Sound, Consciousness and the Divine

[Intro] Welcome to Brainforest Café with Dennis McKenna. [00:00:22] Dennis McKenna: Alexandre Tannous is an ethnomusicologist, sound therapist and sound researcher. 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. This search has led him to the intersection of art, science, philosophy and spirituality. His ethnomusicological approach entails a social scientific study of sound use in several traditional contexts, religious, spiritual, holistic and cultural for various purposes and occasions in entertainment, worship, meditation and rituals of healing and trance. Consequently, his approach in researching, understanding, experiencing, transmitting and working with sound has always been based on a multidisciplinary approach. The material he transmits about sound is based on multidisciplinary research over 24 years, observations he made during his fieldwork in over 40 countries, scientific studies, personal experiences and data collected from thousands of people he has worked with during sound therapy. This has led him to a deeper understanding of how sound reveals and unlocks hidden powers we have within us to promote profound, inner transformation and healing. Alexandre is the principal founder of the Resonant Mind Collective, a non profit collective providing support in processing and integration and that will be posted on our podcast website and his main website is soundmeditation.com. It's my great pleasure to invite Alexandre to the Brainforest Café. Welcome. [00:02:36] Alexandre Tannous: Thank you very much, my dear Dennis. [00:02:39] Dennis McKenna: So good to see you here, my friend. We've had many conversations over the years and over the many years we've had some interesting adventures and you know, have grown to appreciate each other. You've got an incredible mind and you've taught me a lot. I've learned so much from you and I don't always agree with you, but that's the nature of friendship, you know. [00:03:08] Alexandre Tannous: Exactly. [00:03:09] Dennis McKenna: Appreciate each other. We don't have to agree with everything and that makes for lively discussions. So, a couple of things about this podcast. Number one, I certainly want to touch on any topics that you want to be sure we do discuss, you know, and you provided some talking points here which we may or may not have to go to because I think we never have any trouble finding things to talk about. [00:03:41] Alexandre Tannous: Not at all. [00:03:42] Dennis McKenna: What I would like to ask you to start with, sort of, which I don't know if I ever have, but sound has been such an important and profound influence in your life, your spiritual development, your career, your study. It's all about sound, you know, it really centers around sound. What brought you to this. Why have you pursued this with such passion? [00:04:14] Alexandre Tannous: Beautiful question that no one had asked me. I love that. Very sensible. Many factors. I grew up in a foreign country, Beirut, Lebanon. Grew up in Beirut and then lived through 14 years of war. The war started when I was 9. So my life has been shaped by war. But what helped me endure that difficulty and various things among them, and most important ones are my musical practice, studying and playing music and applying deep listening to music, and also my interest in meditation. So music shaped me immensely. I started out from an early age, meditation at age 14. And this love that I had for music and how much I benefited from and how much mystery it can encompass, that grew over the years in the most beautiful crescendo and accelerando. And it's still going. And it reached out the therapeutic and the esoteric properties of sound. But as you said earlier, it's all about sound at the end. The more I learned about it, and of course, this is what I studied in College. I did four degrees in music over 12 years. The more I study it, the more I realize that I know nothing. And as we know when we study rich topic, and you say similar thing about the study of plants, ethnobotany, ethnopharmacology, this is an affirmation that we are investing our time and energy in understanding, using, comprehending something so important that it needs many lifetimes. So music served me well. It allowed me to heal my trauma. And of course accentuated with psychedelics when the two are combined, that I came to later on in life, fortunately. But music has so much mystery. It's not an accident that so many religions and cultures tell you that sound is God. Whatever you read the first thing in the Bible, Old Testament, the New Testament, in our Eastern philosophies, that sound creates reality. Sound is God. Whether in Genesis, God said, let there be light, and there was light, or in New Testament, in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. [00:07:00] Dennis McKenna: Yeah, well, yes, it's true. I mean, so many religious traditions, philosophical traditions, put sound in the broadest sense, vibrational frequencies, energies, at the center of existence. And that's not incompatible with physics. I mean, physics would now agree that's actually a very scientific understanding of phenomena, because phenomena are vibrational phenomena. This is how reality manifests. [00:07:40] Alexandre Tannous: Absolutely. [00:07:42] Dennis McKenna: It's not exactly. This kind of energy is not necessarily something that you hear. It's built into the structure of reality. We apprehend it largely through our ears. But a lot of the work that you do shows that there are many ways to apprehend sound. You know, it can come from within the depths of your physical being, as I've experienced with you many times. You know, when you put a large tuning fork on a person's chest, it is rather transcendent, you know, and you're not hearing that, you know, you're actually feeling it or sort of being that. [00:08:25] Alexandre Tannous: Yeah. [00:08:25] Dennis McKenna: And that, that's an incredible thing, I think, that brings into people's experience the fact that, you know, we are vibratory, we're oscillatory systems. You know, we are sound, we are made up of waves. [00:08:41] Alexandre Tannous: Absolutely. Very rich thing to say, Dennis. I couldn't agree more with everything you said. There lies the mystery as well. So the mystery of how we listen to it, the mystery of how we feel it, as you're saying, with tuning forks and singing balls on the body, vibrationally. And also the way we experience our. And sound of our voice through bone and tissue conduction. So the way we interact with sound is very vibrational. And when. When it's used with awareness, with knowledge, it can take the person beyond the mental chatter, the monkey mind, and it quiets that. And it shows us very fascinating aspects within us, that being with a world that is beyond the 3D material world, it takes us inwards. It allows us to go into deep state of contemplation very rapidly, introspection, self reflection state of mindfulness or meditative state, so it can shift gears. And that's the power of acoustics, which is a branch in physics that studies sound and vibration. Humans love music. And of course we insert music in so many things, in religious ceremonies and shamanic ceremonies, with or without psychedelics, in Eastern philosophies, the mantra system, the sutra system, the chants, the incantations, the prayers, the music in all sorts of context. Parties, festivals, films, music in in commercials, in working places, in stores. What this does to us, it entrains us. It's all about entrainment. Our consciousness seems to be impacted by all of the things that we are entrained with. On the visual level, on the olfactory, the taste and vibrational. And the most impactful one, it