Molecular Physicist Visualised The Process of Dying | David Glowacki

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]Everything everywhere is completely full of light. Like darkness does not mean that there's no light. Darkness means that like no light is reflected directly back at you. I think a lot of our fear when it comes like being afraid of the dark of death or something like that comes from we we think of it as being nothing.

[00:00:21]This is physicist and visual artist David Glowaki who has translated his personal neardeath experience and understanding of physics into a VR experience.

[00:00:36]I fell from a significant height while in the mountains literally gasping for air. And so you know in consciousness science we often hear reference to this this hard problem or how's mind emerged from matter. I don't really understand why that's a hard problem because there is no matter. Everything that we think of as being material is in fact energy.

[00:00:58]>> It was like a mystical VR experience but is also compatible with physics and that I love.

[00:01:04]>> Energy is a metaphor that is fundamentally unifying, right? We don't imagine energy as something that's bounded, that's finite, that's localized. We know it's a field.

[00:01:13]It's non-local. It's connective. It's omnipresent. It's everywhere. like you are the infinite creative matrix.

[00:01:20]Matrice and the word matrice in Spanish also means womb, something that's infinitely creative.

[00:01:27]The results are basically comparable to like a moderate dose of psilocybin.

[00:01:31]After that paper then got some press.

[00:01:33]There was such a kickback from the psychedelic community saying like how dare you compare some digital piece of crap to the power of psychedelics. I was like wow. How are you on that view um when it comes to technology in general and sort of transcendence?

[00:01:52]>> Oh man, you open a can of worms here.

[00:02:00]>> A very warm welcome at the Asencia Foundation's YouTube channel. Um I'm sitting down here in Porto and across the table is David Clawaki. David, a warm welcome.

[00:02:09]>> Hey, thanks. It's nice to be here.

[00:02:11]>> Yeah, and sorry for my voice. I have a bit of a call, but I didn't want to miss this one. You are an interdicciplinary researcher, artist. You have a PhD in physics, molecular physics.

[00:02:21]>> Yeah.

[00:02:22]>> And we just did a wonderful VR experiment experience together.

[00:02:27]>> Mhm.

[00:02:28]>> Uh all to just sketch of how broad uh your field of work is. Um and you run the intangible realities laboratory in Santiago de Compostella.

[00:02:39]>> Yeah. Intangible realities laboratory.

[00:02:41]IRL >> IRL and um the experience we had was just wonderful. You translated a transcendent experience you had into VR >> and what I loved about it is that it >> it touched me deeply emotionally earlier today. So, thanks for that.

[00:03:02]>> And um I loved how you bring together all these worlds because it was like a mystical VR experience.

[00:03:10]um but is also compatible with physics and that I love. So >> I thought it may be nice for this conversation for the audience who who not know you yet to >> maybe start with where this all started for you with like a mountain walk in 2006 that went wrong.

[00:03:27]>> Right.

[00:03:28]So, depends how far we want to go back, but um I guess yeah, I I had a a near-death experience um in 2006 where I I fell from a significant height while in the mountains and um I had a sort of potent I what would now be called a near-death experience. Um, I think at at the time that I had that experience um the field of researchers working in this area hadn't necessarily it wasn't so established as it is now. And so um but yeah, effectively what happened to me was I kind of fell from a great height and then I um I had severe multiple trauma. Um and uh one of the things that happened was I had a thoracic contusion. So effectively like the the blood from the vessels around my heart were leaking into my lungs and I was suffocating and um I laid on the ground for 3 or 4 hours before I was rescued and uh I was effectively drowning like every breath became more and more labored. So, you know, like literally gasping for air, you know. Um and yeah during that time I had uh an experience where which I remember still very very poignantly um where I kind of separated laterally from my body and then I it's like my my awareness was like outside my body orbiting my body like the earth going around the sun or something And then I kind of saw my body as this light, this luminous light that was pulsing.

[00:05:38]And the pulsation was synchronized perfectly with my breath. So as I would inhale, the light would get a little bit brighter. And as I would exhale, it get a bit dimmer.

[00:05:47]Um but what was happening is as my breath was come becoming more and more weak, as my like lung capacity was diminishing, the sort of amplitude envelope of the breath was getting smaller and smaller. And so I was um perceiving this light to get dimmer and dimmer and dimmer. It was becoming smaller and smaller. And I kind of knew that the the um moment at which that light disappeared would kind of mark the end of >> David >> this phys this physical body.

[00:06:25]>> Yeah.

[00:06:26]>> So um but yeah it was an incredibly peaceful experience. It was there's no fear associated. It was like a very kind of like open curiosity as to what would come next. And >> I felt like a massive sense of relief actually, right? It was it felt it felt almost a bit like >> as the light was diminishing, it wasn't necessarily uh disappearing. It was it was more kind of losing its structure and melting into the fabric of everything else. um which you know I have my PhD in computational molecular physics and you know for me as a chemical physicist um you know that's actually what happens to our physical bodies >> with time we actually you know um our our sort of equilibrium state for every single person is is like a bucket of liquid right so in fact that's exactly what happens to us. We melt into the fabric of everything else. And so I kind of had a sense that that was happening but in a sort of a psychic domain I guess you could say.

[00:07:37]>> And you were beyond already um pain or >> Yeah. Yeah. There was no pain. None no pains. There was no pain at all. I think a lot of the accounts I've read of people that have accidents or trauma, there's very rarely pain. It seems like your brain at a certain point your your your brain recognizes that there's no survival value to to pain reception. So pain just turns off. So the pain started at like during the recovery. Like that was when the most intense pain I've ever experienced in my life. You know that was when I wished I hadn't necessarily come back to the physical part.

[00:08:16]>> That was the traumatic part in a sense.

[00:08:18]>> Yeah. That was the traumatic part. Yeah.

[00:08:20]Yeah. Exactly. Okay. And you beautifully I mean during the experience in which you let us let people with VR goggles on experience basically you translated this beautifully into VR and I experienced it myself today.

[00:08:34]>> Mhm.

