There's a fascinating organization
called MAPS, Multi-disciplinary Association
for Psychedelic Studies.
This is a nonprofit think tank that
advocates for the responsible investigation
of psychedelic plant and chemicals
and exploring their potential as tools for transformation,
for interpersonal transformation.
And this is a moment that we're living in now.
Right, we're kind of living through a psychedelic
renaissance where, all of a sudden, people
are starting to take these tools,
these cognitive technologies, that
have been used for thousands of years a little more seriously.
We're starting to take out the magnifying glass
and stop being alarmist and actually paying attention
and studying the potential of these tools, right?
So there's a fascinating article written by Timothy Leary
back in the '60s called Programming
the Psychedelic Experience.
And the idea here was that if you could successfully
pattern and sequence the input signals that the subject would
receive when he was on a psychedelic odyssey,
you could literally assure functional output.
You could almost guarantee a functional catharsis,
that there would be of value to the psychedelic session.
And he described the psychedelic experience
as a period of increased reactivity
to stimuli, both from within and from without.
so you are immediately plunged into a dialogue
with your own subconscious.
Things start to erupt.
Things start to emerge.
New patterns start to be perceived.
And at the same time, the world, becomes
like a Sensurround system, the fidelity, the resolution
of the input signals get boosted.
So all of a sudden, you are overwhelmed,
almost eclipsed by the signals coming in.
You are like a mind in flight.
You are in orbital position.
You are seeing the big picture.
But if you don't have navigation,
if you don't pattern those signals by carefully choosing
beautiful music, by carefully curating
excellent ecstatic poetry, reveries
that you can read while you are tripping,
controlling the environment, hanging around people
whose company induces feelings of well-being,
by patterning those signals, you're authoring the song.
The soul surfing that you're actually doing.
The people that engage in these mystical states
are known as psychonauts.
They're literally soul surfers investigating psyche
through first person experience.
And there's all kinds of answers that we can find within.
There's all kinds of spaces that we can explore.
The new space is inner space.
And it's fascinating.
We have to look deeper into this mystery.
We need to explore these numinous realms,
the archetypal realms from within.
We need to go Carl Jung on our own brains
using a cocktail of chemical technologies
that will thrust the bodymind into liminal spaces
of exploration.
We need to engineer inception-like dream spaces
to explore.
And the technologies are not all going to be external.
Some of them are going to be internal.
Computers are drugs but drugs are computers.
This is the essence.
This is why we should be open to this stuff
because it's absolutely fascinating.
To check out MAPS, Multi-disciplinary Association
for Psychedelic Studies.