seems. This is not just my personal opinion. It is the auditory. And that's why we find music to be everywhere. So it entrains us, it affects us. Entrainment is when you go inside a church or cathedral and you smell frankincense. Entrainment is when the shaman lights up Palo Santo in an ayahuasca experience. Or you go into Buddhist temple and you hear chants and the iconography, the candles, the stained glass in cathedral churches, the chronic chants in mosques, everywhere. All of these things entrain us, so they affect our consciousness. And our consciousness becomes a product of all of the things that these five senses are gathering as data. And there's beyond the five senses, but the five senses are already complex, so let's stick with this for now. So humans seem to be really deeply interested in the vibrational aspect, the auditory. And we see this a lot in shamanic experiences to an extent, where many shamans, especially shamans who work with ayahuasca as main sacrament, they tell you that the icaru, the ayahuasca cell, is the healer at the end. That's the one that really, really does the healing. It can do magic with it by itself, but not with ayahuasca by itself. You need the sound and music. And that's something that fascinated me and studied it for many years and tried to understand it in a short term fieldwork that I've done in over 40 countries. There's so much to learn about how humans use music and try to discern why, what is the meaning of that, how do others look for a similar thing? But I would advise people to study it in context. If we take it out of context, we lose the most important things. And that's something we're seeing happening right now. We think that the cars work for someone in Zimbabwe, Moscow or New York City or British Columbia, where you are. They work on you, on us, in the same way they work on indigenous people in the Amazon. There's no evidence that at all. We're not natives. We did not grow up with this culture, with this belief. So context deals a lot with reality. And that's not something that normal people would know. They need to have studied it deeply, like me, ethnomusicologists. And we have strong foundation in anthropology. Anthropologists study it a lot, sociologists. So context is very important. It's important for us now to study these shamanic traditions with different cosmological models, talking about reality in a specific way. How can they inform us of how we can create our own cosmological model informed by what shamanic societies have done and has been understood and recorded, but also esoteric knowledge in Eastern philosophies, agnosticism, hermeticism, neoplatonism, science, psychology, philosophy and ethnopharmacology, music, phonology, these are all things that are great lenses to understand the nature of being and Nature of reality. And we shouldn't go native, throw things away as Westerners, and go over the native stuff. And without discerning, without taking it apart with curiosity and not blasphemy, of course, while honoring it. But it's important to take these things so we don't fall into dogmatic behavior. Because we're so good at that as human beings. And we're also good at giving our power away. So agency is important. And I believe going back to sound and music, sound and music, if we're paying attention in whatever environment we're doing, especially in psychedelic experience, it takes us inward, they take us inward. Sound and music chant. They take us inward. They allow us to understand us, the self on the source code level, beyond mental chatter, which is now called default mode network, which is who we think we are. The parental imprinting, education, culture, society, religions as operating systems, our beliefs, our language. So sound takes us to a personal part. And this is what I've observed over and over and over. People everywhere are using it. It's helping us awaken. It's helping us find the likeness of God within us. And so many things that we used to call God, they were demystified and informed us through physics. I'm not saying that it's all physics, but let's go toward where the mystery is and not just call everything mystery. We can do that, but we don't have time to meander. It's very important to work in a judicious, attentive, intentional way, with great attention to energy management. So sound and music bring awareness to that. And at the end, you deal with physics in the same way gravity works on everybody. For those who believe in it or not, whether they know it exists or not, understand it or not, it's not going to work on them. Acoustics work on human consciousness in the most miraculous. [00:15:57] Dennis McKenna: Vibration is fundamental to existence. And as you point out in psychedelic experiences, sound is an important component. You can have a psychedelic experience without sound, but you're missing something essential if that's not part of the experience, because that helps to guide it and so on. And that's true of any meditative or spiritual discipline. Whether psychedelics are involved or not. It seems like this is just a fundamental component of experience as such. And particularly these kinds of meditative experiences. When you were talking, I was thinking the thing about sound is in order for it to be sound, it must be apprehended. I would say there's a distinction between, in some ways, a sound and vibration. You know, I mean, you could have vibration. But it goes back to the old trope when a tree falls in the forest, if nobody's around to hear it. Is there a sound? Well, who knows? Nobody can answer that. Presumably, there's a vibration, but no one apprehends it. And this. This is the thing that your practice does. It sets up this dynamic between the situation of creating the sound. But in that dynamic, there must be an apprehender. There must be someone actually hearing it or otherwise perceiving it. And that's an interesting thing. I mean, that's transactional. So, you have. I think you also make a good point. And we've had this discussion many times. It does not. It's a misunderstanding, I think, for people to try to simply appropriate some of these shamanic practices or other practices. You know, we're not indigenous people. We're not, by and large, Eastern people. We're, you know, we are who we are, embedded on our particular civilization and culture and so on. So you can learn from these other traditions and adopt some of the practices, but you shouldn't delude yourself that, you know, we can't become shamans in the same way that a curadero in the Amazon can become a shaman just because we haven't grown up in that tradition. And that is not a deficiency. That's just the way it is. You know, I mean, there are certain. I mean, any more than a curandero and the Amazon could probably become, you know, computer programmer or. I mean, they could become all these things, but it's not part of their tradition. And so it's a misunderstanding to try to emulate this. I mean, the word that comes to mind is ape this. You can adopt ritual practices that include sound, that integrate sound and psychedelics into something that works for each individual. And it really is a very individual kind of thing. [00:19:35] Alexandre Tannous: Yeah, absolutely. And again, for something this useful, this enigmatic, dis. Universal, unfathomable, that connects to the power of physics. And we know, we try to understand the universe and reality through the laws of physics. So I think we need to give acoustics a chance to go deeper into it, understand consciousness. And if we look into Mystery School teaching and the person who introduced Mystery Schools to the West, Pythagoras, his deep interest in the place where mystery schools came in Ancient Egypt, the Hermetic schools and the other schools that were offshoot from the Mystery School in Byblos, he studied them. He wasn't just interested in mathematics and in geometry, mathematics in general. He was interested in this mystery that went underground, that is part of human consciousness and introduced it to other Greek philosophers who came after him. Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Empedocles, Parmenides, and created a School of Cortona. And we know that the Greek philosophers' treatises that were introduced to the west, to Europe by the Arabs, who translated these treatises triggered what we call culture eventually. So it's important to look into what these mystery schools have been concerned with and how sound has been used and how psychedelics have been used in non shamanic cultures such as eleusis in the scene in mysteries. Kikyon in ancient India, taking Soma in ancient Iran, taking Homa, ancient Tibet, taking Amrita. And to understand how differently they looked at that, because so far as Westerners, we are so influenced by shamanic traditions. Not only that, and we are awkward at introducing the scientific to the shamanic because our science lost its connection to spirituality a long time ago. And we've suffered a lot of setbacks. And we see now this interest of merging the two together is becoming more and more sincere and rigorous. And we would like to see more of that. But it's important to understand how sophisticated psychedelics are. And it's not just what shamans are talking about. That's their own way of talking about infinite different ways of talking about them. I honestly see them as the ultimate natural, organic, biological technologies. Same with sound. And yeah, some people might be, you know, having a knee jerk reaction or about to throw up or being violent. No, we shouldn't react to technology like this. The fact that we don't always create magic with it does not mean that it's evil and it's bad. Any powerful tool we can do good, extreme good and extreme bad. And the more powerful it is, the more good and bad we can do with it. So technology can do great things. So people should not turn off when they hear the word technology. These are the real original technologies that the ancients and we are, you know, encoded to use this. We are deeply interested. [00:23:05] Dennis McKenna: Right, We've had this conversation or we've touched on these topics very, very often. Technology, the very word implies technology implies, it's a tool. You know, it's something that we use. Psychedelics can be a tool. Sound can be a tool, Dancing can be a tool. Anything, anything that. And it's not necessarily something that we invent, but it is something. I mean, you can, you know, you could pick up a stick and start beating on a log. Well, you've just, you know, you haven't really invented it, but you've invented music. And the moral dimension always resides within us. You know, you can use these technologies for beneficial purposes, to help people, to help the individual, to so to, you know, for healing, if that's your goal. But you can also use them for nefarious purposes. And this is why I think we have to be careful about technology in general. Because whatever technology it is that we're talking about, you can be sure that there will be people who will misuse it and people who will use it for maximum benefit. So every technology is a two edged sword. And we see the, you know, we see this conversation very much in the current discussions about AI, you know, and the particular applications of AI. And to some people it's kind of terrifying. To other people it's like, you know, this is the greatest thing since sliced bread. We're kind of off topic here, Alexandre, but what do you think about AI? Do you have any thoughts about this and any that relate specifically to your interest in sound? [00:25:05] Alexandre Tannous: Oh, yes, absolutely. I've been observing this phenomenon from the beginning and I interact with it and I'm deeply interested in what kind of mistakes we make in trying to learn to handle it and what are the lessons we extrapolate from them and what kind of good we use from the beginning. Hopefully that would happen more than the missteps. AI is a form of very powerful technology that we created. That, as you said, a technology is a tool is modality. It is a supplement to take us to something that already exists within us, can be seen this way too. And the more powerful the tool, the more knowledge we need to ensure that we're using this tool correctly all the time and not haphazardly. So this is where knowledge comes, but also uncovering through the missteps that we take. Uncovering places for us we need to look into within ourselves. And psychedelics are already doing this right now. Creating healing, bringing attention to the person's self awareness and how the person acts in public and getting people to take accountability. So it's fine tuning the self awareness, self observation. AI is going to give us a chance to do this more in psychedelics. And now with the psychedelic response, wonderful things are happening. Just something similar is happening. Is that not a lot of good stuff is emerging, tension between groups. And I've always wondered why there's so much ego around psychedelics. People may not see this, but I see it because I've been around it for a long time, interacting with it from various angles, why there's such a lot of ego. Even shamans they all fight over who's a better shaman than the other. Even goes to a level where they have these magic thoughts, right? And it happens in the west with facilitators. So what is this about? This is telling us that this powerful tool, technology, is bringing awareness to something that requires attention, that we have not gotten a chance to give it this much attention. So AI is going to give us great chance. The great chance. And this is some context here. I'm bringing into my perception of AI and understanding of it. My interest in the main archetypes. Christ consciousness, the middle way becoming one with the Logos and the two side ones that we're always at risk of falling too much toward this side or that side, too much this side. It would be Lucifer. Archetype, which is not the devil, is the bringer of light and infatuation with technology and feeling that oh, love and light, you know, you need to bypass your spirituality. And this is, you know, complicated when we're still human beings. And the other one is Ahriman that zoroastrianism talked about and Rudolf Steiner talked about. So Ahriman is a main universal archetype that has been manifesting in this mindless technological advancement in scientific materialism and transhumanism in the metaverse, fear induced reality, social engineering and social design. Misuse in mishandling, misunderstanding of technology and AI wanting to capitalize on its power and make a lot of money. Addiction to information, electronic devices, mislabeling, mismanaged energy. This is a chance for us to learn so much about our mismanaged energy to bring real healing and rehabilitation that psychedelics have been doing for a long time. And we've witnessed a big renaissance recently. And it's accentuating. One needs to be given attention to both of these powerful tools, technology, AI, you know, it's causing us to realize Ahriman of this deserves whole talk by itself. People should look into it. A H R I M A N from the Farsi Ahriman. There is Angora Mainzda, the good God, the Christ consciousness. And there's the other main evil side of us. So we need to learn about how we can create good and we create evil. We're having to look at this on the inception level. AI is going to give us a great chance, but we must not fear