[00:08:35]>> And I could sense exactly what you're describing that sort of >> Mhm.

[00:08:39]>> that somehow um of course with less intensity I could sense if that light is me. That was sort of what the experience did with me. But I felt bliss with light. Um, returning to the void, so to speak.

[00:08:55]>> Yeah. Yeah.

[00:08:56]>> And what I find beautiful, I've heard you say this in presentations before, that void, that darkness, you might say, is actually full of light in a sense.

[00:09:06]>> Could you sort of explain that from your physics perspective? I loved sort of how you said that earlier. Yeah, there's one kind of um metaphor that I've returned back to a lot, which is this idea that um we we typically imagine the blackness. We we imagine darkness in our conventional aesthetics that we carry around our head. We imagine black or darkness as being nothing.

[00:09:41]>> Yeah. And so a lot of the source of our fear arises from the fact that we imagine it to be nothing because we think, you know, we like ourselves and we like our lives and we like our stuff and our family and our friends and our whatever. And part of the fear arises from the fact that we think that that's nothing. But there's another way of imagining darkness, which is that in fact darkness is everything.

[00:10:06]Okay? And so one metaphor that I return back to a lot is um if you have ever like gazed up into the night sky and you look at the sky and you think, "Oh, wow. It's it's dark.

[00:10:20]It's deep space. It's nothing." And so you you kind of look and you see blackness. I had this kind of moment when I was I lived in Peru for a while and I was like staring up into the sky and I saw the the the blackness of the sky and I was like, "Oh, it's it's it's it's nothing." And then and then slowly I watched the moon rise over I had this like super cool like art studio in the jungle and it had a glass ceiling. It was just like laid out looking up and then the moon started to sort of transit across the sky and and then I the moon was bright but we all know like the moon doesn't radiate light. So this moment where I kind of realized like, oh space is full of light, right? But the only light that I perceive is light that's reflected back at me, right? And and then and then and then so if you just carry that a step further, you realize like everything everywhere is completely full of light. Like darkness does not mean that there's no light.

[00:11:29]Darkness means that like no light is reflected directly back at you.

[00:11:34]But it doesn't tell you anything about the essence of what is there originally.

[00:11:38]And there you know there's another if you so if you you can carry this even like a step further right you can say well >> a lot you know a lot of so if we just like let's think about darkness instead of it being the absence of anything let's think of it being sort of the fertile the like the the fertile infinite source of everything. Right? So if I give you a piece of paper >> Yeah. and a white piece of paper and I give you like some colors and I tell you to draw structures on that piece of paper and I just tell you draw like an infinite number of structures. Well, you you're going to start drawing structures on the paper and before too long as long as all those structures are superimposed on top of each other, your paper's going to turn dark because doesn't matter what pigment you're using, the paper will eventually turn black. And so, and then somebody's gonna walk into the room like 20 minutes later and be like, "Well, why did you draw nothing?" And your answer is gonna be, "I didn't draw nothing. I drew everything."

[00:12:38]And so, what you perceive as like what is darkness for one person >> from your perspective is actually this the infinite source of like everything that there is, right? Yeah. And so, you know, we we this is just to like this this kind of is a useful thought experiment to to to go into because so much of like the the representations that we carry around in the world is affected by the aesthetics that we have in our head and the images that we have in our head. And for whatever reason, we tend to think of, you know, white as being something and black as being nothing.

[00:13:13]But you could just as easily think of white as being nothing and black as being something. I mean, in fact, in color theory, it's more interesting, right? Because I'm an artist. So, in color theory, it actually there's two different ways. So, so if you combine all the colors, right? So, if I put a color on a piece of paper and then it the light hits it and then it goes it it bounces off, I perceive it as red because it absorbs everything except red. So, red is what comes back to me. So, that's like the absorptive way of thinking about colors.

[00:13:47]colors and some absorption. And so you you can if you layer up colors eventually you just absorb everything.

[00:13:54]So nothing comes back to your eye, right?

[00:13:56]>> And so in an absorptive way of thinking about color theory, um black is actually all the colors. But in a radiative way of thinking about color theory, so like this is how Newton thought about colors. Um then colors radiate. So if I combine like red, green, and blue together, if I combine an infinite number of colors together, but instead of being absorptive, they radiate their color. If I if So if I'm doing computer graphics, this is important. If I want to get white, I have to combine colors together, right?

[00:14:27]To get white instead of black. But if I'm doing things on a on a piece of paper, I combine colors together to get black. If I'm doing things on a computer screen, because the pixels radiate light out, >> I get exactly the two poles by combining all the colors. And so there's this really arbitrary decision we've made that for some reason blackness is nothing. And but it's like I don't know why we do that. That's just like shows you how like sometimes the models we carry around in our head are based on the artistic images that we have. And so so all this is to say that you can think of blackness as being the source of everything. And so this was like quite a deep meditation I had during this near-death experience is like, well, it didn't feel like nothing.

[00:15:15]>> It definitely didn't feel like nothing.

[00:15:18]>> It felt like everything, but it was dark. So like, what is going on? And so these are some like analogies I've been working through for how to imagine the blackness as the sort of source of like the infinitely creative fertile matrix for the the existence of everything as opposed to the absence of something. And I think a lot of our fear when it comes like being afraid of the dark um or being afraid of the of of death or something like that comes from we we think of it as being nothing, right? And so a lot of a lot of people that work in consciousness science like to >> ask this question, well, >> you know, it's so amazing because there's why is there something rather than nothing? And my question is, well, why is there one thing rather than everything?

[00:16:06]>> Right? Like actually like that's another way of asking the same question. Like I tell Kristoff this I'm like every time you give a talk you're like >> why is there something rather than nothing? I'm like but like why is there one thing rather than everything right?

[00:16:19]Like that's that's another way maybe of asking the same question in a in a different way. So >> so much of what you're saying is like for me a true novel way to understand nonjulism to see that that nothingness is in essence everything. is just very beautiful and I think it's very important when we talk about Brahman or >> nothingness that it's actually everything >> and and then also >> for for the light we want to let's say we want that reflection back let's say hearing you talk it makes me think that that might be a form of self-nowledge in that void something reflecting back that I then can say that's me that's my that that point of light >> um it needs to reflect back so um it needs something to reflect on. So there we have our first sort of separation in the universe. We have a first boundary so to speak.

