of reality, and the trends of spatial audio and ambient soundscapes that are able to create contextual layers of augmentation.
LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE OF THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
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 for the past couple of years of VRLA, there's been this section in the corner called visual reality that has all these people from different aspects of psychedelic and festival culture bringing all these consciousness hacking and transformative technology ideas into virtual reality. And one of the people that has been performing for the last couple of years is Torkum G. He's a sound healer, an electronic music producer, and one of the co-founders of Visual Reality. And so he's creating these ambient and therapeutic soundscapes. When you think about music, usually you think about the rhythm and the music and the melody, and this is a little bit different. This is a little bit more of a Yen dimension of rather than trying to tell a musical story, it's more of trying to give you a direct embodied experience of the music by playing with these different polarity points. The other thing about Torkham G is that after the VRLA last year, he started telling me about this whole transformative experience he had with Resident Evil VR, where he took this VR horror experience as a form of fear-resistant training and to face his shadow and to be able to overcome these fears that he had about some of these things that he was facing within these experiences. He really turned it into this transformative experience and I didn't have time to talk to him about it at the time at VRLA, but I ran into him at South by Southwest where we were at the XR house party that was a part of the Kaleidoscope house that had like 20 people staying at the house. It was this epic house where they had parties both on Monday and Tuesday nights. At South by Southwest, there was a lot of other big announcements that came around audio and spatialized audio with the Bose AR glasses. And so thinking about what does this layer of audio augmentation mean and what can you start to do with it? And I think Torcum G is really thinking about it from this psychedelic culture transformative experiences perspective. And yeah, it was just kind of a fascinating conversation to have here at one of these VR parties with all of this energy and excitement that's happening within the XR community. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Torkom G happened on Monday, March 11th, 2019 at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:30.088] Torkom Ji: Hello, my name is Torkom G and I'm a sound healer and electronic music producer from Los Angeles. Some of my recent projects include Visual Reality, which is an interactive VR, AR type of mixed reality, therapeutic-based event production company in LA. I also share my work, which is ambient and therapeutic soundscapes that I develop. I also work with Subpac. Yeah, kind of my interests are a little bit all over those different intersections between wellness, technology, and psychedelic immersive culture.
[00:03:03.153] Kent Bye: Yeah, last two years at VRLA in 2017 and 2018, there's been a whole, like, what's the group called that has a little corner that has all these people that are looking at transcendent technology or, you know, consciousness hacking? Like, what's that area called?
[00:03:17.717] Torkom Ji: You mean the one at VRLA? Yeah, so the last couple years it was me and my collective Visual Reality. So we started in October of 2016 and we did the VRLA of 2017 and 2018. And our whole idea there was to provide this playground of explorative and therapeutic consciousness-based experiences ranging from sound frequencies to VR to performances, immersive art. And we really got a lot of good reception from it. That's where we got to connect with you. And so, yeah.
[00:03:50.934] Kent Bye: Yeah, for the last couple of years, I remember that you were kind of sitting down with doing some live turning of knobs and music that's ambient, but also immersive in the sense that there's sub-pack, but kind of like a rolling meditative space where people could come in and chill out and listen to your sound healing performance. What was all the things that you were doing in those performances? Like, what were all the things that you were pulling together there?
[00:04:13.623] Torkom Ji: So I call it Quantum Harmonics. It's actually turned seven this year in January and that's what I'm going to be sharing here at South by this year. It's my, let's call it my martial arts of the healing world of the healing arts. It's iterative. It's been building and building and it constantly teaches me new ways to innovate the experience, but it's always done live in real time. I play with synthesizers and as a meditator, it's really about me accessing a deep meditative space within myself. and then allowing that stillness to be kind of the input that dictates where and how the sounds, the harmonics are layered in real time with people as they absorb and permeate. It's really palatable to me. I can feel the energy in the room as through the duration of the hour, it gets lighter and transforms and changes. So I'm really responding in real time with basically my hands on knobs, turning dials. But it's meant to be very atmospheric, therapeutic, very tidal, like the waves washing in, washing out. And one main thing about it is that I really like to explore universal principles that are very basic. expansion, compression, things that rise and fall. There's stories and narratives that are found across nature and found within cycles. So in some sense it's an exploration of time, cycles, harmonics, and my own perception of how those things could become an audible art form that also could take people on a journey inside themselves.
[00:05:41.962] Kent Bye: I've done a bit of exploration on paranormal beats like from Holosync and Hemisync where they do this thing where they put one frequency in one ear and another frequency in the other ear and your brain can actually determine the difference in the delta at a frequency that's lower than you can actually hear but it actually does this like brain entrainment. Are you trying to entrain brains in any specific way?
[00:06:02.887] Torkom Ji: That's a really, really good question. One thing about quantum harmonics, there's actually like five steps that you have to take in order to end up with a certain type of, I call it like a sonic feel. It's the palette that I use to produce all my sounds. And if any one of those parameters is off slightly, then it kind of disrupts the mechanism behind how the sounds flow. So within those confines, those rules, I'm able to break out and explore things. To answer your question, no, I don't use any entrainment. And I don't specifically because I very easily could add that element. But for one thing is I perform in rooms and entrainment really works good with headphones. Because as you mentioned, there's two oscillating frequencies at different rates and the brain calculates the difference and makes an adjustment. from its active state of 12 or 13 cycles, either up or down, closer to delta or up to alpha. So, with that said, I don't use entrainment also because my approach is to allow for the body's own tendency to find stillness, to take place without a desired effect, which is leading to a desired outcome in the sense of binaural or isochronic tones which by the way on YouTube most of the time are just BS like they just throw some numbers and throw a Bob Marley track but it's really not what they claim so I wouldn't trust YouTube 95% of the time for this type of material but stuff from like the Monroe Institute is very very much backed and as the origins of this work is very powerful. I use it specifically for desired effect if I want to achieve activity for doing work, then I will put that on for that duration of time. If I want to experience Delta brainwaves easily, I'll do that as well. But for quantum harmonics, my approach is actually just to create a tonal field of sounds that explores the basic harmonics within the Overtone series, as well as kind of like incorporating a little bit of musicality, melodies, arpeggios, but keeping it very droney and basic as well. And I find that that intersection allows the mind to go between these states of expanded creativity and musical enjoyment into deep spaces of droney stillness. And in some sense it's that push and pull that creates this laffy taffy effect of rising sounds and falling sounds and sustains. that actually, through the work, I believe, lead people to a very, very natural and organic stillness within themselves without the use of an external or additional need for binaural entrainment to get them to a desired effect.
