The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Sound Thinking: Using Music, Resonance, and Harmonics for Human Wellbeing with Alexandre Tannous

Episode Date: June 19, 2024

(Conversation recorded on May 1st, 2024)   Show Summary: Music has been an integral part of the human experience for thousands of years, and continues to embody a unique aspect of culture across the world today - yet most people hold only a preliminary understanding of the full range of benefits that sound, resonance, and harmonics can provide. Today, Nate is joined by ethnomusicologist Alexandre Tannous for a deep dive on the evolution of the human relationship with sound and how music could be used as a tool to facilitate personal resilience and healing. How can resonance quiet our reptilian fight-or-flight system and positively impact personal and group consciousness? When grounded in ceremony, how does music enhance spirituality and well-being for communities? What could a world look like in which every human has the access and energy to focus on healing themselves through the powerful tools of sound and meditation?   About Alexandre Tannous: Alexandre Tannous is an ethnomusicologist, sound therapist and sound researcher who holds four degrees in music, and years of experience performing, composing, conducting, teaching and lecturing on music. He has been investigating the therapeutic and esoteric properties of sound from three different perspectives - Western scientific, Eastern philosophical, and shamanic societal beliefs - to gain a deeper understanding of how, and to what extent, sound has been used to affect human consciousness.  The material he transmits about sound is based on multidisciplinary research conducted over 24 years. Inspired by his findings, he designed a protocol of an integrated experience he calls "Sound Meditation", raising an awareness to how a specifically designed sound can have the ability to help us to disconnect from habitual patterns while judiciously listening to the overtone-rich instruments he plays. He uses a method that empowers the participants to engage actively with tools that enhance their experience.   Show Notes and More Watch this video episode on Youtube

You're listening to The Great Simplification. I'm Nate Hagen's. On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment, and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming great simplification. An increasingly central part of my work, which means this podcast, has been the focus on, how important it is to create behaviorally stacked humans, approaching the great simplification through creating emotional resilience and coping mechanisms. This, of course, is easier said than done and requires a vast array of practices, including community, exercise, food, etc.

But one thing that I've increasingly found to be helpful for me is the use of sound and music. With that introduction, I am very pleased to introduce today's guest, Alexandra Tanu, who is an ethnomusicologist, sound therapist, and sound researcher who holds four degrees in music and years of experience performing, composing, conducting, teaching music, and holding sound meditation retreats. Alexander has been investigating how sound affects human consciousness through Western scientific, Eastern philosophical, and shamanic societal beliefs, which has led him to the intersection of art, science, philosophy, and spirituality.

In this episode, he and I discussed this work, the history of sound and humanity up to this point, and how sound meditation could be used in the future as a tool to grow the amount of more emotionally balanced humans. This was one of those episodes like Ian McGilchrist that surprised me. It was long. It was dense. It was beautiful. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Alexandra Tano.

Alexandra, welcome to the program. Thank you, Nate. I'm very happy to be here. How are you this morning? I'm doing great. It's sunny in Manhattan and little shitty, but spring is here. Let me, before I allow you to introduce yourself and, and the trajectory that brought you to this place.

Let me briefly explain to the audience why I invited you to the show. Someone might think that a music theorist and music historian and practicing meditative sound person might be an odd coupling for someone talking about the great simplification, energy, ecology, the end of growth, etc. And the reason is, is that I went to India and I met five or six people in my group who had trained under you or went to one of your seminars. And I personally experienced sound and resonance in my body for the first time like I was a child. And I had never learned about or thought about these ancient techniques of sound is more. important or has more uses than just communicating. So in a roundabout way, my colleagues said you have to have Alexander Tanu on your show, and here we are.

So you have a fascinating career. We spoke offline earlier that stretches across many disciplines, but centers around sound and resonance. Can you, for our audience, tell us a bit about your life journey and your work today? Sure, I'd be happy to. It's a complex one, but I'm going to keep it succinct. I was born and raised in Beirut, Lebanon, and the war became known as the Civil War, which wasn't really civil war, was portrayed to look like that, started when I was a kid.

So I lived through 14 years of war in downtown Beirut. that impacted immensely the way I viewed the world and allowed me to learn a lot from suffering and pain. And I had health issues because of trauma and autoimmune illness. And then my parents immigrated to the States later on and we came here. And during this time when I was in Lebanon, I became very interested in music at an early age and meditation, which I started practicing at age 14. These two were a savior, saved my life and allowed me to deal with the extreme conditions I was living in of terror, violence, insanity, and pain and suffering. and became interested in Eastern philosophies in mystery school teaching

and hermeticism, neoplatonism later on, and a lot of esotericistoric sciences and practices to demystify the nature of being, having been impacted by the extreme condition I was living through and trying to figure out what's going on. And then we immigrated to the States and continued my studies. I studied various aspects of music at the university, over 12 years, that four degrees studied music performance, classical and jazz. Previously, I played different

musical styles, and I studied music theory, composition, conducting music education, and ethnomusicology, which is a field that studies music as a sociocultural phenomenon, and the ultimate goal is to understand human beings by studying culture through music. and continued my interest in many other things. So all of these things that I went through and I studied, and I'm still a student, impacted the way I view the world and naturally impacted my practice. And that's my story in short.

So the way I was entrained, affected by all these conditions, created a very unique mind with a certain neural pathways, which we all have, basically. So one thing I learned that I would like you to explain, band on is how resonance and the traditions

of sound and music and resonance within the body existed a long, long time ago, like predating the Abrahamic religions almost as a serious practice to explore and unravel consciousness, to heal

people, to reveal the nature of our being So I was unaware of all this. Can you give us a grand arc of that story? I know it's a big one. It is a big one, fascinating one. And this is something I became interested in as I was studying in ethnomysicology and doing fieldwork. So the independent research, I neglected to add this to the end of what I was saying earlier

because this is a good preamble to where we're going to go now, is that after having studied various aspects of music, became interested in an area that we never studied about it, even though I did my degrees in a respectable university, Columbia, and taught there. And that area is the esoteric properties of sound and the therapeutic properties of sound and the way sound has been used to impact consciousness and spirituality.

So I did fieldwork in over 40 countries. I've done scientific studies, many of them since. I've worked with thousands of people. So what I'll be talking about is a product of all the years of my education, suffering also in my childhood, up until now, all of this affected the way I understand sound music because they're so complex. So absolutely right. sound and music have been used by humans in different cultures and variety of different ways.

Some of the ways that we witness that is through developing societies, indigenous people's use of music for ritual of healing, trance, possession. We witness these things in all continents, or we even have them in syncretic religions like Vodo Santaria, candombly, we witness it in shamanism. So the use of sound and music is so elemental. And many shamans tell you that it's the song, the Ikaro and ayahuasca culture, the ayahuasca songs, is what does the healing and not ayahuasca itself. Ultimately, you need both. We may talk about this later. So the chance that we use in Eastern philosophies, in various societies, the vocalizations, the use of sound and music in Sufism, which is a way to unite with the divine within us through sound

in bodily movement and chanting, incantations, prayers, mantra and sutra systems in Hinduism and Buddhism. So the way people use mantras to affect the brain, the mind. And these are various ways, each one can deserve four-hour-long discussion because they're so fascinating. So I studied immensely these things and I still studied them. And they inform me of the variety of different ways that humans have used sound and music. That means it's an indispensable power.

And that's why we find it everywhere all the time. In films, commercials, in celebrations, in parties, festivals, sports games, in companies, elevators. In book religions, we will talk about this later. It's really fascinating how book religions use sound and music. So that's what humans do all the time. How old is this? Do we have anthropological, archaeological evidence of instruments or drums or flute type of things? What's the story there?

We do. The oldest one going about 30,000 years ago. flutes made from the tibia bone of an animal or human with holes punched in it frame drums also are found in many depictions in Sumerian etching so many instruments have survived of course basic instruments but humans

go out of their way to spend time and energy to create something, a tool, powerful tool for ceremonial use. So we seem to be encoded with a strong intuition that without knowing the knowledge, without having the finesse and the artistry, the aesthetics of music and art making,

we seem to be driven by something so inherent within us to create music, to create an experience where this experience can entrain us. Entrainment is a very powerful, useful word here. I'm going to say it over and over. Entrainment is how the music affects you as you're watching a film. Your focus is on the video aspect, the visuals and the dialogue, but the music changes your attitude, impacts you in a way.

It conforms you to various ways that the director, in collaboration with the composer, film composer to allow you to feel specific emotions. Entrainment is when you go inside a church, inside a temple, and you smell incense, or you hear a choir, or you hear the church bell. Entrainment is how the sound and the olfactory sense in indigenous experience or shamanic experience affect you. So this is all entrainment. Entrainment can come, of course, an olfactory form, visual,

and auditory, the most impactful seem to be the auditory because we use sound and music everywhere combined with other things. So that's what we seek. To unravel consciousness seems like. Understand the nature of being. So is entrainment kind of like a second level that watching the video we're using our brain

and our cognitive system, but entrainment and the senses sound and olfactory, like you said, are the limbic system and the emotional subconscious. just feeling? Is that how you could describe it? Yes, exactly. Exactly. So look at the impact of language, of poetry, of a song. This is also entrainment. So entrainment, coming from an auditory source, means you're dealing with physics at the end. You're dealing with acoustics, and that's the power behind music. Acoustics is a branch in physics that deals with sound and vibration. So this

vibratory force that comes with us with a specific intention seems to affect the human body, the human being on all levels, the physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, energetic levels, and even visual levels. It can create visuals called synesthesia. Why? Because at the end, you're dealing with physics. And just like gravity, you know, whether the person understands gravity or not agrees with it or not knows how it works or not, it's still going to work. We don't. We don't understand to what extent consciousness is impacted by this powerful force that we call acoustics, and that's the power behind sound. There's another power behind sound that will talk about it, which is pure harmony later on. Basically, you're dealing with physics. And physics, we study

physics because they rule the universe, right? They allow us to understand how reality, how the body, how the universe works. So very important. We'll probably get into this later, but I'll point out now that when I was in India and we had morning chanting sessions, we started with more simple things, but then there were four or five, I forgot the details already, but we were basically massaging our inner organs, and I thought that was BS when I first heard it.

And yet, like you just said, whether you agree with gravity or not, it still affects you. I felt better after these chanting. And our teacher, who's a friend of yours, made sure that we, in this group of men and women on this 30,

of, what was it, a five week, a 42 day journey. We didn't do the la or the va sound because those were massaging the sex organs and below. That was something that he skipped over. But it was amazing.

Like the feeling. And unfortunately, I have so many questions, Alexandra, of course. But I wonder how much of this can be done yourself or how much of it you get the benefits by doing with others, the oxytocin and whatever. Because since I've been back, I live by myself. I work on Zoom. My network is global. There are no people right where I live. And so I felt, yes, I can do the chance in the morning by myself,

but it's not quite the same as being in a group of people. What can you say to that? Yeah, that's a very important point you bring up here. So when you do it by yourself, first of all, you need to be able to motivate yourself because it's about energy management, right? We have energy in time. What do we do with that? And I love your podcast because it covers a lot energy in the world and what's going on.

So here we're going to bring it to the self, the energy management. So it takes a lot of will, attention, intentions, presence of mind to create a practice, to get the self to sit and decide I'm going to do it for 10 or 15 minutes. Once you get into it, you can fall in a nice groove. and you can feel the effects on the physical level, an auditory level, and affects every aspect of you. When you're doing it with people, you're being entrained by the collective energy,

by the teacher, the facilitator, the group, people around you found in one place with the intention to do this. There's a great power in there, and that is something that was studied scientifically with the power of a group practicing transcendental meditation together or individually in how much this is amplified when people are in a group situation, all doing the same thing.

So this is immensely supportive, and it's many complex things we don't understand. Entrainment is how you would describe it, but it involves electromagnetics, it involves physics, it involves things that we can't measure, and, you know, Western science is focused on studying things, only things we can measure. We're now having to look into what we can't measure, but we need spirituality for that to come into science. again. So is entrainment of the sort you just mentioned a large or primary motivation for the church congregations we have in the West where people go and there's other people and there's an entrainment there with music and the smells and the feelings?

Absolutely. It's a shamanic ceremony. If you take this out of its context, the religious, the sacred, the book religions, Judaism, Christian, and Islam, they do this. Ceremony. And the ceremony can change from one religion to another in one denomination or sect to another, how they create the ritual. But people have done this for eons. This is what they do in shamanic societies. In a shamanic ceremony, you have a shaman, someone, designated to facilitate an experience, officiate an experience, like a priest, like a rabbi, and you are found there with a group of people and there is music, there's incense, there's iconography, and it could be profuse ornamentation iconography if you go to

Greek Orthodox Church, for example, very Rococo-like ornate. And there is the church bell. We'll talk about overtones. This is a gigantic singing ball, blaring, pure harmonies. And the call and a response, this is an experience to entrain the self to eventually feel God inside, which is what humans do all the time. You can brand it differently. You can talk about it differently, but at the end, it's the same thing.