[00:17:15]>> Um so I think this is all just a beautiful metaphor for better understanding non-duality. And I I love that about your >> your work and >> I'd love to explore a bit deeper this this line of thinking sort of metaphorically linking the physics with non-duality and the experiential side of it in in these experiences because you bridge bridged that all I think >> um you talked about David Bow calling matter just being frozen light.

[00:17:48]>> Yeah. All of matter is frozen light.

[00:17:49]>> Yeah. Could you sort of explore that because in your experiences it's about light but as we're sitting here it's also a very material experience.

[00:17:56]>> So the the material me the light me the frozen light me.

[00:18:02]>> What are your thoughts there? M so look like I did my a lot of my PhD was in like computational molecular quantum mechanics and like look quantum mechanics is weird and I think like >> everybody knows that it's weird and it's like I think Feman famously said that if somebody tells you they understand it that they don't understand it right so >> but But what one thing about quantum mechanics that's that's interesting um and is quite simple but often overlooked for like the more exotic ideas is the fact that um you know one of the key insights and that arises from quantum mechanics is that what we imagine is material is in fact some energetic wave thing right I mean the Schroinger wave equation effectially says is if you have something that you know you think is material you know has a mass has some motion that actually there's a totally alternative description to that thing which is as some dynamical energy wave that's some smeared out blurry thing that's unbounded and >> you know goes to infinity on both sides >> it's a field of possibility >> it's a field it's a field it's a field and the >> so there's a really key.

[00:19:34]You know, there's a really profound change of like thinking in terms of small bounded part particular Newtonian billiard balls to something that's like this smeared out energy thing. And I think the reason that that's important in terms of our worldview is because when we think about like a a marble or a billiard ball or some particle, we think of something that's bounded that has a finite spatial extent and is like quite localized. Then when we think of things in as just changing the name to like wave or field, now we think of something that has an infinite spatial extent and is unbounded and um is dynamic. And so those are two very very different metaphors for how do you think about things? And so, and for me, like one of the one of the key things I like to think about when it comes to quantum mechanics is the fact that like all of what you think of as um material is in fact energy. Like like why don't you know like everything is dynamic all the time. Everything is vibrating waves, right? And so like you you look at you look at your you know you look at the glass and you're like oh well >> it doesn't look like it's moving. Well the reason it doesn't look like it's moving is because it's moving so fast.

[00:21:02]That's why it doesn't look like it's moving cuz it's moving so fast. You know how when you see a fan you know like a fan is moving and and when the fan is slow you can see the blades moving but when you speed it up it just looks like a solid disc, right? Well this is moving like a billion times faster than that, right? So, of course, it looks like it's solid because it's moving so fast, right? Like, well, why don't I fall through the chair while I'm sitting here? Well, I don't fall through the chair because like there's two fields that can't pass through each other because they're both moving so fast, right? And so, when you start to think about things in terms of like energy waves and dynamics, it's it's a very different way of imagining things. And when we think about, you know, the classic thing you can do in the disco tech, right? If you have a cigarette, right? And you hold it, >> then you you see it as a point. And if I just start to spin it, eventually you see a circle, right? So it looks like a continuous object. It's not a continuous object. Just looks like a continuous object because it's moving at a perceptual speed that you can't perceive. And and that's >> but you know, it's not actually like that, right? And so like the the beauty of even you know atomic and molecular physics showing us these things is that we we know things behave in this completely other way. But we become attached to these representations of things as being material.

[00:22:25]>> Yeah.

[00:22:27]>> And so >> and to our bodies being solid I think >> what I in your in your VR experience and >> which you call like a numadelic experience. So the numa it's from the Greek >> like breath or spirit. Yeah. It's the same root as the word numinous for example. Yeah.

[00:22:44]>> And and you let you let people breathe.

[00:22:46]Um and we had to sort of like uh open our with our um how do you call them the the >> your mudra lights.

[00:22:54]>> Yeah. Exactly. And >> um >> then I had you truly have the experience of being uh light being wave like because you see your your heart going out.

[00:23:05]>> And this is all talk that people in in in in in spiritual communities >> um are very familiar. This is saying it's all energy man and we're all connected and I can see feel your energy >> and we often regard that as sort of newagy talk and not compatible with physics. But after your VR experience, whether or not compatible, I could feel it, right? I could could feel it in a sense. And you just saying that >> it it feels like matter because it's moving so fast.

[00:23:37]>> Is your experience where I could sense my energy going out, the two of us meeting energetically?

[00:23:43]>> Mhm.

[00:23:44]Is that closer to truth in a sense than me sitting here in a in a body of matter solid separate from you?

[00:23:54]>> I think I think it get it becomes a question of like the mental model that we carry around. So I mean you know clearly there is a way of um so so first thing I should say I guess is that like the scientific method relies on like analysis right so like it literally analyzis means like cutting things up right so that's what the scientific method does right so the scientific method that we have evolved you know over the last 400 years or whatever is fundamentally a method that relies on like splicing things up into smaller bits in order to understand them.

[00:24:38]>> Yeah. Reductionism.

[00:24:40]>> Yeah. So, it's like it's it's no real surprise that we've kind of landed at this like constellation of concepts to understand ourselves scientifically. I mean, famously like Deart was like cutting apart animals in order to understand them, right? And you there's there's a level of understanding when you cut something up, but there's also like a loss of understanding when you cut something up, right? So because you for example kill it. So that's the most glaring like omission, right? So you you gain something but you also lose something.

[00:25:14]But you know, so it's like when you're talking to me right now, like there's a few different ways I could describe that, right? I mean I could either say like Hans is talking to me or I could say like you know that in fact like I am enabling hands to speak because like what I hear as your voice is the function of like the receptors that I have in my ears that translate whatever comes out of vibrations come out of you into sound.

