Dr Bilal Hassam | AI, Consciousness & Psychedelics | MindTrap #75

[Music] I take it we are live I just firing up I could see that right just all right those of you that are just tuning in Click uh live and share I'm just firing this up on the other platform as

well right I see some of the regular Pleasant faces to see online Allah bless you

all right so tonight we've got an epic treat for you all on this week's mindtap we'll be going through a whole a a journey inshallah of a conversation ranging on discussions from activism to Islamic leadership to Consciousness to psychedelics to Ai and the future and what it holds and an esteemed guest I have for you

tonight hailing from the UK born and raised in Leicester uh Dr Bilal Hassan who led a life of Islamic activism here he is a professional a qualified doctor practitioner GP who's traveled the world met with many dignitaries he currently resides in South Africa he has an you know a profound research in the world of tech and AI in addition to his doubling

with uh in writing so with all of that in mind I bring to you ladies and gentlemen right Dr bil Hass thank you for joining us tonight how are you alul alh I'm just uh you know as I've just fired up your um the the the volume just seemed slightly low all of a sudden on your end I mean it was perfectly fine a moment ago so I I take it nothing's nothing's

changed here I hope not um can you hear me now loud and clear I can hear you slightly low check if there's a if you go into your settings till then I'll just just have a look it allows you to adjust manually as well if you go into your settings right so till Doc is just uh just brushing up on that so yeah I I just want to say to the rest of you if you could just like and share and spread the love Allah bless you all and right

yeah I we've got I believe back dock all right was any luck in that yeah can you hear me now is that better I can I can hear you but if it I take it it doesn't right okay yeah I mean if you if it does allow you to go if it allows you to usually go is that the loudest okay that's the loudest yeah right shukran is that uh I take it it's okay for people tuning in if you could just uh we've got Clea uh maab a few other people if you could just uh

give a maram all right so any feedback it's okay right Shan I appreciate it hard one right so DOC shukan for joining us and right jumping a bit into your journey you know somebody born and raised in the UK you got into the uh Islamic scene gu take us through a bit of your journey just to understand uh you know where we are today and your and then your thoughts on these fascinating topics which I I'm you know I'm so fond of but before we get to that yeah guide us

navigate through a bit of your uh some of the chapters of your life briefly for us if you will yeah soam alikum to everybody and thank you so much for having me uh Muti um so born born and raised in Leicester um my dad was actually born in Malawi um my mom was born in South Africa in Durban uh but Dad came to the UK when he was like four or five years old and um you know very much grew up in in Leicester and my mom only when she got married uh came to the UK but you know growing up as you probably experienced you know most I think 60 70% of Muslims in Britain are either uh

Bangladeshi Pakistani or Indian and when people used to ask you know where you what are you where are you from I'd often say South Africa and I always felt this connection that that's the place where we went for holidays and all my mom's family were always in South Africa and I think that that sort of always con made me sort of feel like I was a bit different to the people that I grew up against um and how you know I was bright at school um got into a medical school studied graduated um but it was all in that sort of post 911 post 77 era and so I really sort of came into my Islam

under that uh um umbrella under that guise and got very involved with campus activism and in the Islamic societies on campus and did a lot of interfaith work and da stuff and Muslim student stuff and um and one of my big roles was actually being the the designated driver for uh Scholars and speakers so I spent you know my when I should be studying I was driving around all these shakes and and uh um imams and and and whatnot all all across the country and I got to spend a lot of time with different teachers and um and I would I would Grill them you know whilst they sat next to me in my my little VW polo I'd be

giving them a a really um all these difficult questions and then you could sort of separate the week from the chaff you know you get to see who's actually got something to say um and uh I was fortunate to get invited onto a very very fancy uh fellowship program uh I took a break from Medical School it was sort of attached to the UN and all sorts of other stuff and I got to travel around the world um and it really opened my eyes to professional Community organizing and professional Civic society and if you look at the Muslim Community a lot of the issues that we have can be put down to in the western sense you know can be put down to the

lack of infrastructure um the Jewish Community has been around in decent numbers for over a 100 years and um you know obviously the Christian Community being the established religion there's these deep institutions we're relatively new and we haven't built those uh uh that sort of Muslim Civic society and you know alhamdulillah all the stuff that I'm involved in now you get to see a lot of those things are changing and there's a huge industry that's developing and it's really sort of um an exciting time uh so as I graduated I carried on all my Muslim activism stuff and I got involved with lots of different fancy programs um and it sort of came to realize that I

was working as a doctor in West London only really to fund my you know you know at night you know one of the the teachers our teachers would say you know be a be a um a monk in the day and and a or it be a night in the day and a monk at night you know um meaning uh uh so you know as I was working for a as a doctor I would I would spend a lot of my my salary and my time just building organizing arranging programs and events and then that sort of Spilled Out into me doing less and less medicine I started looming working essentially as a you know freelancer doctor and um