We're looking for entrainment, powerful conditions with an intention people found together to create an experience for something really important. That is something that all human beings seek, to understand the nature of being, to understand something about the divine, we're encoded to seek the divine. Unless someone interferes and tells us go look over there or sell us something or entrain us by creating laws. And human beings have been impacted by various groups that created laws for them. Started with the nobility, aristocracy, royalty, that had power and money. And then religions came. and then political systems and governments,

now the media, social media, and Silicon Valley. This is all entrainment. Social engineering is entrainment, social design. So one of the things I found really shocking is that a lot of the sounds from what you refer to as the book religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, predated those three religions. This sounds like, again,

I'm doing this from memory from three months ago. Ibrahim, Ebb is in the stomach and Ra is here and Eam is up here and it's a way to massage those three areas in your body. But that these, this ancient wisdom of the chanting and the resonance was co-opted by these religions. Can you tell us that story or what are your thoughts on that? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So the book religions, Abrahamic religions, the religions

that follow Jehovah, Yeweh, that's the God we follow, even though some people think that Muslim worship Allah and Allah is different than the God that Jews and Christians worship. No, Allah is simply God in Arabic. And there are various names,

but Orthodox Jews cannot even pronounce. They say, Yod He-Vav-Heh, which translate to Yewe in Hebrew. So this is the same God. And we can talk about the nature of this God later because change his character and he's a little dicey to be around them and he's not always kind of promotes killing if you read the Old Testament. So the bottom line is that these book religions are centered around an experience.

And in this experience, sound and music are so important if you study. Quranic chants, the chast that you hear in the minaret, the reading of sacred verses, and there are three different levels of sophistication of this chanting. If you look deeply and study Gregorian chants in Roman Catholic Church, or the very sophisticated Byzantine chants in the Greek Orthodox Church, which is ancient Greek music meeting classical Arabic music and classical Turkish. We'll talk about this later. It's very, very sophisticated.

What's going on there in the octave, in the division? Fascinating stuff. The Protestant hymns, the church bell, again, as I mentioned, which is an instrument that's played that allows you to hear the harmonics. The harmonics is the place where pure harmony comes from. So all of this impacts the entire being of the person and makes them feel God inside. And that's what we look for. So when a person has had this experience for the first time in the Holy House, be it church, cathedral, Jewish temple, synagogue, or a mosque, you're going to have a comeback customer.

Because this is a very important experience that we seek all the time. So I'm not saying that maliciously these religions use sound and music to capitalize on its power. I think that these religions were created with good intention, but because of mishandling power, corruption, they got corrupted and they became businesses over the years. But they do good, except they create also separation because of the issue that humans have. We don't know how to handle power. We don't know how to handle energy. Besides the fact that we are species with trauma and amnesia.

and out of balance, we can talk about this later. Well, I don't know that we're a species. We're certainly a culture that's out of balance and has amnesia. Yes, a good word to use, yes. So there's something within us that we're trying to rectify and correct. We're trying to handle and manage energy differently, and we're encountering obstacles, but we're not aware of the gravity of the human condition

and address it with compassion and empathy. We seem to be seeking businesses, power, money, because something within us, we're driven by something that wants us to feel safe. And we're seeking safety at all costs, but we create this unfair system that capital us on people's pain. Look at the wonderful things that are happening in the Western medical system, but yet pharmaceuticals are not in the business of healing people, heating people because healing people kills business. for a company, from a sort of company, to spend $200, million on drug discovery going through

phase one, phase two, phase three, could be a couple of dozens or several hundred millions. To make a medication that's going to hit a person with one prescription, how are they going to get return? How are the investors going to get their return? It doesn't work like that. Even a year-long prescription, so you need a lot of

milking cows to generate income. These are the system that we've been looking for, profit over consciousness. So, book religions, tried to help people to feel God, but then it became something else. And we started seeking the same experience externally somewhere else and look at the power of festivals, parties, and concerts now. So my list of unasked questions is stacking up.

So let me try to recall some of them. So can you take me back to the time, not before the dawn of the book Religions per se, but long enough back before they were co-opted and turned into businesses, what were people doing and how did the technology, if I could label it, that of resonance, how did that come about and how was it shared with other humans? Yeah. We seem to look for these things. We look for resonance.

we seek music without knowing any of the stuff I talked about, the physics, the mathematics of the octave, music theory, had its impact on the brain, the heart, the entire body. Intuitive intelligence drives consciousness expansion. And we seem to be encoded by

a life force and intelligence, intuition, inspiration, imagination. These are three very important things. You add visualization to that. You drive reality to where it needs to be, again, unless someone interferes. And seem that the most important thing for humans is to always seek resonance,

states of resonance that would increase our bonding. So people, when they meet, they feel, oh, this person has a few good vibes with this person. and we have good chemistry. We mean to say resonance, electromagnetics. What is resonance? It's the quality of a sound of being deep, full, reverberating, and physics is to reinforcement or prolongation of sound

by reflection from a surface or by the synchronous vibration of a neighboring object. That is something that we seek not only through sound and music to unravel our consciousness, unite with the divine inside, unite with each other to create bonding experience, right? That's parties, what are parties about? People getting together to have good time together and bond. This bonding is so important for humans to feel a community.

So I've studied a long time ago now, evolutionary psychology, and there are some interesting prepared learnings and predilections. For one is humans naturally prefer symmetric left-right faces for whatever reason. That is an inherent bias.

Are you saying that we have an evolutionary preference towards resonance? Yes. Yes. If humans use music everywhere all the time and it's the most indispensable art and it's an industry and that's what we created in the West.

We excelled at it, but we put so much effort toward the industry, we neglected what else can we do with music? How can we expand our consciousness and find solution to what's going on in the world right now? How can we seek the divine without having to go through

a religion that's really a business and restrictive? How can we liberate the self? You're dating with physics once again. It's reliable, but most important the reason why I want to mention one thing before else is also about resonance

very important that this asserts what I'm saying that one thing that human beings do everywhere in the world they build very sophisticated big structures like the pyramids that you find everywhere in the world and not just in Egypt. Temples

like the temples you find in Malta in many places in the world, Incan temples Mayan temples, Aztecs, with the calendars that we find like Stonehenge and Adam's calendar in Africa with great alignment

with specific stars, constellations to know where they are on the longer count cycle the platonic year or the great year, not the Gregorian year, the 365 days. There's a bigger count, right? The Mayan calendar

that's about 25,000 and divide into different bactunes and so on. And this is basically Earth, as it's turned around itself, and turning around the sun, our solar system seems to be going through an elliptical shape like an egg, rising and falling, and this creates the yugas in Indian culture. They talk about the four different quadrants, the age of iron, age of bronze, age of silver, and age of gold, consciousness falls and rise. So the ancients seem to be very interested in figuring out where they are in the long-count cycle, alignment with stars, but also when the solstice, when the equinoes are happening to plant, crops, and many things. So this very reliable alignment takes tremendous amount of mathematics and calculation to build a temple with alignment with a true north, where between these two pillars you see the sun coming through.

on the solstice and very extreme engineering we don't understand this but what is this all about? Resonance. Why? It's to be in alignment because I believe that's my theory and the ancient Greeks

talked about it but I find that this is really really important here to mention is that we seek union with the logos is a very important concept here in ancient Greek has several meanings, word, discourse, plan, ratio, mediation, order, pattern, harmony.

The logos in Greek philosophy and theology is the universal ordering principle, the divine reason implicit in the cosmos, ordering it and giving it form and meaning. It is a true universal language expressed in mathematics, geometry, energy patterns, frequencies, processes, systems, systems, relationships, visual patterns, ratios, mathematical ratios, balance, harmony. And we experienced it as music, sound, sacred geometry, mathematical constants, desolation pattern and psychedelic visuals. The incredible Ervin Laslo is Hungarian philosopher of science, system theorist, musician as well, an integral theorist. He said that the logos is an informational software that's holographic.

So the logo seems to be the place where religion's concept of God came. And the closest thing to understanding the reason why we are alive, what is the human experience about? Where do we come from? Where we go when we die? These things were investigated and you were given the tools in ancient religion of ancient Egypt. And that was the last point where religions were about you realizing that you were. You are the eyes and ears of the universe, and we are here to have a human experience and learn about the nature of our being. There's a journey, and we learn through this journey.

So we are, as the saying goes, spiritual beings having human experience, not the other way around, is to remember where we come from. And then, because of corruption and how patriarchy impacted and corrupted the high priest of the ancient Egypt, they fell apart. when Aknatan was trying to save things and go into monotheism and to really bring things back home and not to worship so many gods seemingly outside of us. And this father created the book religions, Judaism, Christianity in Islam, without ancient religion,

the religion of ancient Egypt, we wouldn't have these. But they became more camouflaged and indirect, and now you have an intermediary. You don't have human being learning what he or she needs to learn to be in an alignment to expand the consciousness to realize the true

nature of the divine. The Logos is very, very important and I highly encourage people to look into. And how to do that to connect to noses embodied knowledge, knowledge of the heart, experiential knowledge, non-intellectual knowledge. Nosis

is a word from ancient Greek. It's where diagnosis comes from and agnostic. It's not an intellectual knowledge, it's not something we are taught that's a different kind of knowledge. I'll talk about it later. Nosis is conscious, inner intuitive, and experiential knowledge, imaginative knowledge, and not merely intellectual or conceptual knowledge, belief, or theory. The term is synonymous with the Hebrew D'at, what we find in Kabbalah, and the Sanskrit and Nya, like a Niana yoga,

yoga of knowledge, Vidya, and Tibetan Buddhist Rigpa and Prasna. And Nosis is knowledge of the heart, not analytical thinking, as I said, it is knowledge that comes through an experience that we come, it's built in without our intuitive force. It's very important. That's why Carl Jung said, I know, he was talking about the inner knowing. I don't need to believe. So humans were found of noses, but something must have happened that got us to prioritize epistemary, the other kind of knowledge that ancient Greek philosophers talked about. Epistome is conceptual knowledge reached through

reason and investigation. That is important, but it's no longer in balance with nois. And now there seem to be a great interest in noses with our interest in meditation, spirituality, psychedelic journeys, and shamanism, and

breathwork, to understand what's going on inside, to look inside. And what is driving us to do that, reaching a dead end, the suffering, the pain, the systems that we've created that are collapsing around us is getting us to go inward. Look at what COVID did, for example, got people to eliminate all the distractions, stayed home and had to face their darkness, their fear, their unhappiness, their suffering. And to learn from that, and that's not what we're taught in Western culture.

In Buddhism, they value suffering. So that's a different way of labeling what's going on with reality, and that's our problem. We seem to defy and try to end suffering and pain, not realizing, and we self-medicate, right, with alcohol, with nicotine, with bad food and sugar or legal drugs, this pandemic or serious problem in the States with opiate addiction, with addiction to Xanax, anti-depressants, anti-anxiety, anti-psychotic. So what's driving humans to feel so unhappy? What are we looking for? Are we approaching it in the right way? No, we're self-medicating.

We're trying to disconnect. It perpetuates the problem that creates more business. Going inward and realizing that there is something really valuable from within us, connecting to the heart, to noses, and making effort to relabel things and not come with an expectation, if we trust the process and realize whatever is happening has a good value, how can I get busy figuring out, why is this happening, we defy it. We come with expectation. and that makes disappointment rise tremendously. So that attitude is changing toward what I'm saying,

but it needs rehabilitation, education, someone to point out to people that you have not been using your energy in the most suitable way. There's a different way to manage and invest this energy, and we're waking up to that, and there's a lot of magical things happening in the world. It's not being addressed as much as the horrific stuff, because horrific stuff gets people attention.

For the media to make money, they need people to be sitting and watching TV. The ratings go high, they sell commercial at a greater rate, or they sell more newspapers, and people out of being inquisitive, and that's the reptilian brain that wants to keep you safe. It tells you, don't turn that channel off. Add on, don't switch the channel, don't turn TV off.

Listen, there's a breaking news. We need to stay alive, and that is the trap here. So there is now a 46% chance. that this may be the longest podcast I've ever done, but both of us have a commitment at the three-hour mark, but I have so many questions. So on your comment about nosis, the Greek term, which is embodied knowing, so if there was an experiment where someone was scientifically stating something and it was a double, blind test where they were doing it in silence and then they were saying it in with some music that was in harmony and resonance or something like that. Would the noses of the person that heard the facts while the music was entrained,

would they feel that that message was more true? Yes, that's a very good point. They would feel more true if they're guided. but the problem with the human condition is that we think it's coming from the outside. We externalize the experience. We exteriorize it. And humans seem to create practices where they worship an aspect of the self, but they seek it outside. Whether it's the sun, the tree, the wind, Jehovah, a male-wide dude.

