[MUSIC PLAYING]
>> One of the most overlooked aspects of human ancestry,
whether from shamanic traditions or simply observing common
behavior throughout history, is the pursuit of altered
or expanded states of consciousness through many
various methods.
Many mammals do the same.
And every ancient and modern culture
has some form of practice that deliberately
alters the baseline state of consciousness
that humans operate from.
The fix-it-fast drivers of modern society
have caused for many psychonauts to turn
to devices and electronics to induce or amplify
their favorite expanded and psychedelic states, placing
a larger wedge between biology and technology
for future generations.
Ingesting psychedelic plants might
be the quickest and most reliable way
to induce such a mind-bending journey.
However, the full picture of human history
shows us that there are many other ways
to experience flow states of consciousness
and psychedelic-like journeys.
And the debate about whether or not
the plants or technology are necessary when
we can create these experiences from within
has sparked interest in what each of these categories
might mean for human evolution over the course of time.
Perhaps this is what the oldest practices
of yoga and many other traditions
were meant to evoke--
the natural highs that exist just under the skin.
>> It's not just the plants or the sacrament.
It's you.
You are the medicine, and it's helping reveal that within you.
But essentially, you know, there's multiple modalities.
The plants are just one way.
There's trance.
There's dance.
There's breathwork.
There's yoga.
There's tantra.
You know, there's so many different modalities
because all of those things are essentially getting us
in touch with ourselves.
And our true potential is to be divine beings incarnated,
is to be connected to the web of life,
and to be receiving more of the signal.
>> Most of these methods are generated by flowy,
repetitious, or chaotic body movements,
whether performed within major muscle groups,
breathed within the chest cavity,
or vocalized with the tiny muscles in the throat.
Even the endorphins and other neurochemicals
that are produced internally through strenuous activity
like sports have been known to push athletes
into very beneficial modes of consciousness.
>> Yeah, a natural high is some of the best highs you can ever
have.
And I find at least, that through
intense physical activity and athletics,
I tend to find those natural highs more
readily than in my daily life--
one of the main reasons why I still participate so often
in my sports.
>> For me, as a former collegiate tennis player,
I would experience flow state when everything was going right
on the court.
A perfect example of that would be, you know,
you look at a different sport like basketball
and how you'd see Michael Jordan during the playoff games
where everything was just smooth and happened.
The way that many athletes describe it
is a complete, effortless experience.
You're in the zone.
>> Some of the highest level athletes reportedly find
themselves in the zone during highly intense moments when
training takes over, and the problem-solving mind gets out
of the way.
In every ancient or modern culture,
you will not find any tradition devoid of dance.
All shamanic and religious origins
utilize dance for meaningful and ceremonial purposes,
ushering the one dancing to another plane of consciousness.
>> Dances, in our culture we say [NON-ENGLISH]..
We say moving energy.
This is different.
Songs, they're communication.
But when you're dancing, now you're
moving your collective-- well, if you're individual dance,
you're moving energy for yourself.
I dance in my backyard.
I can transform my backyard from what
it was into what it is now, just by certain dances.
Because you're creating movements,
there is like geometric designs that go into the universe
that you just communicated, I want to create this.
And the universe says, OK.
And then you create it.
Collective dance brings about change, brings about creating.
And these ancient civilizations understood
this, where they would create huge plazas where people would
come visiting, partake of these sacred plants,
and do these sacred dances.
>> The whirling dervishes in the Sufic traditions created
by the 13th century poet Rumi would twirl or spin in circles
for extended periods of time.
Even children are known to spin in circles until they cannot
stand anymore.
"Ring Around the Rosie" and merry-go-rounds
are other examples of children's love for the sensation
that twirling brings about.
In the film "Dance and Human History,"
we are shown that each of the earliest
and untouched traditions around the world
include dance styles that correlate
with the types of tools they used for daily labor,
such as linear, one-dimensional dance where wooden tools were
used, twisting or two-dimensional when metallurgy
was prominent, and even three-dimensional dances
in areas near waterways.
And the common theory of the purpose for these dances
are to revere daily chores and natural elements as sacred
and to achieve psychedelic-like states.