it. Now it's a little bit tricky to do because we've created many unfair systems prioritizing profit over consciousness by creating a fear induced reality and threatening people with fear, whether religions or political systems and media. Because that makes people pay attention because you're calling the reptilian brain, you're dragging the reptilian brain the carrot on a stick. So it's hard for them to fight it. So AI is going to help us with the right attitude, hopefully to understand this to a very important level. Because something fundamentally is wrong for a very intelligent species like we are, I'm not going to say the most intelligent, to create this much chaos, interact in a self destructive way to an extent where termite colonies exhibits more harmony than we do and definitely the sophisticated bees colonies. Something fundamentally is wrong. And if you want, we can talk about it later as to what seems to be happening. And that's what I say in short, about AI. I know there's a lot more to say, but I'm hopeful. But we need to approach it with the right attitude, the look at it through the right lens and filter and the right angle. Not with fear, curiosity, discernment, hope and with interest to understand the self. Now, like, how can we make money on this? How can we create hegemony and power? This is what this tool is trying to teach us to wake up further. [00:31:24] Dennis McKenna: Yeah, yeah, well, yeah, you know, always with, with things like psychedelics and AI and all of these things that are developed through human ingenuity and there's always the question of how to exploit these things commercially, how to make money. That isn't really the question though. I mean, it's part of the question. The question is how can we optimally utilize these things to enhance people's lives? You know, that's. That should be. The goal is to help individual and collective evolution. And these technologies, you know, have the potential to do that particularly, I mean AI, we are just beginning to explore where that might go. But anyway, it's an interesting perspective on AI. I wanted to ask you a couple of your talking points here that you raised, which is interesting for example. [00:32:35] Alexandre Tannous: We've already covered so many of them in this flow. That's why I prioritize flow. [00:32:39] Dennis McKenna: We've covered a number. Yeah. So tell me, what is your understanding of what a mystery school is? We talk a lot about mystery schools. What is a mystery school in your understanding? [00:32:55] Alexandre Tannous: Yeah, so mystery schools are schools that were created in ancient Egypt and to preserve advanced knowledge that belongs to humanity. But our consciousness seems to have lost its throne. We are fallen gods. Right. All religions tell us the same thing. That we lost who we are, our connection to the divine we went through in some way and we are crawling back toward wholeness. So mystery schools are about preserving advanced knowledge that belongs to humanity, that needs to be preserved. And you let it out in chunks in time, as consciousness recovers and the culture in people's consciousness develops. Certain reestablishment, reconnection to the self and ancient Egypt Hermeticists, which seem to have come from ancient Atlantis according to many spiritualists like Madame Blavatsky, Rudolf Steiner, Gurdjieff and others, is a whole other topic and survived all over the world in different mystery schools. The white brotherhood in the Middle east, has nothing to do with race. And mystery school of Tyre in Byblos in ancient Phoenicia, modern day Lebanon that Pythagoras, whose mother was Phoenician, studied and introduced to Europe. They deal with advanced things that eastern schools have brought us. For example, Madame Blavatsky, the founder of theosophy with few other people, brought yoga and meditation to the states in the 1870s. Look how long it took for the culture to be ready and to use them effectively. [00:34:58] Dennis McKenna: Right. [00:34:59] Alexandre Tannous: And sound is another one. And spiritualists mystery school teaching introduced things about life after death, telepathy, psychic experiences, psi phenomena, remote viewing, astral projection, reincarnation, holistic healing. There was one time that these things were unknown and were a very deep woo woo. They're still woo woo to certain people. So they introduced these things and a lot more, more esoteric than this. The two modern mystery schools are Theosophy, created by Madame Blavatsky. And Rudolf Steiner was a theosophist and he had some certain disagreements and split and created his own modern mystery school. Anthroposophy, Rudolf Stahler is the person who created the Waldorf school system, biodynamic farming and Eurythmy. In case people are not familiar with his name, very, very advanced spiritual event, that over 100 years later we still don't understand his work. So mysterious school is about very important knowledge that helps us understand our connection to the divine within us and not the male white dude we now call Jehovah. I don't believe this is the right God in the container. [00:36:20] Dennis McKenna: It's about a sphere of knowledge. [00:36:22] Alexandre Tannous: Yes. [00:36:23] Dennis McKenna: That cannot be really approached scientifically. I think science in some ways is a subset of the perspective of mystery schools. Science is not quick enough in my opinion to recognize and acknowledge its limitations. Science is a very powerful way of asking questions of nature that can give meaningful answers back. But science arrogates to itself the notion that it's the final word and it's not. There are vast fields, vast spheres of knowledge which are unknown to science and possibly unknowable by science. But that does not invalidate those spheres. You know, I mean, and this is. But in the west, you know, we attribute this sort of, we put science at the pinnacle of authority, you know, and we say if it's not scientific, if you can't prove it scientifically or if it's anti scientific, then it's not valid. My own feeling is that that's a good starting point in some ways. But you have to be open enough to the fact that, you know, science operates from a platform of, based on the available data as we understand it, and to its credit, if it's properly practiced, which it often is not it, its premise is based on our current understanding, this is the nature of this or that phenomena that you're studying. But it has to be true. Science has to be open to the idea that, well, you know, there may be new data that comes in next week or next month or next century that's going to completely overturn everything we thought we understood, you know, and we've seen this again and again in the history of science, you know. [00:38:38] Alexandre Tannous: Yes. [00:38:38] Dennis McKenna: So the Mystery School gives you that deeper, you know, sort of appreciation. I, I think not all the, not everything that is taught in the mystery schools are necessarily true, you know, but it's a deep, it's a more comprehensive way of looking at things. You could apply the tools of science to investigate things like reincarnation and, you know, and we know, for example, through work with psychedelics that, you know, psychedelics are something that create unique states of human consciousness that are undeniable and they're pharmacologically induced, you know, but they're very, very hard to study as we, as, you know, even knowing what causes them. You can do brain scans all day long. You could do receptor binding studies and all of this stuff. You're still not getting to the core of what is the phenomenon that you're experiencing. You know, this is, as you know, this is the big conundrum in the