Really, we worship a male-wide dude called Jehovah. And this is our God. when Eastern philosophies tell us no, no, no, it's inside. So it's confusing. We seem to look outside. Similarly, I believe that in psychedelic experience where people have journeys with

ayahuasca or Iboga or mushrooms of various psychedelics and this is what Sharmaliccite is always whatever grows in the region, or you can also have it on LSD and MDMA and ketamine. I'm not cautious with this term plant medicines. Here, I'm

mentioning this for a reason, is that because not everything we take is plant and mushrooms are fungi, not a plant, and if people smoke, toad venom, that's not a plant. And if we say plant medicine, then LSD, MDMA and ketamine are no longer medicinal, and there's plenty of research that are. But basically, when people have the journey, they talk about spirit, the plant spirit. They think this God is coming from the outside, this divine, this force, this healing force, when it's actually inside it, I believe, it's metacognition,

which is the ability to observe the growth from the awareness of our own thought processes. This is the working of the mind, this mental diarrhea that's with us all the time, that judges, that creates the perpetrator and the victim, that creates tension, doesn't have a nice voice. When we go into meditative, contemplative, restful state, or when we do breathwork, we disconnect from it, or when we take psychedelics, that voice seems to change in nature and becomes wiser. So I believe that's nosis.

It's there and accessible, but we need to make an effort. We need to change things in the default mode network, the egoic mind, who we think we are. Default mode network means how we were impacted by parental imprinting, entrainment, education, indoctrination, entrainment, society, cultural religions as operating system, entrainment, your beliefs, the words you use entrainment. All of this creates a very unique wiring in the brain, neural pathways. So psychedelics increase the neuroplasticity for us to remodel things, to change the connection, and they create

neurogenesis. This is based on recent scientific studies that have been done, discovering why psychedelics are so magical and help us heal, awaken, and rehabilitate. We are changing the brain wiring at the end. That's why practice is important, like what you did in India, in the morning, with a group. That helps you feel different. And if you do that every day, but you just need to find enough of self-care and self-prioritization and self-love to do this.

And most people prioritize other things, right? That's our problem. But at the end, it's about connecting to Nosis. And Nosis lays beyond the default mode network, beyond who we think we are. And that's what we seek when we go to raise or dance with or without drugs and we do breathwork or we do various rituals or we do psychedelic experiences. So we seem to be seeking what's beyond the default mode network to understand what can we do to help the self. This is something so important, and I deal with this all the time. I've made many observations about this and all the other things I was talking about before.

and we'll talk about it, by doing my own work, by being rigorous and authentic in my spirituality and my practice, and by working with over 23,000 people, I work a lot with groups of 20 to 100, not just one-on-one. But when I work one-on-one, I realize to a extent these intelligent people worldly, highly achieved, and well-traveled and all these amazing things, or none the above, they all do the same thing. When they're in pain, they use their energy to self-destruct, to be able to be able to. become self-limiting, the self-limiting ego, the self-destructive behavior, the self-sabotage,

that's our culprit, that's what happens to us when we don't get enough love, attention, unconditional love from mom and dad because they're busy with their issues, because their parents did not give them what they needed. We are creatures of love. We need love, we need attention. If we don't get that, we fall apart, we go out of tune, and we end up by trying to fix it over 20, 30 years with psychiatrists or psychologists. So let me share a personal comment. Then I have a personal question for you. So when I came back from India, I felt like a new person. And this is because every single day for 40 days, I was around the same 30 people. So there was community and love and cooperation and sharing. And there was resonance. We were

singing, but more importantly, we were chanting in different tones. And then you could hear the harmony. And we were knuckleheads the first week, but over time, we could find the harmonies. And if you stopped singing, you could hear the harmony with other people. And so I came back and I'm like, this is what needs to be done in our culture. Our culture is missing this. but what I didn't realize is you need two things. Um, you need that personal healing and chanting and, and love and community, but we totally lack the institutions and the structure in the United States.

So I came back and I was by myself, uh, on my farm and there wasn't these 30 people, uh, around. And so I think, I think we need both. We need the personal developmental path, but we need the institutional, um, cultural change. So, so let me, let me ask you this in my own life. I am as you know, just crazy busy. I'm, I'm working 60 or 70 hours a week. It's not sustainable. And I don't have that practice as you're suggesting. But here's what I do. And I would like you to, to explain why I'm doing this and what is happening to my body. This morning, I got up at 6 at 6.30,

I go through all my emails and staff things, but I turned on Brian Eno album in the background. And I had this kind of ethereal synthesizer stuff in the background for like an hour. I listened to that. Then I had a couple of meetings and was a little bit of stress. And before this podcast, I didn't have time to do a formal chanting or resonance or maybe that's my self-sabotage. I don't know. But what I did do is I went for 10 minutes next door and I called my ducks over. Um, back, back, back, back, back. And then they all come over and they talk to me. They go, rack, back, back, back, back. And then the chickens come and they have a

different sound and the African guinea fowl, but go, piqu, piqu, and I was surrounded by the sounds of my farm animals. And to me, that I'm sure it calms my nervous system down. Otherwise, why would I like, oh, I'm going to go hang out with the ducks for 10 minutes? So that is my coping mechanism during a busy day. So what is happening physiologically to my body when I turn on Brian Eno or I'm talking with my ducks and getting the two-way sounds with them? What is actually going on? A cascade of different things. First of all, you're being distracted a bit from the inner dialogue.

and that inner dialogue is always there all the time. When we have an experience, there's an aspect of us that comments on the experience, judges it, labels it, we create reality out of labeling. This is this, this is that. So healing isn't changing the labels, and this is called narrative therapy, which is the therapy that I use with my private clients and myself too. Changing the way I perceive things, upgrading them to something that's more fair, reality is not a process to go through, but it seems like reality is a process to navigate through,

and we navigate through that by changing the narrative, changing the way we understand and label things, name things. So anything that entrains you, distracts you from that inner voice, the dialogue, or sweetens it, conditions it to make it nicer and gentler. How does this happen? Well, if you put rock and roll, you're going to start the groove. You're going to move your body in sync with the rhythm or tap your foot or your hand. Eventually that's what gets people to go and dance. If you listen to Brian Eno,

and he's known to calm you down to appease things, you are being bombarded by very unique waves of sound, very complex on the temporal level, on the harmonic level, the melodic level, rhythmic or a rhythmic, the pulse, amplitude, all of these things are different aspects of the wave coming toward you from the speakers and enveloping your entire being physically, but affecting you on the emotional, mental, energetic, and spiritual levels. If you go outside and be exposed to animal sounds, you're being entrained differently.

And that, a beautiful counterpart, creates a fabric with very complex texture, There is a chicken sound and the ducks and pigs and the birds. Your mind starts to focus on these sounds, and there are two, three, four different sounds going simultaneously, kind of like a Baroque fugue, like Bach. If you listen and focus on the two, three, four, or five melodies going simultaneously, each one of equal importance, this is what polyphony is called. You are overwhelming the mind with a tremendous amount of data,

data, but you need to know how to listen, how to stay with these things, to let go of who you think you are in what you do all the time, to distract the self. But when I'm reading my emails, that's when I'm overwhelmed with data. When I'm listening to my birds, you might call it data, but I don't feel it. My gnosis doesn't feel it as data. It's not data. Well, it's all data because the brain is having to soar through these things, but it's a different kind of data because emails, in terms.

train you differently, and that data creates worry, creates duty, creates an added item on the list to do and have to think about how to reply. When you go outside, the data is liberating you from the inner world, and it's enriching you, uplifting you, telling you, but you can experience this. It's a different kind of data, a different experience. We grow from an experience, how the experience is being labeled. Some people may find that the animals sound to be, cacophonous because they're in an irritable state and that's what we do. When we are in an irritable state, we're not feeling comfortable, we start to look for things to irritate us or we mislabel things that are not supposed to be irritating us as being irritating, right? We encounter this

all the time. So the attitude that we have within us, the inner tension needs to be alleviated. This is where attention and listening judiciously, being aware, being here now, making the effort to let go of the screaming mind, of the monkey mind, of the mental diarrhea that's with us all the time, to bring rehabilitation. And that's what Zen Buddhism is about. Be here now. If you're washing the dishes, just focus on washing the dishes. So one thing you can do in the morning is that realize that that's what you're going to get,

if you're going to do your email for half an hour or an hour, or go outside. So you want to create a balance. You want to help the rehabilitation by creating a system where there's positive entrainment. and you're involved in it, and you're handling your energy differently, you're making choices to be equanimous. Equanimity is a very powerful word for people who don't know what it means, is developing a state of psychological stability without being influenced by inner or outer stimuli. Witnessing something and not being neutral toward it,

but choosing how to react to it, not being reactionary, being measured, being judicious, being discerning. And that's not what we do when we're stressed out. Yeah, equanimity is my goal. And for a few weeks after India, I completely felt it. I still feel it a little, but I'm being pulled back into the vortex, which is the chaos of our culture. Because my day job is to opine and discuss possible ways out of the chaos of our current culture.

And I do believe that sound and music is, is one of those pathways. Let me ask you this. Without naming names, there are people that are close to me who never listen to music. My girlfriend and I, every night we turn on Sonos and have on some music all the weekend. We have music playing all the time, different things.

But what is the difference physiologically or in someone's life, if they have the same exact life as someone else, like a hypothetical twin study, Alexandra, where one person doesn't listen to music and the other person does listen to music often. What happens to the physiology of these people? Yeah.

So basically, the person who doesn't listen to music, there may be various reasons why. Either they don't have that as a practice or they don't know enough about selecting music that they love and grow, because most people love music and something about the human condition is that there's nothing within us that tells us that that music that you're listening to as a 9-year-old or a 10-year-old is crap. You only think is the best thing in the world,

and that is an evolution that happens throughout our life. And it's very tricky to talk about it, but because people become attached to their music and defendant, and whatever they love, it's the best thing in the world. And that's why I'm not going to tell people what is. good of what is bad because my intention here is not to offend anyone. But I encourage people to become curious to listen to something that is foreign, new to them, but they need to learn more about it. Pop culture presents people with something that is easily fathomable and appreciated.

Like we experience us as kids. There comes your older sibling or your cool friend or a neighbor or your dad who taught you how to listen to the doors rolling stones or Jeff Rottal or Mozart and Beethoven or John Coltrane, whatever it is, when one was listening to Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys. It takes some awareness, some fadoming, and that excitement and pointing out, listen to this, this is what's going on. That's why most people hate jazz without knowing how it works, because they don't know how to listen to it.

When you explain to them, things connected to the theme in the beginning, improvisation on the theme, syncopation, blues, scales and groove and horns instruments and rhythm section instruments, then they start to get it. That is essential in learning how to listen to music. So this person who doesn't know, doesn't listen to music, does not know how to listen to good music or they're so preoccupied by the inner world that define the music that's trying to entrain them in a positive way to be a distraction. And that happens a lot to people.

You and your girlfriend are different. You realize the power of music, how much it can create a different mood, can have to be you change your mind. What is happening within you? I don't know if I realize that. I just do it because it feels good. Intuitively. Yeah.

Intuitively, that's what intuition is. What is happening within you is a little change of your mental attitude, of the mental capacity, of your emotional state, and that's entrainment again. And the more attention, and I differentiate here between hearing and listening, there's more attention and listening. and there are different levels of hearing, different levels of listening. So our attention is the spotlight of our consciousness. I would even say if you want a journey, go deep with just music by itself,

or add to it something, whatever. I would advise people not to take alcohol as the worst drug to listen to music. It deadens, brings darkness, closes a heart, but that's what people do everywhere. And any time they're facing music or having musical experience, they love to use drugs. Well, this is telling you that intuitively they're trying to disconnect from the default mode network, but they're not choosing the drugs properly.

Either alcohol, nicotine, or speed, or cocaine or bad drugs, you know, I would say marijuana is better or certain psychedelics. But that's what people do in concerts and parties and festivals. The ultimate point is that here we're following intuition to be distracted. If one wants to journey deep, then one has to apply a judicious equanimous. attentional listening, listening without trying to label things, listening without trying to comment on things, or it's certainly not trying to address other things or have a conversation. That's a different kind of listening and it can exist, but it's more hearing now. So it depends on the person's intention, attitude, how you want to have the experience with music.

You want to give it primary focus or listen to the background. All is fine, but people need to realize that the more effort they put into it, and to just listen and be with the music to go into a non-dual state, and that's what Sufism is about, to unite with the divine within. But the music you select is very important because not all of them take you to the same place. So you're being impacted on a mental, emotional, and neurochemistry level. And spiritual is well and energetic, but we don't understand these things because we can't measure them. But if people want to go there all the time and they create,

rituals around them, you bet it is important. So reality, the world, is the best lab. And that's what I did. Comparative study of what people do. That's what we do in ethnomusicology, kind of like anthropology, to understand human behavior by studying culture through music and why people listen to music, why music is important. Why do they seek the same thing, but it manifests differently and we think it's something different, but it's all the same. Music to change who you think you are. By changing so many things in the body, dealing with physics, dealing with entrainment, dealing with ethos and pathos, there's a concept that I want to explain here and demonstrate an instrument. So this is one of my theories that reality is created with language.