>> The Kalahari Bushmen in Southern Africa achieve
an equally powerful altered state of consciousness
by dancing for 24 hours around the fire and becoming deeply
dehydrated and falling into a rhythmic trance-like state.
And in that trance-like state, they then have visions,
and that, it turns out, is what is
being painted on the cave walls and in the rock shelters.
It's the visions of ancient shamans.
So they enter the deeply altered state of consciousness,
either through a rhythmic dance or some other technique
or through consuming a plant psychedelic, most often
the latter.
They enter a deeply altered state of consciousness.
They experience visions.
They experience encounters with supernatural beings
as they construe them.
Those supernatural beings may communicate with them
telepathically.
This is very common in the shamanistic trance.
They may give them teachings.
And very often, they'll have a therianthropic appearance.
They will be part animal and part human.
>> How was it that these rituals helped early cultures commune
with ancestors or beings from another realm?
Some believe that humanity currently
operates from a limited bandwidth,
only seeing what we are prepared to see.
These dances, rhythmic drumming, and psychedelic plants all
have one major component in common--
they deactivate the communication
between regions of the brain that hold us
in our behavioral patterns.
Once these regions go offline, the human experience
opens up to new patterns, and we no longer
need to be prepared to see in order to truly see.
But communing with other worldly beings
is just one effect of these expanded states.
The health of communities improves with ritual,
as seen in the study of psychoneuroimmunology.
>> The concept of psychoneuroimmunology emerged
in the 1970s, when researchers started to recognize that how
people thought not only affected how they felt,
but it also affected the neurotransmitter systems.
And depending on what the emotional state was,
those neurotransmitter systems could either
be elicited to enhance our immune functioning
or to compromise it.
The simplest example is stress.
If you view the world as being a threatening place,
you fear the world, this releases stress hormones,
and the stress hormones compromise
the optimal functioning of the immune system.
So by using, for instance, ritual
to change people's attitude, to get
them to focus on the positive things in life,
this is not just emotional in the brain,
it's emotional biologically.
Your neurotransmitter soup changes.
And if you get connected with other people,
this starts to elicit the release of lots
of different positive hormones in the body that
can enhance the functioning of the immune system.
So we might say it's just a ritual.
So it may just be a trick, but the trick works.
>> The emerging understanding that what what we act out
through our body actually changes hormonal,
and even neural functioning, has been backed up by even more
evidence in the past century.
In the well-known story of Norman Cousins,
he used laughter in order to recover
from a crippling connective tissue disease.
Another example came from an NBC article titled,
"Smiling can trick your brain into happiness
and boost your health," showing that the act of smiling
triggers a chemical reaction of dopamine and serotonin
in the brain, lowering stress, boosting
mood and the immune system.
There are also articles showing that Botox injections, which
use a neurotoxin to smooth out wrinkles,
also keeps the face from being able to express emotions.
This has been touted as performing like
an anti-depressant, as they're finding that if the face
can't act out a depressive or anxious expression,
then the brain cannot maintain the hormonal and neurochemical
recipe to trigger the inner sensation attributed to those
emotions.
Even animals seek natural highs.
Jane Goodall has been observing apes at Gombe, Tanzania
as they seem to seek altered states of consciousness.
They become aroused as they creep towards pounding
waterfalls, throwing stones at them,
and then settling down and swaying rhythmically
as they peer almost meditatively into the natural wonder.
Since the dawn of cave art, humanity's reverence
for altered states is found nearly everywhere.
And quite possibly, one of the oldest methods of sending
participants into states that are identical to psychedelic
journeys is an alteration of an act that we cannot survive more
than a few minutes without--
the breath.
>> The method I like the most that doesn't require an actual
psychedelic substance to induce a psychedelic state is
breathwork.
There is a lot of different practices of breathwork,
and this is a pretty reliable way
of engaging the body and the breath
to induce an altered state.
And it doesn't take that long, whereas some
of the other ways of inducing an altered state
without medicines--
like extreme physical exertion, or an illness, or injury,
or something like that--
isn't as adaptable in modern society.