[00:08:35.750] Kent Bye: Yeah, so it seems like that when you're working with this type of thing, like I've done a lot of things from Holosync and Hemisync, mostly from the Monroe Institute with the Hemisync, different audio things I've listened to. So I feel like over time, my brain in some ways builds up a certain level of capacity or ability to sort of get into that flow state of entrainment. or just through meditation or other contemplative practices. I think there's a bit of like training your brain to get to that point. And it sounds like you've been experimenting with this stuff for a long, long time, which means that you have your own certain amount of capacity. So how do you translate your performance for where you're at as this deep expert in this explorations of these neural pathways in your brain? And how do you translate that to somebody who's just coming in and maybe not had any of this experience ever before?
[00:09:18.211] Torkom Ji: So I get asked all the time if I could actually teach people. I do about 8 to 10 events a month around LA alongside the visual reality events where I also share my work. But throughout all of those different events, I constantly get people who are really, really blown away by the way that the sound could make them feel inside themselves. And they're always asking me. And the thing is, on some level, I'm always confronted with this question of, how would I even teach this? And a large part of it is that I feel like I can't in the way that I do it. I've just had to come to the terms that I just can't, because there's so much going on. It's kind of like asking modern day AI to do human stuff, when it's like, I just can't do that yet.
[00:09:56.889] Kent Bye: It's like sub-symbolic, you don't even understand it yourself, so how do you explain it or put words to it?
[00:10:01.652] Torkom Ji: It's like, so much of it is exactly symbolic, and there's stories and narratives that, through my own meditations and accessing those spaces of, which by the way, I was a meditator for two years before I even developed this, which means As it was created, I was already deeply entrenched in accessing deeper and deeper spaces of consciousness within myself. And that's what animated the first iterations of this system. But by now, by really refining it, as I said regularly for the last seven years, it's at a point where if I was to teach someone, I would have to break it down into a system of a very, almost like I said, a martial art earlier. I would have to teach them the stances and the basic strikes and all the very, very basic motions and mechanics in order for them to start to piece together their own fighting style. And that's one thing I would be interested in doing, is having almost an academy of students who understand that it's more than just playing ambient music, it's almost a way of life, because you're dealing with a sense that is so profound and so ancient in its origins across myth the power of sound, you can never turn your ears off, you can close your eyes when you sleep, you stop tasting and smelling but your ears hear everything all the time until they don't anymore. So with that said, it's really the one sense that is always on and is always taking in and it turns out is more prolific and around us and a part of our day-to-day than we could ever assume. My interest would be in really cultivating a space in which people understand and have a regard for the sound and the effect of the sound, especially in the field of wellness and meditation and allowing people to have easy access to these spaces. So that's something that I do have a desire to one day do. In the meantime, I'm just paving the way and creating the system out and finding ways to just keep spreading the work as a one-man team for now and then eventually looking at ways to make it something maybe more.
[00:11:59.496] Kent Bye: We also mentioned the psychedelic culture. Can you talk a bit about how you see that the psychedelic culture and the virtual reality are kind of fusing together or informing each other in different ways?
[00:12:10.891] Torkom Ji: That's a great question. Yes. So, psychedelics have this ability to dissolve the boundaries between things. Both visually, when you're looking at patterns, you start to see one fluid animation as opposed to all the parts. Unless you focus on the parts, then you can, you know, we all know how that goes. In essence, all the boundaries between light and people and shapes and silhouettes can become blurred. And it's the same with the internal process as well, because you can create your own reality on psychedelics and all of a sudden experience it and go down this rabbit hole and snap out and be like, wow, that's not actually the real reality I'm feeling anymore. version of reality so it can get blurry and and I think that blurriness serves an experience like VR very well because when you put on a VR headset and You're stone-cold sober. Let's just say like you've never done it ever before and you're dipping into the cold water for the first time It's a bit jarring. It's kind of bright. It's right against your eyes and I maybe get that dizzy feeling maybe the refresh rate is like 57 Hertz and not quite that 60 so You know, kind of picking up, although with VR, I'm sorry, it's 90, I should say. But with that said, you know, maybe there's a little jitter and you're kind of like, eh. But the thing about psychedelics is that it makes things blurry. And in my experience, the one experience I have had where I did converge upon psychedelics in VR, I have to say, I mean, I tried a few different experiences. I couldn't really stay there longer than 30, 40 minutes because I just wanted to go do something else. But the time I was in there was absolutely incredible and blew my mind. And it kind of made me say to myself something like, this is the only way this should be done. And why did I make that statement? Because I was profoundly affected by the way that I became actualized in the given space I was in. And that my perceptions were so blurred that I really felt a part of that world to a degree that I hadn't in my 80 plus hours prior.
