Technologies of the Sacred: Virtual/Vegetal/Vedic

Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. So, I recently had a chance to attend the Awakened Future Summit on May 18th and 19th in San Francisco, and it looked at the cross-section between psychedelic culture, immersive technologies, and meditation. So these are three separate, disparate groups that I've been a part of to different degrees over my last 15 or 20 years.

So it was kind of surreal to be at this event, which brought all these different intersections together and showed all the different parallels between them. Back in 2009, 2012, I was running the Evolver Spore here in Portland.

That salon was inspired by the work of Daniel Pinchbeck and Breaking Open the Head, and it really brought together this psychedelic culture within Portland. And we'd have these different meetings and talk about different aspects of consciousness and whatnot.

I've been going to different meditation retreats and Buddhist practices for 20 years now. And also immersive technologies is something that I've been involved with technology with all my life, but especially covering the VR industry for the last five years. So there's all these interesting parallels between the immersive technologies, psychedelic culture, and meditation.

And this gathering was really from the center of gravity with psychedelic culture in San Francisco matched up with the start-up culture as well as the people that after they do a lot of psychedelics, they're getting into more contemplative spiritual practice, more of a quantified self-consciousness hacking type of perspective. So I ended up doing about six hours of interviews there at the Awaken Futures Summit, and this is the first interview that I did. It was with Rak Razam.

He's an experiential journalist who's been covering both psychedelic culture and shamanic culture, and has written a couple books on ayahuasca, as well as a documentary. And I think he sets a nice context to be able to frame the connections between psychedelics and technology and these different contemplative spiritual practices.

So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Waste of Fear podcast. So this interview with Rak happened on Saturday, May 18th, 2019 at the Awaken Future Summit in San Francisco, California.

So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in. 

RR: So my name is Rak Razam, and I'm originally from Australia. And, you know, I thought I coined the term ‘experiential journalist’ back in 2006 when I was exploring the worlds of psychedelics and spirituality and technology.

It was based on Gonzo journalism and Hunter S. Thompson and this idea that these realms that I was going into and exploring and writing about couldn't be done objectively – you had to really get into the experience of the things, especially with the psychedelics, right? It's like there's no point really describing from the outside something which the wrapper isn't–the creamy center, right? And so Gonzo journalism had a little bit of an edge and a charge to it.

So, as I was trying to, you know, brand myself a bit for integration into the mainstream, which back in 2006, psychedelics were still a lot more out there than they are now, as they have been more integrated into mainstream culture. So I coined the term ‘experiential journalist’ and was writing about things like the ayahuasca movement, DMT, 5-MeO-DMT, reporting on that, going to different counter-cultural events and festivals, and really reporting from the inside out on what these experiences were about.

KB: Yeah, so I've been covering the VR industry and  there's been a very phenomenological turn towards direct embodied experience that is happening from the technology side. And you mentioned that you also kind of cover a technology element. When did the technology to come in to play, going into these kind of shamanistic, experiential, psychedelic experiences, and how does the technology start to blend in there?

RR: So, number one, here's the thing. We have these blinkers on in Western culture. It's like this white, Western-centric, imperialist viewpoint that we don't even see, right? Generally, even though a lot of the movements are helping us deconstruct some of that ideology that we're burdened with.

Because, number one, when it comes to approaching indigenous cultures and cultures which have caretaken psychoactive medicines for millennia, they see them as vegetal technologies and we sort of just laugh, right?

Indigenous cultures in Peru–they call the planet ‘Pachamama’. You know, in the West we have different terms, like ‘whole systems theory’, or James Lovelock coined this term the ‘Gaia hypothesis’ in the 1970s to describe the earth as a living organism, as a self-contained matrix within which life flourishes.

Within that, life itself is mediating its own consciousness and its own expression. And it's using these technologies that are invisibilized, that we don't see them as technologies because they're not necessarily the Western idea of what a technology is.

But the originating technology is consciousness and that is mediated through other filters, whether that's plant medicines, earth medicines, psychoactives, breath work, you know, trance, dance–a lot of shamanic cultures have realized that the technology of consciousness itself can be mediated through these other modalities and expressions.

So, for instance, the great and sacred medicine of ayahuasca all through South America. The curanderos or the healers or what we call the shamans. They call this the ‘science of curanderismo’ and it is replicable. It is measurable. It is explorable. They use these vegetal technologies to open up their consciousness and to explore the realms and the spectrum of consciousness that they are portals to. And so that is a technology.

