Dr. Christof (Christoph) Koch

And even if I don't think explicitly,

There's things that, you know, there are processes monitoring my consciousness to make sure that it's important for me.

And it's very rare, but of course the self can also be highly dysfunctional.

You can catastrophize, you can be highly anxious, you can think people insult you or they say bad things about you, while in fact they don't at all.

And so there are rare conditions of selflessness when just like an astronaut that can become weightless, you can become selfless.

So during episodes when you are experiencing a state of flow.

I used to have this when I wrote computer code when I was, you know, way younger.

You can totally get absorbed by it, right?

Or you read a book or you read an engaging movie or you play some sports or something or you're Alex Holup and climb, right?

And partly these states are so addictive because it's such – you've just realized you spent the last 20 minutes in this heavenly state doing something –

But, again, the critic is gone.

And, of course, during sometimes heroic dose of psychedelics, you can also totally lose yourself, the sense of self, and you realize how profound, beautiful the world is without you, you know, the self being there and constantly interfering and relating it to what does it mean for me?

What does it give me?

So I would call it the transformative experience.

We all know changing behavior is very difficult, but there you're telling me within 10 minutes because of this 10 or 15 minute VR experience, you're now much more hyper aware of this.

So that's a rare experience and I think it would be useful for all of us to have those experiences.

So I work with somebody here in Santa Monica, Elizabeth R. Koch.

We're not related, although we shared the last name.

And she has this really interesting idea of what she calls perception box, that we all run around with our own view of reality.

You'll see how this relates, including, most importantly, my notion of self.