Original subtitles

[MUSIC PLAYING]

>> Researchers in the 1960s began noticing that

by introducing music to psychedelic therapy sessions,

the anxiety and emotional stress would alleviate.

They would report that the feelings and visuals

of the experience had more profound meaning to their life

and circumstances.

Classical and world music was found to be more

universally appreciated.

However, the preferences had a wide range

due to people's personal history and present mood.

But it's not simply music that causes a profound alteration

of psychedelic states.

Simple sounds and vibrations can deeply

influence the unfolding of an altered state of consciousness.

What if there were simple sonic techniques

we could employ in order to navigate the ever-changing

and often intense phenomenon of a psychedelic journey?

What if the understanding of vibration on the body

could give us a glimpse of why music and psychedelics go

together so well and why our shamanic ancestry has

been using sonics and psychedelics together for ages?

>> Music and sound can not only enhance psychedelic journeys

but can initiate psychedelic experiences without anything

else.

There are many traditions throughout the planet

that in order to enter altered states of being will simply

use sound.

Whether it is their voice, or drumming, or bowls, or bells,

or some sort of other instrumentation,

this basically alters all sorts of aspects

of the brain and our consciousness.

The instruments that have been used

to achieve altered states of consciousness

have been multitude, myriad, and many.

Probably the most popular, of course, has been the voice--

shaman and priests and various types

of practitioners using different mantras,

making different tones, speaking in different tongues,

altering different states of consciousness,

literally shifting the vibrational

frequencies of the space, within and without,

using their own voice.

>> Vibration plays a role in many of the world's religions,

especially in their stories of how the world began.

In Genesis 1, verse 2, God's spirit

moved across the face of the waters.

The Cherokee wisdom-keeper Dhyani Ywahoo

states that in their creation myth,

"from the mysterious creator came forth

a sound, the fundamental tone of the universal song underlying

all manifestation."

Native American Peyote Church Roadman Kuauhtli Vasquez

recounts the creation myth of his ancestry

and how sound or vibration played a vital role.

>> They say that in our culture, the creator spirit wanted

the world to begin in motion.

So he told the old coyote to go to the ocean

and take one of those conch shells

out and make a trumpet out of it.

And when he blew it, it started creating

this spiral wave of sound, which sounds kind of like ohm.

So the old coyote blew it, and this

started everything vibrating.

So when you speak, you're vibrating

at a level of the mind.

Like, you understand what I'm saying

if we speak the same language.

Sometimes when I hear people singing songs, I can visualize.

I get a feeling of what they're singing about.

So singing is another form of communication

that supersedes the mind.

You don't really have to understand the words,

but you get the feeling.

>> This is where yogis, just like other shamanic traditions,

actually start to use sound.

So there's an understanding that sound is vibration,

and that vibration is at the essence of everything.

And usually our awareness is caught in all this noise

and sound of the outside world.

A lot of times, it'll be a mantra.

And what's important to know and understand about mantras

is that mantras are vibrations.

They're not things that we make up.

They're actually sound frequencies and vibrations

that are already part of this physical world.

And so as yogis start to hone their awareness in, detach

from the outside world, the awareness starts to pull in.

You can actually start to hear more subtle frequencies, more

subtle vibrations, more subtle sounds.

And this is where the yoga tradition

will say that we're starting to tap

into different levels of consciousness.

We start to move beyond the thinking mind that

identifies us as this body, as this person,

as our experiences.

And we start to drop more into a state that is

beyond the mind, a state of--

instead of individual consciousness,

we start to merge with universal consciousness, which

is really the essential goal, if you will, of all yoga.

>> Yogis using mantra seems to be different than speaking from

the intellect.

Oftentimes, plant medicine enthusiasts

will structure their ceremony or journey with a focus

on using as few words as possible, as they

can be irritating and distracting except for when

those words are sung.

The vocal apparatus of the human body is very complex.

The power comes from the lungs.

The vibration comes from the vocal box.

And the resonation comes from the throat, nose, mouth,

and sinuses.

Speaking comes from the same range of anatomy

as does singing.

But the active use of them is as different

as walking is to dancing.

The greatest difference is the psychological state

one is usually in when singing as opposed to speaking.