I have covered other Western sort of technologies, whether it's been things like blockchain or AR/VR, things like that, as they've been coming in as well. A really interesting little segue to this is some of my research into psychedelic culture in the history and this idea that LSD for instance, which was probably the main driver of the psychedelic revolution back in the 60s and onwards–and you know, it's centered basically in Palo Alto what's become Silicon Valley.

And up until the mid to late 1960s, LSD was both legal and before it became stigmatized, it was used by the intelligentsia, by the mainstream, by the corporate America of the 1950s as a creativity tool. Dr. Jim Faderman, who has been the pioneer of the micro-dosing movement in the last few years, he did one of the last legal studies on LSD and the results came out around 1970 on creativity, thinking outside the box and the usage in corporate America of these psychoactive substances.

There seems to be a parallel in the ability of psychoactives like LSD that have been used in corporate America and Silicon Valley in that hotbed of creativity that helped birth the computer movement and all sorts of modern technological paradigms we have now. Which I believe is basically, has been about shifting from a linear consciousness–a hierarchical linear consciousness–which is what the 20th century essentially inherited, to this distributed, non-linear consciousness, which we really have now, or really is coming into the full bloom of now. And that in a very dynamic way this parallels a lot of these shamanic earth medicines and their ability to shift our consciousness as well.

KB: Yeah, I've been looking a lot at philosophers like Alfred North Whitehead and processed philosophy, but also moving away from the monochronic culture, which is the very linear mindset, hierarchical top down, but looking at these polychronic cultures, so more cyclical and nonlinear. Still, from a perspective as an individual, you have your own sort of unfolding of your own evolution. Still, then you're covering either what is happening in the experience, but also the larger world context. And so, how have you separated what is happening in the world and what is happening in your own personal evolution versus any sort of given experience that you're going through?

RR:  Well, I don't know. I don't think you can separate these things, can you really? Because I mean, your own personal journey… like my journey into experiential journalism and these worlds of shamanism, technology, spirituality.

I was already called to these experiences in these realms and it quickly became apparent that I was going down to cover them as a journalist and I was representing for mainstream fringe, but mainstream media. But really, I was on my own spiritual path and I was having these catalyzing experiences… There's this whole idea of the heroic journey that Joseph Campbell's promulgated these sort of stages. Step one is essentially departure from the known world in your comfort zone; step two is that initiation into the unknown or the mystery and whatever that is for you; and stage three is the return and bringing that change and that information back to your tribe so it comes full circle and it's made a difference.

So I quickly found that you know, discovering ayahuasca and going into the shamanic paradigm down in Peru in 2006, it was almost a cover story doing the media, but then it took me what was originally a 3,000 -word article on ayahuasca and the role of the shaman in the 21st century, eventually became two books and one documentary film on ayahuasca, Aya: Awakenings, which basically consumed seven years of my life, but that was actually my integration and in putting into words and transmitting a map of that experiential space that I had experienced, which was for the culture. It was my heroic journey, but it was also my contribution back to the community, you know, for the map that I'd created on my solo journey.

KB: So because you've been tracking this since 2006, there's been quite a lot of changes since then. And I'm just curious to hear from your perspective what you see these turning points have been? Whether it's some of these studies from MAPS or like, what it has been in the culture from transformational culture, Burning Man like, what are these turning points where you see that it's really taken off and the conversation has changed, where there's a lot more open public dialogue about psychedelics?

RR:  Well in general, yeah, I've been a commentator on psychedelic and shamanic culture for over 10 years now. In 2006, National Geographic Adventure published an article on ayahuasca focusing on Hamilton Souther who was running the Blue Morpho Lodge. That was a turning point in terms of the mainstream appreciation of ayahuasca.

Essentially recently we've had the 2018 publication of Michael Pollan's book How to Change Your Mind. That's been a huge turning point. Back in 2006 actually, my first gig as an experiential journalist was going to Basel in Switzerland and to cover Albert Hofmann's 100th birthday party symposium. He was the chemist who discovered–or created–LSD in the lab in 1938 and 1943, and he was turning 100. That was basically when the idea of a psychedelic renaissance was born.

It was born as an idea that he hoped that his “problem child LSD” could be repatriated or reclaimed back into the medical fold. MAPS was there, the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies, which has been the vanguard movement for legitimizing psychedelic research. And so from 2006 onwards, the idea was basically born when the psychedelic community came together to celebrate Albert Hofmann.