Language creates reality. Language creates the world. And we'll talk about that process in a bit. But music does the same thing. When you play a piece of music or an instrument, given the present notes that create the harmony within an instrument, demonstrate in a bit. Let's call this ethos. Ethos in ancient Greek means the distinguishing quality, character, personality, allure, the attitude and philosophical stance of a sound of an instrument. When you listen to that ethos, that ethos creates pathos, a level of reality. Pathology comes

from pathos, but I don't believe Pathos, another word in ancient Greek, is only about something that's diseased that shouldn't be there. So that's what pathology is. It could be the full spectrum. So I'm going to play an instrument now. This is a chimes called Koshi Chams, specific tuning. They call the tuning ignes in Latin, which means fire. When I play it, you're going to hear different notes. And these notes played together and in succession, they create a different ethos. When you listen to it, you're going to find that you're experiencing yourself, I would encourage people to close their eyes when I play it, so that they focus only on the sound and focus on the experience

in how certain feelings, emotions and thoughts, visual sensations are being evoked. So that's the pathos. And we'll talk about it after I play, and then I'll play different chimes. Skew, what are you experienced inside of you, how the sound of this instrument influenced the inner processes using words, adjectives, phrases?

It brought me back to my childhood. maybe because it reminded me of the ice cream truck, but it was like a spring day and everything was green and I was young and there was no peak oil or climate change in my mind and everything was beautiful and free. And it was just kind of childlike and playful. But then while I was listening to it, my cognitive brain came in and wondered,

what will the 20 or 30,000, viewers and listeners to this, that they might have a different experience based on that. But it would be hard for me to imagine that they had a bad thought or a malicious, uncomfortable thought with that sound. Agreed. Pointed. What you said is spot on, and I've heard the first part hundreds of times, childhood. Everything is green and sunny, joyful, lighthearted people.

use the word whimsical, sense of safety, childlike curiosity, windy day, and windy, sunny day, and I'm riding my bike and the wind is blowing my hair. Safety, huh? Great. That's the pathos that ethos created. And it's just different notes, creating musical intervals with specific mathematical ratios between them and overall harmony. Now I'm going to play different chimes. This is Koshi Chalms tuning audio or air and has a different ethos and it's kind of created a different reality within you, different pathos.

Once again, I welcome people to close their eyes. It's quite different. At first, it was kind of lazy and sleepy and like a cloudy day, but then it felt a little more ominous like there was a storm coming or they would play this in a movie before there was going to be a car accident

or something like that. So it wasn't uncomfortable, but there was an ominous and like something coming sort of feeling. Uncertainty or something. Yes, morose. Yes, absolutely. Once again, I've given this demonstration and received various hundreds of times, thousands of people over the years, the past 24 years, I've been doing this work. So you see what ethos does creates different pathos.

people add to what you said contemplative state meditative introspective wistful feeling it's cloudy outside or misty or snowing

and I'm cuddling with my partner and by fire and all of this is going inwards but it could also suggest nostalgia

melancholy sense of yearning sadness but it brings healing something has been neglected and we realize that oh there's a certain sadness and let's bring and look at it and there is relief all of this so pathos is very very complex this is how language works

language is made out of various sounds that we make with our mouth every alphabet has two groups of letters consonants and vowels the vowels are basically sounds where your mouth opens and closes to different bucle cavity size or vocal tract. R is maximum open, and this is what you practice in India in the morning, saying vowels with some consonants are not,

but centered around the vowel. When you do that, this jaw drops and you open and close the vocal track, which is the distance between the vocal cores and the lips, and that's a cubicle space. That's the inner bucle cavity. so that the vibration when it comes out of your vocal cords is amplified in a very uniquely shaped and sized vocal tract and that changes from one person to another

and that's what gives us the different tone colors that we have that people recognize with as this is Nate's voice even if I'm not looking at him I recognize him this is Alexander, this is Johns and this is a flute and not a violin and this is a piano why the harmonics colors sound coming back to this data, but let's go back to vowels. So how this bucoc cavity is shaped, narrow throat or wide, big uvola or small, soft palate is big, hard, or small, hard palate high, low, big tongue,

small teeth. All of these things create very unique acoustical conditions so that when the vibration is amplified, coming from the vocal cords, it's amplified. It's not just any space, a space that is Nate's vocal tract and not Alexandre and that gives us different harmonics in the sound. Is that why bands or musical groups

that have brothers and sisters in them somehow sound more harmonic because the teeth and the uvula and all the things you just describe? The sound is similar. It could be similar, yes. But there's also the camaraderie and the familial and the brotherhood and the tight

bonding. It creates a different bond. There's similar creativity, similar attitude, similar life experience, so very complex. But voices that are similar to each other and similar tastes create music with a very specific insignia. Yeah. When you played those chimes, I was, and presumably our listeners were as well, transported into the carefree childlike, windy, sunny day and the more melancholy, contemplative. Now, does that feeling or whatever happened to my physiology, does that stop as soon as the chimes stop? Or is there a residual? There's a residual. And depending on the exposure, whether this exposure was lengthy or short, whether it was in person over the waves or over recording, there are great, many levels of

degradation of the sound and music depends on your experience with it the best acoustically, because you are here with me in the room, not just experiencing auditory, but physiologically as well, because it's a wave, right, coming in, you vibrating the molecules in the air in a very unique way. And that waveform, that's what's called in physics, waveform is impacting your physical body. We experience sound auditorily and on the bone and tissue conduction level.

So if you want to hear your voice, bone tissue conduction level, close your ears and say just various words, that's almost entirely bone and tissue. And that's why we react to our voice when we first hear it on a recording. He's like, oh, that doesn't sound like me. Yeah, that's you. That's how people hear you. That's not how you hear you.

Because for the first time, you're hearing your voice only through the auditory and not a combination of bone and tissue conduction and auditory. So this is a very, very complex aspect. That helps immensely in creating a different reality. The consonants, when we use them, their vowels, plus an interaction involvement of teeth, tongue, lips. Like E, jaws close together, pronouncing the vowel E, becomes T. T is E plus the tongue touching the back of the upper teeth and a little bit the gum.

P, tongue is not involved, but smacking of the lips. It's E plus the lips or V, a little harder with a little opening in between. G, Z, they're all variations on E. C, Z. The alphabet is various sounds, consonants and vowels put together that allow you to create a palette of different words that have different syllables. Doesn't really matter what the sounds are, what the alphabet is, as long as when you put a word, the word has a symbology. If I'm talking about a tree and there's no tree within us, you know what I'm talking about because of what the word tree, the sound tree, combination of consonants and vowels

symbolizes and you create the image in your head, synesthesia. That's how reality is created. Ethos creates pathos our words, the language, if I talk in language that you don't understand, that I'm not going to be able to create pathos within you have to. That is a prerequisite

thing. Words allow us to express the feelings, emotions, thoughts, sensations, and that's what creates reality. The world exists because we have a language for it. That's what Alme is trying to bring awareness to the primordial arm. It's not about the sound itself. It's what happens to your mouth.

That's my theory on alm. It's not om, first of all. You mean, ohm, or what I would say. Yeah, most people think it's own, but it's actually alm. Al. Oh, right. I remember that from India. Aum.

Yeah. Aom is not about the sound, even though when people meditate with om, they can go into deep meditative state, but try it with tree or table. You go to the same place as long as you don't follow thoughts. and you stay with whatever word that acts like a mantra. AOM, I believe, is about the processes involved of opening the mouth and then closing. You go through the vowels.

So the primordial alm that created the world, the universe, is a reference, I believe, to the acoustical aspects of vowels and consonants and how the vibration coming from the vocal cords through air going through them coming from your lungs amplified and a uniquely shaped and sized vocal tract And that is what creates reality. Ethos creates pathos.

That's what I believe, after having thought about it and researched many, many years. This is how truth is transmitted to us, with us needing to do work with it and not being handed on silver plate. If it's straightforward and simple, that's not the real truth. One has to do a lot of legwork and neuron work over many years. So I know that beliefs shout louder than facts. to us and there's evolutionary reason for that. Are you suggesting that sounds and music potentially predated language? I think so.

I mean, our ancestors way back didn't have words, but we certainly had sounds. So maybe there was singing or chanting or something even before there was meaning to the words. And then like, if that's true, is connection to sound, you need. to humans even. Yeah, well, humans use it in a very sophisticated way with a lot of intention and wide palette of different circumstances and conditions. But it has been proven that birds sing for pleasure and not just communication. I'm blanking on the name of the researcher, scientist who did these studies.

So animals seem to use sounds and create songs and were to do. communicate, obviously, but also for fun. But humans excel at it because we are unique species or whatever you want to call that. It's called species for now.

And we rely on, but we, I think, we can bypass this aspect of creating reality with words with telepathy and there's a lot of studies been done on telepathy. And maybe at some point in the past, we were more telepathic and maybe this is where we're going. And many people are

telepathic and they can do viewing from a distance, right, and astro-projection. A lot of inner capacity that are unexplored. So there's a different way of creating reality. But whatever it is, sound impacts that. Music impacts that. So from

anthropological comparative culture perspective is the West, predominantly I refer to the United States, but maybe Europe as well. Are we sophomoric and juvenile with respect to resonance and harmony and sound relative to more Eastern cultures? Can you, I mean, when I was in India, every morning, before my alarm went off, I heard music blaring in the various tribal villages around singing and other things,

way, way more musical culture. Of course, I was in Oroville, which is, you know, a special place. Yes, our business. Can you compare the most striking difference between Western and non-Western cultures with respect to music? Thank you.

That's a great question. It's a big one too. There's a, it can deserve five-hour-long presentation. But the short version of it, Yeah, there was a huge difference. And this difference came with the development of harmony in the West in what became known as the Notre Dame School in Paris, Notre Dame Cathedral. This is where Harmony was born in 11th and 12th century with four people, we know of two of them.

Wait, wouldn't Harmony be born in the Pleistocene with just two cavemen singing? with each other? Absolutely. I'm talking about Western harmony, of how Western harmony was developed and born as we know it now. Pardon me, I meant to clarify this point. You're absolutely right. Harmony is a concept that's far more ancient than 11th century. But in the West, these four people, Leonin and Perotin, we know of two of them. Perotin was, they were all theorist, musicians, composers to set an extent, and one of them was also a monk, Perotin. The Notre Dame school started exploring in adding notes to pre-existing melody and realized certain consonants.

And over the next centuries, with Guillaume de Macho, Palistrina, Bach, and all the composers that came after that in the Baroque period, first of all, late medieval, late medieval Renaissance, Baroque, classical period, romantic and post-romantic contemporary harmony was going through a lot of changes, but became the dominant harmony in the West,

which we call tertial harmony. you take C, you skip D, and you take E, and that creates a third. So, do me, sol, me, do C, E, G, E, G. I'm skipping D, and I'm skipping F. Western harmony is based on stacking up thirds. These thirds can be major third or minor third. A major third for a non-musician is when you go between C and E, and you have four half steps, a half step is the smallest division of sound.

Half step is C to C-sharp, black to adjacent black-ion piano, black C-sharp to D. That's the second half-step D to D-sharp and D-sharp to E. Minor third is three half-steps. Western harmony is based on stacking up major and minor thirds to create major, minor chord, diminished, augmented, seventh, ninth, different forms of seventh, ninth, eleventh, and thirteenth. If you add another third, you go back to the root C. This is in short what Western harmony is about. close to the real harmony that other cultures and way, way back, used. And that harmony has a source, harmonic series I'll talk about later.

What we did in the West is that we created our own form of harmony based on an intellectualization, based on creating a system, but without fully understanding the system, little by little, we drifted away from the laws of physics as they're exemplified in the source where harmony comes from something so immensely important, intricately, connected to the logos and to God, which we call the harmonic series. I'll demonstrate that in a bit on a sinking bowl and talk more about it. So wait, what you're telling me is what we call harmony in Western music like Britney Spears or John Coltrane or anything is not true harmony, and it's different

than people would have thought about more than a millennium ago. It's called functional harmony. So what we created in West is functional harmony, harmony that can function and allow us to do the things, and it degraded over the years, not just that. We degraded tremendously, and we invented. There's good and bad. And again, I'm not going to name styles, genres and bands and artists. I don't want my intention is not to offend anyone. No judgment here.