[00:14:07.868] Kent Bye: Yeah, it's interesting because I've talked to a number of people who have had these different psychedelic experiences and that often I hear that interacting with nature is actually in some ways a virtual reality within its own when you're on psychedelics versus when you're in a simulated reality or constructed reality, there's a bit of Limitations of it's actually in some ways a projection of someone else's consciousness rather than what is actually emerging and that's a little bit more Control, but I guess there seems to be something about the synthetic virtual experience and the difference of the natural experience I'm just curious how you sort of think about that
[00:14:39.431] Torkom Ji: I mean, the thing is, I believe there's a very clear distinction between the internal and external process. And at the same time, I think there's the same distinction between how we use our psychedelics. There's some people I hear who go, yeah, I just don't take psychedelics like that. I don't go to a festival and do it. Well, that's fine, but that also sounds like a judgment on those who do. And then we have to ask, why do those who choose to go willingly into a crowd of people at a festival take psychedelics? Are they less spiritual? Is it less medicinal for them? Is it less connected to some type of ancient tradition? First off, my first question around that would be, who are we to judge how ancients took psychedelics in social atmospheres? is one question, because we don't fully have that answered, other than knowing that it was taken in sacrament and in a very spiritual context, but I'm assuming as alcohol and any other substance, there's also a social dynamic as well to a lot of these things.
[00:15:30.982] Kent Bye: Yeah, we don't have a lot of information of what was actually happening with the Eleusin Mysteries.
[00:15:35.348] Torkom Ji: So to add to that would be that sure I say honor both honor taking psychedelics in an environment with wilderness in a dark room and just on your own if that's what you seek just like going inward, you know and then crashing on a bed or being outside by a tree and experiencing nature or oneness I say do that cultivate that and And at the same time, maybe there's room to explore, if you're comfortable, what even microdosing could be like and stepping into an environment where there's interaction, there's world building, there's storytelling with other humans in a fun way that shows you that there's hope in the world. There's this optimism, a childlike wonder. And that's the one thing I always get from my experiences that are externalized like that. I always connect with random people and have these fun games that pop up out of nowhere. So let's scale that up a bit, like 20 years from now. What's a cool thing to do that is also good for you? Probably going to the local VR arcade, or AR or XR zone, where you crunch crazy, gamified, cooperative, RTS-type worlds with 100 different colleagues of yours, friends, neighbors. and it's interactive and real and it takes you away, but what are you doing? You're learning chemistry, learning physics. There's actually this gamification and cooperation around how a cooperative and interactive and immersive medium like that could serve to bring education out of things like schools and into a day-to-day norm of how we interact. with things like games, with our media, our technology, and specific areas that serve as almost like you'd see in Star Wars or Star Trek. What are the kids doing in school? They're playing with these crazy holograms and holographs of information and they're like swapping light information and downloads and interacting with orbs on their head and VR headsets. And there's always this idealized version of how people are going to learn and master their skills in the future. So what's the difference between exploring psychedelics and opening the mind and activating the neurons and doing something like building out a world that has a deeper implication like a sacred chapel online that people can explore and have meaning behind? as an art piece, right? That many people work together and are inspired and maybe there's psychedelics behind that but what's the difference between that and in 20 years when there's like enhancements, brain enhancements? So we optimize our creativity and our brain power so we can actually create great masterful works of art and technologies that even a decade or two decades ago would seem impossible when we start using cybernetic implants. So the way I see it is We want to boost ourselves. Clearly there's something going on where we want to boost and enhance our human perceptions and our ability to transcend our day-to-day fixed emotional capacities related to our workflow and our mundane, let's call it repetitive life. And there's something in us that's compelling us to break free, and psychedelics happen to be a really easy access way. While technology is also a vehicle for transporting you to another world and environment where, contextually, the marriage of those two could, I think, potentially serve in many, many ways. But one main way could be to help with the current depression and a lot of mental issues that are taking place in our society right now by not even psychedelics related but just in general creating an environment that's cooperative and co-creative and fun and engaging in which we see the psychedelic festivals teaching us to be like. And I think the digital world could gain and will naturally step into this area more and more kind of like the wave or the oasis as that idea and concept becomes actualized. then yeah, I think psychedelics will make that a very trippy place to be. Absolutely.
[00:19:27.747] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think another overlap between the psychedelic culture and where I think in the future where VR is going to be going and what Brent Leonard also says is that when you look at ayahuasca ceremonies where they have like these rituals and these gatherings that I think are getting back to these indigenous practices of gathering in circles and having a leader that's helping guide people through this very specific process and singing and all this stuff that comes from a long lineage of ancient cultures and that In VR, I think, in the future, like Brent Leonard says, that there's a lot of that indigenous culture and that ritual practices that are going to fit very well within virtual reality. And that as you do these different sound healing ceremonies, it's in some ways a bit of a ritual, and you're trying to guide people on this journey. And so I'm just curious how you see this overlap between the psychedelic culture with the ritual and these immersive technologies.
[00:20:19.398] Torkom Ji: Yeah, so we keep mentioning VR, but quite frankly, as I alluded to earlier, I couldn't be in my headset for more than 30 or 40 minutes before I just had a natural inclination to take it off. I'm assuming most people tuning in would probably relate or be like, yeah, I mean, me too. And if you're not, hey, if you're the kind of person who's going to trip for like five hours with your headset on, cool. But I'm not particularly seeing a future even like 10 or 15 years from now where like that's going to be a thing. But I am seeing a future where it's very, very similar to our current day festival culture where psychedelics are widely used. And as the sun goes down, the lights turn on and all the hooligans and wizards and priestesses come out and all the all the jesters and maniacs everyone's let loose and it's on some level really fun to just walk around and be a part of a nighttime festival culture especially one with all the lights and stages and environments and interactive art because there is a definite experience taking place there absolutely but with that said what I think is it's going to be more of an AR type situation if anything where we're just going to scale that existing model and it's going to be a lot more augmented and it's going to just bring a little bit more of a digitalization into the scene in the sense that we won't necessarily have a thing that we'll want to rip off. it'll only enhance the experience in a subtle and sophisticated sleek way that we might rather be fond of and find actually comfortable and able to work with while leveraging and boosting the baseline experience without that technology. So I think something like that is a reasonable place to start and then from there to get into spiritual gatherings where people who are in that space can interact. Then I think it's always going to come down to more than anything a real physical interaction. And that's why we need to emphasize locality and neighborhoods and community. Because we're becoming more and more city dwellers and what we're seeing is the dystopian potential of a future where we're all living in that like very verticalized LED city. Although it's yeah, it's kind of cool from a sci-fi standpoint. I mean try living there for a few weeks. People who live in Manhattan could probably relate. A lot of people from New York are like, yeah, I love the city, but after a little bit you just want to go try something else, you know. and I would assume that a futuristic city would be the same. And we have this inclination now as humans to be aggregating towards the cities. So I think one big important lesson to be learned that we should remember, alongside the discussions around the implications around things like AI and emerging tech and privacy, is also bringing it back to the level of community again, and community interaction, and physical, local, social gatherings, where these technologies really thrive and shine, I think, the most. when they could be regularly used and consumed while simultaneously supporting something like a community in tandem, then I think then from there we can naturally get to things like having a ritual that is regular and has deep meaning. Because no one's gonna log on to Steam and then take their ayahuasca and then join the party and then all of a sudden We're having a shaman show up digitally and then something's supposed to happen to us right Does that make sense?