To bring these, I mean, all the studies had been going on for years before that as well. But there was a lot of momentum and that was a bit of a turning point. And media really fell over commenting and documenting this 100-year-old man who invented LSD–it was such a pivotal memetic trigger in the media, but in the decade or so since then, there's been such an avalanche of positive press on psychedelics, coming back into the medical fold and their usage to help alleviate stress, tension, PTSD, trauma, things like that in a therapeutic model. But definitely last year with the Michael Pollan book being published they call it the ‘Pollan Effect’, you know, it's had a pollinating effect.

Basically, psychedelics have gone mainstream now. They really have. MAPS hopes that by 2021, that these substances will be available for use in therapeutic setting to help alleviate PTSD with MDMA. Ketamine has come in again; psilocybin's been decriminalized in Denver and Colorado and is coming in. Ayahuasca is legal in many parts of the world. There's a cultural acceptance, which has been slowly, incrementally sort of aggregating and it's definitely become a flood now, so we're in novel territory.

KB: Great and and finally what do you think the ultimate potential of immersive experiences are and what they might be able to enable?

RR: Well, it depends what you mean by ‘immersive experiences’, you know. Life is an immersive experience and this is just one reality channel filter. So essentially, what psychedelics and shamanic medicines have taught me is that there is a greater capacity everywhere you look, whether that's within or without, right?

And so, we're talking a bit about technology and LSD and Silicon Valley, not to say that LSD caused everything, but LSD was actually one molecule different than LSA, the morning glory seeds. Nature itself teaches us about networks. It teaches us about energy distribution, about filtering channels of reality. Scientific studies have now shown that, you know, psychoactives in general are actually switching off these regional clusters of the brain called the default mode network.

When we lower that egoic mind and that aggregate channel that we've been embedded in, we can open up to these different channels of reality that are always there, that shamanic cultures engage with when they take these psychoactive substances. So it's really a matter of shifting your reality grid or shifting your channel of reality.

So the modern technologies like AR/VR, and things like that that are coming in, it's almost as if we've gotten to this point as a species of really being able to harness and appreciate the natural systems, like biomimicry, to use these natural ways, and, you know, we're just copying really what nature is really doing.

So I've been involved in a few discussions and podcasts lately on this simulation theory that we're basically in a simulation. All these ancient cultures say the same thing, whether it's Samsara, Maya, whatever names they gave it. It's not that this is just an illusion. It's just that what we're in isn't all that we're in, we're filtering down our systems of processing what we're in. Huxley called it the mind at large to make sense of it, to navigate this reality grid. But there's so much more.

 So whether we're using, you know, modern technologies which are bio-mimicing natural systems, we’re creating or discovering our true potential within those technologies and those mediums of reality. And so the shamanic experience with different plant medicines and mediated reality can be really instructive of how to, you know, navigate and also take the lessons from that into these new technologies that we're creating as well.

KB: Great. Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the consciousness hacking community? 

RR: Love is all There is. Play the game well. Aloha.

KB: Awesome. Great. Well, thank you so much.

All right. You can check me out at rakrazam.com.

So that was Rak Razam. He's an experiential journalist who's been covering psychedelic and shamanic culture. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview.

Is that first of all, well, just to frame plant medicines and psychedelics as a form of technology, they are consciousness modulating technologies that help you access different aspects of your personality and allow you to modulate your consciousness in a very similar way to virtual reality experiences.

And that thing that I've noticed within covering the VR industry over the last five years is that there is this psychedelic underground with different creators who have had a variety of different psychedelic experiences that either directly inspire some other work or they've gone and done different ayahuasca journeys and get involved more and more into these different shamanic practices.

And so at the Wagon Future Summit, there was this blending of different people like Adam Ghazali from UCSF who's looking at using virtual reality technologies as a form of experiential medicine.

And in some ways these psychedelics are another form of experiential medicine. And what the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies are doing is that they're essentially legitimizing the efficacy of these different psychedelic drugs for things like PTSD and trauma, and dealing with end -of -life anxiety and depression. I mean, the therapeutic applications for psychedelics go on and on and on, and that's a lot of what MAPS has been doing. So this gathering was a very interesting combination of people who are on the psychedelic underground, who were essentially strategizing and working towards a future where a lot of this stuff that people are talking about and exploring just becomes more and more a part of the mainstream. And RAK traces through a little bit of what's been happening in terms of these different turning points, whether it's the National Geographic or going to Albert Hoffman's 100 -year birthday celebration of LSD.

And the big thing was this publication of Michael Pollan's book, How to Change Your Mind, which came out in 2018. And I think started to open up the doors in terms of what's happening with the neuroscience and all the different therapeutic applications of psychedelic medicine.