But we can induce an altered state with breathwork
and have a full experience within an hour,
hour and and a half.
To me, that makes it very accessible for somebody
to have an altered states practice--
a regular altered states practice that both helps heal
the body, keeps us grounded, helps balance
out other psychedelic medicine use,
and it can be done pretty regularly
to help clear that psychic plaque that we
carry from day-to-day stress and being rushed in the world.
>> These modalities are seen most easily in the yogic
and Tibetan Buddhist practices of the East.
Popularized in Western culture, the core breath techniques
still remain in the highly modernized forms of yoga today.
However, even newer developments of using breath
to enhance health are seen with Stig Severinsen's
"breatheology," Wim Hof's "Innerfire," Buteyko breathing,
as well as many other techniques for achieving
different outcomes.
The most popular of the expanded states techniques
was developed by Czech psychiatrist
and psychedelic researcher Stanislav Grof
called holotropic breath.
After taking a break from psychedelic studies,
he decided to write a few books on the power of expanded
states of consciousness.
>> So I moved to Esalen, and I was trading this house
and the food for workshops.
And I was basically talking of what we found
in the psychedelic sessions.
And people were not very happy with me.
They said, it's great to hear about all
these great experiences, but can't we do something?
Don't you have a little stash on the side?
And I said, you know, I don't have the license to do it.
And I think Esalen would not be very happy with us.
But they kept asking.
So I started thinking about what we could do.
We realized how much can be achieved just
by such simple means as breathing, music,
and the bodywork.
We were looking for a good name, and we finally
came up with the name holotropic because we
were seeing how this experiential spectrum of people
is expanding from that very constricted, limited
that is available in our everyday consciousness.
So holos means whole, and -trope or -troping means
moving towards.
Like in the name heliotrope, is from helios, is the sun.
Heliotrope is the property of the plant, the flower, always
oriented, going for the sun.
So it means moving toward wholeness.
So holotropic states are not like that.
Your intellectual functioning is dramatically changed,
but not reduced.
It's transformed.
You can see certain things much clearer.
You get insights about things.
Where you go inside, and you find out
that the whole universe is represented inside of your sky.
The whole universe from this perspective
is coded somehow in the psyche.
It's available through intrapsychic exploration.
And this is of course the essence
of all the esoteric cultures.
As above, so below.
As without, so within.
So each individual is a microcosm
that also contains the whole macrocosm.
>> In a society hypnotized by scientific study with the use
of external technologies, exploration into the mysteries
of the universe using self-observation is seen
as inaccurate and flimsy.
Answers to our most timely questions, such as who am I?
Why am I here?
And, what am I to do?
Are given only the most conservative answers like,
we don't know.
Or that gene hasn't been found yet.
Speculation is frowned upon.
But psychedelic states or natural highs
seem to push the mind into greater curiosity,
expanded receptivity, inner contemplation,
and wild speculation.
Those who seek altered states of consciousness
are not doing so to get more of the same.
They seek transformation.
People of all walks of life go to the blazing hot and dry lake
bed of Black Rock City for Burning Man one week
out of every year--
not to strengthen their routines and habits,
but to dismantle them and see beyond the veil
of their own making.
In a society touted as being almost completely consumer
driven, people are left to use plants, vacations, retreats,
natural, and unfortunately not-so-natural substances
to shield their eyes and ears from the onslaught of products
and sales gimmicks.
The Kogi people of Columbia spend nine years
of their formative life in darkness
in order to connect with what they call cosmic consciousness.
Egyptians had the pyramids.
Romans used the catacombs.
And even the Essenes in Israel are
reported to use extended periods of darkness.
All of this to remove the shackles of limited thinking
and liberate oneself from the wheel of suffering.
John Chavez, author of "Questions for the Lion Tamer,"
has pushed the speculative envelope regarding
the role of indigenous DMT and telepathy, lucid dreaming,
and the overall questions of how much of our biology
we can actually control through thoughts and actions.