organizing more programs and eventually was able to find and took you know initially taking quite a significant pay cut uh to work full-time in in Muslim spaces you know Muslim media Muslim charity sector um and I'm someone who's pretty well connected and networked um and I spent a lot of my my work as what as connecting dots but but also just you know developing this sort of authentic British Muslim identity and trying to understand what is that and I was very interested and I'm still very interested in the intersection of Islam and culture and I'm sure you you're familiar with

the famous uh paper that Dr far Abdullah wrote many many years ago now uh Islam and a cultural imperative and it was a really sort of important framing statement for me and he opens with this really beautiful analogy where he says you know Islam is like a crystal clear flowing river whose waters are sweet and pure and lifegiving but it has no color of its own and instead it takes on the color of the Bedrock it flows above so in in Mali Islam Islam looks African and in China Islam looks Chinese and ultimately Islam is not concerned with um form as much as it's concerned with principles ethics and values that then

take on different cultural manifestations and that's that's the genius of our Juris Prudential tradition is that Islam was always Dynamic wherever it went it was able to engage local custom and culture and become indigenized and so I felt very much I've been at the Vanguard or trying to be at the Vanguard of what does that indigenization process look like how do we articulate um an expression of Islam that's that's true to the Timeless values of our tradition but also relevant engaging Dynamic to the issues and the challenges and the context um that we find ourselves in today and that's really been the the the question of my my life's work and I'm very

blessed alhamdulillah been able to you know make a career out of it as it were and and now with the Muslim agency that's that's really the intersection that that I'm working at for uh Muslim organizations for people engaging Muslim communities Muslim leaders politicians celebrities artists you know non-muslims or governments and big foundations when they want to understand Muslims um it's sort of getting into the minutia and the Nuance of what it what does Islam in the 21st century look like smell like taste like and know one of the examples I'll end with this is uh you you must have been to top capy Palace right um uh I

haven't yet but inshallah soon soon I know it's you know top capy has it has one of the the the original first sort of compilations of the the quranic text um and allegedly the the the same text that was reading when he was uh stabbed and and his blood is on the pages and it's opened for you to see and when you look at that text as you SE these early qurans it's just it's just very basic Arabic right there's no Hara there's no numbers there's nothing it's just a the very basic Arabic script and and then you just look up and then you see all

this crazy elaborate ottoman calligraphy and then I ask the question how did you get from that to that and and you know the Quran is the most sacred precious thing in our religion but can you imagine the audacity that these Ottomans had to take the most sacred part of our tradition and they're going to like twist it and put some curves and bends and and do all this funky stuff with it and produce something that's so beautiful that a non-muslim is tattooing it on their bodies imagine how comfortable they had to be with the religion and the most sacred parts of our religion and and and how comfortable they were with their

themselves and their identity and their culture that they could bring those two together and that really I feel is a challenge of our age is like how do we bring the tradition authentically from a center ground from the like an orthodox position we're not trying to be liberal Progressive new age but like the center tradition Orthodox Islam for me is Big Tent all inclusive all-encompassing Dynamic engaging and and that's the genius of Islam that we had that built all this Islamic civilization and inshah it's the genius that we return to yeah I mean this whole you know you

look at calligraphy and calligraphy it's kind of tied into the backdrop of Muslim art Islamic Art the way massaged the way these uh institutions had been decorated apart from just being unquestionably beautiful which which it is and mesmerizing it's very entrancing hypnotic as well like people who've looked at Islamic Art have often spoke spoken of things like fractal patterns and and how this kind of stuff which

only in the last century are we coming to understand mathematically as in with with you know with great with theories and Frameworks although we subconsciously recognize these things so Islamic Art the identity that Muslims had back then the security you know the the feeling the feeling kind of sure about yourself about your dean about your that you that you have the right you to to to to kind of tread these water to to be creative in that way to be expressive not to be worried about

somebody shutting you down you know somebody everybody being judging you know this panopticon of everybody's telling each other yeah that's I mean calligraphy is like it cuts to the very heart of the deepest metaphysics and spiritual like you know dimensions of our faith like it all begins with the no with the dot you know you know and you know one one scholar he wrote a book uh it's a real like a Mind Trap um and uh he said one way of looking at the Quran he said uh the