[00:23:39.154] Kent Bye: Yeah I think here at South by Southwest there's been the big launch of both the Bose AR headsets where it's like sunglasses that's projecting spatialized audio into your ears and so it's no visual component but it's sort of that audio layer but also haptics and I imagine eventually taste and the touch of things but getting away from just the visual augmentation and all these other senses feels like it's a little bit easier to start to add those different things in. I mean, I think of like wearing a sub-pack and sharing heartbeats with people. Like, what's it mean to have a closed container where people are okay with radiating their biometric information, but in a way to create these deeper levels of synchrony so that you could start to create this connection between someone else's heartbeat and create a larger resonance within a group. Stuff like that, I imagine, is gonna start to, with all the other sort of psychedelic culture mixed on top of it, I think it's gonna be a pretty wild scene.
[00:24:31.175] Torkom Ji: Right, that's a great point. I think to me that's less of what we would call a ritual. It's kind of psychedelic, isn't it, to match heartbeats, but yeah, that to me screams innovation of the new age of interaction, right? It's totally about how could we have new types of experiences, I think is the main important question we should all be asking. is what am I bringing to the table that is really, really for this time, is for the times. And there's so many different ways that that's already actually occurring. If you think about it, I can point to a few different types of, well, we'll call them games because they're games. that are very much borderline social experiments, where the interaction between the people could be one of goodwill or very, very badwill, where based off of that interaction, there's results that take place that are going to make someone very butthurt. But those are choices and these are multiplayer worlds and everyone can play the way they want to. So on some level I feel like we're already creating this seed of connecting with someone, anyone across the world through a medium, any medium, and having a reaction and a response. Sometimes even becoming friends on Discord and then meeting in real life and becoming real life friends. So there's already, I think, from gaming culture this huge emergence of people socializing and connecting through the social world and then becoming real-life friends from it. So it'd be interesting to see how those types of interactions become more profound and more impactful. And also the implications around are you going to cuss someone out and screw him over? What if you're standing next to him in VR and you're in the same space and he's invited you into his home and all of a sudden you feel like you're there, right? So when we talk about how the interactions change, modern-day gaming is already creating this A-B connection between people. So I think the next level will be one that just builds on that and takes it from a 2D to a 3D plane and all of a sudden we can meet someone and see their avatar, it actually looks physically like them. Stuff like that will be profound, yeah. I think that's where we can start to really delve into what does it mean to be human and what does it mean to have people be local. But I still make the same point, you know, there is an importance around interacting with those around you as well. So we must juggle our time in some sense in the digital world of interactions and society and our real interactions. That's going to be a thing. Who spends more time in what reality and how healthy is that boundary? Those will be implications of the very near future, I assume.
[00:27:09.370] Kent Bye: Yeah, and well, last time I saw you, there was this whole journey that you went on and kind of modulating your consciousness with a very specific horror game within VR. Maybe you could tell me a bit about what you were doing with Resident Evil VR and what you were experimenting with from your perspective.
[00:27:27.282] Torkom Ji: Yeah, so when this game first came out, I was like, oh, great, they're making a new game. I'm never playing it. That's just not for me. It looks bloody. It looks gory. It looks dark, dank, and scary. And although I was at a point in VR at that time where I was like all in, I had my PSVR ready to go, and I was going to play this game. And so I was excited for anything on this level to come out in VR. And that's the thing that made me go, wow, well, It's going to probably be a really, really good game. So, uh... Okay, I just bought the game and it's downloading. Great. So naturally, the first time I booted it on was going to be with four or five of my friends, and we were going to all do it together because, you know, I just got it, it's downloading, and then a couple of people were like, dude, you got it? It's like, let's go do it. Let's check this out. So we're at my place and we're taking like turns, 10 minute, 20 minute increments. And they left, my guests left. And the next day I looked at my PS4 and I didn't have any guests, but I was like, I'm going to do this. And I booted the game right where we left off. It happened to be this really distinct particular scene where you're in this hallway and there's all this commotion going on and the background sounds and glass windows you can't see outside of. And the only way to advance is you have to walk down the end of this hallway and make a left at a door that has stairs that go down to a basement. And the thing is, though, the light ends at about halfway down the stairs. So I'm in the headset, and I'm like, okay, I'm playing this game, let's do this. I went through all the different doors that were already opened, and I said there's no way to advance it, and I looked down that dark staircase, and I made sure, I went back and checked, there's no other way, and I came back to the staircase, and I looked down at it, and I took two steps, and I heard... I've never turned 180 and bounced out of a scene faster in my life. I went down the hallway, turned to the left, and I'm back in some bedroom with a mirror next to me. Physically? Yeah, and I'm literally huddling down trying to avoid this thing, and I'm like, what am I doing right now? I'm a grown-ass man bending in a fake living room down a hallway from a basement I'm afraid to go down.