[00:25:49]Right? So you can say the sun is shining or you could say like I am shining the sun right because >> the experience of heat that I experience on my body is the result of the fact that like my physical organism has a certain form that enables me to experience that right so you know you and you could just go on and on with this like do I describe myself as like a receptor of what comes to me or if I define my do I do I define myself as a receptor of other things that arrive at me as a sight of perception or do I describe myself as the active constructor of whatever is coming to me? Right? You can do it both ways. Um because like the what we experience is is is is a function of what we are able to experience, right?

[00:26:40]Like there's vibrations around us that are translated into certain forms of sensation based on like the morphologies that we have.

[00:26:49]And so, you know, I just think it's important to remember that that like your voice is just as much an active construction by me as it is by you, right? And so I mean this is like the whole non-dual thing is like I can choose whatever perspective I want to >> and it plays around with what in quantum mechanics the whole distinction about knowing and what is known >> like and the epistemic and the antic just knowledge and what's really out there and how they become I heard there this um I think it was Suzac a student of John Wheeler who who called it sort of like epiantic. So he said like knowing and what is known now becomes one like and >> Wheeler was also about all of that and quantum mechanics points to it. Um but somehow it doesn't very often translate into our lives where we do think there's this clearcut between you and me and what I can know about the world and I think these experiences you you you designed help us to experience it. I'm curious.

[00:27:50]>> But let me just return to the one other question you asked which was you asked about >> this kind of spiritual definition of energy.

[00:27:59]>> Yeah. Versus the physics >> versus the physics definition of energy.

[00:28:03]>> And I mean I think I think that that comes up a lot.

[00:28:12]So you know in physics we have certain mathematics that allows us to describe the properties of like we have the laws of thermodynamics for example that allows us to describe the transformations of certain kinds of energies into other kinds of energies.

[00:28:30]Um you know we have rules like the first law which is like you know the total energy is of the univer of the closed system is constant right so energy can neither be created nor destroyed it can only change form we we have these laws of thermodynamics that tell us things about entropy and these things and in in spirituality they also talk about energy I don't necessarily like to be like so obviously if I want to design a steam engine or if I want to design a refrigerator then I want to use the laws of thermodynamics because that's the better language for that. Okay. If I want to like understand why I have an ache in my lower back or you know a a pain in my like um spine, well then maybe actually the energy system derived by like um traditional Chinese medicine is actually a better way of thinking about that. Maybe actually thinking about the body in terms of the connected energy meridians and what stretches I can do is a better way of thinking about that. because in that case like the laws of thermonics aren't going to be very helpful. So I think I think so what all this hints at is the fact that so I should say I'm a trained yin yoga instructor. I've practiced yin yoga for 15 years. It's actually the reason I can walk after my accident. Okay. So I I personally really like that system. It's the reason that I can probably not be in a wheelchair and be talking to you. Um, and I'm glad I didn't use, you know, the first law of thermodynamics to try to solve my problems with my lower back pain, right? Because otherwise I I probably wouldn't be able to walk.

[00:30:24]>> For me, >> what's important is so there are energy does crop up in different discourses for sure. But I think what that hints at is the fact that our our aesthetic of energy is almost like an intersection point for spiritual traditions and scientific traditions because the metaphor that we carry about around us energy is a metaphor that is fundamentally unifying.

[00:30:54]Right? We don't imagine energy as something that's bounded, that's finite, that's localized. We know it's a field.

[00:30:59]It's non-local. It's connective. It can change forms. It's fluid. It's mobile.

[00:31:04]It's >> it's it's it's um >> it's omnipresent. It's everywhere. Like >> it flows. It it's not static stationary.

[00:31:14]And so those poetic that poetics of energy applies just as much to physics as it does to spiritual traditions. And that's why both of those traditions use it in my view, right? because in fact it's hinting at an aesthetic that is recognizable in different places in different contexts. Now the fact that we both use the same word for it may be a source of confusion because you know yin yoga doesn't have an equivalent law to the first law of thermonamics.

[00:31:48]Traditional Chinese meridian energy theory doesn't have equivalent mathematical notation. We happen to live in a system right now where the dominant power goes to, you know, things that have a mathematical notation, but that hasn't always been the case.

[00:32:04]And probably it will spring back the other way at some point in the future, right? At least in my view. So, so you know, so for me, energy as a concept is really potent because it's almost like the intersection point where the poetics of science kind of meet up with the poetics of spiritual traditions.

[00:32:24]>> You've talked about what you call model fluidity. So you are also making here a sort of plea that both these languages these models of reality be it mathematics on the one side and spirituality mythology on the other side >> should both in that sense don't want to make a a truth claim >> or and and and we should should accept the fact that they're fluid is that so right when you talk about model fluidity >> yeah I mean I think this is like this I don't think I invented that term I mean I think like the um the the fathers of quantum mechanics talked about the idea of complimentarity, right? So, how is it possible that in certain scenarios I can describe something as a particle and in other scenarios I can describe something as a wave? Like why is that? And well, one of the solutions to this was saying, well, you just do it that way. You just be comfortable with the fact that multiple descriptions of a thing can coexist at the same time. And Neils Bore called it complimentarity and it's that you just have a suite of different models. You accept the fact that there's no grand answer to anything ever, but you have a suite of different ways of looking at things and you the the the role of the sort of creative person is to um pull out the right model for the right situation.

[00:33:51]>> Yeah. Yeah. As a tool almost as a tool almost >> as a as I like the analogy of language, right? It's like a lot of philosophers and a lot of scientists they get in these big arguments about which is the right way.

[00:34:06]I mean I don't know may maybe because I float quite freely between artistic practice and spiritual practice and scientific practice. I I just I don't understand why what's the argument? I mean we have a we have a whole set of different languages for describing different things and certain languages are better adapted for describing certain things in other languages. So >> you know for example like if you live in the Peruvian Amazon and you want to describe like the sounds of the fauna that live there you speak Ketwa. you don't speak German >> is a better language for it.