Quran is four things he said the first thing the Quran is is silence because the Quran emerges from silence and returns to silence and without silence we wouldn't understand the Quran it would be a constant stream of noise so he said the first thing in the Quran is a silence and then the second thing is letters and then the third thing is words and the fourth things is ay sentences and so he then he says you know the the the the the atmology of of of the word letter in Arabic refers to The Cutting Edge of a blade and so he and he talks about how

like the human being like we have the the the the realm of uh form and the realm of meaning so the realm the seen realm is the realm of form without meaning and the Unseen realm is the realm of meaning without form so the the m and the Mal and the human being is the Barak the interspace between the seen and the Unseen between the realm of of form and the realm of meaning and he says we are able to take meaning from The Unseen and project it onto the form through language

and so hence the vocal chords the vocal system is essentially the Codex for deciphering all of knowledge and so it means The Cutting Edge of the blade and so what we do with our with our words with our letters and our words is that we cut through and we distinguish so when you cut something you separate it out so and cam the word for the the word for words in Arabic means to cut through so the is to is is a cutting edge in essence you know with the silence thing you were saying that's what you're doing isn't it like every word it is a chop that it is something

that a sound must be intercepted with silence for it to express itself as a you know as a morim as a word it it couldn't be without you couldn't just go non-stop without know intercepted uh silences so and it's the same when you think about calligraphy it's it's it's first it's nothing and then it starts with a dot it doesn't matter how you you cannot start anything but with a DOT and you know if you you know you must have had this famous tradition that said all of the knowledge of the Quran can be contain is contained in the F and all of

the knowledge of the fa is contained in the Bas and all of the knowledge of the Bas is in the and all of the knowledge of the ba is in the is in the dot and so like you could meditate just on that presence and absence you know the binary on and off black and white the first you know dot of creation the AL if is you know and they've done you know they look at calligraphy as a it's a it's a huge science like the AL if is seven Nas and it's directly proportional to the the proportions of a human body the head of the AL is the size of your head your head is that one it's seven

seven yeah so if if you so the corresonding to the kind of almost the chakras almost well the irony isy is order there's irony one of my friends her name is Sur s she's one of the one of the most qualified calligraphers in the world incredible talented um London based calligrapher she studied with the Masters in turkey and so on and uh I was just recently with her in Cape Town and she was doing a small presentation about this and you know artists often criticized or we we we're told to be cautious about depicting the human form and the living

form But the irony is that the very letters of Arabic are based on the human form the AL if is is a standing person the head of the AL if is based on the standing man uh and all of the other letters are corresponding that that the ba is a curved Al the me is a curved Al if all of the letters correspond to each other and they have this direct relationship to the human form so it's ironic that the very glyphs that we use in our art are based on the human form and yet we told you know be careful about expressing face or eyes or you know cover the face or whatever yeah

becausei he has a huge fascination with letters and and the the the profound what he feels Mysteries hidden within each isolated letter I mean it's very profound and you know it's something which uh you know I was just listening to One lecture I think it was by Dr Eric winkl but it was just on AR and the wow you know not like the wow is in WoW but the letter wow W and yeah and so it's it's he has this this which is I'm still trying to learn about which is you know

this profound uh inner sight very mystical about each of these is how you're saying that they are very you know that they're not just uh you know just simple scratches on a Surface he feels that they they are symbolic of deeper Mysteries no each letter exactly each letter has a has a secret and each letter also has um you know beyond the the esoteric stuff that you know letters in Arabic are associated with a certain schema of words and I remember remember one of our teachers he was he was saying

for example the letter rain is always associated with something um hidden or unseen right or something that's that's uh that's shied away so just think about you you have uh think about any words with with um with a there's a dimension of something hidden right and right yeah exactly so oh wow you'll start to seal these connections and then you take so then he said take the letter ra so in the letter ra often will correspond to something that's

continuous so just throw out Arabic words yeah like what about corresponds to the to the sound as well a constant sound right well foot as in so keeps going right um the sound of you know vibrations they never end right and then uh so then corresponds to the the sensation of something or the closure or the stopping oh like if as in to stop okay if what else have you got like a statement I suppose it's said

and done as in completed like that so then then he said put put those letters together what do you get in in Arabic Dr to Dr so he says explain it so what happens when you drown first you go in the water the rain then you keep going and then off you're finished and it's very literal it makes sense and there's actually a lot you can decipher in the words based on these schema of of letters and there's there's a whole set study of this is a huge science I mean one of my friends a teacher um brilliant

American Scholar sheam mmud um you know he's an expert linguist and he he Dives deep into these atmology and of Z tuna yeah for Zuna yeah yeah for formally Z tuna I have been in touch with him positively that's right yeah yeah he runs a Lanterna the Lanterna initiative it's it does a lot of teaching and stuff online and Retreats and stuff um but yeah uh there's so many so many so much of this knowledge that's right this right there you know and um uh it's uh it's all it all ties together and I remember one of

our teachers saying that you know uh and this corresponds to the art he said if I can quote it he said uh um that Allah is the most real and Allah is absolutely real and as we approach him we become more real and then internally we become beautiful and then everything we do becomes beautiful and so a society that is close to God is by definition beautiful and you know when you look at the societies our society today and all the ugliness that you see it's it's a reflection of our absence away from and