[00:30:07.283] Kent Bye: Oh, so you're still in virtual reality at this point.
[00:30:08.664] Torkom Ji: Yeah, no, sorry. Yeah, this is in virtual reality the whole time, yes. I did rip the headset off for a minute and said, like, F this, I'm not doing this. So there was a definite moment where I almost just cut it. And so I brought myself to a safety point. And this is a common thing in games, where they give you one little area that's a safe zone where the helicopter won't shoot you, or where the big boss can't hit you, or they give you this little safety room that you can go reflect on your life, you know? And I'm in there, and I'm like, But they don't just give it to you. There's also screeching on the walls and stuff in that room. So even in there, you're like freaking out. But I had to confront it and I decided, no, there's only one way to do this. And there's something in me that has an absolute aversion. And I immediately remembered all of my past experiences, whether they were with meditation, whether they was with ayahuasca, whether it was with this medicine or that experience or this ceremony. I immediately remembered that I had confronted things and experiences and visions way darker and deeper than this little stupid game and this fake sound and a dark basement. But one thing that was equally as heavy was my childhood fear of the darkness, of taking the trash bins to the back alley because there was no lights, and zombies and ghouls coming from the hills, and ghosts who were looking at me and waiting for me by the trash bins. So that's something I had to confront, and I did. But later with psychedelics and by laughing and enjoyment in a pure dark room, by feeling like I conquered this type of childhood fear that was innately inside of me that I realized was just a fear of the general unknown, let's just say. A lot of clarity came through for me. So with that said, I'll zoom back in. I'm back at the staircase. Round two. I'm looking down. I take a few steps. I hear the voice. I take a few steps. I'm in the darkness, I'm going down, boom, she's in your face. She pops up, bloodied, this ghoulish, freakish creature. And this whole fight ensues where your heart is pounding and you actually have to beat the scene. You have to beat the sequence of events and liberate yourself of this scene. But it hits you and it doesn't stop until you beat it. And so that fear and that hesitation, that rubber band effect, being hit so hard by something you have to confront so quick in such a manner that's so in your face and stabby and so guttural and visceral. And it ends immediately, just stops. And you're like, all you hear and feel is your heart pounding. And 14 hours later, I finished the game. And when I finished the game, I remember putting it away and going like, man, I am happy I played that goddamn game. I realized, I was like, you know what? This is actually why I bought VR. This is why I got this. This just put me through an experience, and the story kicked ass. I mean, the story was, like, solid. I really, really liked the story of this game. But the thing is, the feeling after accomplishment, like, finishing the triathlon, or completing the physics exam with an A+, or whatever else, you know, getting your black belt, this was like a black belt for me, where not only did I confront a lot of things that At first I was like, I'm never going to do this. But I also found a liking to a genre that I didn't think I ever would like. And that I had an aversion to. And that is the horror genre. And it's led me to explore what the horror genre is about. And all the different, it's not just one blanket genre. There's different types of horror that scare us in different ways. And depending on your constitution and your own innate fears and subconsciousness, one of those or two or three of those variables will spook you in different ways. Whether it's a Lovecraftian fear of the large, grotesque, unknown, alien, ancient, cold, dank, primordial, massive, or whether it's the very Victorian horror of werewolves and ghouls who are going to snatch you in the evening. But those are two very different fears, and they're reflective of where we are at as a consciousness. So if we're going to deal with shadow work, what's safer playground than a digital one? What better one than one that you can easily rip off and shut off? What better one that tempts you with the fears of darkness, spiders, snakes, ghouls, demons, the undead, the living, the corrupt, the dark, the evil? And you get to be the one who piles through all of that in a synthesis. It's like a matrix booting. Instead of the akimbo uzi training or the sword fighting, it's the one where you loot up the anti-fear resistance, right? The fear resistance training. So that's what I turned that into. It showed me more about the horror genre than I was willing to or wanted to accept prior. And it also helped develop my part of my shadow work, which has really let me step into more of a balanced approach to how I deal with things like healing, which I think has to incorporate, obviously, the yin and yang is a great symbol for this exact demonstration of perfect unity and balance between the yoke. Yoga is yoke, egg yoke, unification. So there's a unification that we have to seek. in order to feel complete and for me I found that I wasn't while I was running from this thing and for me personally by going through this thing I found a little bit more unification for myself so
[00:35:27.239] Kent Bye: Wow, what an amazing story. Thank you for telling me that. Because, yeah, I remember my first experience with the horror genre in VR was probably Sisters, where it was the one that really gave me that spine-tingle experience, where it was just like a change blindness thing. I wasn't expecting this little sister doll was kind of jumping around, but the audio design was just amazing. And it just, it gave me this visceral reaction that I realized there was things about that experience that were different. And it sounds like your experience with the Resident Evil VR was a bit of like an initiation or a rite of passage. And we're here at this XR house party at South by Southwest, and early in the evening, there was a VR experience happening in the pool. And I was like, ah, man, I don't want to get in the pool. It's cold, and yeah, I don't want to mess with it. But then I was like, when are the other times am I going to have an opportunity to have a VR experience in the water? And so I was like, all right, I got it. And then I was encouraged by a number of the people that were really egging me on with peer pressure. I was like, all right, I'm going to do it. I'm going to have the experience. And I feel like after I did it, I feel like I had this feeling of we just had a shared experience of we got in the water and we saw this VR experience. I think the other thing that's actually been coming up about the horror genre that's been surprising is that there's experiences that horror pieces like Catatonic in particular has like inspired at least two experiences that are surprising. One is with Morgan from Vantage Point which is she saw the power of horror and said oh I can actually train people what it's like to be harassed in the workplace. And she created a whole workplace environment that was inspired by that. And also another person here at South by Southwest who had created an experience for people who are going through neurodegenerative diseases to be able to go back and recall different memories. But it was inspired by the power, the visceral nature of VR to be able to give people an embodied experience of cultural artifacts from the past that can allow them Some deep associations that they're able to have but there's something about the unconscious dimensions of the reactions that I felt personally with the horror which is sort of like the you the screaming or the Gone through a number of different horror experiences at the void. They had Nicodemus which another example of I was just, they have a video of me that they had, and I was just like screaming all the time. It was like this unconscious, like, ah! But also, the visceral reactions in my body, Brad Herman of Spaces, they had another horror experience where you're basically just walking down the hallway, and it was like narrow hallways of just like jump scares. And I was like, oh, I should be immune to this, but I should know it's coming, but it's still, there's something about those experiences that like triggers something at a deep, unconscious level.