[00:34:44]>> If you want to describe like >> mechanized engines, you use German cuz that's a better language than Ketwa, right? So like >> but but to argue which is correct is like neither one's correct. Like they're both describing different aspects of the sort of infinitely creative matrix of what is. And sometimes one's better than the other one. It makes me think that sort of your um your translation of the the near-death experience into a VR experience is is one way of of of sort of like communicating uh translating that experience um into to to new symbols.

[00:35:22]And I'm curious because um you have um done it many times. it has been done worldwide and you've done a study um in which you've asked people um similar questions that are asked after having had psychedelic experiences and those outcomes I found fascinating. Could you tell about sort of that research and the outcome?

[00:35:43]>> Yeah. So, uh we so we developed this um this new medallic VR stuff um over several years was being developed. It it actually has its roots in like an earlier digital artwork that I made which was called Hidden Fields where it was like a mirror. It was like a a mirror where you'd see your reflection but you'd see your reflection as light, not as a person. It it was this piece toured all over the world. It was a scene by like 200,000 people on three continents. It's it's still set up in the lab in Santiago and and basically what you experienced earlier um in the new medallic VR is is kind of like the VR version of that earlier piece.

[00:36:30]And um and so we've been like I've been working on these pieces for a long time with a range of collaborators and um we were we were getting really interesting results back. So just like anecdotal results when we would show it in an art context. people would often come up to me um and you know this was in like 2013 or something they people would come up to me and I would yeah I would I would be at the gallery for the premiere and the art party the opening party or whatever and then people would come up to me and they would be like you know I love this piece and I'd be like well what do you like about it and they would be like really made me think about my own mortality and I was like what are you talking about it made you think about your own mortality like I wasn't thinking about that when I made it. I was just making some thing. But this this came came up a lot like people would have these very deep experiences when they would see themselves >> sort of re-represented as energy and then kind of dissolved into the matrix of everything else.

[00:37:40]And so then when we ported that into VR, the experiences just became sort of a bit more potent because VR's an environment where if it's done right, it has the possibility to just focus your attention a bit more than maybe a 2D format.

[00:37:59]>> Y >> and I was getting these results. We so so these results the the quality of these like I don't know call them VR trip reports, right? People weren't taking drugs. They were just doing VR.

[00:38:11]But they were starting to reliably say things that were like really really powerful >> and consistent.

[00:38:18]>> Yeah. And I was looking at them and I was like, well, this looks this is really interesting. We have to try to do something with this cuz this is like it was an art thing. I mean, we were just doing as an art thing. Like we would go set it up at art galleries and show it and go to parties and it was like it was cool, but it was like this there's really something going on here. And this was kind of um I made friends with some of the guys that that were Imperial College in London at the time who worked in the center for psychedelic research. So I became friends with um Chris Timberman who's a researcher there and another guy Robin Carr Harris. Um >> and I started showing them some of what people were saying and they were like wow like dude you're getting this in your lab in Bristol. I was in Bristol in the UK at the time and I was like, "Yeah." And they were like, "Well, why don't you try measuring it on the same scales that we use to measure psychedelic experiences?" Because a lot of what you're showing here looks very reminiscent of what people say after psychedelic experiences. And so I had never published a neuroscience paper. I had never done a psychology experiment. So I was like, "Okay, so can you show me like what to do? How do I do that?" Like what are the things to we have to do. So they >> showed me all the stuff we had to do and then we we did a study and we used all the same questionnaires that are used for psychedelics. Um and then we did the analysis and we published this paper in like we published two papers, one in 2020 and then a follow-up in 2022 which basically reaffirmed the results that the answers that we got when we analyzed like what people said on the all the questionnaires that are used to analyze psychedelics and then we compared the the the scores that we got when people after people experienced VR are we found that people gave results in a very consistent way that's now been replicated by a number of labs across the world that show that the results are basically comparable to like a moderate dose of psilocybin.

[00:40:27]>> Fascinating.

[00:40:28]>> And so like I am not saying that our VR experience is an acid trip or a psilocybin trip. I am not saying that or an IAS. It's it's clearly different. In one case, you're eating something that is crossing your blood brain barrier and causing changes in your your neurochemistry.

[00:40:49]In this case, you're doing something that's purely visual that maybe also is causing some changes to your neurochemistry. We don't know exactly.

[00:40:57]But the point is is that you know after an hour long after a 40minute VR session or a six-hour psilocybin trip when you kind of measure people's responses is it people seem to have very similar perspectives at least on the questionnaires that are used for psychedelic research. So, you know, a skeptic could an optimist could say, "Well, that's great. We don't, you know, need psychedelics. We can use VR." A pessimist would say, "Well, maybe this just shows us the limitations of the ways that we measure psychedelic experience, right?" Um, which is a totally valid thing to say, right?

[00:41:34]>> Yeah. Well, you've done you you you yourself have done both and and I myself have done both. How would you how would you compare the two? I' I I can I mean I'd agree that to a certain degree it is the same experience. Um it has to do with boundary dissolution as Terrence McKenna called it >> and um but what is truly new and has sort of huge potential I'd say is that >> this is an intersubjective experience that you know you're having the same experience. It's a group experience and of course you can do psychedelics in group sessions >> but how do you compare those two?

[00:42:11]because I think this is something new in that sense or or has huge potential >> because of its interceptivity.

[00:42:18]>> Yeah. I I look I think that >> if so if you look at what people talk about after they experience psychedelics they talk about something like feeling a sense of unity with themselves with others with the world around them. They talk about a sense of awe.

[00:42:35]>> They talk about a sense of the sacred.

[00:42:38]They talk about a sense of, you know, Aldis Huxley famously talked about isness. You know, the he could he looked at the flowers and he could see them kind of just shining with their sort of internal radiance and sort of vibrancy.

[00:42:53]They they they they talk about, you know, often a sense of calm. They talk about a sense of insight.

[00:43:01]They talk about a sense of um kind of reimagining their relationship to their thoughts and things around them.