distance away from the Divine and so there's a connection between ethics and Aesthetics and even the word from what I remember the wordan isn't we say you know Excellence spiritual Excellence it corresponds to a a visual a visual Excellence like a Hassan is to be visually visually pleasing as well so um you all these things are intimately tied together about that you see because we are fundamentally mirrors of the Divine you know on Earth Allah's

names his attributes we we are mirroring the the you know the Divine t on earth like and we see Allah's in in all his signs because the signs of Allah are going to be either the cosmos the horizon or in us or the scripture but you know Allah says you know in in you you will see his signs so I suppose as a as a mirror the the the closer proximally you know between a proximal and distal reflection the the more you're getting closer to Allah symbolically speaking

speaking here that you are becoming more I mean more real in a way and more beautiful because that's what you're mirroring because the true wujud being is really Allah's being our being is but an you know like an epip phenomenon like an emergent property so we do you know we we do exist but our existence compared to Allah's existence is is non-existence I mean Allah's existence is the real existence and we are like this emergent property so I really yeah I I really like well that

that you could you could also liken it to um you know you know this this idea as you mentioned in your this psychology series recently and or and you know when we um when we get in the way of that when let say we I mean our NS our ego uh we block that reflection and when we can understand what it means to lower the self lower the ego you know obliterate the ego even that what what shines through is only

then a full a fuller reflection um of the Divine yeah somebody just put a comment here just to add I mean just to put that the study of letters holds along history amongst the Sufi harism uh which was said to be founded by f asadi shukran for that and I'll look into that as well but yeah okay and you know this thing about the form you were saying Doc and because you know you've had a whole um you know like almost a lifetime around people that

have been very rooted in spirituality in in this whole kind philosophical Outlook as well um the form this I I find this so fascinating as a you know philosophical discussion the form because and and then words because words are a type of form you know in a way there's but I guess there's form in material but words too are a kind of form without which they could not exist and you know whether that's some punctuated silent es and things like this that we're

saying but this is a Divine it's almost like the Magic by which you know the lights in this world for us have switched on that Allah saying that you know with this very K one could say by words bringing into existence beingness or or us and but then at the same time the Great lest experiences are often ineffable you can't capture in words so there's a bit of an almost like a I don't know whether it's oxymoronic

or it's uh a paradox or whether it's a contradiction I don't know that you know words are this thing this this kind of this ability to capture within form is what you know Allah has it's it's the miracle and it's the kind of animated nature of this D that we are in yet our Peak experiences Escape that simultaneously so I mean what what are your thoughts on that because yeah so you know in medical school and I remember that you look at a a child developing that you have these

uh benchmarks and Milestones so you'll have like gross motor skills fine motor skills language and speech and then I think there's another category I can't remember and if you look at what a 2-year-old can do with words and basic grammar if you were to correspond that to their fine motor skills it's equivalent of it's like them learning how to do brain surgery at 2 years old that the amount of neurological development and complexity required to articulate as a 2-year-old is as complicated as your F motor skills of a of a of a neurosurgeon

and you know I think it's been said before I can't remember the Latin word really okay wow the humans are like the the the what's it homo speaking whatever the Latin is you know that we what differentiates us no no but I'm saying like there was a there was a play on that that said uh you know what differenti differentiates us I think sapr refers to thought right yes it refers to the wise yeah so there was someone else who said you know we we we're actually the the the speaking human because that this is what differentiates us from every other creature is our ability to articulate as as much as we as we can and understand as much as we can and you know even other animals that can communicate it's

it's it's Lighty as a part um yeah so my initial thought when you were speaking was was actually um you know perhaps words are the interface that allows us to uh Engage The simulation as it were and I've been thinking a lot about you know this um room's uh uh analogy of the ant that's uh walking through so this roomie talks in in one of his stories about this ant if you go through it yeah for the viewers as well yeah so so molana roomi talks about this this ant

who's uh climbing through these uh this carpet and he's complaining to God that what are all these huge fibers or huge you know tall things of different colors it makes no sense my life is so difficult he's complaining and then you know Allah says you if only you could see what I can see when when you zoom out you see this beautiful Persian rug and I think when you look at any and every angle and dimension of reality it's in perfect order and perfect Beauty

you know from from from from all these different perspectives and the only perspective where it looks out of syn is our human uh sort of uh uh daily conscious experience that this everything kind of looks a bit jungled up as soon as you start to if you were to take the most disgusting thing you can imagine like a pile of dog feces and you zoom in enough onto a microscopic level you'll just see beauty you know and if you were to look at look at it from a look at it from a a light a light spectrum perspective you see beauty and for you you see order and structure and patterns so from every sort of angle uh

you know we have this uh um verse in the Quran that everything is worshiping Allah but you don't perceive how it's worshiping Allah and you know everything and this ties quite interesting to to an AI conversation as well but you know one way of looking at it is everything has programming everything has programming and that that programming you could call fitra and nothing can transcend its fitra everything is that your big once if your programs been written then you can't transcend that programming right it's your it's your code it's your F and the only the only creation that can transcend it its own code as it were is