[00:38:05.452] Torkom Ji: Have you ever been to a haunted house?
[00:38:07.329] Kent Bye: I have, but it's been a really long time.
[00:38:08.771] Torkom Ji: Not like a real spooky one with ghosts, like a fake one with props and actors and stuff?
[00:38:14.076] Kent Bye: When I was a kid, but it's been a really long time.
[00:38:15.918] Torkom Ji: So, I mean, me too when I was a kid. It's been a while. But those are horrifying. I mean, those suck. Those are not fun. But getting out of it is very fun, right? What's the feeling of walking out of that last door and then you're in that parking lot, right? And you're like, ah, and you smell the fresh crisp air and you see your car and you're like, that's behind me. It's not for everybody, right? To be exposed, especially if you've had a lot of trauma in a certain type of way, there's a certain incremental approach that has to be taken to overcome and to really work towards trying to absolve that type of suffering that can occur through repetition in the mind. And that's what VR can offer people, actually, is by exposure therapy, which is going to be very, very big. And I had an inverse racial experience where I had a black avatar in Rec Room, and I was called an N-word from a couple of white kids. And I was like, wait, I'm not black. Wait. But then I realized I was trying to rationalize that I wasn't really, but I was black in this world, and I totally felt the abuse. It was completely uncalled for. It was based off of something that had nothing to do with me personally. It was just an exterior skin. And all of a sudden, I was like, whoa, that was like my second experience with VR altogether. So absolutely, I think there's something about having these types of experiences in these mediums that make it so we can actually Look, here's my honest opinion. I think everyone, I mean, look, I've been honest this whole time. It's funny when you say you want my honest opinion, but I'm saying that to really affirm what I'm going to say is, in my view, I feel like we're all trying to be our ideal best version, right? Like, that's a healthy outlook, I believe. Like, we all want to be the Superman of our own reality. And we have to come to terms that we're not the best at everything but we can always learn to be the best version of ourselves that we want to step into. And so for me a big part of that is overcoming the things you have aversions to or fears or objections and instead approaching them in a way that at the very least blunts them so they're not sharp. And then once you blunt them, maybe you can work on rounding them out even more and then eventually it just bounces off you and you don't even get impacted. So I think there's a natural tendency, whether we know it or not consciously, for us to be more resilient as people with what we can take as a capacity. Now everyone's at a different level and everyone has different experiences that dictate where they're at with their own level of tolerance to the chaos of the world. But that's why I believe, as the examples you alluded to, a lot of these things need to be addressed, but need to be done in a way where we can totally leverage technology to make it so it's scalable and incremental and controllable. And that way we know what we're putting people through and what level they're at. And then custom creating experiences that help people grow and expand into less stressed, less anxious and less fearful versions of themselves. I think a lot of this relates to those same fundamentals is like how to get people to be more whole is the bottom line. And there's a lot of methods and approaches to this.
[00:41:30.380] Kent Bye: Now, it sounds like you had a bit of a transformative experience going through and playing that 14 hours or 15 hours with the Resident Evil VR. And Ken Wilber talks about how there's states of consciousness and stages of consciousness. And so I'm curious if you feel like that was something that you're taking away in terms of something that you, like a part of your character that feels like it's transformative that you cultivated and developed through that experience, or if it was a temporary state that was ephemeral and that it was just an experience but didn't necessarily stick with you in any way. I'm just curious how you make sense of if that was a transformative experience and then what you feel like you were able to bring back into your day-to-day life after having that experience.
[00:42:09.467] Torkom Ji: Yeah, that's a really really good question. So the ways that I've seen this tangibly affect my life is just the general, I'll recall, scenes of the game. where I was really stuck or had a moment of a blockage. And just by that memory, I'll go against my apprehension or fear or obstacle, and I'll use that game experience as this snapshot, Polaroid of my mind. It's like, hey, you've had to encounter something that was specifically designed to creep in behind your neck into like deep crevices of very, very subconscious and primordial fear locations within our body, within our psyche. So if that was specifically targeted and designed for me to have this type of experience, then what's this real life experience that I'm in control of and that I have actual will over and I can help influence and turn positivity out of.
[00:43:08.931] Kent Bye: So it's sort of like an embodied experience within VR that provides you with like this archetypal symbol of your fear that you're able to recall in moments that you need to overcome the fear in your real life.