[00:43:12]And I think that what we have created does all those things like do I think if I but I wouldn't say to you that like this is the same as Iaska or I wouldn't say to you this is the same as psilocybin or I wouldn't say to you you know this is the same as LSD because it's not like >> first of all >> all of the drugs that I've mentioned you know >> just now because I didn't talk about DMT or 5me DMT last for many hours our thing lasts for like 40 minutes, right? Of course, our differences.

[00:43:44]>> Obviously, like if you've done DMT or 5 MOD DMT, the visual phenomenology that we've implemented in this environment is very different than the visual phenomenology you will experience on DMT or 5 MODMT. However, after people have those experiences where the emotional state they're left in and then the reasons they ascribe to that emotional state are similar to what we have created. And so you know that's what I would say. So when when we published the first paper, this is why we named it New Medadelic because when we published the first paper um in 2020, we published at a human computer interaction conference like the kind of like the the most prestigious human computer interaction conference called KAI.

[00:44:34]It's like a ACM conference and it was it was in Hawaii that year 2020 April 2020 it was in Hawaii and we submitted the paper for that conference and then we won the best paper award for the whole conference out of like 3,000 papers. We were like selected as one of the best papers and we were super excited because I had never published there. It was like this crazy project.

[00:45:00]got the award and so I was like excited. So I like rented like a cabin on the beach for the whole team and we were all going to fly out there and like have a fun time and then CO came so we never got to go which was annoying but whatever. Um maybe it'll happen again sometime. But um the uh the what was I going to say was that the um there was such a kickback after that paper then got some press.

[00:45:31]>> Mhm.

[00:45:32]>> Um there was such a kickback from the psychedelic community saying like how dare you compare some digital you know piece of crap to the power of psychedelics. Oh my god. It was like it was like I got such nasty messages from the psychedelic community on this. I was like wow. In some sense I wasn't super surprised because if you >> actually so when actually when when psychedelic research kind of first started up in the 50s and 60s and they were showing oh people can have these deep mystical experiences. actually like the meditation people said to the psychedelic people, "How dare you say that?" Like psychedelics, some cheap dirty trick like psych like just popping a pill could take you to the same place as meditation, right? So >> everyone's always kind of poo pooing the last thing, right? So like >> the meditation people poo poo the psychedelics people and then the psychedelics people poo poo the VR people. So if you see it in like the arc of history, it makes a lot of sense.

[00:46:32]>> Yeah. But the reason we called it pneumadelic was specifically to to dis create some distance with psychedelics because I I don't think it's a psychedelic experience. It's different but it's doing something that's similar to psychedelics. Right.

[00:46:49]>> And on a sort of when we zoom out what it also does and I find beautiful is that we live in a time where that sort of uh reflex you're describing many people have that um with technology in general. Mhm.

[00:47:02]>> I mean, we can sense it also in our community sort of like AI seeing it as something um dangerous, right? As a sort of danger because it many people claim that it might be conscious. I don't believe it's conscious. I don't also see any scientific reason to think it is.

[00:47:17]But we see that sort of this danger and as you have always had with the latest technologies. But your work also proves to me that um technology can can instead of sort of create more separateness, isolate us in our own echo bubbles online, unite us and have these beautiful transcendent experiences and that I find very hopeful >> is that sort of how are you on that view um when it comes to technology in general and sort of transcendence?

[00:47:46]Um, >> yeah. Well, I think Oh, man. You opened a can of worms here.

[00:48:00]Well, so one of the things that distinguishes our technology from most forms of technology is like we're not trying to sell you anything, right? So, so, so I really mean this. You could have judged me. You could have charged me a lot. But I really mean this. I really mean this. We're not trying to sell you anything because so like a lot of technology gets very creepy when you want to sell people something because like a lot of our alienated modern techno surveillance industrial complex is a result of the fact that we want personalized profiles so that we can like do targeted advertising.

[00:48:41]It turns out if you don't worry about that, you can do really beautiful things with digital art. Like really, really beautiful things. Like I've been doing that for a long time. And we've like this piece that you've experienced I >> is beautiful and wonderful. I actually think the earlier the predecessor of a hidden field is also a gorgeous piece that used technology to connect people in a beautiful beautiful way.

[00:49:03]>> And so I mean technology >> never looked at it like that. that sort of the potential of technology is gauged by that surveillance.

[00:49:12]>> Absolutely. Completely like completely and I mean this is like this is the direction AI is going. I mean completely like we have the whole internet and all of social media to train algorithms to like do personalized stuff. I mean this is the direction it's going. It just gets super creepy in a hurry.

[00:49:30]>> And with your I mean with your understanding of technology and having done this what could AI be used for? How what would sort of like a a true tech utopia be for you?

[00:49:42]>> For me?

[00:49:42]>> The word is a bit creepy of course like a utopia >> techn utopia >> but I mean no but how >> so okay so I guess before we talk about this the first thing I'd like to say is the word technology. Let's liberate the word technology which so it comes from the Greek techne logos.

[00:49:58]So logos is translated as word in Greek.

[00:50:02]It's like language, logos, the same where we get logic from.

[00:50:06]>> Techn means the art of >> Yeah. craft.

[00:50:09]>> The craft. Exactly. So like if I like to think of the word technology as like basically like the art of logic, >> right?

[00:50:19]>> For some reason the word technology has in our modern world now become synonymous with microprocessor technology.

[00:50:29]micro insilico like microprocessor fabrication is what people when they say technology that's what they mean >> but like the word technologos is a much much much broader than that and so in fact it's an it's an art word it's a craft word it's it's about craftsmanship and it's it's an aesthetic word >> and so the first thing I would like to do is just like I mean it's probably impossible at this stage but I can still say Maybe when we use that word we could be a little bit more conscious about what we actually mean.

[00:51:04]>> So I think for me uh technologos utopia would be one where like we can use the same systematic approach that we use for scientific experimentation or empirical empirical sort of insight to apply to create creating beauty >> like that.