the human being and the Very definition of what makes us human and this is what Allah says in there there's verses and this Hadith about this that you know had we not sinned had human beings not sinned Allah would have had removed you and replaced you with a with a creation that did Sin and then repented to be human is to sin and if we were perfect we wouldn't be we wouldn't be humans we' be Angels we'd be something else so when you think about a Ai and Consciousness that a computer program can only ever do what it's programmed to do it can never transcend its programming it's not going to if it has Consciousness it's not going to feel sad unless it was

programmed to feel sad it's not going to take its own life unless it it was programmed to do that right whereas a human being can transcend our basic our our our our basic programming and and that that's that's what defines us as a human being you could say yeah yeah we're jumping ahead jumping ahead no no no no I love that I love that so you know a bunch of things there that really are so fascinating one that everything having this programming and a quick uh just a side note on that re just you you've seen the photograph

of that bacteria that you know that that's got all these scientists and kind of uh molecular biologists and other people Engineers as well all excited where it's it's it's all on you know online about how at a such a tiny level it's operating with what is equivalent to engineering engineered uh kind of parts and motors and it's running on something almost equivalent to how we would think of uh Electric engines so it's it's been quite widely circulated but yeah this thing of look

Consciousness so through this we for us for humans the light the lights are switched on you know so you know so to speak that What Makes Us different is this gift of Consciousness I you know often to me I use the term Consciousness uh synonymously with r uh and that it is you know it is this this thing that Allah has breathed into uh some of his creation that has you know it just switches the lights on and and through that we have this ability we have you

know insan is like you said even language which we touched up on it I to me language is always a miracle that it exists it's nothing short of miraculous it defies to me what would be the laws of nature almost the fact that language exists and the the way it exists it's you know it's it's incomprehensible the the fact that you know we can so so the fact that we can in just morphemes and in Expressions short bursts Express you know stringing

together just a series of sounds Express delicate you know uh complex Concepts that and emotions I can evoke emotions in The Listener and okay maybe emotions one could say well animals can make cries and and it can evoke certain emotionality but the fact that I can uh convey and project these you know such complexity with just words and you can pick it up instantaneously as you hear it and visualize and mentalize it it it is a miracle because it doesn't make any

sense this a funny story I remember um this uh scholar was asked by uh um a debator who was very critical and uh rude he he was insulting Islam and he says you know how can your Quran be uh so precious and important it's just words words can't do anything and then so the scholar says ask your mother you know she's a she'll know as a as a as a prostitute itute she'll know she'll know best and so the man gets crazy ah what are you saying about my mother because I said two words and look what happened to you you're completely transformed your state that's my words and that's

horrible words so what what about the words of God but I think this also ties to ties to another important thing right which is you know words have to be experienced and and it ties into the AI conversation really importantly and you know because it's it's ultimately about the first person experience that we are we can experience those words and we have a I think the word qualia right that the first person experience of of of of this is what Consciousness is right it's a first person experience and that's SCI can't crack I was gonna I was

gonna say that you know with language where I was going with it is that language is not contained by one person like one person there's no one person who knows all of English there's no one person that knows all of Arabic or language exists as a network and it exists simultaneously it is being affected it is growing it is shrinking words are going out of use words are coming into use no one person controls it no one person even and and the way it works it's this is it you see

it runs as though it is really just a software that is in operation that is being updated by this kind of zeitgeist uh we pick up language carries with it certain rituals of not just words like even there's things like for example even like how you speak like let's say for example when you begin a con conversation you will first just go into just some meaningful acknowledgement could be anything morning morning what's up what's up like these words in and of themselves just a ritual then there would be a subsequent ritual of some pleasantries then you know seldom would

you just jump like you couldn't jump into you could physically but you couldn't like if I met you and I said straight jumped into a uh a you know the meat of something I want her to say we wouldn't do that even if I wanted to I would begin with like as a ritual certain things like there's almost these rules and laws which were never taught nobody teaches you this is how you engage we all just tap into this software that we are all a part of and it's very computer like you know it's very a simulation almost uh that how it's running so yeah I I wanted to that

that that's where I was kind of leading this that it it seems very uh in line with one that this is a simulation this is a you know configuration clearly and and that leading into you see because insan being you know shaped in the in in not in a literal sense but in the Hadith in the that is in bukari and other books that man has been created in the image of God um which is also a verse of the Bible but it's also in bukari and in other books that you know Allah created Adam upon his Sur and not meaning here

physical Surah but anthropomorphism but in the fact that that man human can then mirror the Divine qualities on Earth that he too knows he too has power he too has these things and then I guess creation because the ultimate thing of create insan is to create and creating intelligence this is the you know it's like such I feel it's the ultimate Buzz for insan but in one way is this not the you know the kind of one could say you