Extended fasting leading to years of inedia,
or living without food, breath practice leading to world
records of 22 minutes without oxygen,
breaking the four-minute mile when doctors said it was
impossible, surviving incurable diseases,
unbelievable feats of strength and willpower,
all because the human spirit seems to seek beyond
conventions and restrictions and mostly with purpose--
to know thyself, not just in theory but embodied.
The psychonauts that long to witness
as much as they can on this beautiful planet
in these amazingly mysterious bodies
do so because the greatest mystery of all
is right around the corner, and this life
might be their only chance.
What truly lies on the other shore when this body dies
is a mystery.
But glimpses into that world have
been coming to light in the form of near-death experiences.
And the experience is far closer to a psychedelic journey
than one may think.
>> Michael Sabom, the cardiologist who studied his
own patient-- he had a case where they were operating
for a tumor which was sitting at the base of the skull.
They had to freeze the patient.
So there was not only no cardiogram showing anything,
but the EEG was flat.
There was no brain activity.
And yet from her they got the most accurate perception
of this out of body perception.
She was able to describe what they were doing.
She drew the pictures of the surgical instruments and so on.
And you know, this happens with not just
in these kinds of situations, but all kinds of transpersonal
experiences mediate sort of extrasensory perception,
becoming an animal, or experiences from the past,
from historical events, visiting the mythological realms
and having visions from mythologies
that you never studied.
This is the Jungian idea of the collective unconscious.
It is all well-documented in psychedelic research
and confirmed by holotropic breathwork.
So these kinds of things, you know,
they ask for a radical revision of psychiatry and psychology.
The most basic metaphysical assumptions are wrong.
>> One in five people who are resuscitated from cardiac
arrest are reported to have a near-death experience.
Why would the process of death bring
on such similar experiences to psychedelic states
of consciousness?
One study by Jimo Borjigin at the University of Michigan
has found that for about 30 seconds after rodent models'
breathing and heart stopped, their brains increased
their neural activity, including gamma waves in all of them.
Oddly enough, the activity in different parts of the brain
became twice as synchronized as when awake.
Cognitive Neuroscientists John Kounios and Mark Beeman
found in their research that what
we would term as an aha moment has
direct correlations with gamma wave bursts in the brain.
These bursts happen when brain centers fire together
that have never done so before, giving rise
to a newly integrated and higher level of insight.
One hypothesis popularized by Dr. Rick Strassmann
got the world thinking about why the psychedelic compound
DMT is produced in the body and congregates in the brain.
While the evidence of DMT being released in dying brains is
still in question, an article published by Juan
Acosta-Urquidi reports that both 5-MeO and N,N-DMT caused
widespread cortical hyper-coherence in the gamma
wave region.
While this is not definitive proof,
Rick Strassmann gives an insight as to why
dying brains might release DMT.
>> To protect the body, number one,
and to kind of begin the movement of consciousness out
of a more body-grounded state, which occurs when you take DMT,
is you lose awareness of your body.
So I think it would be protective.
There are some data from Hungary which
indicate that DMT is what is called,
you know, neuroprotective in conditions of low levels
of oxygen in the brain.
Which means that if you're not providing
your brain with enough oxygen, your nerve cells begin to die.
And DMT seems to inhibit the bad effect
of a low level of oxygen. It protects the brain
against low oxygen levels.
And that's why the DMT theoretically
is being released.
So it would be important to demonstrate that either DMT is
increased by stress.
Or if you could demonstrate that DMT was increased
at the time of death, then it would be a pretty good picture
that would be completed.
You would have the low oxygen, which is a stress.
And if that increased DMT, then you'd
have more DMT around to help with respect
to neuroprotection.
>> While Chemist and Psychedelic Researcher David Nichols does
not believe DMT is the most important chemical that is
present at the time of death, he does express the neurochemical
dump that the brain produces during high stress
and near-death experiences.
>> That was a topic that I addressed at the Breaking
Convention talk recently.
And it was interesting because one of the people
there was named Jimo Borjigin.
She is at University of Michigan Medical School.
They looked at brain transmitters.
And what they said was when you cause cardiac arrest, you get--
and this is her word--
a brain storm of chemicals.
She saw dramatic increases in norepinephrine, dopamine,
serotonin release.
