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.