know uh not not to uh almost to to you know this term of the the Divine tragedy of you see because human beings Allah L created human beings and look at the rebellion and the kufur of insan and insan goes on to create an intelligence which would just perpetuate this potential this kuur back to to us you [Laughter] know interesting yeah I mean you know you could say you know Allah has attributes

of and you know the powerful the the the one with all knowledge you you know the word in intelligence is not there as an attribute but you could argue for Allah being the ultimate intelligence right I don't think people would argue with that or the the original intelligence and so our intelligence is a just as our existence is an abstraction of his existence our intelligence is an abstraction of his intelligence and so in one way you could say our intelligence is artificial and so the first artificial

intelligence was could you say that the Adam was the first artificial TR like it's artificial it's not real it's it's artificial right it's it's it's it's an abstraction of the of the ultimate intelligence yeah so um and you know what differentiates our our intelligence to what this AI stuff is again for me it comes back to this programming and the definition of what it means to be human and obviously Consciousness and all of these things are tied into it that is that is so profound because the thing about insan intelligence you know this ilm that Allah has given it is an intelligence I

mean today using the term intelligence is indicative of right so of having the knowledge and the information what differentiated insan from just other animals having some form of you know intelligence animals are intelligent as well I mean it's not that they you know that that insan with his intelligence could create new intelligence like he had that Allah didn't just teach you know he didn't just intuitively give this modality of well I know a b and c because that you know you could you could train an animal

a pet to just know certain things but it could then construct new knowledge right based on the original tools that it had this ability to then go into new Uncharted territories and this is what insan is now training technology to do this whole AI thing it isn't just knowing that you know okay it knows this pattern it's to say well we want it to create we want it to form new kind of knowing so you know this this whole

story in a way uh it's kind of playing playing out yeah so I have so on that and we spoke about this a while ago um yeah but it was initially for a client I was starting to do a sort of Deep dive into sort of all this AI stuff um and this was probably like a year before um chat gbt and all these things sort of broke into the public Consciousness so I was kind of ahead of the curve with where it was all going and I was sort of reading all these science papers and conferences and um and uh I started to dabble with the whole AI art thing you know before it was so popular and

actually set up my own little Instagram page and stuff started to go viral I remember when you visited us when you visited us and you were talking about stuff and man it was it really hooked me and and to me a lot of the stuff you were saying at the time was like w so I could see you know your kind of Deep dive into it was very profound yeah and so so I could see where all this stuff is going and I I think there's many ways you can overstate it and in many ways it's being understated that that that the impact it's going to have in the next 5 years on human Civ ization is unlike any other change in terms of how we function

how we live how we buy sell work entire Industries are going to be wiped out by a single computer program that some guy in his boxes in India is going to write on his laptop with AI you know the the Sam Alman the the the guy you know behind open AI you know he's talking about the first billion doll company that will be run founded and maintained end to end by one person because you don't need any other any other people and they think that's coming very soon you know so the technology is so transformative and and so pervasive in so many ways I think someone said we

already the average person today is interacting with 50 to 60 different pieces of artificial intelligence if you're the average person in the UK or in the US that every single part of our life will is you know whether you're auto autoc correct on your phone there's there's an AI it's not it's not generative Ai and more fancy stuff but there's AI That's literally putting words in your mouth you know suggesting or maybe you meant to say this but Compu is telling you this is what you were thinking or this is what you're going to say yeah and um so anyway I started to like do a bit of a deep dive on this and then I started to look at okay what are Muslim saying and what have our Scholars

said and it was pretty much nothing has come in any substantive way there's a few sort of warning claron call you know stay away from this doic technology um there was an interesting conference that was held by C Cambridge Muslim College uh did like a a one two day Symposium a few years ago and um they had some interesting presentations but you know that was the sort of extent of it those lectures are up online you can find them um so then I thought look I'm not a scholar I'm not an academic uh how can I contribute in this space so for me it's through the prism of culture

so I started this AI art project created a brand the brand makes art it makes all sorts of other stuff like this jacket and all these other sort ofs what's the brand called the brand is called if you can read it here says where is it there Muslim pcity can you see that Muslim mus Muslim pcity as in a play on Simplicity and Muslim Muslim Simplicity exactly and the irony is uh it's not maybe somebody is that is that what it is just do Muslim Muslim muslim.com yeah Instagram page got a lot of share

the link there's a lot of videos and stuff I've done um some of them you know very viral millions of views and I sort of was able to crack crack the code without trying you know all organic reach and all this and so you could see how just uh this technology um I mean it's funny like even now in my day job I a lot of design work and I designed brochures and and uh you know fancy documents and that's all through AI i' I've people have hired me or my agency to design brand like you know branding assets and logos and and I'm I'm not a branding guy I'm not a designer guy I don't even I barely know how to use