[00:43:19.594] Torkom Ji: Yeah, and I assume that's one way. And just the other is just I've noticed how I approach things since going through that. I know it's not just it's not just that game. It's also what that game how it changed my trajectory and the things I was interested thereafter and the things I began to learn and research and find out about as a result of what the game also put me through and those all those branches all when you combine them I think would lead to a a little bit of a let's say half a degree shift from where I maybe would have gone and you scale that 5, 10, 20 years, I think it's very informative if you look at a life's work of where and how and what I will end up creating as a result of how this has informed me. And when we talk about transformation, what's more transformative than producing pieces of art and work that directly transform? In the same way, in a fractal, that the developers of the game created a piece of work in order to create some type of transformation. So in that sense, I think there's a deeper layer of transformation that's happening here. That's more in the gray zone of what we perceive to be transformative experience. I think it's connected to the same gray zone of how we perceive intelligence to be mapped out and what artificial intelligence, how that dominates the spectrum that we may not even understand. So in some sense, I think we're going to learn a lot more as we study the brain and how the brain changes. But we're at the infancy of these technologies. Remember Oculus was launched as a Kickstarter in what, 2012 or 2013? VR became a thing really short after, again, and it's going through kind of a renaissance with just general technology becoming more advanced, more optimized, faster. and bringing us into this 2020-2030 paradigm. Whatever that means, we'll see. But it's coming soon, it's coming quick. And I think from that level of understanding, the research and science and data required to really fully understand how these things are affecting us positively is just now starting to be really implemented and collected and thought about in a way that really wasn't even 10 years ago. And I think that's going to really inform a lot of what this conversation includes, is once we have a really tangible understanding of the ways in which these things can affect you long term.
[00:45:38.111] Kent Bye: Yeah, and we may never get to that point because it could be just part of the unconscious context that is a part of our lives. So, yeah, I'm skeptical that we're going to be able to quantify it in any specific way.
[00:45:47.737] Torkom Ji: Well, yeah, we won't be able to quantify everything, but we will be able to quantify things like how the brain chooses to wire itself and tendencies that could be either supported or created or rewired through maybe even regular use of VR. I think there's a lot of science behind that, of certain types of games or applications that, if used regularly, can help Enhance or rewire the brain towards more positive tendencies. I think that'll be a thing It's not to be seen if just a one-off experience Or if like playing a game and finishing that is enough or that if if to see something on the brain level that's measurable and beneficial if that requires more consistency, but at the very least The whole other part of the conversation, as you mentioned, is how it affects our subconsciousness, the storyteller inside, the animated self that is connected to the cosmos, the history of all of the timelines of the human experience and the earth experience, as well as the big giant question mark of what may lie tomorrow. And when you put all that together, I think it really makes it exciting to acknowledge that you right now are creating and a part of that unfolding of the planet, of the species. It's an exciting time and I'm learning to be less and less fearful and more and more open and engaging with how to maintain humanness into these new ways. Because that's going to be key. If you get lost, I was watching Inception today, it's like, if you get lost in which dream you're in, you don't know what reality you're in. In some sense, I think the anchor for us is going to have to be to maintain some semblance of tradition and humanity that has defined the pillars and the anchor of our identity. and is what helps us move into a future based off of something. So we'll have to see, but I hold optimistic and I look forward to being a part of creating content and experiences that help nourish and fortify a lot of these themes and principles. So that's personally what my alignment and my choice is at this time, to serve that kind of mechanism but in a wholesome way.
[00:47:52.714] Kent Bye: I think you just answered the ultimate potential of VR and immersive media there. Do you have any other thoughts on what you think the ultimate potential of immersive media might be?
[00:48:02.227] Torkom Ji: Sky's the limit, sky's the limit. When we have a thousand people solving cancer by playing a genetics game and taking in raw data feeds by playing an RTS where the victor finds the right genome and then all of a sudden, when we're at the point where we're pooling together all of the brain power and interactive, futuristic, digital experiences that have all of the interfaces and data we need to create solutions in a way that's fun and leverages multiple people working like ants, to create one massive collective understanding or solution to something. I think that's where I want to see it get to, ideally. I think each of us are brilliant and if we can all have a little slice of processing something larger with a big team of people that are working in a way that's fun and interactive and requires their involvement. And I think we can start to use that mechanism to bring a toroidal energy into the fields of finding solutions for things instead of I'm just building a base so I have more realm points or coins to use. Instead it's like we're gamifying the solution process for things that humanity needs to solve that just require number crunching or putting pieces together until the right things fit. So, yeah, that's my view, that's my alignment, and it's been a pleasure talking with you today. Thank you so much, Kent.
[00:49:21.567] Kent Bye: Yeah, thank you. Anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the immersive community?
[00:49:26.329] Torkom Ji: Yeah, I just want to inspire everybody. Even if you're just getting into it and you're brand new and you don't know where to start, it isn't about thinking outside of the box. It's about taking what you're already doing and finding a way to transform it and uplift it with these emerging new mediums. And that's maybe a lot easier than you may think. And once you do that, you're already a step ahead because you're working with the now. You're working with what is happening in this moment. And traditional mediums are all perfect and should exist, yet maybe leave some room for exploring how those traditional mediums could be scaled into some of the newer mediums. And you may find that there's a lot of support and newfound excitement and energy that may lie for you as an artist and creator by opening up to the potential and possibility that, yes, you could be the one. to execute that idea. So I leave you with that.
[00:50:14.263] Kent Bye: Beautiful. Awesome. Well, thank you so much.
[00:50:16.625] Torkom Ji: Thank you so much. Thanks for tuning in.