study of consciousness. You know, this separation between subjective experience, which we all have, so we know it exists, and objective experience, which may actually be a fiction in a certain sense. There is nothing beyond subjective experience. [00:40:14] Alexandre Tannous: Yeah, absolutely, yeah. These are all very, very important points, coincidentally, and to bring it all together, we're taking the listeners and viewers from this wild excursion. Very rich and beautiful and resonant. Sir Francis Bacon, one of the holders of mystery school knowledge, a Rosicrucian and a very advanced human being spiritually. He's the person who created the scientific method and he was so fond of natural philosophy. This is why when you came up with this idea, I want to create The McKenna Academy from Natural Philosophy, I heartedly supported you on this and helped you created and work together and launched it with the Mystery School Retreat in Sacred Valley. Through wonderful event, we are making our way back. We are bringing back science, back to spirituality. If Sir Francis Bacon knew what is going to happen to science down the road, he would not have liked this. We aired and lost it a little bit, but we're making a comeback because scientists and technologists, the engineers are the new priesthood right now. And that's part of the reason why I believe we became such an intelligent human species, but wisdomless that we're destroying ourselves, the environment, plants, plant extinction and species extinction is rising and we're looking for a different planet. That's not what an intelligent species does. Something fundamentally must have been wrong. And I believe that it happened because it needed to happen for us to learn something. But instead of being busy, you know, acting on this, we need to discern what is the lesson here to learn. Because suffering and difficulties, pain can bring a lot of, lot of deep understanding, a lot of deep lessons. If we choose not to understand, then we miss out on a great opportunity. If we choose to understand that, then we can grow. And we need growth right now. So we are gravitating toward the use of powerful tools and modifying the state of science. Now science is going back to natural philosophy, which was based on study nature to understand who you are, what you are. What is nature to you, what are you to nature? Where is the divine? What is the divine? Understand the nature of being. Because I'm of the school that I believe that everything that we experience is part of who we are. And that seems to be the ultimate truth that we find in the Vedanta schools, in Hinduism and Dzogchen, in Tibetan Buddhism and in Kabbalah and in alchemy. And is that you're all of that? What's the biggest question anyone can ask? Who am I? And in Vedata school is tat famasi in Sanskrit. You´re all of that? We need to wake up in a dream. So we're altering the way. We're using powerful tools for God's sake. Now we drink crazy brew coming from the Amazon. We don't know who made it. You know, we eat fungi and plants and we smoke toad venom. And when 30 years ago was strange to tell someone that I have a shrink because the person would think that you're crazy. So we're really been working hard. We upped our game in trying to wake up. So, by understanding this phenomenological aspect and having deep interest in metacognition, by observing the growth, observing our thought processes and, and growing through that, which is something psychedelics promote. I don't believe that, you know, I have my own ideas and we've talked about these ideas and, and what shamans say. I don't believe that when we take something that's the plant spirit talking to me, I have another way of seeing it. With all due respect to people who think differently, I believe this is an aspect of myself that the chemicals, the molecules, I believe the spirit is in the molecule because people now take psilocybin in these studies and that's synthesized in the lab. There's nothing organic and people call mushrooms plant spirit when it's fungi. So there's a lot of misunderstanding in words used flippantly and loosely. And they create an unhealthy reality that works well for the self limiting ego who to begin with is attached to its own suffering. We need to wake up, we need to take accountability. We need to discern and understand the nature of being and use language differently, to navigate through reality differently. Because psychedelics and working with powerful tools, combination of sound and psychedelics, are promoting just that. To wake up more in the dream, to change our labels, to change the way we name things. Kierkegaard if you name me, you negate me. We do this all the time. We create things by giving them name and they start to exist as such. We need to revisit them and reevaluate them, reassess them. Is that really what's going on? I love Terence to death. I knew so much from him. But I honestly don't believe that the mushroom talks to me. That's the higher self. That's metacognition. That when we go into that state and no longer experiencing the usual self. [00:45:48] Dennis McKenna: This is the whole controversy about not only not just does the mustering talk to you, but the whole current conversation about the DMT entities, the non, apparently non human intelligences that you encounter in deep psychedelic states, particularly dmt, often with mushrooms. And the conversation is always, are these things real? You know, and my response is yes, they are real. They're experienced, but they probably come from within us. You know, they're not something external, they're productions of our own. You call it the higher self. I guess that's as good a term as any, it's part of the self, it's part of the unconscious. I don't see anything in any of the literature I've read about these things that would, that would not be explained by that. I mean there is, you have to. One thing that science has done that's useful in looking at this type of phenomenon is what they call occam's razor. Right. The idea that if there's a simple explanation, the simplest explanation that accounts for all the data is probably provisionally correct, you know, until something along, other data comes along that disrupts, you know, that model. I do think you touched on a point earlier about how we've turned science into a religion. And I think that's very dangerous and I think it's totally anti-scientific. [00:47:39] Alexandre Tannous: Absolutely. [00:47:41] Dennis McKenna: It's because science, the virtue of science, the best thing about science is that, properly practiced, it never postulates or poses to be the final word on anything. It is a way of asking questions of nature. You know, and anytime you. And now, you know, we've dissected and described various aspects of nature in a great deal of detail and quite a bit. And there's a tendency on the part of scientists and certainly non scientists to say, well, we've pretty much got this thing figured out. And when you make that statement, that in itself shows how ignorant we are and how limited our knowledge is. Science properly practiced science always reminds, reminds its practitioners of its limitations, you know, and you don't. Humility is something that more scientists should discover in a sense. I mean, and I've, I've always suggested that scientists should, you know, take courses in philosophy of science in order to think about what they do. What about what is this thing called science that's so powerful? But we tend to accept science as a quasi religion and it becomes a cult. And that undermines the whole purpose of science. [00:49:23] Alexandre Tannous: Absolutely, absolutely. Couldn't agree more. I think there must have been a reason why