I’m honored to present my monologue, Songs, Psychedelics and Seizures: A One-Woman Flow at the Science of Consciousness Conference 2022. Sponsored by the University of Arizona in Tucson (my alma mater), this year’s program includes such consciousness studies leaders as Roger Penrose, Dennis McKenna, Robin Carhart-Harris, Katrin Preller, Christof Koch, Elizabeth Krasnoff and Deepak Chopra.
I’ve chosen a topic, Flow, with which I’m deeply familiar. Through these three flow states, or Flow Gates as I call them, and aided by forces both animal and ethereal, I’ve experienced a connection into a larger matrix and become the thing I was doing. If science is identifying that a psychedelic quiets the Default Mode Network and avails a person of other forms of conscious attainment, well this has existed in art since forever. My profession is about functioning outside the DMN. I’m hired and paid to flow and to insert my tiny little straw into the vastness of consciousness.
Psychedelics is a quicker way to this flow state than the dedicated practice that performance art requires. A seizure state is just another way into something vast and mysterious and moreover essential. How do I know? Because I’ve come back each time with new language.
Through these sacred lenses of music, medicine and the mystery of epilepsy, I’ve been able to draw a cosmic umbilical cord back to Source, back to my Essence and from my Essence back to here. I’ve discovered that Flow is my natural and ordinary state and that this, the DMN, is the altered, non-ordinary state. It’s a playspace for consciousness.
Let me tell you a story about a singing experience so peak and optimal, that when I left the stage I said: “If that’s the last song I ever sing, may that be the one.” Let me tell you about the nearness of death that has accompanied me since my first psychedelic trip ended.But first, let me tell you about a hawk.
To view the monologue, click here.
To view a trailer of the talk, follow this link.
You’ll find my Abstract on page 277 of the Science of Consciousness Conference program.
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