As the ancient adage goes, “with great power comes great responsibility.” This leads us to the question: If used wisely, can the XR metaverse actually elevate human consciousness? Can worldbuilders craft virtual environments and experiences that make us happier and healthier as individuals and as a society? 

We’re not talking about influencing participants with ideologies, philosophies, morality, political propaganda, brands, or even social causes for that matter. Can the power of XR help transform us into better people? More responsible citizens? Can it motivate us to unify in building a better world?

The need for transformation

We don’t need to dwell on the need for individual and social transformation — the signs are all around us. The last century of technological innovation has given us vast personal, computational and industrial power that continues to grow exponentially. Individuals can now mislead the masses with a single tweet. Nations have the power to annihilate cities with the press of a button. And our hunger for energy and material wealth is choking the planet with our own waste. 

Gus Speth, author and top U.S. Advisor on Climate Change, put it this way:

I used to think that top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that thirty years of good science could address these problems. I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed, and apathy, and to deal with these we need a cultural and spiritual transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that.

Technology is but a natural extension of human consciousness and intent. We currently have the technological solutions needed to create an abundant world with clean, renewable power, materials, and resources. We have solutions for mitigating, and possibly reversing climate change. And we have the capacity for the altruism needed to overcome selfishness and act in our mutual best interests. 

It’s time to transform, either consciously and intentionally, or involuntarily as a victim of our own ignorance. If we are to create a better world — or even just maintain our present quality of life  — a “cultural and spiritual transformation” within this generation would appear to be essential. We all get to go on this journey of transformation.

The science of transformation

Neuroscientist Dr. Paula Tallal said of, “You create your brain from the input you get.” Shuler and Bear showed that we not only create our brain — we craft our perception from the beliefs and expectations we choose:

Visual neurons in the brain’s primary visual cortex — long thought to conduct purely sensory, value-free visual information — can also modulate their response as a function of expected reward. In a clever study that sharply revises the view of the fundamentals of how we see, Marshall Shuler and Mark Bear show that visual neurons once considered to be mere feature detectors are affected by complex cognitive influences such as reward expectancy. Even at the most fundamental level, it seems, our expectations influence how and even what we see. — Susana Martinez-Conde

To the extent that our beliefs, expectations, or worldviews are substantially changed due to exposure to media (of any kind), we can legitimately say that our brains have been “rewired” by the experience. Facilitating positive transformation on a personal, social, and ultimately, global level is the highest expression of worldbuilding. 

Transformative experiences substantially alter a person’s “possibility space” or life’s path — ideally in a positive sense. L.A. Paul describes the transformative experience as:

…a kind of experience that is both radically new to the agent and changes her in a deep and fundamental way; there are experiences such as becoming a parent, discovering a new faith, emigrating to a new country, or fighting in a war. Such experiences can be both epistemically and personally transformative. An epistemically transformative experience is an experience that teaches you something you could not have learned without having that kind of experience. 

Having that experience gives you new abilities to imagine, recognize, and cognitively model possible future experiences of that kind. A personally transformative experience changes you in some deep and personally fundamental way, for example, by changing your core personal preferences or by changing the way you understand your desires and the kind of person you take yourself to be. A transformative experience, then, is an experience that is both epistemically and personally transformative.

Many of the best stories ever told involve personal transformations of the story’s characters — timeless story themes such as the criminal who redeems himself, the scrooge who is re-awakened, or the hero who falls from grace. In XR, we ourselves can become the character who is transformed.

Paul’s epistemic and personal categories of transformation readily map into the two educational modalities: cognitive (intellectual realization through thoughts, facts, semantic language, narrative, and visuals) and affective (emotions, inspiration, and motivation transmitted through storytelling, drama, music, and semiotic language). 

Worldbuilders are discovering that XR experiences can evoke a wider range of affective states, including flow states, mindfulness, unity consciousness, and mystical states. 

Technoshaman: Maestro of transformation
In his 1985 book The Death and Resurrection Show: From Shaman to Superstar, Rogan Taylor traces our modern entertainment industry back to the earliest of all religions — shamanism. Shamans use rituals, feats, songs, stories, power objects, and performances to “fine-tune the psyche of his tribe.” Shamanism — like religion — was a “tool for both surviving and accomplishing transformation.” Rogan sees the shaman as a “maestro of transformation.”

While modern entertainment likely emerged from shamanism as Taylor suggests, he is quick to point out that, unlike today’s audiences…

… the tribal audience certainly would not have arrived at the shaman’s healing séance in the expectation of being mildly amused or merrily entertained. They came to witness, and take part in, something powerful and sacred.

According to evolutionary anthropologist Michelle Scalise Sugiyama, shamanic storytelling in indigenous cultures is a form of pedagogy used to communicate social norms and traditions. Storytelling is often accompanied by visual, auditory, and/or gestural modes, including drumming, singing, chanting, eye-gazing, vocal mimicry, and variations in volume, rhythm, timbre, pitch, and stress in speech that “cast a sort of awe on the audience,” according to one anthropologist she cites, who studied the Dena storytellers.