we as a very intelligent species became who we had become, again, to learn something very important. But we need to learn the lesson. When we think about science in a very material way, we're going to create such reality. What is real? Anything the mind focuses on becomes reality. [00:49:52] Dennis McKenna: Exactly. Experience is real on something. [00:49:54] Alexandre Tannous: Anything you experience is real, especially things that you focus on. And your brain gates whatever is unnecessary and puts this as the spotlight of your consciousness, your attention that becomes surreal. And for me, when I go into DMT experience, everything drops off, is no longer accessible consensual reality, the idea of the self has gone, replaced by something so alien, so esoteric, and that becomes more real than reality. You know, if you are a meditator, if you're into mindfulness, if you're into deep listening, you're playing music. That can happen too, not in such a strange way, but whatever your mind is focusing on becomes real. So what seems to have happened to us as species? The ancient Greek philosophers gave terms to two different kinds of intelligences and ability to use knowledge. One that is called Epistemy, which is a conceptual knowledge that is reached through reason and investigation, which is what we seem to have prioritized through our deep interest in education, schooling and university, and thinking, thinking. And that gave rise to science in a specific direction, divorced from its connection to spirituality. And that problem started happening around Sir Isaac Newton's side when he met with church officials, with his colleague to create the Royal Academy of Science. Tell them, we don't want you to interfere. Tell us what we can study, what we cannot study. And the church said, okay, fine, you can do that, but don't come close to consciousness, the biggest piece of the puzzle. He wasn't happy about this. As an alchemist more interested in alchemy than physics and mathematics. And the other type of knowledge is Gnosis, which is non conceptual direct knowledge reached through personal experience of the divine. I think we are in search for Gnosis that we left in the dust and to bring it to be in equal par and great balance, harmony with Episteme. That is very important. But the problem is that we've gone too much toward the left, let's say, or in that direction where we're so deep into episteme and gnosis, we lost, for me the psychedelic experience, esoteric knowledge, mystery school knowledge, meditation, contemplation is all about uncovering gnosis. The word can refer to the knowledge we acquire through our own experience as opposed to knowledge that we are told or believe in. Gnosis is conscious, inner intuitive knowledge, direct knowledge, experiential knowledge and conceptual knowledge, relief or theory. This term is synonymous with the Hebrew da'at concept in Kavanaugh and the Hindu Jnana, Jnana, yoga knowledge, yoga of knowledge, and Vidya and Rigba for Tibetan Buddhists. So we are in search for that. And I believe this is happening through molecules, through ritual, through prayer, through use of sound. And hopefully we bring in science to serve this understanding and not take us away from the real mysteries, from the real spirituality. In communing with nature, communing with what else we think we are. The problem is that we think we know who we are. And that's one thing psychedelics tell us bad, wrong. You only think you know right as you say it over and over and over. I think we are in search of alignment with the Logos. The Logos in ancient Greek has several meanings. Ratio, reason, plan, word, discourse, harmony, mediation, order, pattern. The Logos in ancient Greek, philosophy and theology is the universal ordering principle. It's divine reason implicit in the cosmos, ordering it and giving it form and meaning. It is the true universal language expressed in mathematics, geometry, energy patterns, frequencies. And this is why when we smoke dmt, we see this profuse ornamentation and fractals and sacred geometry and incomprehensible shapes and patterns and colors. I think we're trying to take a close look at what else we are to our reawakened self. But we still call it the outside, we still call it spirits. [00:54:33] Dennis McKenna: So perhaps the reemergence of psychedelics in our society, they've been around forever, indigenous people have done them forever. Eastern philosophy, whether connected to psychedelics or not, have understood this mindset for centuries. So this dichotomy between conceptual knowledge and gnosis or wisdom, I kind of equate gnosis with wisdom, but maybe, so maybe the rediscovery of psychedelics, the reintroduction of psychedelics into society, as poorly managed as it is, and so on, but ultimately is a good thing because it's an effort on the part of the collective spirit, call it the collective consciousness or unconsciousness, to reintroduce gnosis as an element of our collective knowledge. And so that's a hopeful side. and much more so than the idea of the. I find the reductionist, totally scientific worldview that dismisses everything else to be, well, for one thing, rather impoverished, you know, because it forces you to ignore so much of experience, but then inadequate even on a scientific level. I mean, scientists should practice a mantra every day, say, remember how little you know. Remember how little you know. Remember how little you know. Which is what psychedelics always. That's the message that I come away with every time. You know, don't become full of what you think you know, because actually you don't know shit. You know what it comes to. [00:56:39] Alexandre Tannous: Absolutely, absolutely. That there's so much for us to awaken, but also to realize that how we use it as technology and to learn more about the knowledge needed to better use this technology and invest our energy differently then we use psychedelics as powerful tools, but without looking outside, without attributing something that we already had, proof that it's not what we think that's doing the work, the spirit. Because when we take molecules synthesized in lab with nothing organic but organic molecules, but nothing organic meaning fungi or plant, put together, the spirit is there is how this alters the human trip, which is a human experience and what this informs us about. For this to happen more and more, it's very important to bring a greater and greater level of education around psychedelics now that we're experiencing this wonderful renaissance and to learn the lessons we need to learn. Because even though we work together in psychedelics, as we know the field is not so united and we're observing this division more and more. The whole world is divided and this division is something recreated that's trying to bring awareness to us that we need to get our shit together and come back to a state of love, harmony and resonance. That's what's missing. This is the role of music in the psychedelic experience. And to watch for the pitfalls of using powerful tools, any powerful tool. Psychedelic, working with sound, with knowledge, being in a position of power can have pitfalls. Ego inflation, spiritual materialism, spiritual bypassing spiritual superiority and boasted humanism and messianism and, you know, self aggrandizement and cultural appropriation. Practice in a negative way. Something I call monobiosis, the disease of becoming an expert after having read one book. This is not a judgment. These are byproducts of using powerful tools and not being prepared for them. Not having context, not having awareness, not having done a lot of work on the darkness within us and the disempowered self that we are in this taking away the