Photoshop but through the technology I can produce something just as a higher standard as a designer as an average designer you know there's people who who are incredible at their jobs no doubt but average person with very little you know and for me my value ad is that you know I've got the the thinking and the creative process that that's my contribution and then the tool I have these tools now that I can just multiply the impact of my work you know 40 50% increased efficiency uh on on what I'm able to serve clients you know by leveraging the technology and again I was using this even before gbt was out I had already had a similar sort of basic

Proto chat gbd type software that I was even on the Islamic stuff now so just last week we were having a discussion on our one of our group chats uh you know just with just you know with with the lads and mates and but it's it's fascinating there were sharing now where chat chat GPT is already with some of the Islamic discussions because I remember when chat GPT was a thing you know when it was just as in it was just like wow everybody was on it and we're all getting into at that time I remember trying it's only been what a couple of years two years or something I was trying uh Islamic

questions like I was trying I wonder would it know like I would ask it first of all something complex on let's let's say the r of the age of AA or the on a rwi a particular narrator or if I was to ask about bukari it knew very basic things like bukari is a collection of Hadith books and stuff like that sorry a book of Hadith collections but it was very limited but just last week we were sharing some of the discussion with it you know some very detailed discussion already on narrators and I was like not just that you're still you're still approaching it from a very utilitarian perspective and actually when you like interacting with

chat GPT and there's actually better software that's that's surpassing chat GPT in terms of its benchmarks so there's other technology that that uh that have similar interfaces that work in slightly different ways and really it's a it's it's like a language you have to understand how to interact with it to get the best out of it and so um when you when you're able to be a bit more sort of have a bit more dexterity and play around with it and understand how to engineer your prompts and how to uh lead it through certain I meant by that it's you know in the last one two years it's learning so it's it's it's not learning

as much it's it's it's it already has all that knowledge but it's able to now synthesize and draw connections and hold in its working memory so much more and you know and what's what's going to happen this is what's what's more interesting people have like oh you know they in the same way like some of the I AI um image generation software you know it would sort of mess up your hands and faces and feet would get all sort of mangled and you'd look at it and I remember I think the scholar was saying oh this makes me uncomfortable it's the jalic and you can see how it's all malformed and stuff and and I said I said then and it's been proved that

within 6 months a year all of that would go away it disappear and all these like hallucinations and the AI making mistakes all of it will this this this stuff is like you're looking at a Nokia 3210 right now and saying phones are crap because look at this Nokia 3210 I can't do nothing with it we we're at such a basic level of this technology and it's exponentially exponentially increasing in in ways that like we can't even understand the scale of how these things are how fast these things are moving uh it's it's just like if your company has more than five people one person should just be full-time on AI and understanding how AI is changing and how we apply it to the business and that

person will give the most value to that company as a guaranteed um and so what's going to happen very soon and the way this technology is going to impact Islamic circles in Islam and understanding of Islam is going to be huge and that I already use these Technologies for the way I will research uh things about Islam and questions that I have an example yeah so it w it won't be very long till there's a piece of you know I I Muti um yeah I was going to say this that is there something you know the way we were saying about chat gbt we

were running through there was some like a detailed Hadith discussion on it and I was just impressed with some of the stuff now it was coming up with and it knew work memory but do you know of certain it's not about the see like you're approaching again as a scholar but approaching as a human being that I will have in my pocket access to the most intelligent but also the most compassionate caring understanding delicate wise teacher in my pocket that I can not in my pocket my headphones now cuz it be live I'm not so

sure about the compassionate angle and all of that because it com out 100% no because it's how you program it because you're interacting with just a essentially a chatbot but you know it doesn't take much and I could do it I could do it within half an hour where you program a chatbot to behave a particular way meaning I want you to behave if it's designed with its kind of like heightened levels of so-called niceties to choosing always the nice opinion to say no take it take it up a level right so imagine a piece of software and this is this is this software can be done in the day and then someone could design it where it has

access to all of your financial data all of your geolocation all of your emails all of your whatsapps all of your phone logs it has all they already this techn Google and Facebook already have all that anyway right yeah but but it's all wrapped up it's all wrapped up in a in a in a im muy app so when Muti asks a question about look can I can I not go to this family function what should I do it's going to know when was the last time you called your dad when was how long did you spend at Juma for the last three weeks and then this week you actually spent 20% less time you rushed out how long have you been on your phone what YouTube what's your browsing history being it knows when to give you

a more lenient a lenient perspective it knows when to give you a more gentle perspective you two people can ask the same question they'll give opposite answers because you need to be reigned in and you need to be given gentleness and the same way like you know they say when you speak to Scholars I can't remember making the ethical decision for you and it'll do way better than your average IM and people can say oh no this is technology is Haram theic but what have you got at the moment is Islam Q&A you know you Google a question and it's going to tell you beat your wife and there's no marital rape and all these other nonsense that people are going to digest and they really believe it I'd rather have a piece of technology that

