Vishen Lakhiani draws on his ayahuasca experience with a Colombian shaman and Steven Kotler's research to argue that modern society is monophasic — locked in waking beta consciousness — while indigenous cultures have always used altered states for healing, intuition, and insight. He frames the rise of meditation, breathwork and plant medicine as a partial recovery of access to alpha, theta and delta mind.
Transcript
in january this year i uh i did ayahuasca with a shaman from colombia now for those of you who have never heard of this ayahuasca is a form of plant medicine it opens up your mind to new levels of connection and it gets you into what is called an altered state now altered states are fascinating to me these are different levels of mind that let you tap into human abilities that we in the modern world tend to ignore stephen cutler once said we live in a monophasic society but indigenous cultures live in polyphasic societies what this means is that in our world we learn to function in one level of mind the beta or waking frequency but the mind is far more complex than that there are other frequencies you can tap into alpha for relaxation theta for tapping into intuition psychic potential and healing and delta where the really crazy stuff starts happening now the thing is in our modern world we try to solve everything at the waking level but in indigenous cultures they use altered states for really powerful abilities i spent some time with this tribe the ayahuasca tribe in the amazon rainforest this is one of many dream cultures around the world where people communicate with each other true dreams they also use ayahuasca to access other levels of mind for insight for healing for communication with a higher power but the good news is even in our modern society we are starting to wake up in stephen cutler's book stealing fire he said that the altered state industry is now a trillion dollars everyone from ceos to marines to athletes are using altered state tools to access states to expand their awareness now in this book by danielle go it's called alter trades goldman talks about the four main ways to access these altered states right there is neural training and i'm a big fan of that there is plant medicine there's breath work and there's meditation and goldman says this the most important is meditation so yes you can do ayahuasca and i do that you can do neuro training and i do that but these require a lot of time travel euro training can be highly expensive i spend about fifteen thousand dollars for a five-day experience but there's one that gives me breakthroughs like nothing else and that's meditation most people ignore it because most people do meditation in only one tiny way in which it should be done and that is where they focus on their breath and they clear their mind that is passive meditation but there's a form of meditation called active meditation and when you do this you get to go and play with all of these alternate states now the most powerful and defined form of active meditation i've found and i've been studying it for two decades now comes from jose silva he's a mind science researcher who studied and created something called the silva method in the 60s 70s and 80s i've been studying the silver method for 20 years and it's one of the most powerful ways to access the alpha level of mind for healing for for relaxation for creative visualization but then going into theta in really well constructed ways to tap into psychic potential to source inspiration ideas and then go further to delta and in delta you communicate with higher intelligence and you shift reality you see coincidences you see it's hard to explain but things just get easier it's like you are blessed by luck now of all the programs i've studied the silva system has been the most defined methodology for accessing and using altered states and after 20 years of working with the system working with jose silva's family because he passed away in 1999 mind valley is bringing the silva method back to the world in a big way i'm honored to have been asked to be the new face of the silver method because of my my research in this and we'll be bringing this to mindvalley and i want to invite you to join me on a 90-minute free master class where i'm going to be teaching how to access altered states in this class you're going to learn about the different states how to use these states and i'm going to show you a technique that you can train yourself so that very reliably you can access a particular altered state and i'm going to give you a tool designed by jose silva that allows you to use the state in a really powerful way to do anything from manifesting your dreams to self-healing and this master class is part of the new silver ultramine system the methodology that jose silva developed just before he died and that mindvalley is now updating and bringing to the world thank you i'll see you there you