The very act of singing, opening the throat

and holding extended notes, directly

affects the nervous system through the vagus nerve.

>> So the vagus nerve, extremely important nerve,

wanders through your entire body.

People who are stressed out and sick

have poor vagal nerve tone.

Sound is one thing that can affect it, particularly

vibrations, vibrations created through sound,

which means that when you sing, when you hum,

when you chant, when someone around you

is singing and humming and chanting,

when you're listening to very good music,

you actually see an improvement in vagal nerve tone.

And an improvement in vagal nerve tone

specifically affects your heart, the electrical signal

of your heart.

And so, absolutely, sound can affect vagus nerve tone

in a very profound manner.

>> In over 25 years of studies coming from HeartMath

Institute, it has been found that the heart sends far more

information to the brain than the other way around.

The heart, in fact, influences emotional processing,

attention, perception, memory, and even problem solve.

And under a psychedelic state, all these faculties

are highly influential in the way the experience will unfold.

So how does an act as simple as humming

have such a deeply relaxing effect on the body?

>> We found that the hum literally is a sound that is

probably the most powerful vibroacoustic tool that exists.

When you close your eyes and [HUMMING],, it's more powerful.

As soon as you open your mouth-- and of course,

the ohm, if you like, is based on the hum.

If you go (HUMMING) ohm, but it's just to go [HUMMING],,

as soon as you open your mouth, the sound

begins to escape through your mouth.

But if you have your mouth closed,

it's totally a vibroacoustic experience

causing a massage on a cellular level

and causing different organs, bones, and tissues to vibrate.

And when we project our intention onto the sound,

that can really affect it as well.

So it can really affect our nervous system.

And this type of thing has been used for eons,

ever since, if you like, one made a holy sound,

or one made a sacred sound, or one did a prayer to the divine,

or one did a prayer to the animal kingdom,

or one emulated the sounds of jaguar,

to when one emulated the sounds of all sorts

of different creatures on this planet.

They've been using sound to travel

to different states of consciousness

since the beginning.

The voice is our primary instrument.

And I think even before we spoke, we made tone.

And in fact there are, if you like,

legends of us singing the language of the birds

before we ever spoke.

>> Researchers like Michael Harner,

who wrote "The Way of the Shaman,"

focus on animal movements and sounds in shamanic traditions

to enter altered states.

He says that shamans in ecstatic trances

will not only mimic the movements of animals

in their dances but use animal noises

to connect with these specific power animals.

And to back up Jonathan Goldman's claims,

Shigeru Miyagawa, professor of linguistics

in MIT'S Department of Linguistics and Philosophy,

coauthored a paper showing direct correlations

between bird songs and human speech patterns.

But how can vocalizations induce states of consciousness

that open us up to the nature around us as the shamans did?

Perhaps it must be understood that most everything

we do in our bodies involves movements.

In her TED talk, Amy Cuddy explained

how putting hands up in victory pose or hands on hips

like a superhero caused testosterone to increase, which

gives a sense of strength and power,

whereas the stress hormone, cortisol, drops.

By using the voice, the throat opens up

and resonates in the chest right where the vagus nerve travels.

If singing, and even prosodic speaking, increases vagal tone,

this would affect the heart, lungs, gut, and much more,

causing the nervous system to prompt an altered state

of consciousness.

Even beyond the words that are being sung,

the intention behind them, including how and when

they are used, seem to make all the difference

in the shamanic traditions.

>> So there's a way to communicate through songs not

only among humans but to everything that exists.

So that's why I say you can sing to the sun.

You could sing to the earth.

You could sing to peyote.

You could sing to iowaska.

So what you're doing is you're singing gratitude.

You're singing love.

You're singing appreciation.

You're singing the desire for information.

You're singing this unifying--

creating harmony through music, through playing songs,

through singing songs.

This is a language.

Singing and songs, whether they're with your voice

or whether they're instruments, is a vibration

of spirit communication.

It's a whole different sensory perception.

I mean, if you're in a ceremony and you're just

sitting there listening to songs,

once the songs come from within you

and your voice is activated, you're

like in another dimension.

It's a total new dimension.

Then you're, things-- it's like it activates more information.

>> Whether the sounds are self-produced or listened

to, ancient civilizations have used sonic manipulation

to induce expanded states of consciousness since

the beginning.

