Altered Brain States with Garnet Dupuis

Music.

So I'm sitting here with Garnet Dupuis. He is an amazing inventor, thinker and also I would say an extremely conscious and aware person who has done a lot of work on himself and learning different practices.

He's able to bridge technology, science, metaphysics, spirituality,

all of those, and bring them on our level.

So he's done a lot of different things on his career in terms of technology products, and you would say also

different kind of entertaining experiences one can have, which are maybe beyond just entertainment.

And the latest thing that he's been working on is something that helps people to access

something he calls the First Language.

And throughout history humans have used different means through which they are trying to achieve,

higher states of consciousness or different ways of looking at things.

Even ecstasy, which actually as a term means out of ordinary, out of balance, out of stasis, out of a state.

And there's different states of the mind, anything from the wakeful state up to the dream state

and everything in between.

And I'm very honored and intrigued to hear how he's going to tackle these things,

talk about how technology and new ways of inducing these states in the brain

can, in modern ways, help us achieve something,

that humans have tried to achieve through drumming, through fasting, through sleep deprivation,

through molecular interventions, plants, movement.

There's so many different ways. The real masters of yoga and Zen Buddhist masters

on terms of meditation, or if you even take something like

Shaolin Kung Fu, where we see this physical feat, but at the same time, when they are able to achieve

great physical feats, to be able to do that in terms of concentration, they also have to

work on the opposite, which is meditation and, I would say, altered states, which,

interestingly to me, are kind of part of the human story and progress. It's like we're

constantly pushing the envelope of our, you could say, like, just the basic homeostasis, or,

if you think of resilience of the body, it requires that you push the boundaries. I would

say the resilience of the mind also requires us to expand the spectrum or the envelope of,

possible states. So with that introduction, thank you very much for taking the time to sit with me

and have a conversation.

I can say thank you. You've been doing more than your homework.

That's a pretty hefty introduction.

I'm not quite sure what we can pick up, but sincerely thank you.

In my life, like many of us, I've come to value the experience of learning.

I don't know if it's above all else, but it's certainly at the very peak of reward.

And throughout time it became more and more obvious to me that learning was always best when it was shared.

And the chance to sit with you, because I respect you, and both of us knowing we're,

not quite sure what we're going to talk about, but we're very sure that it's going to be

good, to me is that quality that keeps the learning alive.

The risk of being open, the risk of being in the moment, and the risk of saying what

you believe to be true to the best of your ability.

To me, this is a unique opportunity, and it's honestly appreciated.

So let's start from just a basic overview of your life. You're much older than a lot of us.

Almost everybody is what I find out. Almost everybody in the health and wellness space.

So you have seen a lot of things.

It's an advantage, yeah. Okay, to put chronology on it, this is July right now.

In a couple of months, I'm 74.

And I entered university as a French-Canadian farm boy. Nobody in my family traveled much.

Nobody ever went to school beyond basic schooling and entering the university system in Canada,

but right near the American border at the end of the 60s was a momentous period.

It really is, you might try to imagine, like I can try to imagine a generation before me,

but it's like a movie in my mind. I don't really know the feeling.

And the feeling at that time was one of liberated adventure, liberated learning.

And to me that, okay, also filled with romanticism, idealism, naivete, all of that.

But that period remains precious for me, not because of the outcomes,

not because the two pills that, not really a pill,

pill, but the two pills that changed everything at that time, the birth control pill and LSD.

When you put those two things together with great music...

Perhaps you can imagine the sense of liberation. I thought it was painkillers that changed society.

No, not the one I was involved in. Not that one. It's interesting, like, during that time,

paracetamol was also invented, and it's only recently they realized that it's also dampening our emotions.

That it's not just a physical pain that is being reduced, but it's also like just evening out the emotions.

And what you're speaking about is maybe even heightening emotions.

It was honestly an exciting time and that was for me over 50 years ago, 53 years ago.

And I reflect back on it now, frankly a lot of what I experience now or have been experiencing

in this period, it's a kind of a sequel to the movie because of the excitement of psychedelics.

There was no social media. So when you travel, like the two weeks after I finished my degree

in this university in Canada, I was living in Isfahan, Iran. And a year after that I'm in

northern India in an ashram with my guru. To understand what it was like then, because the

exploration was also still physical. It wasn't just a psychic exploration. When you would go

off and travel, a letter would take weeks.

And we still had at that time, what we call the rainbow route.

You could get as far as Istanbul and collect around and try to find somebody with the very famous VW van,

get up to 10 people, share the gas.

And from there, west to east through Turkey, down into Northern Iran, through Tabriz,

maybe Tehran, Isfahan, cross over into Afghanistan, maybe spend a few months there

because you could live for nothing.

And in those days, a room, food, and all the hashish you could ever imagine.

And then off through Pakistan into Northern India and up.

Nepal into Kathmandu. And in those times, I guess, we didn't have internet,

so you couldn't really have social media. Nothing.

When you left, like, your friends, family, like, they didn't know what's going to happen.

No, a long-distance phone call from those areas, you'd have to go into, usually, try to find a large hotel.

You'd book a long-distance call. They'd try to put it through.

Come, we have the call.

I'm, okay, I have to be careful not to romanticize the period.

But the freedom, it was called the counterculture. And this is one of my themes that maybe we can talk about today.

Also the beat culture. Oh, beat was before, the beatniks.

We won't go there, but briefly, the name beatnik comes from two things joined together, Cold War period.

One was the suppression of the Cold War and this generation living under it felt beat down, trodden, beat down.

But there was also the infiltration of spoken word and jazz and black culture into this post-war.

So there was a beat, beat down, but there's also a beat. And Nik comes from Sputnik.

The Russians beat the US into the space race. So the first satellite is Sputnik.

So that group became the Beatniks. That's before the hippie thing. I guess the point I'm dancing

around if there is a point, is the way that contemporary culture shapes a person's point

of view.

Right. And right now, you and I have a distance of three decades or more in age, and then now

at your age, there's a generation under you, let's say 20 years younger, that are just

hitting their 20s and watching and seeing,

how much culture can change within a generation or does it require a change of generation to change a culture.

So we'll take a big risk and talk about Western culture.

It's not one thing. We're here right now in Estonia and then there's Europe

and then there's North America and so on. So let's pretend that Western culture is one thing.

It's not.

What do you think? Do you think cultures can really pivot within a generation?

Can people change their mind halfway through?

Or does it require a bump from the next generation for change?

I think it requires some kind of external event.

A big change, cataclysmic change in society. It can be war, like the Vietnam War, I think,

was one of the things that really fueled the whole rainbow culture and interest.

You were part of that, in a sense.

Maybe I need to ask you, because you went through that cycle.

What I see right now in my lifetime, it's a good question if there has been an event like that

that would put things into motion.

But I see that the younger generation, I guess it required a shift in generation for sure

for some of the things of the past generation to dilute.

An example would be our parents of my generation. They were very much into alcohol and smoking cigarettes.

And all of that, still having this idea of getting family quite early.

While this generation that I'm in, and the one that is now a couple of decades younger than me,

for them, that's not the way how they spend their time.

I personally grew up not in one-way media, but two-way media.

I learned programming when I was 13, and very quickly, when I was 14, 15, 16,

I was interacting with people, not on the internet, but through bulletin board systems.

And I was running one of them as well, kind of the early social media, social technologies.

I was first users on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

It's crazy, wow. And it's like, the reason why I'm very well versed on it,

and maybe not the older generation, was because I was not preoccupied with life.

Often when you grow up, you get preoccupied with a lot of things.

So I'm asking myself, do I have the time to open-mindedly look at what the young generation is doing?

I'm not even on TikTok. It's a struggle to just have the time to figure that platform out.

So when you're growing up and you have a lot of time, you spend doing things and whatever your peers are interested in,

and that kind of changes things as well.

I would say.

What can change midway culture is like something that really pushes ideology

or day-to-day life in the new direction in the midst of it.

that's expanding it, but certainly 10 years, 65 to 75,

it was called the counterculture because it was fundamentally a reaction against the rise of institutionalism and the rise of corporations and the rise of new technologies.

So there's perhaps a parallel now. At that time, if I, and I've thought about this, what one word

could try to capture the point of view that shifted in what I'll call the hippie culture,

which is better to put as the human potential movement, that's a derivative of that.

Human potential. It's, and I think the word natural was really, was planted, and which

remains with us today. The idea that the foods at the time in the grocery store, you know, I grew

up a farmer and yet a lot of our vegetables were from cans because it was considered

vogue. It was considered modern and preferred. The idea of going to an automatic washer. I remember

us getting our first telephone in the area, in the farm. I remember we had the first TV.

And that surge of institutionalized personal technology was pushed against, in the counter

culture, the idea of, I don't want to work in a corporation. I don't want to have to

wear a suit. I'm not aspiring towards an automatic washer, an automatic dryer, which is really

the salvation of the earlier generation because they had so much damn manual work all the time.