[00:51:26]>> Yeah. Like you can be empirical about creating beauty. Like you can make an artwork >> and then you can show it to people >> and then you can like listen to what they say and you can get feedback >> and then you can like workshop different ideas and you can iterally improve it in the same way that you would with an experimental physics experiment or a chemistry experiment. You do it the exact same way. You can be you can take that same way of thinking to scientific domain or any other domain like that method of thinking that craft that that logos that would drive the the sort of evolution of the craft can be applied in any circumstance you want. So I think for me like if you ask me what's a technological utopia it would be that it would be where people are using like sophisticated cool new innovative methods to create beauty >> like so like that's how I would say it like >> that's probably not what you meant when you asked me about how do I say AI being used in a technological I mean I think like >> it's a bad it was a bad bad way of asking it but your answer is wonderful because I never thought of also that sort of >> honest scientific inquiry um as a method >> um to apply that in the arts where we often think as the the artist um we've created this myth of like the intuition coming through you and that's of the hard work of course every artist knows you have to put in the hard work >> but as you just said bringing that like almost empiricist mindset to art. I love I love that sort of how you >> bring those two together and um on already the impact you're making. So you said okay we we see that this experience is similar to people have having an experience of oneness. Um is it already being applied like therapeutic sessions I can imagine people with fear of death for instance having this experience >> might sort of be alleviated. Um is it used in that that way already? H.

[00:53:38]So, um, so we're we got some, uh, support from the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation to run trials to investigate whether it can be rolled out in a therapeutic context for people that have recently had a cancer diagnosis.

[00:54:01]And so we're working with the University Hospital in Santiago de Compostella with the oncology department.

[00:54:10]Um so when people first get like a cancer diagnosis, they often have like a lot of fear and anxiety that arises immediately, right? Fear of uncertainty, um you know, fear of what will happen to them, um fear about what will happen to their family. And there's an enormous amount of anxiety that often accompanies that diagnosis. And so what we're doing is we're working with the psychologists in the oncology department to offer this as a potential therapy for people that first an optional therapy for people that first receive a cancer diagnosis to give them um an opportunity to really kind of yeah go into the source of their fear.

[00:54:55]Um and so the experience we've developed is called um clear light and this is an experience that was developed a couple years back and in collaboration with um my colleagues uh Justin Wall and Joe Hardy and uh Gregory Rufa and and Sergey various others. Um but we did a pilot study with um American in in the US with um American patients and these were people who sort of self-identified as having a life-threatening illness and then we we we did this it's like it was six modules of six different pneumadelic modules. It kind of takes you through a journey, gives you the opportunity to kind of meditate on your own mortality and kind of go into um the source of your fear. And the results that we found from the small pilot study that we wrote were really really encouraging. So we found that on a number of the scales that psychiatrists use to kind of analyze where people are at in terms of their their fear post diagnosis um we found significant improvements on a number of these scales.

[00:56:15]And so on the heels of that work we're now running a larger scale. We're trying to move beyond the pilot phase to a randomized a proper randomized control trial that we're running in Santiago de Compostella to see if we can reproduce those those results on a larger scale.

[00:56:32]>> And yeah, at the moment I'm working with Dr. Kathy Andrew who I think you met earlier today during the experience.

[00:56:39]She's the sort of senior scientist, post-doctoral researcher that's running those that's responsible for managing those trials and she is um analyzing the first results that are coming back and and and so far it's it's looking really encouraging. It's looking like it's it's it's helping people a lot. And so >> I'm excited about that because I think a lot of the personal motivation for doing this project was that I felt such a transcendent sense of peace when I had this experience perceiving myself in that way and I think you got a glimpse of that today also.

[00:57:19]>> Absolutely.

[00:57:20]>> Right. Like you got a sense of that, right?

[00:57:22]>> Absolutely. Absolutely. And so I guess the goal of the project is really like well how can we construct like how can we use you know the affordances of our time the >> the poetics of circumstance call it what you will kind of like what we have available to us now to transmit that experience to people in a way that can hopefully help them.

[00:57:45]>> And um so far it seems to be working quite well. Um, it's been very interesting to do that work. We've had to adapt because how how cultures think how people think about death varies a lot depending on their culture >> and the dominant religious values of that culture and sort of the way that you know what's acceptable conversation. It's extremely culturally variable. And what we found is we had to change a lot of the clear light experiment, >> the clear light experience, excuse me, >> the clear light experience that worked in the US >> when we tried to just do a direct translation of that for the people in Spain. It did not did not land well.

[00:58:38]>> In a certain sense, we had to be much more secular in Spain.

[00:58:42]>> Oh. And I was slightly surprised by that because you know Spain is a Catholic country and you might think there's this >> but in experience itself or how you sort of guide people through it.

[00:58:54]>> The experience itself I'd say aren't >> well no but clear what you experience today was you experienced a different experience. So, so no, it it it was different before. I would say for the American audience, we leaned much into more into a narrative of mindfulness and meditation.

[00:59:13]>> Mhm.

[00:59:14]>> And that narrative did not land with the Spanish.

[00:59:16]>> Oh.

[00:59:17]>> And what landed much more with the Spanish was a narrative of matter and energy.

[00:59:22]>> That's interesting.

[00:59:23]>> Just actually a narrative of matter and energy. just starting from quantum theory being like we're going to like we're not going to get into debates about mindfulness >> like you know >> Buddhistic ideas that many of which have become trendy in western therapeutic experience experimental context >> we really had to roll it back to um matter and energy >> and we found that that landed much much better with people I don't I can't claim that I can sit here and tell you why.

[00:59:58]>> No, but it's interesting >> those differences are, but I'm absolutely fascinated by this and I would love the opportunity to deploy the experience to more translate it into more languages and test it in different cultures and see what the differences are because I think this just gave us a glimpse of the complexity >> but also encouraging because what we found was that new medallic aesthetics worked.