But we lost the knowledge of harmony. Human beings are suffering because they lost harmony and love, and we are in search of that. That's what I'm trying to allude to. Wait a minute here. So you're saying that for various reasons, and you know, please feel free to tell me how we degraded it over time. But if we in this culture are listening to functional harmony in our daily musical options, does that have a less equanimity impact on our bodies than true harmony music would? Yes, it has less of everything in so many things, and I'm going to go through them. That's what we did in the West, part of us, disconnecting from our true nature, the divine inside, nature, the ultimate feminine archetype, the one that nurtures, the mother, right? And the logos, this degradation happened, I believe caused by trauma happened in the past, and we can talk about that later. and the systems that we created

that got us to prioritize profit over consciousness what patriarchy did and what book religions did and asserted patriarchy created further imbalance we're species out of balance between the inner feminine and masculine

we can talk about this a little later as well we're not in a symbiotic relationship harmonious relationship with nature symbiosis airs where everyone needs everyone else is not based on survival of the fittest and that's what you find when you observe how mycelium works in nature, the fungi, the plants, the roots, helping each other, giving nutrient. The flower creating nectar, doesn't need nectar to survive,

but it needs to attract birds and insects to take the pollen and cross-pollinate. That's an example of symbiotic relationship. Human beings stop being part of that. We felt self-entitled. We found profit, and we started raping nature and depleting resources and creating chaos and pollution everywhere. The fact that we lost harmony and we deviated from harmony and created a different form of harmony and even the incapacitated

functional harmony degraded over the centuries, notice now it does not take so much craftsmanship to create a Beethoven symphony, Chikovsky piano music or Chopin or John Coltrane or even pop music with orchestra in the back

and now you need the computer. That is a different thing but we focus only on that and degraded the palette of what else can we use to create harmony. But the essence of the modification is what we did to the octave and we changed the mathematics in the octave. In the west, we divide the octave into 12 equidistant half steps. So equidistant means C to C sharp is exactly equal in cents amount to C sharp to D. That became known as the equal temperament.

I know it's very difficult to fire the midbar. I'm going to expand on it a little more. So the whole octave is equal to 1,200 cents. A cent is a unit used for logarithmic measurement of sound. If you divide the 12 half steps that you find in the octave, which is not a problem, it's only 12 half steps. And other culture are more than 12.

I'll come back to this later. As I tell you what happens in non-Western music. That the 12 in the Western octave became equidistant, and that is exactly what got us to no longer be in alignment with the harmonic series frequencies. because if you take a piano tuned in equal temperament, that means 100 cents stacking up. Every half-step is 100 cents, totaling 1,200 cents.

You no longer have the mathematical ratios that a pure fifth C to G should give you a 3-2 ratio, major second C to D or D to E, with a black key or a half-step in between, two half-steps. That is a 9-to-8 ratio. When you observe the tuning of the harmonic series, these notes cannot be played on a piano

only the fundamental frequency or if you're starting on Deden that's your fundamental frequency So the piano itself is created out of harmony Out of harmony Not so much you can notice But your buddy can notice

string players that play musical instruments with no frets Violins, violas, cellos, basses where you can play between the notes Not like guitars This fret or that fret? The magic is in between an Indian culture

they call that Shruti. Shruti is the note between the note. Indian octave is 22 tones. Arabic and Persian is 24 tones per octave. Turkish is 53. Byzantine chants of the Greek Orthodoxes is 72 tones per octave. And if you go into smaller divisions, then you are likely to play a mode or a scale with notes that would be in harmony with the harmonic series notes. Harmonic series is a series of pitches that go and frequencies go on to infinity, starting with whatever you call fundamental frequency. If you start on C, then that's it.

You can start on C-sharp, D, B-flat, whatever it is. But that series follows suit. You cannot change it. So it's a series of infinite mathematical ratios, mathematical constants. I have a lot of questions here. I cognitively understand what you are saying. I'm going to demonstrate it and you understand more.

Because, so we changed the true music. in the 11th and 12th centuries. We created a different system of harmony, and it took some time to develop. Would the average person be able to tell the difference today? They feel it, yes. If they hear music from medieval period, it sounds very different.

If they hear music from India or North Africa, it's kind of sound different, because not only it's a different culture, but they're using the octave notes differently, and the notes are different, and that's kind of resonate with them differently, and it's kind of train them differently. And this is why in spirituality,

tend to hear Indian classical music, right, or Eastern music or in Orientalism, music that suggest something else, the mystical, the spiritual, and the elevating, and that became part of the New Age movement. But this is something that I think very, very seriously, I would love to tell you all I know about it, all I want to transmit, but it takes a lot of time because I would have to explain concept so that I can lay the ground and I can allow people to understand the complexity of this and the consequences. This is not something that's easily understood. And that's the problem is that book religions tell you sound as God. But what does that mean? They always tell you this in the beginning of all holy books.

Genesis, God said on the first day, God said, let there be light and there was light. this is telling you a lot about what creates reality in the New Testament and the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the words with God. So, Alexandra, I know a lot about the world, about energy and ecology and human behavior and economics. I know very little about music. I suppose you could say that part of my body, my embodied desires,

want to listen to music. Last weekend, I took a, on Friday night, I've largely stopped drinking other than than special occasions, but I do on the weekends have a CBD gummy with some THC 9 just to relax. And I found myself, I was watching Philip Glass metamorphosis, which was like a 30-minute piano where all you saw. was Philip Glass's hands playing the piano, I was completely entranced by it. I did nothing else. I just sat there and watched it. And I think 20 years ago, 30 years ago, I would have thought

that was boring and dull and why would people listen to some guy playing a piano? So maybe as I've gotten older and wiser, maybe I can appreciate that or whatever. But what you're telling me now is the piano itself and Western music is not the true harmony in the in the physics sense that music is meant to be interpreted and experienced. So my two questions on this topic are why did this happen in the 11th and 12th centuries? Why did it continue to the present day? And why is this relevant to our lives and our futures? The fact that that the Western scale is out of balance with true harmony. Yeah, beautiful.

So very rich questions. There's a long answer and a short answer to this, but the short one is not that short. So Philip Glass's piano piece, Philip Glass, is known to be one of the minimalist composers. There's Terry Riley and a bunch of others. People can look up minimalist composers. Why do you appreciate it now,

and back then, because you were looking for a different thing. You didn't have a life experience. You were very specific in what you like and what you love and what you look for, not as open-minded. And that's the problem when people don't have a healthy level of curiosity. They're so hardwired to look at and try to find what they know. What is familiar. Familiarity is so essential for us.

It makes us feel safe. Makes us feel that we know this. We get it down. and it pleases us because it reasserts and reaffirms, confirms to us things that we already know, and that says, kids, we love that, and the kid is still within us. So now that you became more worldly, culture, aware of many things,

tolerant and curious, and you developed over the years that, well, you know Philip Glass, Philip Glass is a great composer, and let me give it up, and maybe the CBD and THC9 and whatever you took can help quieting the mind. Let's be here now. You realize what minimalist music is about, which is developing a trans-like state, a hypnotic state.

It does not bring a lot of variety of music like jazz or like progressive rock, Jeth Rottal or Emerson Lick and Palmer. Things change dramatically and they throw it at you in very complex stuff on the melody, harmony, textural rhythm. No, this is slowly moving and shifting. and a creating repetition, and if you let go and see this repetition as being welcome and being therapeutic, rehabilitative, healing, grounding, contemplative,

taking you into euphoria or trans-like state in a gentle way, then you are in the groove and it's going to take you somewhere. So it's entrain you in a very specific way. It's true that the notes of the piano, this is the second part of the question I can say a lot more, but I'm going to stop here and move to the next question. The issue with the piano notes that most of them don't ally with the tuning of the notes in the harmonic series, and I'll give example, expand more on the harmonic series in a bit, and demonstrate on an instrument, that they are quantized.

Is that garbage truck in your background? Is that a harmonious in harmony? Yes, to get your attention to entrain you. It's all unchanged. Yeah, I live in the north tip of Manhattan away from the chaos. Nonetheless, we have some sounds, but not the noise pollution you have in Midtown and downtown. It's an investment in my sanity living by nature and away from the chaos of overwhelming sound. So the piano on a note, sorry, the piano notes, don't align, because they're equal-tempered,

don't align with the tuning of the harmonic series that is encode in us that we feel and when we sing when we play fretless instruments we automatically play between the cracks not where the notes go on the piano black and white keys of piano or

the frets on the guitar or the keys on marimba vibraphone organ harpsichord any fretted any keyed instruments people, musicians when they play wind and brass instrument they overblow under blow to give you the notes because we feel it.

When you go on the piano, you don't have that choice. Now, I'm not saying because it's out of sync with the harmonic series is no longer effective. It is still very powerful and effective. And music can be addictive and tremendously powerful as an entrainment tool, but not as much as when these notes are in alignment with the harmonic series notes. And that's the issue. How did this happen? Well, I think people didn't know enough.

So there was ignorance, lack of awareness of concept of physics and harmonics. Was there any deliberate action? Maybe, but I'm not going to be conspiracy theorists as that, no, absolutely the church knew. It's possible, but it's also possible to start with ignorance, because that's what plagues us. We don't know enough, and we seem to suffer when we don't know enough. Knowledge is the ultimate power that's known,

because when you have enough knowledge, your reality is different. people say that ignorance is a bliss in very few circumstances but most of the time it occurs but that's another topic can discuss some other time so being a student learning investigating things

letting go of what we think we know letting go of what we think is truth upgrading it fine-tuning it because of cross-referencing and because of an approach that is more medieval scholar-like Renaissance person not having one specialty

chemists don't know enough about sound and music unless they've investigated that they don't study it. It's not part of the training. Same with the medical system. We need to be Renaissance men, women, people, medieval scholar that had many different specialties to understand the magic of where it lays. So that over the centuries, this harmony with good intention to enrich music drifted little by little away from the real harmonic series. non-Western countries preserved it. But wait, because of the prominence and the primacy of Western culture, that is North American and European,

and because of colonization, these ancient music cultures, like in North Africa, Central Asia, Indian classical music, Turkish, Arabic, Persian, Armenian, music of Azerbaijan, they started feeding some sort of arrested development that they developed music like in the West where there's harmonies, and orchestras and music like John Coltrane and Wagner and Brookner and Bach because of the intimidating conservatory system and the oppressive hegemonic Western culture that also did good things and I'm saying it ruined things period we did good and bad and that's what humans do all the time but we tend to eradicate something in Mowdown

eradicated indigenous cultures. It brought to them good things and bad things, Christianity, diseases, schooling, and and hospitalization. Wait a minute. Are you saying that music in these other areas, North Africa and Southeast Asia and India and Pakistan and Afghanistan, that, too, has been colonized? It was impacted tremendously because of the world. of rock and roll, pop culture, because of TV, American TV, because of the media, because of

film industry, Hollywood, but mostly pop culture and rock and roll. It influenced a lot, the conservative system and the music, and they started emulating that, but now there's a renaissance, there's a great interest. They didn't completely leave their music behind. They kept it going, but there was a foreign new influence that brought some disqualification. distortion, simplification, and a lot of people started vibing more with rock and roll. Why? Rock and Roll vibes with everyone, because it's about lower chakras. It's beautiful. I'm not degrading rock and roll. I played it a long time ago and I still listened to various things, but not just rock and roll. So rock and roll is more inviting. And as a teenager, rock and roll invited me more

than certain stuff that my dad was listening to that were non-Western cultures, music. I didn't have the maturity to understand. But as a graduate student, when I was, I started understanding, studying, and playing classical Arabic Persian and Turkish music, which became my area of specialization music of Western Asia, and studied the macam system, the model system where the octave has more than 12 tones, and they're not quantized in how the ethos of this macam, this mode scale, can impact you and how you can journey differently, different form of entrainment. I realized to what we have been missing in the West,

and I'm not saying Western music is not good. It's impactful on consciousness, but not as impactful as it can be because of all the things that we did to the Western functional music system that evolved and degraded at the same time over the years and gave up more choices, but at the end, we drifted away from the physics of sound

from the harmonic series. The proof of this is that, look, nowadays, right? people know this that sound healing and sound bath are very popular like the new and i saw this coming when i first started researching sound therapeutic and esoteric properties of sound impact on consciousness and spirituality and psychedelics the way psychedelics works with sound 24 years ago at some point in the near future the study of sound harmonic series instruments and psychedelics are going to become powerful tool as about 10, 12 years ago, you started seeing sound healing, sound bad. I don't like these terms.

I call it sound meditation, which is not a term that I coined. I like it better because it suggests active participation. And that's what I encourage people. What are involved in meditation, sound, music, or any active participation, not a passive one. We love to be healed. If I lived in New York City today, and I used to, could I find a place? place to go to a sound bath. I did in India. Every weekend.

We did. Thousands of places every week are doing this. Everywhere in the States and is going into Europe now. So what are the instruments used? This is very important in sound healing, sound bath or sound meditation. Well, we use instruments that I use everywhere in the world, whether people know a lot about what I'm talking about, I know nothing, whether they're from Western or non-Western culture.