Yeah so frozen foods and yes the modern the famous tv table yeah that basically

gave so much more time for people. Interestingly...

You think about what would attribute to the extension of lifespan,

like the average lifespan expectancy. Now it's like over 80 years average globally.

In US it's 75 and declining.

Yeah, that's why I'm out of the US and in Thailand. It's the outlier.

From 45 to 85 happened because of medical technology.

But how much would you think it was attributed to medical technology versus hygiene versus...

I think it's sanitation hygiene and the reduced exposure to the elements.

Yeah, that's pretty much the stuff that comes out. Of course, if you get into an accident,

we can fix you in ways we couldn't in the past.

And thank you for that.

But in the end, the fact that we understand hygiene and people are not dying of infections,

secondary infections... That's right.

Of whatever you're like going through that we invented antibiotics.

Although nowadays it's almost like a demon is the word antibiotics, but it was a life.

It saved lives everywhere. Pretty much. I have a question for you.

Let's play the imagination game. I'd like you to imagine out loud

what it must've been like for, to be a hippie.

My first image is freedom. Freedom. and now I see an association with American freedoms.

I see a lot of the hippie movement, although it was also in Europe.

It was quite fueled by Vietnam War and America having its own foreign problems

and the youth being against it.

It's almost like the lockdowns of our time or pandemic in a sense,

like people getting tired of policies.

And then psychedelics, Timothy Leary, all of these pioneers.

Who were calling for the expansion of the mind, and I would say probably the interest of the Orient as well.

Like, you went with that. Like, why... I want to ask you, why was there such an interest in the Orient and in the exotic,

as far away from your own culture?

I can't pretend to speak for the generation. I'll just speak for myself.

It's probably related. I don't know if it's representative,

But I grew up a Roman Catholic, French Canadian, English province, and Catholicism at that time had

still a sense of tradition and the sacred and the mysterious. And I loved that feeling,

the feeling of the big church and the solemn chanting in Latin and the incense. It was so

beautiful. But beyond that small context, the rest of the culture didn't seem to offer that.

And it was the beginning at the university level there would be a couple of very small little occult bookstores and you could half a block away you knew

that you're getting close because the incense was so strong at the time you're burning this stuff like crazy and you get in and there's only three

bookshelves there were no books like we have now bazillion books well if you can

just download digital, boom, you get it.

So there was almost no

reference to anything beyond confined religion that served as any authority, served as any access.

So bit by bit, you hear, and some of the first gurus, good or bad, were making their way over.

The Beatles in the 60s, Maharishi Mesh Yogi, and Sri Aurobindo, and I was convinced

that there was a resource there that was precious, that was lacking in Western culture.

I didn't find myself, Western mysticism was impossible to find at the time.

I decided I will go there and I still remember the very first night I was in this big ashram

in northern India and I'd been initiated and I had this old army war surplus mummy sleeping

bag that weighed about 10 kilos.

And I'm laying there with my head exposed looking out at the stars and the foothills

of the Himalayas and I felt like I had come, like I had restarted my life again, that I

had been waiting for this.

It's not so much that I came home to the place, but I came home to the opportunity

to explore consciousness again with guidance.

It was, and this has been my whole life, it's always been about consciousness and those

things associated with using consciousness for good and helping others if possible.

It's always been there.

And I don't know if that's the result of the culture of the time or just my personality

or probably a combination.

So when I reflect back, even the term the human potential movement.

To me is, again, maybe it's cultural. It's a, I don't know, it's a more warm term

that the human potential, yet I believe it's the same fundamental urge,

but the attitude, now it seems most of the authority is being derived from expanding science.

A lot of biohacking is science-related, looking at all sorts of physical elements

and the metrics of certain processes.

That didn't exist then.

The science was nowhere near any kind of explanation, but the Asian spiritual traditions really seem to have their handle on it.

Yogic pranayama techniques, and I studied after my Indian guru with a Korean Taoist teacher for 10, 12 years,

and the past 25 under an Eastern Tibetan Dzogchen teacher.

And I respect these traditions a lot.

I think, unfortunately, they're failing now because contemporary culture has changed so much

that the effort, the discipline, the commitment,

the time required to mature in these disciplines, in these methods is absent.

That's one of the reasons why I have my focus now. I try to be a good man.

I try to do a good thing.

And I've had very rich psychedelic experiences, never a bad experience, very lucky.

I'm not much involved in it now.

I still work with my practices, my methods, and now with evolving technology,

I have a potent interest in biophysical, psychoactive agents and methods.

Right. When you were speaking about seeking some kind of mysticism,

which was lacking in the West, and you went to the East, seeking for it, and you found it there,

and you spoke about the bookshelves, it reminds me of the fact that,

the hippie movement was fueling a lot of this cultish behavior, almost.

By just a few translated books. Only a few Vedic texts were translated to English. Very few.

The translations became the representative of Western understanding of the Eastern,

techniques and philosophies. For example, chakras came from...

That's a good one.

Yeah, chakras came from one translation of a specific Vedic text, not all of them.

So that gave it the seven chakras, but also, I mean, there's different interpretation.

Oh, many. That was the Serpent Power by Woodroffe, I think.

Correct. So the Serpent Power book, that also put the colors in the chakras.

So the rainbow movement put the rainbow colors in the chakras.

The original Vedic text don't have the colors.

No, no, no, it varies dramatically. I think it was Christopher Isherwood, Maybe that's wrong.

1973, a new age book. That was the first appearance of the rainbow sequence.

It was like boot morph or something.

No, no, he didn't rainbow it. It was the 73 text. Woodroffe, I'm aware of those texts.

It's a kind of a hobby interest of mine because of all the ways things got screwed up.

Like Evans-Wentz in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, how massively misunderstood that was.

And Jung's foreword was like silliness.

That.

Even Darwin's texts. And on and on. One thing that I want to say about that is Theosophists also.

Oh, boy. A lot of damage, like Charles Leadbeater, Madame Blavatsky with...

Blavatsky. We go into the bookshop and there was almost nothing there,

but there was Blavatsky's and then Bailey's.

And you need to say, oh, this is going to be great. And they're impenetrable.

They were occultists.

They weren't practitioners. They were mostly interested in mediumship at the time

and psychic healing, and they just massacred.

But the power and the potency of their influence, it's huge.

For example, they wrote a book called Chakras. Yes.

And that was a channel download. It was a theosophist, just like visionary interpretation of,

imagine what it might be.

Correct. And that influenced a lot of our understanding of Chakras.

Yeah, absolutely. The Chakras, oh, come on. What's his name? Anyway, I'm aware.

I'm because in the beginning it seemed to be resourceful and one of the reasons

why I did my best to travel to what I would call more original teachers in the

original culture was one is to get credible guidance and the other was to not get lost in all this gobbledygook that was splattering around and

And sometimes, when I look now, I'm afraid of the popularization, oversimplification.

Patchwork, composite processes that are being put out now with trademarks and everything,

with the expectation that if you just do this, wham, bam, thank you ma'am, it's going to happen.

I have some sensitive concern that some people may be disappointed and at a certain point and,

Maybe then swing back to a fundamentalist view. I'm not sure but right now it seems,

Almost out of control with commercialism. There's one thing that also came to me now that

there was the whole thing about Tantra and this sexual freedom and all of that.

And it was like one Kundalini text that was translated to English that influenced a lot of that thinking.

And there was this American guy who learned yoga from an Indian immigrant.

And then he changed his name. And he became the embodiment of the Neo-Tantra movement,

mixing up his own sexual fantasies with these things.

And that's what people think Tantra is. And very interestingly, how impactful that is, is that in Estonia, for example,

this neo-tantra is huge. And there's some people who were organizing these things,

and they went to India, just like you went, just to learn things. And they ended up

in a tantra ashram. And when they went there, after two weeks, they realized they'd been...

It was completely different from what they thought tantra is. And when they came back,

they stopped organizing some of the tantra things because they realized they had misunderstood the

the whole thing. Very much so. And there's Christopher Wallace,

who is an academic who's written a huge book called Tantra Illuminated. And in that book, there's only one page about sex.

And that one page is the story of how Americans misunderstood.

To me, Tantra is probably the most important, most important,

how should I know? I think it's incredibly important in the evolution of spiritual practice, the concept of Tantra really means continuum, that coming

out of the Brahman castes and the Vedic's, that it was a democratization of spiritual

process that you didn't have to be in any particular caste, that all experience had

the potential of being a vehicle for awareness, and the physical and emotional and psychological

and spiritual, men and women, to me, that is still looming over us in our Western culture

because of the materialism that we're in right now and the separation of brain and mind.

I think Tantra is a brilliant...