self limiting ego and healing ourselves before we become healers to others. Healer doesn't heal, healer facilitates healing. And if the healer is still bringing his pain and lacking awareness, then he or she is not going to be a good healing facilitator. We know this so well. So it's important also to be discerning with the words that we use. For example, the word medicine, for me, that's used a lot to describe psychedelics is certainly a better word than a drug, but it has a connotation because for us as Westerners, medicine for us is like omeprazole. Take it and you know, the heart, the heartburn is gone. Take Advil and the headache is gone. Take this medication or whatever, it addresses symptoms. But these are medicines, as the indigenous understand, in which they have a different understanding. It means you have to make effort, you have to use them, you have to learn to get out of the way, lose who you think you are, to learn about what else you are or who we'd like to become. We shouldn't anthropomorphize a lot, which is projecting human quality onto things outside of us. Indigenous people do that. That's part of their cosmological model and traditions. I respect that, but I'm not someone who's going to take it out of context because there are consequences. So we need to be discerning with the words that we use. Either shaman, guru. We need to look in the right direction. Look in words. [01:00:38] Dennis McKenna: I think this happens in every tradition. I was reading a piece, the piece that you sent me before, talking about sound meditation versus sound therapy and sound healing healings. The point you make is sound healing is a misnomer. And I think the point you're making with the medicines here is medicines don't heal people. Sound doesn't heal people. Healing comes from within. [01:01:06] Alexandre Tannous: Yeah. [01:01:07] Dennis McKenna: You know, the drugs, the psychedelics, the sound, all of these things facilitate an inner process. So it's completely inappropriate for a person to represent themselves as a healer, a sound healer, or a shamanic healer or whatever. There's an element of ego in there. It's like saying, I'm the healer. I can heal you. I'm going to heal you. No, you're going to heal yourself. I'm going to facilitate that by creating conditions in which you can discover your own ability to heal yourself. It's a critical distinction and it's very easy to get away from. I mean, medicine, conventional medicine has very much that perspective, that the doctor is the healer and the doctor has these tools, these drugs, whatever else the technique is, and those things will heal the patient. Ultimately, the healing comes from the patients, or that doesn't even have. Patient is maybe a wrong word because it implies that a person is sick. You don't have to be sick in a clinical sense to be healed. We all need healing. You know, we're wounded from birth. [01:02:37] Alexandre Tannous: Yes. [01:02:38] Dennis McKenna: Fact of birth is a traumatic event. [01:02:41] Alexandre Tannous: Exactly. [01:02:41] Dennis McKenna: And the rest of our time trying to recover from that, you know? [01:02:46] Alexandre Tannous: Yeah. And. And healing is very powerful. And we do get healing when we are in these experiences. Absolutely. But it's not just healing. And I appreciate very much you weighing in on the nature of healing and the importance of the self involved to manifest the healing, to create it, and not just sit and wait for it to fall into our lap. But there are other things than healing and therapy. I see in psychedelic experience, there's therapeutic effect, there is rehabilitative effect, which is let's not do this anymore. Let's fine tune it and this rehabilitation in it. There is conservation of energy and better energy management and investment. And there is education. There is revealing to the true nature of the self, of reality, of the divine. There's nurturing, nourishing, empowerment, introduction to the mystical, revitalization, regeneration, reparative work, restorative work. Also these things are important to talk about. If we talk only about healing, we gotta extrapolate only healing. We have to remember that words create reality. And this is very, very deep. [01:04:01] Dennis McKenna: And words are just a word, are sounds, are sound. [01:04:05] Alexandre Tannous: Exactly. And we're dealing with acoustics and physics as well. And we are being entrained by word. We create reality. And Terrence talks a lot about how words create reality. I was so inspired by his teaching to go deeper into it, to understand how far this can go. So why we are doing this is very important. How did we get to misperceive this? To have this misguided perception is very important. I believe that there must have been a trauma in the past that happened and caused us to fall from grace, to fall from being one with God. Right. The Godhead, lose the Godhead. And according to the Yugas, we go through cycle of rising consciousness, fall consciousness and the four quadrants. Right. We are now exiting the Kali Yuga, which, you know, the age of iron, brown, silver and gold. Golden age. So. But I think that we are trying to understand that we are a species with trauma. I believe more and more people are talking about this, and Graham Hancock talks about it, that this flood that seemed to have happened about 12,800 years ago, cataclysm created lasted about 1200 years until 11,600 years, and seemed to have wrecked a lot of things. People should look into what Graham Hancock talked about, which is really valuable. I add another aspect to this impact that it had on us. Water coming out of nowhere and burying everything. And cities are. Towns are built next to a body of water. Right. To facilitate transportation and to have access to the sea for various reasons, food and transportation, et cetera, in the old days and still till now. So. And this seemed to have happened around the end of the last Ice Age. So this truly happened. And there's physical evidence now, the younger Dryas that we can study. Dig deep into this. [01:06:14] Dennis McKenna: As Graham says, we have developed collectively an amnesia about these amnesia because they were traumatic and yet so traumatic, those traces. [01:06:25] Alexandre Tannous: And also launched us into creating different reality. That's the part that I want to introduce here is the fact that we're so traumatized. And you know, in any difficult situation when you are in danger, what takes over is the reptilian brain, because it's there to keep us safe. And that's what's responsible for fight, flight or freeze. The reptilian brain, people don't know, regulates your breathing 24/7, whether you're passed out, drunk, meditating, sleeping, dreaming, tripping, it runs flawlessly. It also regulates digestion, balance, motor skills, facial expression. So if we're in danger, this is what's going to kick in. And that seemed to have survived this trauma, this reptilian brain, dominant behavior that created a different reality, that made us create these unfair systems and unfair religions that use fear, fear induced reality, manipulate people with weaponized psychology and shame and guilt and all of that. All of them, not only Christianity and mishandling of power left and right, whether by aristocracy, by religions and by political systems and governments, and now the media and Silicon Valley is doing it on a whole other level. They're creating reality, we're trying to heal from that and to realize that the reptilian brain has been dominant and that mess created an imbalance between the inner feminine and masculine. We lost the positive aspect of the feminine, which each one has positive and negative. And for me the positive aspect of