Musicians or not, they know a lot about music or nothing at all. Intuitively, these practitioners pick musical instruments where you can clearly and audibly hear the harmonics. The harmonics are kind of like ghost tones, very high frequency, far higher than the fundamental frequency, and I'll demonstrate them here. And so notes of various frequencies, notes variable number one, notes of various amplitude, softness and loudness, second variable. one is notes of different modulation, which is how these frequencies beat and pulse it, like wow, wow, wow, wow, compared to wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, that would help you follow the sound. And we use these instruments all the time in any form of sound healing or music sound used as a therapeutic modality. Gong's, singing balls, discs, chimes, bells, church bell,

overtone singing. So I'm going to demonstrate this singing ball that's made out of two metals, copper specific percentage, 75 to 77%, and tin, 20 to 22%. And with little impurities, that creates bronze. It's an alloy. You can't find it in nature unless you do it. We don't know how human beings figured out this recipe. And it takes a lot of work to source pure material to melt him and hammer this to create an instrument that takes a lot of work. Why, at the end, you're going to get magic here. I'm going to play the ball and listen to the harmonics as they pulsate modulation, different amplitude, soft loudness, and different frequencies,

and listen to how it entrains you with eyes closed. And I'm going to play it with different mallets to bring out more concentration on lower, mid-range, or high frequencies. It may seem like it's a one sound, but it's many different. pixels, auditory pixels, harmonics that were overshadowed because they're lower amplitude quieter. Now I'm going to rub the rim to sustain one harmonic. The friction on the rim is making the ball sing and now with a different method to sustain a lower harmonic. How do you feel and what did you experience? I feel good. I feel calmer. I feel like I

forgot we're doing a podcast. Those notes sounded beautiful to me. I have no idea why. And I have no personal knowledge of whether those were in harmony or not. I don't even know how to define harmony other than what you said earlier in gnosis. Those felt like true sounds to me. And I actually felt a tingling on the top of.

my head or like a some massage or some opening at the top of my head. I mean, that might just be my, my headphones impinging on my forehead. I don't know. But tell me, I mean, tell me the physics or. Yes. Beautiful. Yeah. What you said is poignant and many people make similar observation.

Some may say I feel grounded. I feel likeness of being more relaxed, liberated, the monkey mind and the critical thinking and expansiveness and so on and so forth. That's the power of pure harmony. What you listen to is the singing ball in training you with various frequencies because it's an alloy, that means there's a long sustain too. You can't do this on a kitchen pot. You get tang.

There's no note that resonates in sustain and there's no harmonics. The harmonics give you the tone color. They're found in every sound we hear, but most of the time, The fundamental frequency, the lowest part of the first note in the sound, is so dominant, it overshadows these harmonics. Humans love and intuitively, they gravitate toward these instruments I stated earlier, gong, singing balls, juries, shakers, rattles, discs, bells, overtone singing, music that vibrates and rattles and brings out this hidden part of music, the harmonic series,

the place where harmony comes from. When you listen to it, that entrains you and you become harmonious, you step outside of the monkey mind, the judgment, the inner dialogue that creates reality, and you feel that. So can I summarize the conversation so far in a simplified Western non-musical expert sort of way? Are you saying that Western music appeals to the lower chakras, which she, you mentioned earlier, and that this is just the tiniest glimpse of what music could do for humans if we had a more advanced appreciation and our culture adopted what used to be. Is that a fair assessment? Yes, and it's a lot more complex than that.

I'm sure. And among many other things, but this aspect is primary. That is what creates industry. That is what makes albums, bands, concerts sell. Because people want to feel good. People want to detach from the self. EDM is about that. Let me ask you a hypothetical question.

So pretend you were doing this experiment, and maybe you and others have done this experiment, where you have a group of people and you play music that is Western flavor with the non-man, pure harmony, and you play pure music that has the right physics and math that is in harmony. Two questions. Which would they prefer everything else being equal and how much of that preference is based on what they're used to and they feel comfortable with?

And second question is, can a scientist, would a scientist be able to physiologically test any therapeutic benefits? on their brain and body and physiology from protracted listening to these two different types of music, one non-harmonious and the other in ancient harmony. Yeah, another beautiful question, complex one too. So a person who's used to listening to only death metal or rock and roll, rap music, or country music, whatever their taste is, if they were exposed to the sound meditation instruments, singing bolts, gongs, and they were taught someone transmitted to them how to best listen to it in a different way than they listen to the music that they love, they will have the same

enjoyment, the same experience that you had. This is physiological, this is something where there's repeatability, but they need to know a bit to how to listen so that they don't feel antsy's like, what is this shit? You know, give me the music. Oh, this is too, this is too, you know, new agey. If they have this attitude, they're not going to be fit. If they come to it with an open mind, open heart, curious mind to have an experience and not have a look for specific things where it can create disappointment, a certain

expectation. If there's no expectation, then they're going to have the same feeling that you had. It's physiological. You're dealing with physics again. like gravity. And they're going to feel exactly the same thing, and this is why sound bath and sound healing and whatever names people call them,

hopefully they change them to sound meditation, which or sound journey is also good. It means it's inviting you to be an active participant, not the way to be healed. The sound healer does not heal you. What you do with the sound, how you listen to it, and let go of your thought processes,

the cognitive loops, the judgment, the dialogue, the inner, dialogue, the chat that we have, the commentary, the labeling, the perpetrator, the victim, the ribbons we're dragging from the past that create lenses and filters that would make us judge reality differently. There's no presence. There's no presence and present awareness. They're going to have the same experience. If they have this attitude, they're not going to have it. This is something that can be measured too. Because, and this is something I studied very, very deeply

in collecting data from people I work with to understand how people feel what are some of the benefits of working with these instruments quieting the mind is one enabling participants disengaged from their undesirable habitual patterns emotional, mental

physical right? Depression anxiety. What is anxiety about people creating a scenario in head predicting what may happen in the future and take it seriously and they become attached to it and they see that's absolutely eminent but they don't realize that they've done this 20 or a thousand times in the past and it never happened, but they don't take account into that.

They still do the same thing because part of them is addicted to this anxiety. It's generated by predicting the worst case scenario that will never happen or they're attached to something in the past. So resonance and harmony allows us to quiet the reptilian fighter flight system? Yes, among other things and quiet the inner dialogue, allowing people to address their pain instead of pushing it away because when we're in pain or were we addicted and that's a known thing part of the human condition is that we can become addicted to shame guilt anger resentment self-loathing self-victimization and there's a great addiction to the suffering

and that generates pain and what we do is we push something away if we're afraid of it and maybe we've done that as children and we grew up doing the same thing that thing that we're pushing away is something we created. And the hand that's pushing away is also us. And we try to deal with it. And basically, when we haven't healed, we realize that we create problems and spend time and energy and try to fix them. Attachment to the past, attachment to pain, attachment to suffering is immense. And people commit suicide because of something like this. People take anti-anxiety, antidepressants, opiates antipsychotic because of this. It's a very, very serious and debilitating.

And trauma mind creates a different reality. We'll talk more about this later. So there's a lot. And quieting I have on my website studies that I've done of how these instruments quiet the brainwave cycles in EEG studies that I've done. And people can see images of what the baseline mind brain looks like with a lot of micro thoughts.

and when they're exposed to gong or singing ball, how all this electrical data is diminished greatly and there's a clean slate, quiet mind. I want to get to that on music and healing, but let me ask you a dumb question about the false harmony or how you described it. How many people know that? Would the members of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra

be aware that our instruments are not in pure harmony relative to a thousand years ago? They do know. This is something that we study very briefly in music history, music theory, as musicians. We study about the equal temperament, and people know

what it is, but they don't realize the consequences. They think of it as, oh, something happened, but not realizing the consequences to what level it affects consciousness and how cultures, like in India, where music is used to sit and listen and dissolve in the instrumental or vocal playing, singing,

and they play the tampera, the tall standing instruments where the student plays with four open strings that vibrate because the string is on a wide bridge and they put a thread under the string with correct specific placement so that it rattles and brings out the harmonics, some of the harmonic notes, so that the musicians, instrumentalists or vocalists, can tune their notes to the harmony of nature, to re-harmonize, to bring things to a state of resonance, to quiet the mind, to further self-inquiry,

spiritual growth, exploration of expanding consciousness, connecting to the higher self, to create deeper relaxation, to be here now, to let go of the monkey mind. And that's the point. You will be proud to know, Alexandra, that I have, I tabla pro on my phone. I heard it.

And I listen to the Tampura. Yeah. Beautiful. There's harmonics. People look for them all the time. Well, that's what we we use that every morning in India. Yep. So the church preserved the bell, by the way.

The bell is all harmonics. The power of the church bell is immense. You hear it. Across the valley from a distant village. You're mesmerized. You give it attention. Try to stand on the. it or try to play a church bell if you can with the big group i've done that it's enchanting

it's mesmerizing why it's harmonics your body is resonating it's quiet mind you are experiencing the divine within why would the church use that that's question i've asked myself i'm not implying conspiracy here but we've gone rogue but part of us is still looking for the right thing we've modified harmony we created equal temperament we created industry and i'm not blaming anyone This is what happens to species with trauma is that we try to find God but we create a system that looks for God outside of us, system that capitalize on people's suffering,

systems that create profit over consciousness. We are changing this. We're finding our way. So on that note, no pun intended, how can music help us heal and rehabilitate the better side of what's humanly possible.

And if I could ask you a personal question, and you don't have to answer this, you can use another anecdote. But you relayed to me and on this podcast earlier, that when you were young, you were very sick and that you eventually found your way to music and music healed you. So can you explain using yourself or anything?

Any other example you want. What are the mechanics of resonance, true harmony, and music to heal us, specifically with trauma, which in my opinion, 95% of people in the West have trauma, maybe even 99% I don't know. Yeah, higher. Yes, absolutely. We all have trauma. Yes, this is a great question.

So just to correct one. think I started my studies exploration with music before I became sick, and meditation, but when I became sick, I resorted to music and meditation even more intuitively and built my career around music. I mean, it's not common for people to do four degrees over 12 years unless they really, really,

really love what they're studying. And that was my journey, and to start another 24-year-long research so far now. I'm still a student, and now I'd no longer do a job as a musician, composer, ethnologist, conductor, researcher. I use all of the skill to channel into what I'm interested in, sound, use as a therapeutic, sound music,

use as therapeutic modality to help myself and help people because this seem to be the most powerful tool. That psychedelics and your phenomenology, your meditative, contemplative, and mindful state that you bring to experience, This seemed to be the most powerful tools that created shamanism. I can talk about this later, but I'm going to go back to

what you ask. What it helped me with is to disconnect from my attachment to my pain, to the suffering, and to find solace in peace, to find salvation. The problem with our trauma is that we drag it into every present

moment. We are constantly thinking about it, attached to it. Rumination, right? Happens to every person. What is rumination about? Well, the person finding him or herself investing a lot of time and energy and thinking about something that creates anxiety,

creates fear, creates anger, creates resentment, or any of these unhealthy emotions, and they cannot shake it off. And that people resort to self-medication, sleeping pills, to be able to sleep, drinking alcohol, smoking weed. I would advise the latter other than

the other sleeping pills and alcohol is not good, highly addictive. and taking opiates. So, and doing whatever we can to not find ourselves investing time and energy in thinking about something that's not good for us. And the more we think about it, the more we're awake or irritated. How can we remedy that?

Music, and there's a big field of music therapy that has been doing well since the 40s in the West, where therapists use music for people to alleviate their trauma or get them to play very basic instruments, like banging on a small percussion instrument that does not require great skills, to explore listening, to disconnect from this attachment to the ribbons dragged from the past. This is what music can help us. Now, if we go into the origin of this power that music has pure harmony, using these instruments, combining them with psychedelics even, or using music and psychedelics, that's what shamanism is and I'm not reducing it. and to nothingness here,

I'm saying that it comes down to these two most powerful tools that have served humanity over thousands and thousands of years. This is what we're bringing back, but now there's great attention to psychedelics, but not the function of sound and music in this psychedelic experience because people stay away from whatever they don't understand and they study with whatever they are, conditioned, trained to study and fathom and research.

So is the implication that if someone does no meditation at all and no psychedelics and no sound uh reflection like zoning out to Philip Glass on a Friday night that if they do none of those things that any one of those things would be healing yeah um meditation psychedelics of of the appropriate um type and dose which I'm not also not an expert on with a qualified practitioner and and and And music. So are you implying that all three together are really what the healing therapeutic benefits would be? I believe so.