Appreciation of the continuum of opportunity, even the concept of separating physical from non-physical,

all of this, I think it gets in our way.

I think inside-outside gets in our way. I think big and small, near and far,

all these things get in our way.

One thing that I want to touch base on is that you said that this Oriental Buddhism and all that,

it's no longer as trendy because it requires so much dedication and time.

Yes, that's my opinion. And Western, they want to have things, fast food, fast everything.

Like even a podcast like this is better split up into 36 clips.

More likely to get views than a long-form format. But in the end, I see that psychedelics are now so popular

because people are seeking quick answers also.

Like they don't want to put the time in meditation. They don't want to do the bread work hours every day.

And want to do the fasts.

So what they do is they just go to a ceremony and they think they got it all.

And I guess that's also what happened when hippies went to India with their LSD

and they showed that to the gurus there and they were like, yeah, it opens up a little bit,

but this is not the answer. Yeah.

So this is either a convenient view or a matured view or a mistaken view.

Let's talk about it, but I'll ask you the question first. What do you think is the reasonable style of vehicle

for people now to expand their consciousness?

Your generation went to India.

My generation is deeply intrigued about Amazon and the jungles.

So Fortune 500 companies or startup companies, executives, they go to the Amazon to expand their minds with Ayahuasca or they...

Yeah.

I think it's in the footsteps of not really people like William Burroughs and Aldous Huxley,

and not even Timothy Leary, but it's more like in the footsteps of Terence McKenna and

Dennis McKenna and the way they popularized these things more like in the 80s.

And I'm born in early 80s. Okay. drew up like.

It's actually quite rare, not common for my generation, that I got exposed to Terence McKenna's thinking

when I was like my early teens.

Okay, that's unusual. And so I stumbled upon his material on the internet,

and I got intrigued about his view,

because at that time, the drug education was pretty much like you take, you smoke weed and next thing you take LSD

and then you jump from a building.

And that was what was pushed on people.

And to me, it didn't make any sense when I was listening to Terence McKenna

and he explaining the indigenous ways of use and explaining the travels and the exploration that they did

when they went to the Amazon, like discovering something that no one had,

basically really written much about.

And they described also new methods, even like growing mushrooms, magic mushrooms,

which was not known how to cultivate them.

Now it is like a huge industry and it's becoming legalized for therapeutic use.

But they influenced a lot during that times.

And when I was growing up, I realized that if I'm going to seek for a mystical experience,

it is not by going to a church.

It's not by going to India. it's going to be that I go to the jungle.

And I went to the jungle in my late 20s.

And that was a huge shift. And my first exposure to them was with the Shibuko Koniba Indians.

And I'm very grateful for that because that was before Joe Rogan podcast

and all of these were mass marketing DMT trips to people.

I went there before landing pages, before Western. I remember there was one Western gringo shaman

and he was a bit of a crazy guy.

And that was all that I witnessed in Ikitos. I mean, it was full of cowboys even at that time,

but there was a lot of genuinity in it.

Many of the things that.

People now speak about on podcasts and the retreat centers didn't exist, any of it. I was exposed to the real deal, in a sense,

in a very uncommercial setting, and I'm very grateful for that. Also,

that I experienced it that way, because I have now very deep respect to generational knowledge that is there.

I take it very seriously, so I'm more of a traditionalist in that sense, and I've been always very careful

in what I put into my body. So I've never tried opioids or amphetamines or any of that stuff.

I read very early on that I only saw the negative in it. I saw nothing that's going to expand

anything. And I actually do have also a very critical view on weed, that it's not something

to be played with. I think there's a lot of bypassing related to it, that only medicine

and it's going to cure this, and that is dangerous,

because if you really look into the papers,

it does mess up with your short-term memory and your ability to memorize things long-term.

It does influence a growing child, the development of the brain.

So there is disrupted neurodevelopment.

There is adverse reactions to it. Even if it is not addictive,

people getting quite depressed and paranoid and can get stuff done.

And to me, that's not like my choice of tool. And so for me, the more interesting thing

in terms of mystical experience was the connection of.

Traditions from animism. Because I'm from Finland, and Finland is not really like in terms of,

Christianity, that's of course there, but we are very animistic. We're connected to nature.

Also Estonians are very connected to nature. So this animism part was, I always felt connection

to nature very deeply. And it's also in my biohacking today. It's nature connections,

It's not about molecules and pills.

It's about nature connection and like mushrooms that grow in the forest, not the magic ones, but medicinal ones.

I want to jump on that, this idea about nature, that we speak of it, not you at this moment necessarily,

but it's oftentimes spoken of as being something different than ourselves.

And to me, the realization of being an aspect of nature has helped me.

I have a lot of connection with nature in Thailand.

I live in the mountain rainforest. I do wild animal rescue and conservation work, all of that.

And what is, again, there are two points I'm making. I'll just make the point I'm going to about nature,

is that I think our brain is naturally psychedelic.

Meaning that the capacity for broad spectrums of consciousness states is innate to the brain.

I don't think the compounds cause the experience. I think the compounds enable an innate process.

And that innateness is so attractive because it's inborn. and that's why I think that...

For one thing, there is no single psychedelic state. There's such a broad spectrum of subjective experiences that we broadly call psychedelic.

Even if you do the same compound two days in a row, the experience is only generally similar,

it's very different. And the same thing with the mystical state. The mystical states are

almost innumerable, and it seems to me the psychedelic states are almost innumerable,

and yet we talk about them as if they exist as like water in that cup, that it's a thing.

Where I'm driving my perspective, my belief system, and also the technology that I work with.

Is I believe that there are a great number of psychoactive agents, but that any of the agents

don't really cause the experience, they tap into an ability. It's like learning how to walk.

We have an innate, driven biological force that, given some opportunity, we begin it and we walk.

It's not as though it's something foreign that we bring into ourselves.

We're made to be able to walk. And I think our brains are made to transit through very wide spectrums of consciousness.

I feel, not only with psychedelic compounds, but also even with the light sound things

that I work with, or breath work, or sensory deprivation, that these are all enabling agents,

but they're not the cause.

I think the cause is innate. I think we're made biologically to be able to access these things.

So I'm wondering what you think.

I don't think the agents are the cause of the endpoint action.

I think that they either excite or activate innate capacities.

That's what I think.

In my late 20s when I had Ayahuasca, like after that experience,

I definitely was thinking that it's the brew that causes like this open soft disc.

Doors, perception, like Aldous Huxley called them. But for me, later in life, I've experimented with.

Caused one event where it was not while doing it. It was outside of that, but I attributed the fact

that I was doing it every single day for three hours. That's a lot of practice. Yeah, that was

It was very deep. I really needed it at that time

because of the loss of a long friend

and just the hopelessness of what was going on.

Wow.

But that was the motivation that led me there. But there was one experience in between that practice

where I would try to go to sleep and I noticed something is now happening.

And I tried to calm down by bread fork meditation. I couldn't do it. I had an important meeting in the morning.

It was midnight, I wanted to go to sleep. I was like, okay, should I call someone?

Am I getting a panic attack here?

But then I sit down and I start observing what is happening.

And then I was like, this is exactly the same stuff I experienced in the Amazon. Whoa, really? Yeah.

So I was like, this is DMT, and it's produced by my brain.

And then I just, because I realized what it is, I'm having a mystical experience now without an agent.

That actually the agency was probably the breathwork, but we'll skip that. Very possible.

So what I did then was I just relaxed into it and just focused on the present moment,

what it can teach me and the visions that came and all of that.

But it was a full-blown trip the whole night.

I was in a trance state.

And I would say after that experience, everything shifted. And it gave for me a new meaning for some mystical text and.

Concepts that I've read, for example, Kundalini awakening.

I felt maybe that's what I experienced. Some people describe a religious experience.

Maybe that's what I was experiencing.

Some people describe accessing the state that is between death and rebirth.

I felt that's maybe it.

So it was kind of... The thinking mind tries to catch up. Yeah, depending on what our earlier experience is,

we tend to attribute it in different ways.

And I think when people have this experience out of the blue,

which I now know is possible, that they might think it was Jesus,

or they might think it was Krishna, or they might think it was this or that,

depending on their experience.

And if you live in an animistic world, maybe it was the plant spirits,

or it was the animal spirits, or the totem.

This is the point of culture, that the culture colors our interpretations of things.

So I think we are all describing undirectly the same thing, but we need to describe things in symbols

because we can't describe it directly, so we attribute it to different concepts.

And so now I have deep appreciation for other forms of ecstasy.

I'm not representative of an individual, but I've, in what I'll call, to call it something,

meditative practices, because I've practiced a number of different traditions, sincerely,

and I've had quite a rich psychedelic range of experiences. The transcendent, I'm using words.

Transcendent experiences from the meditative techniques have been substantially more

attractive to me than fucking great. There's some kind of genuineness, and maybe that's

only in my head, but there's some kind of genuineness in it.