I think it's just got people really curious. And just within the last couple of months, there's been both Denver as well as Oakland that have decriminalized psychedelics that are growing from the ground, whether it's psilocybin or mushrooms or ayahuasca. And so one of the things I'm taking away from this gathering is that there is this psychedelic renaissance that we're in the very beginnings of and I'll have some more interviews to cover in specifically what maps is doing but they're essentially creating a FDA approved psychedelic and then they're on the road to be able to distribute and administer these different drugs in a therapeutic context and so they're helping to redefine all the different contexts and rituals that are involved with that in order to administer these different psychedelics and the role where technology is going to come into play is it's going to help either prepare people for psychedelic experiences or to help do some level of screening to see if people would be responsive to a psychedelic treatment or it could also help to do levels of integration of going and having a psychedelic experience and then using virtuality to be able to help make sense or integrate a lot of the experiences that people may have had within their psychedelic journeys.

So there's a number of different themes and topics that came up in this conversation that I think if you've been listening to this podcast as from long enough, you'll probably hear some similarities. The psychedelic culture and the indigenous perspectives take a very panpsychic perspective in terms of having consciousness be distributed and nonlinear and just thinking about it, not in a hierarchical linear way, but thinking about it in these more nonlinear, polychronic ways. And I think that people get involved enough into these shamanic and psychedelic cultures, then those types of themes and topics seem to be a pretty big part of that culture.

But philosophically I think it's very similar to either neoplatonism or panpsychism or a little bit more of an enchanted worldview where there's consciousness that's embedded into the world and not something that's just an epiphenomenon of the brain.

So the last point that I just make here is this: that the other common theme between all these different topics of psychedelics and immersive technologies and meditation is looking at it through the lens of neuroscience, because in some ways, having the most cutting edge neuroscience research right now is looking at things like meditation and virtuality experience as well as psychedelic experiences.

And that was a big focus of Michael Pollan's book of looking at how, you know, when you take psychedelic drugs, it's turning off your default mode network. It's allowing you to have this ego disillusionment experience where it's less about you as an individual, but seeing how you are connected to the larger whole.

And that's that ego disillusionment process that is, I guess, opening up you to all these other different, what Rak calls “reality channels”, and that there's all sorts of different modalities that could get you into these different types of altered states of consciousness to where you start to turn off that default mode network, whether it's plant medicines or meditation or earth medicines or psychoactives, breath work and trance dance. All of these are entraining your brain in different ways to be able to help access these different altered states of consciousness that are using these various different technologies, whether it's meditation as a technology, or psychedelics, or through these virtual and immersive technologies.

And the thing that comes up over and over again at these different gatherings is looking at the hero's journey from Campbell.

And the way that Rak describes it is that there's these three stages. You go through this departure of the known world. You have to go through some sort of obstacles or challenges where you have this initiation into some of the unknown mysteries, and then you return back and you bring back the information and you share it with the tribe.

And I think it's that sharing of your story and trying to bring back the insights that you're getting from these different psychedelic journeys that ends up being this medicine either for yourself or for the entire community.

And I think that's what Rak is trying to say is that right now we really need these brave explorers that are going into these altered states of consciousness and getting in touch with these different ways of knowing so that you can tap into insights that we need as the collective in order to deal with all the things that we're going through right now in the world today.

And just a shout out to the simulation theory where he is also drawing these parallels between like the Samsara or Maya or mind at large. So these perspectives from Aldous Huxley or Hinduism or Buddhism, you know, there's different ways of talking about the ultimate nature of reality and the illusionary nature of reality and whether you call it samsara or maya or mind at large or similation theory– it's all kind of talking about the same thing, which is that there's these deeper patterns and structures to the nature of reality that we may not be able to fully perceive and that the world that we're seeing is in some ways perhaps this holographic projection or this platonic cave where we're just looking at the shadows but we're not able to ascertain the true nature of these aspects of reality.

And there's something about the psychedelic experience that either is just this complete internal experience and perceptual trick of allowing us to explore new neural pathways in a way that is totally mundane explanation from a neuroscience perspective, or it's actually opening up our consciousness up where it's like helping to tune down the parts that's really focused on our ego and the default network. And it's allowing us to tune into these more subtle energies to the nature of reality.

So that's all that I have for today, and I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon.

This is a listening supportive podcast. And so I do rely upon your donations in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com /voicesofvr.

 Thanks for listening.