Taylor also details how these storytelling elements of shamanism survived as modern showbusiness while leaving behind the deeper sacred, mystical, and ecstatic dimensions of shamanism.

Showbusiness looks like the orphaned child of a divorce between art and ecstasy. Forever hiding its shameful origins, while, at the same time, secretly attempting the reconciliation of its separated parents.

With XR’s ability to form a wideband neural interface between worldbuilder and participant, future masters of XR experience design — the technoshaman — can bring the power of awe, mystery, and ecstasy back into mainstream arts and entertainment. The technoshaman is a maestro conducting the nervous systems of their audience.

However, like the shamans of old, the technoshaman must go within to access visions, or actually embody elevated, transcendent, or other beneficial states of consciousness in order to transmit them. They must themselves transform if they are to inspire transformation in others. 

A 360 cinematographer with a deep love of nature will transmit this love through their work. A musician with years of mindfulness practice will bring their audience into deep contemplative states. A visionary artist who journeys into altered states will evoke psychedelic experiences in their participants. When the technoshaman’s consciousness is laid bare for all to experience through multisensory XR technologies, there is no room for inauthenticity. The artist becomes their work.

The same goes for larger worldbuilding teams that require a wide range of skills, including programmers, audio engineers, animators, lighting designers, composers, producers, directors, performers, and more. Participants will receive a transmission from the combined consciousness of the worldbuilding team. 

This has always been the case in the entertainment industry, of course. But with XR, the transmission of consciousness is more profound. Worldbuilding teams that want to optimize positive impact must work to achieve authentic coherence of heart, mind and vision as they create and perform. 

In their highest expression, all performers, storytellers, journalists, filmmakers, and influencers are contemporary shamans who wisely tend to the psyches of their tribes. Emerging XR technologies are supercharging their crafts, turning storytellers into worldbuilders. 

The technoshaman knows that worldbuilding is mindbuilding and has pledged to use their power wisely for the upliftment and evolution of human consciousness. And, as the power of the XR metaverse grows, turning us all into worldbuilders — let us use these tools wisely for the betterment of humankind.

Technoshaman Resources

Here are select examples of experiences, venues, and platforms of interest to aspiring technoshamans.

Eight principles of the technoshaman

1. The technoshaman uses advanced digital technologies to craft experiences that are positive, life-affirming, healing, or awakening, and that support or accelerate the natural evolution of human consciousness. 

2. The technoshaman awakens minds. Rather than propagating memes, philosophies, ideologies, propaganda, brand messaging, and other forms of influence, the technoshaman seeks to evoke mental states that empower, embrace ambiguity and diversity, awaken latent faculties, transcend dualistic thinking, slow the internal dialog, or leave room for deep contemplation.
   
3. The technoshaman opens hearts. Rather than gratuitously evoking emotions such as fear, shock, horror, or loss, the technoshaman focuses on positive emotions, including love, empathy, a sense of connection, awe, or joy. Storytelling is used as a path towards empowerment, mood elevation, epiphany, communal unification, or liberation of the human spirit, not simply to manipulate emotions or behaviors.
   
4. The technoshaman embodies the states of consciousness that they seek to evoke in others. The experiences they create are authentic and not contrived solely for influence or personal gain.
   
5. The technoshaman’s creative medium is the nervous systems of its audience, most powerfully accessed through multisensory immersive media. As such, technoshamans are attuned to and respect the nervous systems of their participants.

6. Technology is simply a medium for transmitting states of consciousness and is never an end in itself. 

7. The technoshaman promotes evolutionary communities by evoking a sense of unity, coherence, harmony, and connection.
   
8. The technoshaman seeks not just to entertain, but to transform.

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In Part 1, I introduced the archetype of the technoshaman, one who uses XR (extended reality — VR, AR, and MR) technologies to craft multisensory digital worlds and experiences that elevate and harmonize human consciousness on a mass scale. In Part 2, we deep-dive into “digital pharmacology” and use XR to evoke alternate states of consciousness.

The social impacts of contemporary media are well known. Film and television can engage, inform and motivate on a mass scale and are no longer solely dominated by major studios who must make significant investments in productions. And the increasing democratization of media has placed great power in the hands of nearly every individual. 

More than 6.5 billion people — 80% of the world’s population — now own smartphones. Social media has enabled nearly anyone to influence the minds of hundreds, thousands, or millions of people with videos, news, opinions and niche programming.

Storytellers intentionally use the power of media and entertainment to achieve social or global change through social impact entertainment. As described by Ella Saltmarsh, stories can be tools for “building community through empathy and coherence,” connecting diverse people and generating “narratives that hold together groups, organizations, and movements.” 

Stories can re-author our personal and cultural narratives and mythic narratives or worldviews, including values, mindsets, rules and goals. “Stories deeply affect our psyche and collective direction of travel,” Saltmarsh says.

Unlike film, television, or streaming media, where passive audiences watch visuals framed on a wall or a handheld device, XR (extended reality) worldbuilders use presence, embodiment, and agency for spatial or environmental storytelling. These place us within the “storyworld” with XR’s ability to simulate real-world experiences, giving this new medium a deeper, more profound effect on consciousness. 