That is not so easily accessed by me with compounds. It is, and I would say at this age,

I'm more and more intrigued to explore dedicated practice and see where it leads.

For example, the next Biohacker Summit in Amsterdam, 14 or 15 October,

which theme is Expanding Consciousness, where you are going to be speaking,

and which is exploring consciousness expansion from all the different modalities that you guys have used,

not just compounds.

And what I'm very intrigued about is this 16th generation samurai who's coming there.

And I grew up, in addition to listening to Terence McKenna, I grew up watching Oriental movies,

like Chinese and Japanese martial arts movies.

I learned Aikido and Tai Chi and Judo and these kind of arts.

I was very much into sticks and swords and bokkens and different weapons and wushu and acrobatic stuff,

kind of ninja things.

But the philosophy always intrigued me of the body and the mind connection,

that the body and the mind is one. Sure.

And the deep practice that is required to be able to, in every single moment,

accept death and also be fully present.

Yeah. You're living at the fullest, ready to die any second,

and realizing that everything is temporary, fluid.

And it's like, how do you respond to it? Do what, in, again, I'll be generalized,

in our Western cultures, have you detected anything that resonates in the same way

as what you've just described?

In popular culture? It's a broad question to answer as you like.

We're talking, you're being truthful, I'm being truthful.

I'm just also curious. As I get to know you a bit more, I'm interested in your thoughts.

You're interested in me, it's all good.

But to me, this is the magnetism that a number of the Eastern or Asian cultures

in different forms and shapes,

they represent long time traditions that seem to have genuinely deep and profound quality of awareness,

that there's something there.

I would say I feel it's more mature and deeper. If I take the samurai philosophy,

maybe the Western counterpart would be a stoic philosophy.

But the samurai stuff, to my understanding, may be even older.

So, there is something about virtues and building character and accepting that life is suffering,

but work through it, don't employ it.

And Western philosophers have taken... And I really appreciate Western philosophy.

I did read a lot of...

And I would consider also Carl Jung more of a philosopher. I would consider Freud more of a philosopher

than, let's say, a scientist.

Sure.

They invented a lot of words to describe things. Also, the German philosophers like Heidegger and Hegel and Wittgenstein, I've been reading this.

I was very interested in philosophy in school, and I would say I consider myself also more of.

A philosophist than, let's say, a technologist, although that's what people see. And I think

there is... I'm just reflecting on the fact that you went seeking the answers in these

ancient cultures, and I would say that's where I go also. And it's very interesting how interested

that we are like something that is really far,

from where we come from.

And I would say that's also what's happening if you go to Japan, they're super interested

in our culture. Very much. Like the Japanese, they love Finland.

For them that represents like some kind of heaven. It's a super cool.

Yeah, there's a wonderful connection. So that's why we do organize.

Because you have Tokyo in your future.

that we're going to do it, they're like, wow.

I don't get a reaction like that if I would say we're going to organize in Amsterdam or London

or, let's say, somewhere in the US. They would be like, OK.

But if I say it's Tokyo, they're like, wow.

There's some. I tried to convince you a couple of years ago to do Chiang Mai, but I'll pass on that one.

I'll forgive you for that.

I have given a biohacking talk in Chiang Mai. It's a wonderful place.

So what I want to dive into from setting the stage, so to say.

Into like how to induce these states with modern technology.

Got it. Because here we are.

We have done, as humans, practiced different techniques from, let's say, breathwork or drumming,

rhythmic movement to induce certain brain states. There is brain waves, and now we have technologies

to do it through sound.

Okay. Some call it binaural beats. You're hitting it right on the head.

It's an easy answer from my point of view.

And let's use the drum. The voice is our first instrument as humans, but beyond that, percussion, hitting something.

You could have hit any log, but the idea of creating a drum is an example of technological instrumentation.

An instrument that allows something to happen that you sense, but you can't express without the instrument.

There was no saxophone music before the saxophone instrument.

First language, you mentioned it a while ago.

I have a concept that there is a primal or very first language, that when things are

growing together, there's proximity.

If there's proximity, there's got to be interaction. If there's interaction, there must be interrelationship.

If there's relationship, there must be communication. If there's communication, you've got to have a language.

So what's the very first language? And my concept is that it's a combination of two things.

Mechanical vibration and electromagnetic radiation. Mechanical vibration requires a medium, radiation doesn't.

So I think mechanical vibration, obviously sound, is mechanical vibration.

And electromagnetic radiation light.

And because of the material nature of mechanical vibration, we have been more easily able as a human species to make instruments,

to express different types of mechanical vibration,

stringed, reed, flute, these things.

Right now, I feel that we're beginning to be able to manipulate light with the complexity and expressiveness that we have been historically manipulating sound

because of emerging technology. I think we can now have instruments that we can interact with,

design and expand that will do with light. Our brain is hugely disposed towards vision more than

anything else, and it follows the principle that I believe that music is not the sound that you hear.

That's not music. Music is the feeling you get when you hear that sound.

The sound itself is a very abstract physical signaling.

It's just pitch and rhythm and tones and so on, but when that hits the brain, the brain

has some capacity to generate from this abstraction, experience, feeling states.

You don't have to be intelligent to enjoy or make music and here is just a bunch of,

physical signals and you feel joy, you feel sadness, you feel all these things and you

want to move your body because of the way the brain takes the sound signals and turns it into experience.

Right now we're getting closer so that the light, like in the NeuroVIZR, the light,

okay, colors and geometrics, but that really isn't the experience.

It's the feeling that you get when you see them. It's the feeling that you get when you hear.

Our light instrumentation right now is more or less, I would compare it to the early sound

synthesizers. For the listeners who are not aware, NeuroVIZR is this device that has these lights,

blink at different frequencies, and behind closed eyelids, you see different patterns and geometries and all of that.

.

None of the geometries or patterns exist in the light itself.

It's what the brain is interacting.

So you're generating everyone a slightly different experience,

different visionary state.

Now, sound has been used to induce these states, and there's something about the rhythm of the shaman's drum,

which is also techno music, like the certain beat, the signaling progress that is always continuing.

It's almost like a heartbeat, almost like operating on the same frequencies.

So can you describe how then the brain is like, why is the brain synchronizing into it?

Like, why do we see changes in brain wave patterns that seem that it's like dancing with it?

It's almost like it's singing along.

I won't pretend to know the brain that well. Nobody really knows the brain that well,

but we know a lot more about it.

To me, let's go to that reference of more of the music, not the light, although it's also true of the light.

That music is an example of brain language.

The brain knows how to make it, the brain enjoys making it, the brain enjoys experiencing it.

It's an insight into a way of knowing without thinking.

It's a pre-cognitive kind of intelligence. It's not a neocortex world of applied symbolism.

It is what it is. The sound of a G7 chord moves you in a particular way,

in the same way that when you see cobalt blue, it moves you in a certain way.

It is at the level of first language. I say second language is movement.

And third language is cognition and ideation. So at a most fundamental level,

we are, why do we go in awe at a particular sunset?

We just haven't had the tools to work with visual experience,

although all the mystics talk about the light and so on.

We just haven't had the instrumentation.

This has been sun gazing or something. Okay, yeah, we had sunlight, moonlight, firelight.

Fire to me is intriguing.

Out at our friend's house a couple of nights ago, we had a party all night and a big bonfire.

And to me, what is fascinating about fire, with natural fuel, fire light flickers,

in and around central alpha.

It's the very first mind machine, which is why gazing into a fire is provocative

because mid-alpha, alpha 10 hertz is the control freak of the brain.

It allows focus without distraction. the very first mind machine in caves and Neolithic times or whatever,

you would just stare, not because you're bored, but because there's some kind of magnetic

qualitative inducement going on that it moves.

And then once you're in alpha enough for a period of time, then the drift can go left or right up into excited states

or more reflective states, theta states.

We are nature.

And isn't it an amazing coincidence that fire should flicker at the 10 hertz rate

that is the dominant control frequency in the brain for order?

No, it's because we co-evolved.

It's a co-evolution that the light is the radiation of the experience.

And then when you look at the serotonergic hallucinogens, the typical LSD and so on,

one of the things that it does in the brain is it suppresses alpha.

Alpha is suppressed. Why?

Because then the brain is free to interact in ways that normally Alpha doesn't permit.

So Alpha, like in Vipassana meditations, the beginning of Vipassana-style mindfulness, so on,

is it's a top-down control process.

And as you mature through it, then it becomes a bottom-up sensory experience

in the present moment.

Right now, I'll come back to this, that we understand enough with emerging technology,

that we're at the edge of being able,

to create the yin-yang combination of sound and light.

And my prediction is that the meaningfulness of it, the way that it will move consciousness so quickly

and so fast beyond ideation, thinking, and symbolism

is because it is so rooted,

and we just haven't had the technology,

To manipulate light.