As noted in Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal's book "Stealing

Fire," Greek cathedrals were built with walls

close together in order to create a sound that mimics

the flapping of angel's wings.

The 1,100-year-old temple of Kukulkan in Chichen Itza was

built so precisely that if you were to clap at the base

of the pyramid, the echo will come back to you with

the chirping sound of the national bird,

the sacred quetzal.

The ball court on the same temple grounds

would also echo seven times before the sound would escape.

The Greek Telesterion, the Peruvian Chavin de Huantar,

and other ancient underground sites

have been found to be constructed

for their unique acoustic properties.

Even in the 5,000-year-old mortuary temple

of Malta's Hypogeum Hal Saflieni is said to have not only housed

elongated skulls and stories of the paranormal,

but this is the oldest prehistoric underground temple

in the world and is said to have been created for sonic rituals.

Archaeoacoustic researchers have found that ritual chanting

in this ancient sonic chamber, which deactivates the language

center and shift's hemisphere dominance in the brain,

effectively causing states of consciousness related to mood,

empathy, and social behavior.

It seems that our ancient ancestors

revered the use of sonics as well as psychedelics in order

to bring about religious-type experiences.

Sound healer Kimba Arem employs the knowledge

of sonic resonance on the body, and even experiences

deeply expanded states of consciousness herself,

with the use of one of the oldest instruments

on the planet, the didgeridoo.

>> So the didgeridoo definitely has these very meditative,

calming-type frequencies encoded in it.

I was once involved in some research where they actually

hooked me up to a brainwave monitor.

And you can actually see the brainwaves

that you're creating.

And so you can see the feedback.

And there was one that said gamma.

And I was asking them, what is gamma?

And they said, well, we don't see that often.

It's usually Buddhist monks who have

been meditating for all of their life can get it up there.

It's like above 35 hertz.

It's kind of an unusual brain state.

But this technology was so we can

learn the feedback of the brainwaves we're creating

and how to affect them and try to--

like a biofeedback experience.

And while I was playing the didgeridoo, the gamma one,

this little ball goes up to the top, showing the highest level.

And then as soon as I stopped playing, it goes back down.

So I start playing again, and it goes back up.

I couldn't touch it otherwise.

So I was able to tap into some frequency,

but only while I was doing this breathing

pattern with this sound.

>> As the didgeridoo is believed to be over 40,000 years old,

other wind instruments in Europe have been discovered that date

back even farther.

The mammoth-ivory flute was found

in a cave in southern Germany dating back

almost 44,000 years.

In present-day Slovenia, the Divje Babe flute

was discovered and dates back to 67,000 years ago,

making it the only musical instrument associated

with Neanderthals.

Iegor Reznikoff, ethnographer of music

at the University of France, found

that there are cave paintings roughly a kilometer deep

and all throughout the Arcy-sur-Cure caves with bone

whistles and flutes found there.

Reznikoff and his team studied the acoustics in caves

across France painted by early man.

They found that up to 90% of the paintings

were directly at places where the acoustics were

best for ritual and mind-altering ceremonies.

These dates coincide with Graham Hancock's work on the clues

that we have about ancient rock and cave

art and their connection with shamanic or expanded states

of consciousness.

>> The oldest traces we have are in the range of 30,000

to 40,000 years old.

It goes much younger as well.

There's much more recent rock and cave art.

You can find it in many different parts of the world,

whether you're looking in Indonesia or Europe or South

Africa or Australia, as a matter of fact.

And very important, very detailed work

has been done on this imagery.

And I want to pay tribute to Professor David Lewis

Williams of the University of Witwatersrand

in South Africa, who is the originator of the notion

that this art was inspired by altered states

of consciousness.

David began to put that idea forward

with particular reference to South African rock and cave art

back as early as the 1970s.

There's really no other way, satisfactorily,

to explain them except to say that what we are looking at

is likely the work of ancient shamans who

are doing what shamans still existent in the world today

still do.

Because shamanism, the essence of shamanism,

is a deeply altered state of consciousness.

And while there are a variety of ways

of getting into a suitably deeply altered state

of consciousness which don't involve substances--

for example the Kalahari Bushmen in Southern Africa

achieve an equally powerful altered state of consciousness

by dancing for 24 hours around the fire

and becoming deeply dehydrated and falling

into a rhythmic trance-like state.