[00:50:18.747] Kent Bye: So that was Torkum G. He's a sound healer as well as a electronic music producer and one of the co-founders of Visual Reality. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, well, just the concept that you would use a horror experience within VR to be able to face your fears and to use it as this fear resistance training and to do this deep level of shadow work where you're really paying attention to your inner experience and what are the different fears that are coming up what are the associations that are coming up with those fears why are you having those fears there's all sorts of different aspects of these horror experiences that are really speaking to your unconscious and if you're getting triggered by these different cues then there may be specific associations and stories that are connected to that. And so it sounded like Torkham G was able to go through this 14 or 15 hour journey where he was able to conquer all these different fears and that it wasn't just something that he did and moved on from but it's actually like a transformative experience in the sense where he now has had these direct embodied experiences of being able to face and overcome different aspects of his fears. And so that when he comes into a situation in his real life that will remind him of these things, he's able to pull upon those resources that he's able to cultivate within his own sense of his character and be able to apply that into his day to day life. And that he said was a slight shift of his trajectory of his life by half a degree or a degree, which the small short term isn't much, but over time that could be the difference between landing in San Francisco or Los Angeles if you're going across the world. And to me, over the last couple of different conferences, I just keep hearing people when I ask them about how they got inspired to get into virtual reality. I think at least three or four different people have told me that it has been by Guy Shalmardin's catatonic horror experience. There's something about the horror genre that a lot of people are just like, nope, I'm not going to do that at all. But if they actually go and have that experience, they end up having this really deep transformative experience that allows them to see the potential and power of the medium. The other thing is that Torkum G is doing this ambient sound healing music and it's very subtle as to what's actually happening when you're listening to it. When I listen to it, it's not like the typical music where there's chord progressions, but he's operating at a much more fundamental layer where he's talking about these very droney and basic stillness. exploring these universal principles that are very basic like this contrast between expansion and compression or rise and fall and the stories and narratives that are found across nature and found within cycles and so he's talking about this quantum harmonics as this tonal field of sounds that explores the basic harmonics that are within the overtone series and that He's able to look at these different exploration of time and cycles and harmonics and how these can be described and experienced through the metaphors of what he's creating with his ambient music. So to me this reminds me of the contrast between the yang archetypal journey and the yin archetypal journey where The yang archetypal journey within storytelling is the typical hero's journey where there's a hero that's going out on this quest and there's a very specific obstacle that he has to overcome. But there's this competing yin archetypal journey, which is, I think, less about you having that individuation process, but more about that ego disillusionment of you trying to see how you're connected to a larger whole. But it's also trying to cultivate this deep sense of embodied and emotional presence within yourself. And I think by doing the subtle consonants and dissonance cycles that are experienced within music that he's cultivated through this deep level of meditation and awareness and being able to pay attention to all these different things. It sounds like he's really cultivated this sixth sense of music and being able to tune into these energies and reactions and then cultivate these types of experiences. But it's actually very difficult to even describe what it is precisely that he's doing, because it's all happening at this more intuitive level that is sub-symbolic. You can't really necessarily put language on it. And so I feel like there is going to be a lot more of this type of use of music and creating these ambient soundscapes and different ways to really cultivate this deep sense of embodied presence. And I definitely experienced that by looking at some of the different demos that are happening with the Bose AR headsets. it was a lot of different types of storytelling that was much more about creating a whole context around yourself where you felt like you were being transported into this other realm and because the Bose AR glasses and the quick connect 35 headphones they have the both an accelerometer and gyrometer and a magnetometer it's able to detect the position of your head and connect to your GPS you're able to locate yourself where you're at in space but in terms of are you looking north or south you're able to be able to detect that within either the Bose AR glasses or with these specific headphones that have all those sensors inside of it. Now all of a sudden you're opening up the possibility to be able to create these different soundscapes overlaid all of reality. And talking specifically about psychedelics, it sounds like for Torkham, there was a very limited capacity that he could be tripping on psychedelics and want to be in a digitally mediated experience within VR, maybe a half hour, hour tops, but nothing like a four to five hour experience within VR while you're tripping on some sort of psychedelic substance. So it feels like there's going to be plenty of other more subtle ways of a haptic device or sub pack, or maybe these Bose air glasses with sonification and spatialized sound eventually with taste and touch. And maybe something that's not as disruptive as having a visual input on top of all the other visual experiences that you're having while you're taking some sort of psychedelic substance. but that he said that psychedelic culture is about the dissolving of these boundaries between things and that you're able to go down these rabbit holes of your own creation and then you have this psychedelic blurriness that happens when you're in VR where it just gives you this deeper sense of just a confusion or immersion where you feel like you're not necessarily knowing what's real and what's being created by yourself or what's being created by these different simulations that we're putting ourselves in. And that it really sees that both the virtual reality and the psychedelic culture that both these are boosting and enhancing our perceptions that are allowing us to transcend our day-to-day fixed emotional capacities and that there's going to be more and more of these different indigenous practices and rituals that are starting to be cultivated to create these sets and settings to be able to have these specific transformative experiences. Whether that's recovering from trauma or facing your fears or being able to cultivate and build up capacities in your lives that are going to expand the range of your ability to handle all sorts of different stress or emotional experiences that you're currently not able to handle in the absence of some of these simulations or experiences. So that's all that I have for today. And, uh, I just wanted to thank you, uh, for listening to the voices of VR podcast. If you are a listener of this podcast and you enjoy this podcast, then I consider you to be a fellow future dreamer, someone who enjoys to think about the future and to think about what's possible and to potentially even help to build that future that doesn't exist right now. And if you want to help to build that future, there's a couple of things you can do. One is just to go out and make experiences and just get involved in the community and start making stuff. Another thing you can do is just spread the word about this podcast as a resource for other people who are interested in learning more about virtual reality technologies. And if you really want to support both this as an initiative to further your own education and what's happening in the VR field, but also to help sustain this as a podcast. as a resource to the general community. There's people all over the world who are listening to this podcast who are isolated in communities. They're not connected to a place that has a community. And a lot of these conversations end up being the connection to what's happening in the larger VR community and is helping people around the world learn about what's happening in VR. And if you want to help to support and sustain that, then you can become a member of the Patreon. Like $5 a month is a great amount that if more and more people donated that amount, that would just really help sustain and grow what I'm doing here on the podcast. And there's so much things that I need to add to both the website and to update it and to add more tagging and metadata and to create a memory palace of all space and time so that I could take these over a thousand interviews and start to create a process by which there can be other ways that you can gain access to this information and archive that I've been collecting. So if you want to help make that happen, then please do become a member and join the community of Voices of VR. And you can do that at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
