Establishment hippies

Today's event in the Adventures in Consciousness Season was a five-hour session called 'The Museum of Consciousness' - an interactive audio-based 'exhibit' for cultivating altered states of consciousness.

I'm still reeling a bit to discover it's part of the University of Oxford, as is The Centre for Eudaimonia (the life well-lived) and Human Flourishing, whose neuroscientist director, Morten Kringelbach, introduced the day. The Centre's research into how psychedelics work in health and wellbeing shows that psychedelic experience is rated as the fifth most pleasurable experience in life. (I can't remember what the first four are.) I knew that psychedelics are being seriously researched, and used, for the treatment of some mental illnesses but not that they were mainstream enough to get a PhD in using them. That's a bit of a volte face since I was at university.

The 'exhibition' involved five 'transmissions' of 40-minute sound experiments, performed by 'audio wizards' in order to alter our state of consciousness through the power of sound.

• Tritha, an Indian classical contemporary singer, told us how sound has been used for healing in India for centuries, with the different vibrations of different pitches affecting different organs, then sang examples.
• David Glowacki, whose Masters is in religion and whose PhD is in physics, does research in Peru into how the perceptual impacts of ayahuasca can inform aesthetic approaches. He and two associates played us some of the results.
• Scott Beibin, 'an inventor, artist and environmental activist currently working at the intersection of space exploration and ecological sustainability', played us his music for getting to Mars and back. He has also recorded the resonances inside the King's Chamber in the Great Pyramid in Giza.
• BitterSuite, who I saw last Tuesday, did a similar experiment to then but using different music. They elicited interesting comments about music from the two syntaesthetes in the room.
• Raffaella Fryer-Moreira, a multimedia anthropologist, told us about how the indigenous community she works with in Brazil, whose previously rich rainforest habitat is now hectares and hectares of maize monoculture, is chanting to save the planet. I have slightly more faith in that than in COP29, starting tomorrow.

All the performers were much younger than I am, and I wonder whether they know how familiar their language, activities and concerns feel, and how bemused I am that the counterculture of fifty years ago has become mainstream.

Meanwhile, outside, the autumn sunset was doing its best to be hallucinogenic, drug-free. (Processing: exposure increased, saturation decreased)