>> Vocal and wind instruments are just the beginning

of the instruments used to induce altered states.

The drum-- the earliest known drums are roughly 8,000

to 10,000 years old, with one reference to a 37,000-year-old

drum made with elephant hide.

Drumming has been an integral part

of many shamanic rituals dating back many thousands of years.

>> One of the explanations that we have based upon contemporary

clinical research is that people are able to deliberately induce

these kinds of experiences, special people.

And when they do, there's a breakdown

in the integration of a specific part of the brain called

the temporal parietal junction.

And what the drumming does is it basically overwhelms

this part of the brain.

When the brain gets repeatedly stimulated,

it eventually habituates.

It no longer responds to the signal.

And this part of the brain apparently

habituates by disintegrating these different parts

of the brain that normally all function together.

So all of a sudden, the sense of our body

is no longer tied to the visual field,

the perception of the environment,

or the sense of self.

So we're able to have these experiences

of our body traveling to other places

because the brain is no longer integrating the real body

sensations with the environment.

>> Rhythm may be one of the most powerful sonic tools

for affecting the human organism,

particularly for affecting our nervous system.

Slow frequencies, slow rhythms, basically

cause us to calm down--

are having our brain waves and our heart rate

and our respiration slow down.

The sound is going into our ears and affecting this.

Fast rhythms will cause us to want to get up and dance.

It's really that simple.

If you use slightly out-of-tune frequencies,

you find that it really helps induce

deep states of consciousness.

Tibetan bells that people hit together-- tingshas,

as they're called--

if they're well-made, will fall right within the state

called theta, which is really one of the really wonderful

states where very much shamanic and deep inner-traveling

work goes.

And yet at the same time, there are

a lot of really fast rhythms that

are used by many different indigenous people,

to including those in Africa, that put people into trance.

>> When listening to a rhythmic drumbeat that goes

on and on throughout the night, usually in a group,

the most common response is for the listeners to get up

and dance, to move their bodies and express the rhythm back

to the group.

And to further elaborate on the power of music

to bring groups together, author of "This

is Your Brain on Music," Dr. Daniel Levetin, found

that people who listen to music out loud together

spark stronger relationships, often

causing people to spend more time with loved ones, more time

hugging, making love, cooking meals with one another,

and even close the distance of physical proximity

between housemates.

Perhaps this is why we see a high emphasis

on communal bonding amongst tribes

who take psychedelic plant medicines

and dance and sing as a group.

>> In this ancient city, in Tenochtitlan,

people would come from the entire confederation,

which was from Canada all the way to the tip of South

America.

They knew the same dances, the same beats.

There's thousands of these dances--

dance to the earth, dance to the rain, dance to the ego, dance

to the corn.

They're the same dances danced by an entire civilization

across an entire continent that were

done at certain precise moments, like the equinox, the solstice,

the eclipses, the new moons, the full moons.

People are doing the same movements

to the same vibration--

humans interacting.

This is very powerful.

People are singing and dancing and taking medicine.

This is like geometric progression.

>> The fact that music and psychedelics pair well and go

hand-in-hand with dance and community gatherings says a lot

about the nature of psychedelic experiences.

Many people express how the world around them

dissolves its barriers and becomes

one continuous phenomena under a psychedelic state.

The inside can become indistinguishable

from the outside.

This seems to be seen in the complementary relationship

between psychedelics and music, music and dance, dance

and community, community and harmony.

All communities seek to quell disputes and foster cooperation

just as the trillions of cells in the body

cooperate to make up the super organism that is the human.

All these phenomena are seen in culture

since the dawn of the modern era of man

and were not separated into individual categories

like they are today.

And one reason the experiences of psychedelics

can be so meaningful when paired with music

is shown in a recent discovery by the neuroscientist Mendel

Kaelen at the Imperial College of London.

He found that the interaction between psychedelics and music

increases information flow going from the parahippocampus

to the fusiform cortex.

Once personal memories and contextual associations

from the parahippocampus are sent

to the fusiform, or visual, cortex,

the visions that emerge from the psychedelic experience

becomes much more personalized.