Because it's radiation, but we've been able to manipulate mechanical vibration, but we're,

catching up. I think what took 30 years in musical synthesizers from the Moog until now,

we can get there in light in three years. I think it's a break-open opportunity for,

helping bridge in the same way that the shaman's drum or the Tibetan big trumpets and all the

things that have facilitated us, because the trumpet is technology, the guitar is technology,

it's all technology.

Now visually enhancing, light enhancing technology is going to catch up.

And I think that we're going to be very happy.

We don't have to be technophobes. For people that are interested in compounds or not interested or want to meditate or don't

want to meditate, I don't think it's cheating.

A shaman's drum is not cheating, it's enabling. So, I'm very much believing in what I'll call biophilic technologies, biophilia, life-loving

technologies, not a phobic, destructive technology, radiation and all the nasty shit that happens.

But I believe that we have an ability to create biophilic technologies that will act as biophysical

psychoactive agents and that they will be cooperative with innate experiences,

that they'll fit perfectly and beautifully with sensory deprivation or pranayamas or

microdosing a compound or anything like that. I think we have an advantage that we're technically

enabled now and this technical ability is going to increase radically in the next few years.

So let me give my take on the NeuroVIZR. Sure. Thank you.

So one of the things that I find interesting about it is that, first and foremost, it's 11 minutes.

To get into states, often with breath work or meditation like I did diligently, requires three hours.

I got it. So it's faster.

The second thing is...

Shown it to people who would say, I can't meditate, like I can't sit still.

You give it to an ADHD person, it's very hard. You give them NeuroVIZR, they can't help it.

It's the first time they would come out of it and they would say, had a meditative or visionary experience,

because it really forces you with it, like it takes you.

It's very powerful in that sense.

Music can also take you in place, but somehow the light is more powerful.

Much more direct, like much more, it's like a psychedelic in a sense. It is psychedelic.

In my opinion, it is a psychedelic. It's a biophysical psychedelic.

May not be a biochemical, but because the brain, my opinion, the brain itself is psychedelically enabled.

And it doesn't matter, the agency is secondary to the capacity, that we have a capacity.

Our brain can do this. Of course, it can go off wheels. that can become pathological,

but just because a state is uncommon doesn't make it abnormal.

So there are all of these normative, it's like Groff. He said, okay, we have sane, we have insane.

He says, we need another one. So he said, sane, unsane, and insane.

Insane is the nasty shit. Unsane is just a variation on sanity.

And the idea that we can provoke it through a bottom-up sensory stimulation

should not really be surprising.

Maybe we just don't have the experience with it, but once you taste it, it's suddenly,

for me, it both feels familiar and foreign at the same time.

This is weird dichotomy, and the, I will go technical because I love the technical.

What's not understood is that with the visor there are three simultaneous levels of signaling going on.

There's macro patterns, mesopulses, and micro flickering.

So it's addressing the three different levels of the nervous system simultaneously.

And why do I choose 11 minutes? Because neurologically the average human can maintain a tension without tension for around 10-12 minutes.

That's why I do 11 minutes.

You can piggyback one more time again to around 20 minutes because you have enough local neurotransmitters.

So if you want to piggyback, that's why TED Talks, even the conferences and things,

that 20-minute time, whether it's Transcendental Meditation or the old Halo,

which is now non-existent, this 20-minute thing comes up a lot.

So my approach is I try to achieve the most while doing the least.

I don't want to push a person to maximum tolerance. I want to get them to minimum threshold

and then let the brain take over.

So that's my goal is to be economical and not stressful.

Another thing that I find interesting about the NeuroVIZR is that,

unlike the molecular ways, you induce certain states, the likelihood of side effects is less

because it's more targeted.

It's not like you take mushrooms, you have all kinds of weird sensations,

the gut and all that later because you have receptors all over the body,

but they are affecting now the brain directly.

Just different electro-stimulation of the brain.

Then the other thing what I find interesting is that because of this mechanism

delivering this experience and these states.

That it's not so dogmatized, like substances. Not controlled substances. You can't control light.

You can't pass a law like, this frequency is not allowed. That's the devil frequency.

Yeah, don't use the devil frequency.

It's prohibited. It makes people turn down their weapons and surrender. We don't want that.

So, unlike the hippie movement, which was fueled by LSD,

And I guess the government at the time became a bit afraid.

Very afraid, I would say. That it's going against their policy,

and people didn't take the top-down control hierarchies anymore and the dominator culture.

But they started to, Timothy Leary said, think for themselves.

And with this light, it's accessible to everyone and everywhere.

And it can be brought into therapy or medical setting or recreational setting without complex laws.

There's really no, I guess there are cultures that do prohibit music, but we'll put that extremism aside.

Yes, it's visual music, if you want to work an analogy.

And the capacity to manipulate, again, I won't go technical to waste time right now,

but it's so rapidly advancing.

And I study musical instrumentation to see how it can be applied.

What we have right now induces neuroplastic change. It's undeniable.

But what we have right now with the NeuroVIZR experience, I would say conservatively represents maybe 15, 20%

of what it'll be in a couple of years.

So first and foremost, this is accessible. It is portable.

It is something that works rapidly. It is immediate onset.

You don't need to wait hours for it. No, turn it on, turn it off. Exactly.

It's a perfect businessman's break. You can always take like a 15 minute coffee break.

It's interesting that coffee break and cigarette or tobacco break used to be in the law.

Yes. So now we can have a NeuroVIZR break or- Go for it.

Because what I've noticed working is that If I feel tired and unfocused,

I take a session and I'm back in business.

So it's like a reset. It's almost like a power nap.

And it really helps me to reorient into what I'm doing. So I find it very useful.

I'm gonna toss one more thing in that I think is a big positive,

is now that we're moving out of the prototype phase and going into production and refining the applications,

the price is going to drop dramatically.

So that it'll be buy some hardware and then purchase into whatever content that you want.

Yeah, so it's becoming rapidly accessible. Exponential technology is progress,

a lot of these things will make it.

Easier to access these states. Now, what I also find interesting is that you just don't leave it there,

that this is not a one-and-all solution,

but that there is also protocols that you develop

that where it's combined with other techniques.

Could be with like bread work, could be with meditation, could be with certain substances,

not necessarily powerful substances, but maybe you could have like just something like a nootropic cocktail,

something mild that really helps the brain to process all of that.

drug-free microdosing.

I have 15 different session designs, dose day, trance day, norm day,

and you can plug in whatever you want, Fadiman, you want Stamets,

you want microdosing, whatever protocols.

And you can use it without any compounds, and it is radically attractive and effective.

Or if you want to do some compound microdosing and stack, here you're stacking a compound with light and sound.

So the stacking principle doesn't have to stay biochemical. You can stack biochemical with biophysical.

And I'm very proud and happy that we're going to launch that at your event.

That's the right place with these kind of e-psychedelics, in a sense, like electronic psychedelics.

And I find it, so we have pharmaceuticals, we have nutraceuticals, and now we have electroceuticals.

That would be fair.

Or light ceuticals.

Yeah, we will find language, but the whole thing is when something is newly evolved,

then there's seeking language to catch it.

And I'm really hoping and watching and waiting and trying my best to create a more normative response to what's called altered states or

non-ordinary states.

We have to go, we go crazy.

If you define non-ordinary, some people would say it's like a crazy thing.

We do it every circadian cycle, nighttime dreaming or hypnagogic states.

These are very illogical, wildly expressive states.

If we don't go crazy a little bit, on a very regular basis, it will create...

Insanity of the negative kind. We need to let go and loosen up. We need that.

Cultures automatically have that whether it's Mardi Gras or Carnival or New

Years or Halloween. We know that every once in a while you got to let it go.

There you go. Catnip for cats and bamboo for the pandas. Thank you. I'm a believer

in what? I'm a believer in trying our best. I'm a believer in that and I'm

believer in as we learn, share the learning. One of the things I want, I,

actually I need in my enterprise is I need more like-minded inventors and explorers and artists. I don't want to do this by myself. That sucks. I want to do

it with. I want to spread the joy and share the joy of the conscious, transformative entertainment,

healing experience. And also one of the things that I'm moving aggressively towards, assertively

towards, is algorithmic AI, because I want us to have the ability to see the music that we love.

And we will always have creative artists, but I would love the ability,

you jump onto Spotify, play the tune that you're in the mood for,

and have an algorithmic simultaneous process. It's not, it's like the screensaver.

The idea is not to use light to express what the music is saying.

There's the explicit and then the implicit. Let's say I'm a musician, wish I was.

I'm a musician and I create this music.

And let's say that you're a dance choreographer and you have a dancing troupe.

I say, Teemu, here's my creation.

I want you to see how you add dimensionality to it with dance.