And that may be actually what's driving the increased
activation, the EEG coherence.
But then what I said was, well, in addition to that,
we know that under times of stress, people,
their brains generate endorphins,
endogenous morphine-like compounds.
So people that, say they're long-distance runners,
it's well known that they run, and run, and run,
and they get to a point where it becomes
too painful to run any further.
And then they get a second wind and they keep going.
That's actually releasing endorphins.
So now you've got increased norepinephrine, increased
serotonin, increased dopamine, probably increased
dynorphin release, other enkephalins,
increased glutamate.
You've got this whole literally brainstorm of chemicals.
Why do you need to talk about traces of DMT?
You know, it doesn't make any sense.
So that was an argument I presented.
We don't need to invoke something
where it is just speculation, when we've
got all these things that we know happen,
that we know are released, that we know are neurotransmitters.
>> Perhaps psychonauts often speculate about what is not yet
proven because this is merely the collective genius at work.
Theories are proven and disproven daily,
and some are resurrected for further review.
Most people prior to the early modern period
believed that the stars and planets
revolved around the Earth.
Most people more than a few centuries ago
knew nothing of what microbes were.
50 years ago, we had no knowledge
that the human body could produce the most radical
psychedelic compound.
And 50 years from now, we'll likely
know much more than we could ever dream of today.
Speculation should never supersede
the scientific method.
Yet Einstein reportedly arrived at his most amazing discovery
in the relaxing mind frame of a shower, not the lab.
Steve Jobs says psychedelics gave him
one of the most important moments of his life.
And co-discoverer of the DNA double helix, Francis Crick,
was on a mild psychedelic journey
when he made his discovery.
And whether or not DMT is the prime neurotransmitter
during near-death experiences, even what
Dr. Nichols' reports shows just how incredible it
is to have a pharmacy just beneath our skin that floods
the body with mind altering substances
in the presence of high stress situations.
In 1990, Dr. Kasamatsu and Dr. Hirai
conducted a study on a group of Buddhist monks
in which they took a three-day voyage to a mountain
in extreme cold weather, no food, water,
or communication of any kind.
After the second day, the monks began seeing and feeling
the presence of ancestors and other beings.
It was found that increased amounts of serotonin
began flooding the brain.
Serotonin is exactly what psychedelics mimic.
Even a modern rendition of Tibetan tummo yoga
has been crafted by Wim Hof in the Netherlands.
His breathing method has created much of a buzz
because it has been scientifically shown
that he can withstand submerging himself up
to his neck in ice water for eight
hours with perfect alertness and core temperature that
not only stabilized, but even increased during the test.
This breathing technique has been shown to dramatically
boost immunity in the face of E. coli infections,
for himself and his students.
>> You feel the adaptation right on.
I can see it.
[BREATHING]
That's good.
Now you can look at it, contemplate on it.
>> As well as produce experiences that have been
explained as nearly identical to psilocybin mushrooms, or DMT,
could it be possible that these substance-free methods
of dumping neurochemical cocktails into the system are
not simply ways to get high, but that normal consciousness is
filtered heavily by our default brain activity and that these
practices and their ensuing neurotransmitters unlock that
filter, allowing for us to see and feel more of the real world
that exists all around us?
Is this what yogis and mystics alike
have been seeking with spiritual practices for thousands
of years, the soma within or divine ambrosia in the body?
Perhaps it's important to ask ourselves,
once the astonishment of states of psychedelica are not so new,
then what is the point?
Is it to see visuals and feel peculiar?
Or are those merely the sensations associated
with stepping out of the conventional box
of consciousness in order to access more of what we truly
are, what we are truly meant to witness in this life?
Perhaps this is the real purpose of psychedelic plants,
not simply to use substances to tune out,
but to move past the temporary tickle of the body and peek
beyond the veil of illusion.
For when the top-down opinions and the rhetoric of culture
are carefully examined, all that is left to do
is to remain open to love.
What happens when the mind becomes still
in the knowledge that you are the real and only medicine
that this beautiful planet needs?
There is only one way to find out, and that way is within.