The power of XR

Everyone in the metaverse can become a worldbuilder, giving them the power to evoke memes, moods, and states of consciousness in other participants. The result is akin to a virtual brain corpus callosum between groups and individuals, allowing for direct transmission of consciousness from worldbuilder to participant. 

Of course, music, arts, entertainment, architecture, literature, and other real-world modes of expression have long been used to evoke profound brain states in participants. But XR supercharges this process, due to various factors:

• XR interfaces create a wideband interface to the participant’s brain and nervous system. Immersive displays can place a pixel on nearly every nerve ending in the eye. 3D audio simulates spatial and spectral properties of sound. And XR controllers capture natural movement and gestures.
• XR production tools and robust user interfaces, enhanced by AI, accelerate worldbuilding without the need to write code. Virtual worldbuilding is not burdened by the need for physical materials, construction, labor, and logistics, vastly accelerating the democratization of virtual worldbuilding compared to physical worldbuilding.
• XR performers can easily inhabit and command virtual worlds, controlling complex interactions and effects through natural gestures and simple controllers. Imagine a live theater that suddenly morphs into a cave, a castle, or another world altogether.
• Virtual worlds combine music, arts, entertainment, storytelling, social media, architecture, and multisensory modalities into a seamless experience for participants, compounding their psychological power. 
• Unlike physical spaces, virtual environments are inexpensive, easily replicated, and massively scalable with global reach.

The metaverse

The XR technology market will expand by a factor of 10 in the next five years, according to a forecast by Statista. Over the long term, wearable XR interfaces are expected to replace handheld smartphones. And some expect the metaverse to replace the internet, despite Meta’s problems.

To articulate and guide the development of the metaverse “for the greatest good for the greatest number” of participants, virtual reality pioneer Tony Parisi recently proposed these Seven Rules of the Metaverse:

1. There is only one Metaverse
2. The Metaverse is for everyone
3. Nobody controls the Metaverse
4. The Metaverse is open
5. The Metaverse is hardware-independent
6. The Metaverse is a Network
7. The Metaverse is the Internet

Widespread adoption of the metaverse using XR interfaces will place unprecedented power and influence into the hands of worldbuilders. But will worldbuilders use this power wisely? 

Digital pharmacology

XR technologies can extend beyond simple storytelling. Immersive multisensory media can evoke specific states of consciousness, or “digital pharmacology.” Applications could include enhanced entertainment, education, leisure and lifestyle, enhanced well-being, spiritual ceremonies, and a wide variety of clinical applications.

There’s a rich history of sensory experiences being used to alter consciousness. Music is a powerful mood-altering agent that can induce or modify cognitive states and perceptions. Sound healing and vibroacoustic healing have been proven effective. Simple nature sounds can improve health, increase positive affect, and lower stress. 

Visual stimuli such as natural environments — both real and virtual — can similarly affect physiological states (as measured by blood pressure and muscle tension). They can even alter our perception of music. Other powerful sensory modalities include haptics (touch) and aroma.

Transformational and mood-elevating experiences can take on many forms. Here’s a partial list:

• Awaken the Mind
  • Inspire imagination, creativity, and open-mindedness
  • Educate, train, inform
  • Epiphanies and new understandings 

• Open the Heart
  • Empathy, compassion, understanding
  • The emotional shift towards love, respect, joy, happiness

• Activate the Spirit

• Awe, wonder, ecstasy, bliss
• Transcendent, numinous or “unity” experiences
• Cosmic consciousness

• Going Deep
  • Mindfulness and contemplative states
  • Trance, dream, and mystical states
  • Psychedelic states

• Soothe the Beast
  • Relaxation, sense of calmness
  • Feeling of safety, restoration

• Awaken the Senses
  • Arouse passion, romance, sensuality

• Energize and Engage
  • Awaken the body and mind
  • Stimulate, motivate, alert, play

• Entrain the Brain
  • New kinesthetic skills, break/make habits, reprogram

Mindfulness states have a broad range of health benefits. Studies have shown decreased anxiety and depression, improved immune function, mitigation of cognitive decline due to aging, increased mental clarity and focus, improved heart health and mental health, increased longevity and self-confidence, improved moods, improved sleep, pain mitigation and more. 

Likewise, studies have shown that psychedelic states can treat obsessive-compulsive disorder, end-of-life psychological distress, alcohol and tobacco addiction, and major depressive disorder. More research is needed to validate the degree to which XR experiences can evoke such states. However, XR applications are emerging to guide patients receiving psychedelic therapies.

Awe is one of the most powerful emotions one can experience. In a partnership with Cirque du Soleil, Dr. Beau Lotto’s Lab of Misfits conducted an ambitious study on the emotion of awe. The findings suggest that awe motivates us to step forward into a world of uncertainty in the search for answers, raises our risk tolerance, increases social behavior, and can even reframe who we believe we were in the past. Multiple studies have also found evidence that experiencing awe makes us kinder and more generous. These are all good things for this day and age!

Read Part 3

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