And what I can add to that is that, yes, now shamanism is fanning out of the Amazon Basin and out of Africa and out of many culture. And that's wonderful. But that's someone else's story. See, when you study cosmological, when you study indigenous people as an anthropologist, as a sociologist, as an ethnomusicologist, study their cosmological model, how they created their understanding of what's going on in reality. In the West, we have a different cosmological model. What is part of that cosmological model? Well, you have Jehovah and book religion, you have society, culture, and the political system, educational system, you have pop culture, blah, blah, blah. If you go to the Amazon Basin and you study

the Ashaninka or the Shippew, then your relationship to plants and the plant spirits and to music and various customs and arts is very different. When you take this out of its context, a lot is lost, but people don't realize that these don't apply to New Yorkers, to people in L.A. or to people in Zimbabwe or anywhere else in the world in modern cities, cosmopolitan cities, because they have a different meaning and meaning changes when you take something out of its context.

What we need to understand, and I encourage people, and I'm not being judgmental, we're deeply grateful to indigenous people that have kept these traditions alive in spite of the hegemony of Western culture and colonization and religions that mowed down and eradicated these systems that we're so attached to that that's what they do, that's what indigenous people do,

let's do that here, and we're going to get the same thing, no, no, no, we need to understand what is this about. How can we use that without any dogma, using them as technologies? The true, and I know the word technology as good and bad side, and I don't mean the bad side that I'm talking about the real, organic biological technologies that humans have used for eons, music, movement, vocalization,

sound, sound, sound, and music, psychedelics, but great attention to how can we label this as best, what kind of meditative state of presence, contemplative, introspective, self-reflective or mindful states. There's meditation. There's contemplation, mindful, self-reflection and introspection, almost the same thing, and there's mindfulness. This is the phenomenological aspect of the experience.

You're coming to an experience with the intention to do this here now, whether you're on peyote, mushrooms, Iboga, LSD, ayahuasca, cannabis, or nothing at all. It's all great, but for different purposes. And you're paying attention to what music does. with the ethos that it has, and the path that creates within you, and how you connect to your noses. I believe we need to create our own Western cosmological models informed by all the things

that we know. And we know quite a lot, and not everything is bad. People tend to throw this away, and they go native. They start talking about plant spirits and talk about, you know, what indigenous people usually talk about. That's not necessarily empowering. That gives away to the ego to root itself and creates ego inflation, creates problem with spiritual materialism, spiritual bypassing,

pathological altruism, something I call monobibliosis, which is the disease of becoming an expert after having read one book, it's a word that I coined. It creates a lot of, a lot of issues that we need to really deal with, and it creates just various things

that can be, going native basically is not good, understanding what they're used for and how we can use them in a non-dogmatic way, and self-empowering way, and learning about what can this inform us about the true notion of reality, how these technologies can be used, and the knowledge of how to use technology like a computer is very important. If you give a computer to someone who is computer illiterate, they may do good things or bad things with it. They may hack into people that can't steal identities.

We need to know how to use them. That's very, very important. So if we knew how to use the technology of music, resonance, and harmony with meditation, with or without psychedelics, let's just leave that as a footnote for the moment. What scientific evidence and story can you tell us of maybe the people that you've done this therapy with over the years? How does that music resonance and harmony in a practice over time change the trauma, the physiology, the experience of that human's daily life? Some of the observations that I got from the data collection, from people listening, taking notes of what they told me as feedback, experience sharing in my own experiences, my fieldwork in over 40 countries doing crazy. experiences in different contexts, in various continents, different experiences. This is how I got to experience psychedelics and become interested in them because of my own

trauma, my own healing that I was seeking, that, you know, the Western medical system chopped two organs out of me because of the severe case of ulcerative colitis, the autoimmune disease that I had at age 21, first entry to a hospital left six months later without the colon and rectum because they were irreparable in extreme state, severe state of inflammation, even though they gave me tons of cortisone and tons of antibiotics and all sorts of nutrients, they couldn't heal the inflammation. They decided to remove them. So they chopped me up and I have different plumbing now in my digestive system, created a new

technique basically called ilioanal anastomosis where they created an artificial rectum from the small intestine to help replace. But I've been living with chronic inflammation. since, that drove me to discover so many things. So suffering is a form of training. If it doesn't kill you, you gain a lot of statelessness, resilience, strong constitution, tenacity, and you become more compassionate and empathetic, resourceful, imaginative. Because you're trying to survive. You're trying to, and by doing that over the years, I was able to realize that suffering is a training as value. It gives us the opportunity to learn

things I cannot be learned in any other way, but that's not how it's labeled. By helping myself creating a narrative therapy, changing these labels, then my past over the years became something else. And without the suffering that I went through, the war caused my autoimmune system going berserk. And what inflammation is, and autoimmune diseases, is that the person's autoimmune system attacks the host body, the host part, thinking that their foreign that they are to be dissolved and disintegrated and creating inflammation. That's basically what goes on. And this inflammation can be exacerbated with stress, with sugar-rich diet, bad food,

cortisol high, all of these things. And if we don't have a system that can help protecting us, music and sound, as I realize, cause people to release their trauma, to establish state of resonance attunement with the self, to not experience insomnia, to improve dynamics between couples, some people started dreaming once again, exercising equanimity and no judgment, no attachment, enhance self-awareness, facilitating connection to the higher self-self,

to noses, promote self-observation and self-worth, letting go of our attachment and self-medication to things that might go to, and becoming self-destructive, because when we're traumatized and haven't healed, we become self-destructive. And as we become self-destructive, we destroy others around us without any ill intention. We can become sociopathic, we can become depressed, we can become full of anxiety, panic attacks.

This is all the body, entire body, entire human being, on physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, energetic is out of tune like an instrument, and it takes a lifetime to tune this body. Whoa. That was a potent three minutes, my friend. are you implying that in addition to eating green leafy vegetables and minimizing our sugar intake and not drinking alcohol, that proper listening to sound meditation and harmony and resonance reduces inflammation in our bodies? Tremensely. And I'm a live example. That's why I do what I do. I didn't need to start this research. I spent over $5 million on it for my own money. I took a lot. I mean, you know, I'm totally dedicated to this. I had four degrees. I was living my dream. All my life wanted to do many different things in music. And more I listened and studied, the more I expanded the spadet of what I can do. And I, you know, it was in the ringer for 12 years. It's not common. And I taught at a respectable university. I don't need to do this. But my, my, my, my, following my purpose in what I,

can also do to help myself and help others, and that's how I decided to quit what I was doing, even though I loved them immensely, but I focus on it because this is needed in the world. Yes, this is the new diet that we need to have, eating better, figuring out what's going on in the microbiome. This is an immensely new science. We are ruled by over 100 trillion microorganism, protozoa, bacteria, fungi, parasites that rule our consciousness. And if we have bad diet, if we have a bad diet, take a lot of antibiotics and have sugar and stress, this imbalance is going to happen. There's rising signs on microbiome on the vagus nerve, another essential thing, how peptides can help the body create the self-healing process and not just taking pills to maintain the illness

and create a lot of milking cows. We're resorting to more effective methods, having spiritual practice, doing breath work, doing psychedelics are not for everybody. Meditation is for everybody. I encourage people to, when they want to do psychedelics, to be very, very cautious, learn a lot and best to do it with a practitioner. Because most of the time when people do work with psychedelics, they don't do good work, they can augment the chances for them to have psychotic episode, or become addicted to peak experience, or to empower and root the ego. And the ego, that's ego inflation, makes the person think that you're a Messiah, God created you to save Earth. and that's messianism, is one of the byproducts of working with powerful tools. What are powerful tools? Sound is one, knowledge, yoga, psychedelics, having power in mishandling it, basically.

If the person is traumatized, feeling insecure, has not fully worked on themselves, the ego starts to use these things as crutches to create control, hegemony, seeking more power, more money, more popularity, and because of lack of self-love and lack of self-reve, hasn't been addressed in the insecurities and healing from the past, they start to seek more and more external validation and they want to become healers to others at the cost of self-neglect. You know how common it is right now these days? And this is how shaman's gurus go rogue. Also affected by the community, how people buy down to them and they look at them and then when

they are subjected to their ego trials, they fall and crash and people, ah, you know, they kick and scream and they blame, not realizing it's really hard to do this work with people. It's really hard to do the work with itself. I hope people after this part of the conversation can begin to see why this is relevant to the human predicament, the great simplification, the metacrisis, which I believe is a manifestation of our human behavior

and our fragmented self and our culture promoting, separation of self versus others and nature. So we, literally I could talk to you all day. We both have a hard stop in 30 minutes and I still have some key questions for you. One of them being, how would you recommend those interested, the viewers and listeners of this program,

get involved in sound and meditation or sound meditation? depending on where they are. I mean, we have, that's the challenge is there's almost 100,000 subscribers of this channel, and I don't know most of them, and they're all coming from different places in their own lives. So what sort of general advice could you give for those that are intrigued and would like to start sound meditation? Wonderful. Well, to become curious, you need curiosity as a prerequisite, to have a new, kind of experience.

And in most cities now, people can find someone doing sound bath, sound healing, and various names. It's good for them to learn about it before they go, because most practitioners don't talk about, don't transmit what

the receiver needs, or they talk about something that's woo-woo and may turn off people, and that's the common thing. Most of the time when people research sound on YouTube and internet they get to really shallow pop spirituality, pop shamanism, pop whatever, very reductionist, not so serious with a lot of unconfirmed rumors and wishful thinking, the sound, one frequency opens your heart chakra, this frequency opens the throat chakra,

nothing in sound is to be treated with this level of simplicity. The truth is always far more complicated, but because people sense the power and the usefulness of that they speak about it with language, with words, when they're not equipped to use the most appropriate. So I talk for at least an hour before I facilitate any experience, depending on how much time I have, to give people the knowledge of how to use these powerful tools and sound as a powerful tool. And it's about what can you do with that? How are you listening?

How can you let go of your own thoughts? Are you sitting here and listening to it in the background as I'm playing these instruments, or you're focusing on it and resisting, pursuing these tangent thoughts? important or unimportant, prioritizing things. So this prerequisite knowledge before they go and have an experience in person, preferably, or they can even use tracks that people can find on YouTube. Some are bad, some are good, depends on what kind of track. Or they can buy some good CDs, good recording.

They can download. Spotify has plenty of them, iTunes, iTunes music. I have six albums people can find on my website, soundmeditation.com. again I didn't coin the term I'm not promoting this because I'm promoting my brand and I don't do that the term existed before and I've been researching this for a long time that's why I have this domain but using my albums and my sound cloud recordings few of them they can bring in this practice learning about meditation to meditate with mantra or without a mantra to sit and hum at home just humming on different, just lips closed, basically, like,

mm, with eyes closed, sustaining as long as possible, taking deep breath in, coming back to the note, or vocalizing on different vowels. I'm keeping it simple here, but these are very powerful exercises like, ah, and later on changing to O or E. And sitting and going through the different vowels, when you do this, you're changing the harmonics. If they can learn to do overtones singing,

and I'm going to demonstrate it now, and they can learn that with different professionals and teachers that they can access on the internet. A lot of these teachers have uploaded free videos on YouTube. They can learn this is the most powerful practice. Any person who is new to meditation or seasoned to do is, doing overtone singing because nothing quiets your mind like when you do that. Overton singing is basically humming on one note or toning one note, and I'm going to demonstrate

in a bit. And by changing the bucle cavity, opening and closing it, I can naturally amplify one of the harmonics in my voice to create a condition in physics called Helmholt's resonance, where a specific cubicle space can naturally amplify a frequency that's there but that's overshadowed by the primacy of the fundamental frequency. and all of a sudden you hear that note. And that's what you hear when you listen to Tibetan monks doing throat, chats, tuven singing, Mongolian.

And I'm going to do it in a way that would be similar to that. Here we go. This is a note sung on whatever vowel. Now I'm going to take this o. And I'm going to do overtone singing. And you're going to hear this note being sung. as a drone, but then you're going to hear other notes coming up and down, and I will move my hand with the harmonics. These are the harmonics. When I do that, this immediately quiets my mind,

the monkey mind, especially if I have eyes closed and especially if I do it with lips close. I'm going to do it with lips open first. Humb-lips closed. You may not be able to hear it so much, less so, but I'm feeding it entirely through bone and tissue conduction and immediately quiets my mind even more so than when the sound comes out so on and so forth.

This is another exercise. It was like the human didgeridoo sounded like. That's what a didgeridoo is. The tubing that amplifies the helm holds resonance that the musician is doing by moving the tongue up and down. That's what we do when we

play brass instruments, trumpets, French horns, tubas, trombones, when we play saxophones, flutes, the tongue, the embassure, the velocity of the air, the position of the tongue, how harsh or flat it is, and how big or small, the opening of the lips, is where the magic is. And all it's being done is amplified in a specific tubing with holes that you depress or valves. basically the tone color on an instrument is caused by four conditions in physics. The size of the instrument, the shape of the instrument, the material

that makes the instrument, and the method that you used to play the instrument, blowing air into it, buzzing through it like brass instruments, blowing air through a single reed like clarinets, saxophones, or double read like oboes and bassoons, or flute, no read, but blowing

through the notch or recorder, or bowing a string instrument, plucking an instrument, hammering piano, a tone color is all harmonics, the inherent harmonic series in the instrument. We create harmony out of instruments with different harmonies. And you're suggesting or stating that the human body is also an instrument? Absolutely. And these instruments, this harmony impacts the body immensely. And you just need to quiet the mind to feel.