Because music increases this information flow,

the tone of the music may have a dramatic effect

on how those memories are relived in the moment.

Could this be the basis to shamanic traditions creating

music during psychedelic ceremonies?

>> So why is music so important here in the context of using

psychedelics?

We're getting this opportunity to move our sense of self

and being into this visual space that's

provided by the integration of these deep processes

of the brain.

Some of the other kinds of effects

that are achieved through the use of psychedelics

have more to do with psychodynamic processing.

So on one hand, the psychedelics are

going to stimulate you to deal with issues

about past trauma, repressed memories,

your emotional concerns and preoccupations.

But what happens with that information

depends a little bit upon the interpersonal dynamic

and the processing of that information

so that you're able to make more effective use of it.

>> As many psychedelic researchers today,

such as Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins University

and Mendel Kaelen at Imperial College of London,

have created personalized, psychotherapeutic playlists

to amplify personal journeys of the participants--

however, the use of music in some iowaska as well

as other psychedelic ceremonies also

put emphasis on the silence after the song.

And for modern sonic explorers, listening to silence

has taken on new methods.

>> There are even these things called anechoic chambers that

are so quiet there's no external outside noise.

You can literally hear your heartbeat, your respiration.

If you listen hard enough, you can

begin to hear your brain waves.

And in fact, there is a level of yoga

called Shabd Yoga, which is--

or Nada Yoga.

And this is oftentimes utilized.

But there also is just listening.

The yoga of listening is so very, very powerful.

And oftentimes, it is an inner listening that occurs.

So our nervous system is affected by the sounds

that we listen to, but it can also be really affected

by the sounds that we don't listen to

and we listen to internally.

>> It has been said by many who enter anechoic chambers that

the silence is deafening.

There is so much noise present internally

that it becomes unnerving for the novice.

However, some long-term meditators

claim to hear harmonics and melody within the silence.

This phenomenon is different from musical ear syndrome

in which faint, musical auditory hallucinations occur

frequently.

Maharishi Shiv Brat Lal wrote that "various sorts

of sound currents reverberate in the human system from which

the initiate has to pick up the right one and listen to it,

otherwise he will go astray."

Swami Vyasanand is quoted as saying, "Only the central sound

has the power to attract the consciousness to the center

and carry the soul to the center of a higher realm."

And even Maharishi Mehi, in his book

"Philosophy of Liberation," warns that there are misleading

sounds due to the gross vibrations in the body.

The true central sound is distinct

and is the same vibratory force that organizes the cosmos.

As many within sacred circles believe

that shamanic traditions and psychedelic experiences

amplify sounds from Mother Nature,

could this inner sound be a wave current

that shamans and meditators tune into in order

to reach expanded states of consciousness?

>> The sound of nature, and it's called the Schumann resonance.

It was discovered in the 1950s.

And it literally is, if you like,

the frequency of the ionosphere, the electromagnetic field

of the Earth.

And it's based upon the speed of sound going around the Earth.

And it's around 7.83 cycles a second.

And this falls right within that theta range

that I was talking about that helps induce shamanic states

of consciousness.

And what's very, very interesting

is that, oftentimes, you'll find that crickets

and a lot of other creatures of nature

will oftentimes be making sounds that

are very, very close to that.

That's quite important.

So what happens is when we listen

to that, or the waves of the ocean

rolling in and rolling out, they're also attuned to this.

And this basically slows down our heart rate,

our brain waves, our breathing, putting us in tune with nature.

And by putting ourselves in tune with nature,

we're able to, if you like, travel to higher

realms of consciousness.

>> The music of nature, the harmony of the higher realms

of consciousness, the music of the cosmos might be exactly

what shamanic traditions tuned into during psychedelic

ceremonies, which were always rooted within and surrounded

by the elements and creatures of the Earth--

all of which are attuned to and harmonizing with the symphony

that Mother Nature composes.

If the set and setting for sacred ceremonies

are carefully constructed, and the sounds

of ritual instruments as well as nature are present,

perhaps the healing capacity of these traditional practices

can be amplified.

And maybe the world will come to understand the power of sonics

and psychedelics.

Up next, our journey into psychedelica

wraps up, exploring how to produce

psychedelic states of consciousness

naturally from within.

[MUSIC PLAYING]