[01:00:20]>> Yeah. Yeah. We just had to frame it in a slightly different way for people to understand more. framing I think the framing the essence of the experience I can imagine is very much the same >> because that's also what ND experiences worldwide show us that in essence those experience are very often the same >> and um to me David and I thought also nice to sort of wrap everything we've discussed so far because you started with your own personal experience and you were wanting to let go and I had that experience today also the pure beauty of becoming one with the people around you returning uh to that oneness and and to me it felt just like relief like I felt like the the the low entropic state of us sitting here fighting off entropy >> in our universe like that's what life does and it's it's amazing but it cost so much so much energy I mean I'm talking to you with a broken voice in my it's it's so much energy involved >> and then to just let go and the bliss of that >> and you feel like you somewhere feel that's home but on the other And you also feel that the universe wants this also wants this you and me sitting here.

[01:01:30]>> How's that sort of >> boundary for you personally and you struggle with it like daily the oneness versus the Davis or have you found like the stable point? I'm just curious how it works for you.

[01:01:42]>> For me it's still a quest.

[01:01:43]>> I mean I the what I like this is an idea that comes up I didn't invent this idea.

[01:01:49]This comes up a lot. I've probably know about it most through Alan Watts. But um this idea that we all of us are all of us organisms whatever organism we are whe any any like limited instantiation of the of the of the finite we're finite right.

[01:02:12]>> Yeah.

[01:02:14]So if you're infinity, if you are the super po, if you're if you're the superp position of infinite possibility, the complete black space, which is not nothing but everything, >> you are the infinite creative matrix. By the way, the word matrix in Spanish translates as matric and the word matrice in Spanish also means womb. So in Spanish, it's beautiful because the word matrix means something that's infinitely creative.

[01:02:41]>> And so I really like that. Beautiful.

[01:02:42]>> Um, so if you are infinity, what are you going to do? Well, the only thing you can possibly do is explore all the infinite ways it means to be finite.

[01:02:52]Like that's literally the only thing you can do, right? So we we started off talking about like or yesterday we're talking about how everything is relationally defined, right? Like every concept only makes sense in terms of its other concepts. So something and nothing and black and white and like >> you know unified and distinct and whatever. So if you're infinite, >> you can only understand yourself as infinite if you experience the infinitely varied ways of being finite.

[01:03:20]>> So the only possible thing that can happen, the only possible thing that can happen is that you just have to play in the universe of the finite.

[01:03:27]>> Yeah.

[01:03:27]>> And so that's it. So if you look at it that way, then then each of us is kind of just like a little aperture through which the cosmos is trying to experience itself in a different way. So maybe I experienced myself as a bug over here for a while and then I experienced myself as a bird over here and they're all like peering in >> at I always think of it like a sphere and a bunch of little eye eyeballs in the sphere and they're all peering in and like the one thing they can't see is what's back here, right? So, it's like the classic image of, you know, the dog chasing its tail, right? It can't ever see what's back here, but it can see what's in here, right? It can see all the other organisms, >> but it can't see beyond that.

[01:04:08]>> The hide the hide and seek. I don't know what's called >> it's exactly it's like the eternal game of of hideand seek. And so didn't he also say which I love is that he said that um first let's say the first thousand explorations of finite states being that infinity would be I want to be the ruler of it all. I won't be the prince.

[01:04:30]>> Oh no I think that was that was another thing he was talking about. He was talking about if you could dream any dream >> Yeah.

[01:04:37]>> that you wanted you would >> you would always you would dream pleasure for the first you know thousand times >> for the first thousand you could he said imagine you could dream multiple lifetimes every night. Well what would you do in your dreams? He says event you know first thing you try to do is you try to have all the pleasure you could have. I would live in a castle. I want to be the king. I want to have sex with all the people I ever want to. I want to eat good food all the time. I just want to like whatever.

[01:04:59]>> And then eventually you get bored of that. You say like let's have a little bit of risk, right? And so you'd say, okay, like I'm going to dream something where maybe it's like the outcomes is not exactly certain, right? So I put myself in risk, right? And then he kind of goes through this thought experiment.

[01:05:13]He says, "Well, you where you land at is you'd be dreaming right now exactly what you're doing right now, right? Talking to me, talking to you, you know, being in this situation here, like not feeling so good, not knowing when you're going to get better, you know, knowing your mortality is on the horizon."

[01:05:30]Oh, and only if if only we could always laugh at it and and see the beauty of it because I think there's so much beauty once you sort of can just like breathe out and and enjoy that and be with that and don't fight it, right? And and just >> Yeah.

[01:05:48]>> Yeah. We also have um I mean I I definitely believe that you'll have this is one of the things I like about Buddhism is there's not the uh >> if you don't get it right this time around you have a lot of chances to keep going round. So >> there's not the same kind of like >> pressure to get it right this time around as there is in Christian paradigm for example. Yeah, >> you know, >> of course the karma story, but yeah.

[01:06:15]>> Yeah, >> beautiful. Um, David, thanks so much.

[01:06:19]This has been like a very fun conversation for me. Sorry for my voice.

[01:06:23]>> Yeah, no worries.

[01:06:24]>> And for you watching. Um, sorry also for um yeah, my voice breaking down a bit, but there was a lot of beauty >> in everything you said. And thank you so much for the VR experience. And we'll put links down below in the description of this video. And I hope soon people can see or experience this this new medallic experience. Is there sort of any timeline for that or is it still will it remain like a niche?

[01:06:50]>> We're look like we're like a small group of people that's trying to figure out ways to make this sustainable and we don't have very good ideas.

[01:07:00]>> If any of your listeners have good ideas then like please get in touch and like >> okay >> help us figure it out. I mean, every time we do these experiences, there's an incredible amount of interest and people love it and people start breaking down in tears. I mean, >> I I was telling like you started crying today during the experience. I mean >> that happens to about 20 to 25% of the people break down in tears during these experiences or like it's very common, right? I mean, >> so they they leave a really potent impact on people.

[01:07:34]I don't necessarily have ideas about how to make it sustainable or widely available. Like we're a small group of creative people trying to do something in the world. And if if your listeners there's there's smart people out there that know how to do these things. So if anyone has an idea, by all means get in touch.

[01:07:52]>> All right. All right. It's noted. It's noted.

[01:07:56]Thanks, David. Thank you so much.

[01:07:58]>> Yeah, man. Absolutely.