We need to feel more than think. We're species. We're not human beings. We're human doings. Even when we're sitting down trying not to do anything, we're doing something. That's our problem. Human being is just be with an experience.

And if you want to add something to what I stated before as part of the practice, fast breathing to disconnect from the monkey mind or slow diaphragmatic breathing to enhance this practice that I want to give people to take home with. And to practice them alone, to read more about them,

to check out YouTube videos, to go and do them in groups, which the experience is enhanced like you, what you experience in India. This is where the magic is, but you need people to have the willingness to invest their time and energy, sometimes money,

in doing that. So after this conversation, I almost want to look into and change the theme music on this podcast channel, because this podcast is kind of intense, scary anxiety producing information and

knowledge about the world and maybe it would be best coupled with something that's harmony and more peaceful like your chimes. I'd be happy to help with that. I can give you some of my tracks or I can point you in the right direction. Because it's about

entrainments. That's what I by the way, between parentheses, that's what an advertisement does. I used to write jingles when I was a graduate student making money on site, that you have to grab the person watching the advertisement in the first two seconds. Otherwise, they can oppress that channel change or give their attention away. The music has to be very specific to the prototype of the person who's going to watch this commercial, whether the commercial is about children's toys, Tylenol, Rolex, Cadillac, Clinique product

for women. That's called functional music. The music you hear in teenage clothing store is different that you hear in jewelry store. It's all created with a way to put you in the right mood and train you so that you can be at ease and spend money. You see how we explored music is I want your attention.

I want your money. I'm sure this could have been a 10-hour conversation because this is really, I'm curious. I'm a little kid here trying to learn about this, but I also see the relevance. And I don't know if my viewers are going to feel the same way because this is really a different sort of conversation that

you and I have had, different than ocean acidification or energy depletion. But I do feel that this is central. So let me ask you this. How does healing of the sort that we've been intimating on a micro level, an individual human, give us insight in how we might heal at the macro level of communities as society and and the whole world can healing be a collective process? Beautiful. Well, it brings awareness to how much our reality is a byproduct of what's going on in the inner world.

And the inner world impacts immensely the outer world. An example of this, if I wake up one day with a certain malaise or attachment to the argument that I had two days ago or yesterday, or past memory that's coming back, I'm going to be grumpy. I'm going to be irritable. And people around me, I'm not going to have the best time. I'm not going to enjoy my presence. I may impact my clients, my friends, my colleagues, and so on and so forth.

The inner world is one and the same with the outer world. There's no inner and out. Reality is not what it seems to be, and that's what quantum physics is trying to explain to us. so realizing that we need to heal and healing it's not just healing there's therapy and healing but mostly rehabilitation mostly and also education regeneration rejuvenation revealing to the true nature of reality how much we're impacted by inner processes ribbons we're dragging from the past that influenced the way we experience reality through filters and lenses that's what people suffer from And the world is created by people, influential people, people empower leaders of all sorts who have their own pain and they've neglected the pain because we always follow the dopamine access, the reward more than addressing the pain.

They've neglected their healing following the next position up, the next company acquisition, the next million dollars. And as they ignore itself... So are you suggesting that the most powerful people... in our society, are the people in need of the most healing? Everybody needs healing, but the problem is that people who are very powerful, they're in position to impact millions of people. The underground counterculture artists in Brooklyn does not impact hundreds of millions of people, but a president of a big nation or a big religious leader, or big financially, or

a big leader of all sorts, especially when you have mishandling power, being drunk by this power, experiencing pain, and avoiding. healing, yeah, we're species with trauma. We have not been addressing the trauma. We have not talking. And the divide that's been happening in the world, this is topic for another conversation,

is that people become polarized. And we have created a system that makes money, increase the attention how the media gets by polarizing to report something that's really dire. And we started pursuing this more and more instead of rectifying and bringing healing with compassion, empathy, and

no more pointing fingers, no more trying to make this group more righteous than the other. And music would help with that because if a lot of people experienced time with harmony and resonance, that would lead to more equanimity, which would soften our conversations and have less polarization. This is not just a theory, Nate. I'm telling you how I do my work. I'm telling you how I've been doing my work, how I've been teaching hundreds of people that they do. magic in the same way I do. It's not about a healer. The healer is the receiver. It's not the

officiator. We use the wrong language has been creating different reality and we need to address that with compassion, empathy, and awareness. Yes, and I can say, LAMOL. So you're not the healer. So you're not the healer. I'm the receiver is always the healer. If I'm receiving experience, I'm the healer. Healing facilitator is different from a healer. I'm not saying that the function of the practitioner, better word than a healer, if you ask me, with all the respect to people who use the word healer. But I think we're impacted by traditions who use words in a non-suitable way. They don't give

it the right attention realizing that words create reality. Also caused by ego inflation. Also use in a non-discernible of how words change the experience. If I come to experience, tell you I'm a sound healer. And the sound's going to heal you and I'm my angels

and my ancestors are going to heal you. You may buy into my story and go into it not producing what you need to produce. If I come to it and explain these things, give you the tools and tell you what is impacting you, resonance, harmony, how the experience that I'm creating here, and as you work with me, the most important part of the equation, the phenomenological aspect being, what you do with the experience, with the sound, how you let go of your thoughts, that's what's healing. The experience is on a whole other level. The benefits is

completely different and you're feeling more empowered and you can take that home and not have to come back to me to be healed. That changes everything. This is the compassion, empathy and I'm promoting. This is what I do with my clients. I'm telling you how I do my work. I'm not philosophizing and creating theories that I'm not based on any truth. Whether people are going to accept or not, that's up to them. My gnosis at the moment knows that you are speaking truth. And partially that is because I spent six weeks doing this. So I know how I felt then. So I I want to be respectful of your your time commitment. I definitely want to have you back maybe as a roundtable with Ian McGilchrist or other people

looking at the fragmented self and the way that our brains can go forward. But I do have some closing questions that I ask all my guests if you have a few more minutes. Including music or not, what sort of personal advice do you have to the listeners of this show at this time of global fragmentation, polarization, metacrisis, et cetera. So to be curious about what we discussed and start to do the search, while being skeptical, see,

the other part of the problem is that people become gullible and they accept anything. Or they become doubtful. I'm promoting skepticism. Skepticism is healthy. Skepticism means, what you're saying is kind of resonating with me. I'm interested, but I need,

To have more discussion, I need to hear more about it. I need to dig into it more. I need to research it. This is where the magic happens. Why, we're dealing with cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is debilitating to any person. What is cognitive dissonance for the people who don't know what it means? Well, the brain is wired in a very specific way.

If I come tell a person something that would clash with what they know, what they believed in for so long, especially if it's really important and it clashes horribly, they will reject this truth that I'm giving to them, which is far more true or absolutely true, far more than what they believe, they will reject it. Cognitive Dissness was a term was coined by Franz Van Gogne, Martinique, psychologists and activist and humanists. So we're changing the wiring in the brain, so being curious, investigating things, approaching things with not doubtfulness, cynicism,

but skepticism, researching things, giving way to what direct experience can allow the person to change their mind, to have a different experience because they're not about intellectualization. It's about experiencing it and processing and integrating their experience. That's number one. Being more open to new music that they've never listened to

and to learn about how to listen to a new band, new genre, new style, new musical culture and not spend their entire life loving and listening to only what they've been loving and listening to for years. Upgrading the palette, enriching it, bringing more things,

and not feeling that, I'm so attached to what I know, I like, what I love, I don't want anything to shake this foundation. Trying meditation, trying breathwork, reading about authentic spirituality, doing experiences with reliable practitioners who don't sell you their specialty as I'm unique, I'm a Messiah, I'm a healer, I'm a guru, I'm a shaman.

These are terms when I let go of, because they don't imply self-empowerment to the receiver. These are some of the things that I would start with promoting to people to investigate. And how would you change that advice, if at all, to a young human, late teens, early 20s, who's listening to this show and has their whole lives ahead of them? Yeah. Well, it could be similar, but it could be watch your diet. Watch where your time and energy goes. Do you play too many games, computer games or Nintendo or whatever?

Is there a level of addiction? And notice that all games are violent because that involves the reptilian brain. We can talk about this, how the reptilian brain and violence, how the hook, the carrot on the stick, the clickbait is getting the reptilian brain to be engaged, the fight or flight or wanting to win. So what they watch on TV, what kind of music they listen to, how much they spend their time being rebellious, or refuting everything that their parents or older people give them. Some things are to be refuted in question, but not everything. But we as teenagers, we practice rebellion a bit too much. But to be more discerning, to realize that it's never too early to practice spirituality,

to learn meditation. Meditation is not something for adults. I tried at an early age. It's uncommon, but it saved my life and music and spirituality adding to meditation. What do you care most about in the world, Alexandra? Understanding consciousness and spirituality and exploring the potential, the power of sound and music. And exploring love and the feminine love, compassion, empathy, kindness, being in service, intuition, imagination, inspiration. This is what's going to help us change this reality.

Because of the trauma, we disconnected from the positive aspect of the feminine topic for another conversation. If you could wave a magic wand and there was no personal recourse to your actions or decisions, what is one thing you would do to change human and planetary futures? Wow, I don't know how to answer this question. Well, wishing for better educational system that promotes independence, self-empowerment, exploring some of the most important questions for me as a human being. Who are we? Why are we in a human experience? Where do we come from? What are some of the most important things for us to explore while being a human?

What happens when we die? To explore sci phenomena? I love Rupert-Cheldricks' work because he, as a scientist, has been exploring a lot of these things. I love in McGilchrist's work because he brought a new way of understanding this duality in the brain, and we need to stretch the envelope of what Western science has been doing and brings

spirituality to science. This is also part of the problem, is that it's a great intent of the early scientist, Isaac Newton, and his buddies that created the Royal Academy of Science that to distance themselves from woo-woo

and superstition, they threw away the baby with the water. and science became reductionist material focused on studying things and only things we can measure. Now we're realizing that while a scientist may start as being atheist but there's the concept of God and not in the mail-wide dude we call Jehovah waiting for them, as they say at the bottom of the cup.

So we need to bring back science and I'm one of the co-founders of the McKenna Academy of Natural Philosophy with Dennis McKenna, my good friend, to bring natural philosophy science to the place where I started natural philosophy. And guess who started the scientific method? Sir Francis Bacon, who was a spiritualist and the holder of Mystery School Teaching, and Rosie Crushin, and he didn't realize that this is going to lead us to divorcing ourselves from spirituality. We need to bring back spirituality to science, because now the new priestess,

are the engineers, the designers, and the people in Silicon Valley creating technology that promotes something completely different. You can talk about Aramon and the parasite in a different talk, but that's very, very important to understand. What's going to help us is more grounding and more balance to balance, balance, balance between feminine and masculine, balance with nature, with each other, and not to kid each other for whatever reason, sociocultural, religious, racial,

economical, political. You are a true rock star, Alexander, and I don't mean that only in the lower chakra sense. I would love to have you back. Is there a topic that if you were to come back for a round two that is relevant to our futures, that is one topic that you would be willing to take a deep, on just one topic

that drives your curiosity. Thank you. What would it be? Asking for this question. Where does our pain come from? Why we do things differently? No other species do what we've done. Look at the world.

It's great balance. An ant colony, termite colony exhibits more harmony than we do. How did the very intelligent species get to this point? I believe there was a big traumatic event, a series of them, but one main one, that caused us to create more debilitating events and systems to investigate that and to investigate also archetypal forces that are at work, Aramon, is one, the polar opposite of Christ's consciousness, the parasitic force that many ancient cultures talk about, and how this impacted the reality that we live, we created a different form of entrainment,

created different systems that prioritize profit over consciousness, created more imbalance, and what are the systems that we have created to rectify this and heal from it and how they are not taking so seriously, as seriously as we need, or we have not succeeded in taking it seriously in the right kind of rigor with more authenticity and integrity to learn from the pain, from the suffering,

to move on with enhanced experience. Okay, that sounds like something I would be very curious to learn. Thank you so much for your gift of your time today and of your lifetime of work on these issues. Do you have any closing words for our viewers? Yes. Seek inner connection, inner work, love and harmony. That's what humans lost and that's what they're in search for. Thank you so much.

my friend, to be continued. Thank you. Thank you. Have a wonderful day. I'm happy to be on the show. Thank you for the invitation. If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of The Great Simplification, please follow us on your favorite podcast platform and visit The Great Simplification.com

for more information on future releases. This show is hosted by Nate Hagen's, edited by No Troublemakers Media, and curated by Leslie Batlutz and Lizzie Siriani.