I want a dimension of feeling of an implicit messaging because here's the explicit sound.

But when, as I say, music is not the sound you hear, it's the feeling you have when you hear the sound.

Can you show me somatically in your troupe?

Can you add dimensionality to my music with your dance? It's going to be one thing. When I'm watching the dancers,

I'm hearing the music. They're not separate, but they're going to show me things hidden in the music

that I'm feeling but not really hearing. Wow.

So that's why I call what I do with light to the sound experience, not just mimic.

Let's talk about the design of that experience.

So one thing that you have told me in the context of the fact that there is quite a lot of devices on the market

that have existed for a long time for flickering light in front of your eyes.

So a lot of that is random.

Like, it's just like experimental. You mentioned that what NeuroVIZR is inducing

is the macro, and like there was like these different- Macromeso micro, yeah.

These different layers.

Like, what is the pros? How did you discover different programs?

Because on the app, there is like ways to induce,

Of course, I would imagine like the different brain states or the like different alpha, beta, gamma, whatever, waves.

Those are easy because it's their... Dumbass easy, actually.

That's super easy. So we just try to get the same frequency as what is seen in the brain on those states.

But what about things that would influence creativity or focus or divine like flight?

So how did you... How do I do that? How did you do that?

Okay. Why is it not random?

Okay, there are generally, okay, I was working with the early tech in the 80s,

that you have this thing called the frequency following response, that the brain, given a

stimulus, if it's repeated and predictable, that usually if it's a clean signal, it takes

about six to eight minutes before the brain actually picks it up and starts to do it.

The first period is called superimposition, where you're like you're forcing the person to dance in a certain way.

That's a top-down process neurologically, and what it does is it works to help reinforce existing patterns.

The thing that motivated me was a collection of things, but it's the attentional state of neuroplastic change.

That neuroplastic methodologies, like pain and pleasure, what do they have in common?

They focus your attention. That focal attention is the opposite of brain entrainment because.

When the signal repeats then the predictable nature of the brain knows what's coming and

it withdraws attention. That's why it's a passive experience. The signal will just

make the brain behave in a certain way.

I started off with trying to better understand cybernetics, psychedelic information theory,

systems theory, all these things of how to communicate information for positive

neuroplastic change. That's my game. That's what I want. Right now, generally on the market,

without criticism, you have, other than what I'm doing, you have these two categories of flickering

light devices and processes. One is conventional brain entrainment. It's been around for 45

years. It hasn't changed one iota. Maybe the technology is a little bit better. Then you

have those that are just generating random signals, and that's a different experience.

The device can create random light signaling, and they say, just play any music that you

you want. So what happens is the brain, because the brain always looks for signal and noise.

The brain tries to make sense out of nonsense. That's what's going on all the time. When

the signaling is randomized persistently, and it's not in any way related to the music,

what happens neurologically is called dissociation. It's a little bit like ketamine or nitrous.

The brain can't find a signal. There's nothing predictable, there's nothing to follow, there's

no story here. It creates a suspended state and a person kind of floats in this suspended state,

which is quite relieving if you've never spent time there, if you're really cognitive all the

time. However, the negative sense is that if you do it repeatedly over time, then the brain will

go into a strong inhibitory and what'll happen is you get what's called a grayout or a washout,

where now you don't see any colors, it's all grays, because the brain is now having to protect itself

from a wild, non-specific, random stimulation.

So in short bursts, it can be quite pleasant, because it pulls you, neurologically,

it is similar, as I understand it, it is similar to the disassociation of ketamine or nitrous.

The me and my experience pull apart, and that's okay for short periods.

There is an application service called Brain.fm.

And Brain.fm is like this binaural beats thing.

What?

Their whole thing is that it's AI-generated in that way that it's not pre-recorded.

The problem with a lot of these pre-recorded binaural beat stuff is supposedly the fact that.

In their description, the brain starts to expect.

It knows what's going to happen next. When you hear it the first time,

like some beautiful music, it's awesome, but once you listen to it many times,

you just know your brain knows what's going to come next. It sounds similar, but it's different.

It's a bit fractal.

Like, it puts you in a pretty interesting focused state.

And that's the whole idea. If it's not too competitive. If it's more background, it can do that.

If it's foreground, then it'll disassociate. There won't be the ability to focus.

So those systems, if you use it more ambient, as an ambience, then it creates,

it's similar to white noise.

It creates a filter that dissociates you from other sounds of what's going on.

Is it like a reverse sound or a? There are different ways to characterize it,

but the point is it's understandable.

So you've got these two categories, brain entrainment and random dissociation.

So I've tried to craft the concept with a term, I call it brain engagement.

You engage the brain in a series of command-demand processes.

So it's a kind of brain exercise towards a certain vector, a certain theme.

Other than the macro, meso, micro, which is too detailed right now.

But it's a kind of neurological storytelling. So there's a hello, here I am.

And then suddenly there's, depending on the session, there's significant brain destabilization.

I scramble the eggs.

Because the brain, I want the brain to have an appetite for the signal.

Because when you start the session, you may not be hungry for the change.

Your brain is in a certain mode.

So I say, oh, hi, Teemu, how are you doing, man? And I slap you around a little bit.

I say, what the fuck are you doing? Pardon me.

And I say, I'm just trying to get your, you got my attention. Okay, boom. So I do different degrees of destabilization.

There's technical ways of doing it. Then I drop in the primary signal vector. Okay, here we go.

And a little bit of reward. And once you think, oh, the brain's got it, then I slap it to the

side with some conflict that I stress it. And then after the stressing reward,

having tolerated the stress, it's a very methodological based composition technique.

I see. Now it explains my experience with it, because I noticed that there is moments where it's quite intense,

then quite pleasant, then quite intense, quite pleasant.

So it's intentionally built that way, so you get enough.

Yeah, you get some challenge and then some reward, some challenge,

and it moves the brain progressively into a probability state.

There's no way of making the brain do something unless you're overbearing and punishing.

But I can say that there is a generous probability state that may last a short time.

Working with generating states and then with repetition and learning over time,

the state can translate to trait.

For states, you need the stimulation present. For traits, you don't need the stimulation

because it's brain generated.

And also what I have built, there's so many other elements in it.

When people ask me, oh, do you use binaural beats? Please don't say that word to me. It is so primitive.

We'll talk more about that maybe.

But the idea that's driving it has a rational defensible sequence

that why you can get where you're going.

If we did a movie script together, it doesn't matter what it is.

And there are some characters in the movie.

What is the simplest way of learning more about a particular character?

What would we write into the script?

We would create some conflict because you know the person, the character as they are,

and you want to learn more about them. So you put them in a conflicted circumstance.

Then you see things about them that you wouldn't ordinarily see.

In the designs, I purposely, depending on the goal of the session,

because some sessions are overtly training you to let go and sedate.

Some are motivating you to climb a little bit and stretch out.

Now we're really shooting you up to the sky to see if you can fly.

That's what I call the vector, technically, the theme.

But the amount, like you have exercise and kettlebells and the whole thing, you calculate

or calibrate the sequence of the exercise to create certain outcomes. Full-on is crazy.

Not enough, no result.

It's methodological. And the different sessions have that. And also, I have elements in there that if you're running it off Wi-Fi, meaning you're

connected to my server in the sky,

there are certain elements in the session that are randomized, they will never repeat the same.

I see, so you don't get that bored.

No, just as soon as your brain says, oh, I know what this session is,

wait a minute, what was that? The mix of flow and friction.

The designs have that quality. There's no flow without friction,

that prediction and surprise.

Right. Flow state is like basically where you are at the peak of your ability,

but it doesn't become frustrating, but it's not too boring either.

But you have to have a frictional state. There has to be some transition that without friction, there's no flow.

Some challenge. There's got to be. That's why for flow, that magic 2-3% thing,

that's a lot of what I play with.

It doesn't matter what the method is, to get motivated neuroplastic change,

You need three things in the method, and there's a fourth thing that is the secret sauce.

First thing is you need to have sustained attention.

Without attention, sorry, there's no motivation for change.

So that's when Qigong, BioFig, everything, bringing your attention to something

is empowering that process. That is the commonality of pain and pleasure.

I say it, repeat it, I'll give the same stupid analogy. If I had a knife and I jammed it into your left knee right now, that'd be very painful.

And if somehow you had an orgasm in your left knee somehow.

What is common between those? Your attention goes to your left knee.

You got my attention. There you go.

The second thing you need is what's called marginal demand. That's that two or three percent.

That's why in the NeuroVIZR sessions, depending on the session,

there is more or less neuroplastic demand.

So the marginal attention combined with marginal demand are the two things that have to have the third for efficiency.

The third is a little bit harder to explain. It's the belief, the buy-in, the open-mindedness to experience it.

It's a kind of a psycho-emotional state.