feminine is love, kindness, compassion, empathy, forgiveness, gratitude that psychedelics enhance and revitalize, right, revamp. And the negative part of the feminine is lying and acting with cowardice and submissiveness and denial. The positive masculine is logic, discernment, reasoning, the intellect and et cetera. And negative is hatred, violence, retaliation, forcefulness, aggression. Where species are balanced because of this trauma. And yes, we are species with amnesia, we lost who we are. And I think we're resorting to the use of powerful tools like psychedelics and sound. Hopefully we're learning more and more how they are technologies and how they empower the self to gain back agency. What is agency is the mindset, logic, discernment, reasoning, intentions, attention, will, awareness, intuition, imagination, inspiration, upgrading belief, letting go of who we think we are. This is what needs to be reestablished. We lost our agency and that's why we create reality. That's disharmonious. We species that lost love and harmony and we're in search of that. [01:09:25] Dennis McKenna: And these technologies, psychedelics, sound meditation, these sort of, these are the antidotes to the poison that is put into our collective consciousness by these institutions like religion, these authoritarian based religions and rigid political systems and so on. These are all systems that are basically designed to bludgeon people into behaving a certain way. They hand you. They say, we have it figured it out. You don't really have to think about anything. Here are the answers. Just believe these and you'll be fine. You know, of course you have to stop thinking. That's. That's thinking is very inconvenient for these systems because it makes you question things. Well, Alexander, where we're over the top of the hour. This has been a fantastic conversation. We can go on for hours. I don't know. [01:10:26] Alexandre Tannous: We have done that. [01:10:27] Dennis McKenna: But listen, but it's. It's been. We've touched a lot of the main points. [01:10:35] Alexandre Tannous: Yes, absolutely. We always have rich conversations, Dennis, and I want to say something that I wanted to say it in the beginning, but we didn't get a chance to say. You switched to a different topic. I wanted to express my gratitude and my love to you and what you have done in this world. How much of an incredible teacher you have been to millions of people and a great example of how to know a lot, but still be open and be humble about it to how to still be kind and embody humility in a very authentic way. I love you and millions of people love you for what you have brought. And what you still bring, again, is going in a crescendo, in accelerando. You're giving more and more as you become wiser and wiser and you create incredible things in the world. I couldn't be more grateful to your love, support, and teaching. You have been a great teacher to me and to millions of people and our every interaction we have together. [01:11:38] Dennis McKenna: I appreciate it. I appreciate the compliment. I feel the same way about you. We're, you know, let's face it, we're all just monkeys. We're trying to figure something out. We're trying to make the world just a little bit better. So in that sense, I appreciate it and I appreciate having people like you in my life who are, you know, not only great teachers, but great friends. And that's the most important thing. [01:12:08] Alexandre Tannous: And it's okay if we don't agree on everything, which we disagree that we disagree, but that does not affect lives. [01:12:14] Dennis McKenna: What would we talk about if we. [01:12:18] Alexandre Tannous: If we all agree something is wrong? Right? No. It's very important for us to accept and not spend so much time and energy in fighting about who's moral. Right? And the whole world right now is up in flames in conflict for us to learn many lessons. But first and foremost, this very same lesson is that it's okay to coexist even when we disagree. I think the problem here is the Jehovah religions, they introduced this concept as a parasitic force. This is a topic for all other conversation, but just to close with it, to bring awareness to this parasitic force that's manifesting in the world, creating more divide and disagreement and people killing each other over a variety of different things. Religious affiliation, political and parties and blacks and whites and rich and poor. All of that is for us to realize that we don't have to do that. It's mismanaged energy. What do we choose? What kind of creality do we need to focus on and create how much what we do, our actions, the words create a reality. We need to understand that in psychedelics, which manifests the mind, revealing the soul. Right. Are explaining just that. We need to realize that whatever we invest our time and energy in, that is the reality that we got to create. It seems to be simple but very hard lesson to learn in 21st century. [01:13:43] Dennis McKenna: So many things conspire to muddy the message. But that's basically it. You know, again, just don't believe everything. Don't believe anything anybody tells you. Use your own, your own ability to think and to evaluate and to really, you know, I think in our inner core we know what's right. We know what is right. Not some religion or political system out there that's telling us this is right. This is what? [01:14:14] Alexandre Tannous: Yes. [01:14:15] Dennis McKenna: No, no bullshit. Get away from me. [01:14:19] Alexandre Tannous: Yes, yes. [01:14:21] Dennis McKenna: Yeah. [01:14:22] Alexandre Tannous: And then. And then humans can't disagree and cannot coexist. And there has been evidence of this in medieval Spain and Portugal, the Iberian Peninsula. Sorry that Muslims, Christians and Jews coexisted with great level of cultural tolerance and religious acceptance and with no problem for over 700 years until the Reconquista. So people with differences can exist, but where it seems to be treacherous. Here is how it interferes from the outside. Breaking people apart and taking advantage of certain situations and throwing a spark that gets factions to turn against each other. This is the part that we need to wake up to. But that parasitic force is also teaching us something about the divine within, which the ancients talk about. And they call many different names, right? The general law in Christianity, esoteric Christianity, the Gnostic called it the Archons. Castaneda called it the Flyers. The topic of all topics, the Satan concept in Kabbalah and so on and so forth. Uatiku Native American spirituality. This is trying to teach us about the nature of the divine. And that means. And also whatever we invest our time and energy in becomes amplified. This is trying to take us back toward Christ consciousness, toward being one with the. With everything, nature and the universe, the logos. This is the ultimate message that we need to be more discerning and use these technologies to wake up and not to still be asleep. [01:16:01] Dennis McKenna: Yeah. What we have to do is start listening. [01:16:04] Alexandre Tannous: Yes. [01:16:05] Dennis McKenna: That's really all we have to do. And that, of course, involves sound. [01:16:10] Alexandre Tannous: Yeah. [01:16:11] Dennis McKenna: Thank you, my friend. It's been a wonderful conversation. [01:16:15] Alexandre Tannous: Absolutely. [01:16:16] Dennis McKenna: Look forward to getting this out there. And so have a great day. [01:16:24] Alexandre Tannous Soundbath [Outro] Join our mission to harmonize with the natural world, support the McKenna Academy by donating today. Thank you for listening to Brainforest Café with Dennis McKenna. Find us online at McKenna.Academy.