You have to have those three things in any neuroplastic method.

I don't care what the thing is, sensory enrichment, whatever.

Then the fourth thing, the magic, the secret sauce, is a very complex neuro-hormonal state.

If you could add that state to those three, all those are exponentially better.

And that fourth secret sauce is this thing we call enjoy.

Enjoyment, that feeling of, wow, yes, that potentiates the other three.

That is the theoretical template that I have used with the NeuroVIZR that is not my creation or invention.

It is standard neurology in terms of neuroplastic generating methods.

That's profound.

I believe that Western medicine and science has not been able to treat certain conditions,

or induce certain states because it's quite narrow-minded in terms of neuroplasticity.

If you take for example...

Different brain states, ADHD even, you take ADD, OCD, you take different personal disorders, narcissism,

whatnot, anxiety, different disorders.

The talk therapy, which is mainly the thing, it's a combination of talk therapy and some kind of SSRI,

or something that stabilizes in their mind so that the person at least doesn't hurt themselves.

So that the talk therapy can happen.

It's like, the reason why they see that some things are untreatable is because they're not deploying neuroplasticity.

They don't understand how to change the brain over time, why it's so hard to change some conditions.

And I believe if we connect the Eastern philosophies and techniques and modern technology like NeuroVIZR

and Western understanding of psychotherapy

and analysis, and also the different cognitive behavior or whatever, why, for example, art therapy or music therapy

is sometimes more effective than just collectively,

trying to change something is because there's probably induction of these kind of states.

Another, it's a little simplistic, it's true, but it's not as simple as this, but it's true to say,

that neurologically, we have top-down processes and bottom-up processes.

And if you look at the entropic brain or the anarchic brain, Carhart-Harris and Friston,

those people, they believe and recognize that there was a primitive bottom-up,

that was then modernized with the neocortex top-down.

Something like brain entrainment, neurologically, something like guided imagery, something like talk therapy,

These are all neurologically top-down processes.

What's a bottom-up process? A bottom-up process is the direct sensory experience of information

in the moment. It's just happening. The bottom-up processes only know the present moment.

That might sound really attractive, but it's incomplete. The top-down neurological processes

harvest this information and put it into a library that we'll call past experience,

and then projects it forward to future expectation.

So it's a predictive engine on top of the felt experience. That's right. That's exactly what it is.

And when you realize that the top-down process has no connection with the present moment in and of itself,

it lives in the past and attempts to predict the future.

And if its prediction is right, it only knows it from the bottom-up validation.

The bottom-up may invalidate.

It can be a prediction error. Oh, what a surprise! I'll write a paper on this sometime because I'm

convinced the earliest neuroplastic generation experience in the human psyche is this thing we we call humor.

The benign violation of expectation. Surprise! Where you thought it was going,

it hits a right hand or a left hand turn, you get this thing called laughter.

I do my best to work predominantly with bottom-up experience.

I work in the neuroplastic attempt to bring the person into the present moment.

I think, however you get to the present moment, that is the therapeutic goal.

I think the truth of the present moment is unbiased. Top-down has a confirmation bias.

It wants its view of reality to be correct.

And that's Friston's work with this active inference and so on, which is another technical area.

Working with information that is meant to help a person.

Kind of be attentionally grabbed and surprised into the present moment,

I think has a tremendous, not only therapeutic,

but consciousness potential.

I guess what trauma is like where the prediction engine is constantly wrong.

Yeah, it pretends that the past is the present.

Yeah, it's basically reliving and then reacting to the moment, catastrophizing.

Two massive names in our Western tradition, Freud and Pavlov, both shared,

because actually Freud was biological in his premise.

They both share the same opinion that the organism has a natural capacity at self-resolution,

when it comes to conflict or trauma and healing at a level, and that when this process is

obstructed by a kind of stickness or blockage of natural channels, and I don't mean energetically,

I don't even know what those channels are, they're probably psychological and biological,

They say that...

The healing is not to fix the problem, but to open up the natural channels of resolution again. That's the game.

And Carhart-Harris has his primary consciousness and secondary consciousness.

Primary being the sensory bottom-up, and secondary being the common translated symbolic top-down.

Freud expressed it differently.

The primitive, he called the id, and the evolved, he called the ego.

It's the same model. Actually, Carhart-Harris appears to have borrowed from Freud,

even the terms of primary and secondary in his model.

I struggled for a long while to try to understand what the hell is information.

What do you mean when you use the word information?

I got saved, to my satisfaction, by Gregory Bateson, now past, brilliant, multi-everything

anthropologist. He gave the solution to me in two bumper stickers that I follow right now,

even in my development of what I do manually and what I'm hoping for algorithmically,

follows his principle. He said, information is news of change. When something is not changing,

the information load drops. When it changes, there's suddenly the generation of information.

So, information is news of change, then the second one is information is a difference

that makes a difference.

So not every change is actually radically informative and that's where the system and

complexity can figure these things out.

I believe that in signaling, the explicit signal, whether it's the sound or the light

flash, that's explicit.

I think that there is tons of, this is gonna sound strange, non-existent, existent information.

And I'll give you this analogy. I'm gonna do an air drawing right now of two mountains,

right, two mountain peaks.

They exist, that's explicit.

But there's something there that isn't there. Implicitly, it's there.

So what's there that's not there? The valley.

The valley is nothing, but it's an implicit message from the explicit of two mountains.

So I think all the signals that we consciously experience, whether it's sound or light, and probably beyond that,

these are the explicit signals that the implicit messaging, the experience quality comes from sensing money.

Maybe like you had described earlier without the details where you had a certain experience

and everything you seem to read between the lines and you were describing that sustained state that you were in.

I think it's because of the reading between the lines, meaning sensing the implicit messaging that is innate

but hidden in the explicit signals.

So I work with trying to notice what I call the delta dynamics.

I look to see where the changes are, because if I say to you, number five, number seven,

I give you a five, I give you a seven, what's implicit?

Six.

Two. The difference between five is, or it could be six, linear and one is quantitative.

But the idea is that explicitly five and seven creates two.

That's the difference.

That's also, by the way, this example was great. Yes.

Because we both had different association and interpretation of the situation.

But when we communicate and someone says, I understand you 100%, it's never true.

Never true.

Because the implicit is always a bit different. Subjective. If I say Paris, one might think about Paris Hilton,

the other one is think about their trip to the city of Paris. Of course.

So there is all these associations with symbols. Yes.

You said first language. Yes. Terence McKenna said that the world is made out of language,

which was a profound thought for me, that there is certain language to it.

People mix knowledge with information. Information as in having a form.

It has like a certain sequence. It's codified reality in some way.

We give it a certain sequence. It has the implicit explicit qualities of it,

and that's the information flow of the communication.

We know more than we can say. Oh, for sure. And we can say more than we can write down.

And we know more than we think.

In communication, there is a lot of things that are being said and what are not being said.

There's things that are being understood and misunderstood and not understood at all, in a sense.

All the time. So in the end, also, when I listen to you, I'm not really listening to you.

I'm having associations, implicit, Explicit, I think I'm hearing things.

You are hearing things.

The experience you're having is only indirectly related to what you're hearing.

So it's when you put the NeuroVIZR device, everyone sees different patterns.

They see similar, but then it morphs quite quickly.

So it does begin with a great deal of initial similarity. And I can show you a stack of papers,

this big research, mostly done in the 50s, correlating different optic frequencies

with colors and geometry.

Is that why in psychedelic experience with substances, people describe similar audiovisual so-called

hallucinations or illusions? Yeah, those are Fluver's form constants.

with photic stimulation and mescaline.

And he came up with what still stands today as four different basic templates for visual hallucination.

Tunnels and funnels is one, checkerboards or honeycombs is another.

Spirals, and radios like spider's webs. Those are the four based on the hyper columns

in the visual cortex.

When you stimulate the visual cortex in any number of ways, because of the hyper columns,

one side of the hyper columns generate color tones, the other side of the hyper columns generate angles.

Right now, when you look at me and I look at you, we have depth perception based on which hyper columns

are being predominantly stimulated, because depth perception is based on the outline, the edges of things.

And you'll notice in human art, for long periods of time, all the visual art was two-dimensional.

Right. And then suddenly it became three-dimensional. The technique, the understanding of perspective came in.

Why did it come in then and not before?

Interesting. Indeed.

If you, the eye is perceiving difference and optical illusions is partly the brain's prediction engine

absolute like filling in the blanks without error correction.

Correct, all the time, all the time. It's such a juicy topic.

And when and where meaning comes in, when something is meaningful,

is both a goal, a destination, and a satisfaction for me to be able to bring a person into what constitutes some kind of meaningful state.

That usually I call it knowing without thinking. Meaning?

It's significant. There's some kind of significance to it. It's almost like the term is me in it, meaning there's some kind of like

boundary dissolution of what you're being perceiving.

Something like that. I don't know because, you know, meaning,

we assign it at an intellectual level.

You can have a state that you recognize is important or a moment or something, a glance to the eye.

It touches you, yeah, that there's something there and I suspect that it's proximity to the present moment.

What is very interesting about the latest AI progress is that they implemented something called novelty in it.

And the fact that they implemented novelty was actually that made this giant leap

in image generation and recognition and all that. Like most of the progress is because of implementing novelty.

And that's precisely one of the cardinal elements of my compositional formulation is call it conflict.

Or call it surprise or call it novelty that I purposely play with the prediction generation

confirmation bias and then throw in a joke, throw in novelty.

It's interesting to me that Priston, who is massively a genius in all kinds of ways,

says that the brain will do everything it can to avoid surprise.

And I believe that from a rationalist view.

However, as I said, humor is amazing.

It's an amazing cognitive process and it's built on the delight of surprise.

Even young children, you know, do some magic trick or whatever it is.

I discredit Friston, which is absurd because he's 10 stories higher than my brain,

but that I think the brain does everything it can to avoid surprise in order to be prediction accurate.

However, a life that is totally predictable lacks discovery.

I think that's the whole point of a surprise.

When you have a prediction and you get a solid prediction error,

what a surprise, the novelty of discovery.

The novelty, I think it's learning. I think that every neuroplastic change

on the smallest level is a biological hero's journey.

Right, your brain is expecting certain things and novelty is when it notices that its prediction is wrong. That's right.

That's novelty. Interestingly, Terence McKenna described, in addition to saying that the universe is made of language,

he also said that the universe is a novelty generating engine.

He had a novelty theory that what the universe is doing, instead of entropy, it's striving for novelty.

There's some intrinsic.

Process in it that loves to generate complexity. Maybe we can call it creativity.

The creative process is not to build an edifice that is replicated solidly every time,

but to have variations on the theme, to have creative discovery and novelty.

It's the same also in terms of evolution theory. For evolution to happen, you have to adapt or change.

You have to have errors. And I see genes as a collective filtering mechanism.

Adaptations, but at the same time, it's prone to errors, just like a cell dividing is prone to

copying errors. And the fact that there is these slight errors is actually what creates change.

I think it's one of the most important driving forces. It's probably, we're not going to get

into Sheldrake and all these other elements, but I believe that as our understanding progresses

in these ways, philosophically and physiologically, biologically, that we have the opportunity

to craft our technology, like an AI, to craft the technology in such a way that it is enhancing

to the process of consciousness, that it's not supplementing a process, it's not giving

you addicted to ongoing support because you don't grow up into it.

To me, this is a high-level hope I have, because otherwise I feel sometimes pessimistic, and

I'm trying to find ways out of that. And I think...

What you're saying, perhaps what I'm saying, points to something.

The idea of the confirmation bias, our view of reality.

Be careful that we don't do everything possible to resist prediction errors.

That kind of concludes the thing that, yeah, it's not just random blinking lights.

Oh, God, no. No.

But it's also not... It's not brain entrainment.

It's not fully...

What I would love to see is algorithmically some kind of feedback process where it's like adapting to what's happening,

which is like, you're now designing. Give me a little bit of time.

A little bit of time, a few smart people, and some resource, because this is where we're going.

It's the attraction of the potential is undeniable.

So light is music for the brain, and the composition of that is now,

is still a static journey that you designed to induce certain states, but maybe soon

it is something that is adapting

to what the brain is actually doing, and what its preset state is.

Correct. That's wonderful. I find that very profound and important,

and it's going to be interesting to follow this.

And definitely, I'm already getting a lot of benefits of using these kind of technologies of not brain

entrainment, but brain engagement. Yes, which is not coming down in brain entrainment.

It just is what it is.

So I'm all for engagement, and that definitely does engage me into a creative process that is helpful.

Or a meditative practice or whatever. If you feel like you can, I just don't feel like doing

like something like, like some simple pranayama or vipassana stuff.

Like you put this device on and just go with it. Well, I like to characterize it as everybody's best friend.

What we see is that the process, you could think of it as brain priming or sensory enrichment, essentially.

And this may sound like an overstatement.

I don't think it is.

Anything that you do after the NeuroVIZR, because of the hyperplastic state and then what's called a metaplastic state,

everything is better because it's like a warm-up before you do the hard-on exercise.

That you can use it as a brain priming process. People that do neurofeedback report back to us that if they have the session first,

that their client will drop into the neurofeedback process,

15 to 20 minutes faster than they would normally do in an hour session.

So they're saving 40% of the time because the brain has been primed into a process.

When you do a session, even an 11-minute session, your brain is in what's usually called a hyperplastic state for 1 to 2 hours.

Hyperplastic means it's sensitized to informational change. So it's a sensitized state.

So it's in a positive state for learning new things. Yeah, I think because the brain is physical.

We're not gonna debate what is the mind. So the things that we know about our physical body

are essentially true of the brain.

Any kind of basic exercise is physically good for most people.

But we don't really generate brain exercise very much. The person that works physically,

so I don't need to exercise because I work all day, but how many times do you bend over backwards in your daily? Never.

So that means if you have to bend over backwards, you can't.

In many ways, we don't do brain backbends, we stay within the bowling alley of mental habits.

The idea with the NeuroVIZR is it could be it's brain exercise disguised as entertainment.

It's provocative. Can you do this? Can you do this? Can you do this? I'm going to guide you,

I'm going to push you, I'm going to reward you, I'm going to do that, so that the brain starts

to have a neuroadaptive response because it's getting information in the form of stimulation.

It's physical, it's just straight on physical. And then whatever the mind is, this glorious experience,

I don't know what it is, but it certainly has a relationship to a healthy brain.

A well-functioning brain is really good for your mind. Absolutely, yeah.

And the well-functioning body creates foundations for a well-functioning.

Let's face it, when I look at you, that's your brain. Your brain, even this is our reductionistic silly things

that we cut things into pieces. To say you have a brain and a body is stupid,

because your whole body is your brain.

Yeah, it's a neural network. It's a unified complex system.

This is the thing that's, we, maybe I said it earlier,

you can't give the right answer to a wrong question.

And there are so many things that don't make sense to us because of the philosophical principle that we enter with.

Our axiomatic position is false.

And then we try to remedy it by explanations on the false premise.

And you and I both know scientifically, at least if we believe it, that we're 99.9% space.

Yeah, pretty much. So there's a forced tension that makes it feel solid.

I think it's really important.

To be an honest explorer of experience. Absolutely.

Thank you very much for this. This has been profound. And we are releasing also on the Biohacker Summit YouTube channel,

your talk that you gave in Helsinki. Oh, thank you.

Which was profound on the Fourth State of Consciousness. I recommend very much for people to check that one out. Thank you.

And I'm really looking forward to your talk at the Biohacker Summit.

I think the title is The Psychedelic Brain. I'm going with that right now.

That's going to be definitely something that I want to listen very carefully

and see what I can learn in the end.

One thing that you explained to me beautifully once was the fact that when your brain is

in kind of this balanced state in this default mode network,

where profound change is possible is to induce this imbalance.

Correct. Do you stabilize the default mode network?

Exactly. they have the stable brain and they have this destabilized state and that destabilization is what creates

the foundations for change.

It's like imagine or visualize that you are looking at the sunset in a regular state and then you're looking

at the sunset when your friend just died.

Correct. It looks different to you. So it's inducing this instability,

which I think psychedelics also do. Of course.

Which then makes you see things differently. Temporarily, but that is the point.

You should not be unstable.

For long periods of time, short periods of time are part of health.

Walking, bipedal walking, is constantly falling forward and catching yourself with the next step.

That's beautiful.

So in a sense, that's what we need more for having also healthy brains and be able to train that,

its ability to fall forward.

Yeah, being comfortable with short periods of uncertainty because that's where possibility...

Chaos sounds horrible, but it also means unlimited possibilities.

And for some, chaos is just something we haven't recognized the pattern in.

No, and we all need help.

And I think that sometimes we can feel like there's a monster chasing us,

that there's something we're avoiding all the time.

And I suspect, I can't claim victory here, but I suspect the monster that's chasing us is simply the truth.

That's it. If people want to know more about the NeuroVIZR,

can you maybe share a website?

Not surprisingly, it's NeuroVIZR.com. How do you spell it? VIZR is a weird spelling, neuro like you imagine,

and VIZR is V-I-Z-R, so it's a sound alike.

V-I-Z-R, NeuroVIZR.com.

Wonderful. So that's where people can find more information.

Yeah, and we're upgrading the website. The messaging issue is the game.

Okay. Thank you so much. Brilliant. Honestly, sincerely, thank you for the time.

Thank you. I appreciate you and what you do. Thank you and see you on the other side.