actually you can you can train it and BAS it on a lot more uh you know grounded compassionate deeply you know spiritual empowering you know even so for example I trained a little piece of I created something like this uh where it asks you questions when you ask questions it reflects it back to you but what do you think I mean surely you you you've already done this haven't you so you should be able to what what did you remember that thing there so and this technology will cost like a pound a month it's and it's it's just literally around the corner so why you going to go to your local Imam when you actually the app on your phone can give you a much more

nuanced detailed personalized answer to your questions then what your average Imam or your average teacher is is going to be able to give you don't you don't you feel the issue is that you see because we are already in an age where it's not about information but it's about filtering through information so as to have because now we're in a mass proliferation of information there's too much false information out there or inaccurate information so it's not about memorizing and learning but about being able to navigate through the junk and clunk of data so which is nested in the

the theme of trust I guess because let's say now this thing I you know one okay this element of such a pervasive uh you know reality of let in this artificial ENT that it knows you know that the veil is the Su the So-Cal Suter is removed that it knows your you know it's it's like a Lesser God of sorts that it knows you know how you spend what you do how much time you spend here how much you move around it will know whe you know you know whether you you know appointments you have all this kind of stuff and even know let's

say if it's trained to pick up on where you are in accuracies you know where you're at a place but saying you're at somewhere else or something now all of this level of the S being removed and and obviously people's comfort with that because I don't think most people are comfortable with that but then the so the trust you have in this so to go to this machine and say well look should I fast you know I've got an exam tomorrow or uh should I join my prayers or should I give in you know do I need to do this I I mean I guess this is it I mean that there's a because this machine

could be getting it wrong so to speak I mean couldn't it be getting it wrong or is it what do you think I mean you like the threat that this technology poses to life coaches for example huge there there's no need for a life coach because whatever a life coach will give you you can put in your headphones and it's not did you see the film her with wackin Phoenix no h e r her so this was a about 10 15 years ago check it out if it's if it's a good one and that technology that so and it was actually a huge legal case going on right now so essentially it's

it's about like this AI software that's basically always in your ears and you have like a AI companion buddy that you're talking to and then this guy who's very recluse uh who basically kind of falls in love with this AI chatbot and is voiced by Scarlett Johansson and uh when open AI think I know the the movie you're talking about but I haven't watched yeah so it just it just broke the the news because when open AI premiered in the one of the last showcases about a month ago that they've created the exact same thing that essentially you have a buddy your best friend in your ear the whole time listening

conscience and and and able to fully like as if you've got a best friend always there always able to talk to you and the voice that they that they programmed was sort of very similar to Scarlet Johansson and and then it came out that they actually approached her to uh pay her like $10 million for her voice print and then she declined and then they put it out and now she's she's suing them or whatever but um that's a really sort of preent film but you know like all of these concerns that you have it's very soon going to be all these problems they're all fixable problems and if you think about the

average person what issues do they have they're not worried about you know was my woo accepted or not they're like this dealing with their issues the my mom this my dad this my my best friend's got cancer my my you know stuff there it's going to be solved you say this but you know when when we were speaking about things like human beings we too are a kind of Hardware within a software within this kind of simulation you know as it were and we were speaking about language almost operates as this software around us this kind of Wi-Fi almost that we're tapped into and not

contained by us but somehow isn't The Human Experience also like that that don't humans it's not just I don't just mean information and procedures but human beings take so much more from Human contact than and I think this is now starting to surface as people become more and more isol ol ated and they have just you know they have social media they have you know I've got thousand friends on Facebook I've got this but I'm but now I've become

depressed because the the actual there is something to there is you know in that ether so to speak of our you know this kind of simulation human beings derive something that is you know we is more than the actual thing than the sum of its products when it comes to human interaction so when you said grief and when you said like a human being um so like even the thought of it now like let's say anybody who's experienced grief the thought of let's say I sure like don't get me wrong like I I've

experienced grief and and many people have and let's say I I would listen to things like let's say on YouTube I'd listen to stuff that are very helpful and whether it's it's going to be words or whether it's going to be you know instrumental or something or a lecture for example sure that in its own way but the thought of like a something just like an AI or a machine uh consoling me that thought is inconsolable like it would IM imminently put me off like I would feel almost I'd feel almost insulted as a human to say well

you know listen to a machine to tell you uh that to help you get over this grief I would feel that what the hell like am I that low that I need to listen to a machine to tell me how to overcome this so look I I think don't get me wrong yeah I I think this technology is incredible I think it's going to be way more impactful and in you know pervasive in people's lives than we realize and I also think it comes with a lot of dangers and a lot of risks and I think there's going to be you know a

separating out of camps but you know one person said look you mentioned earlier you touched on this idea of privacy right and you have you ever had that that phenomena where you talk to somebody and then about something and then the next day you see adverts for that thing on your social media feed definitely definitely AI spying on me do you know how that actually actually works notic but you know how that works so people people theorized and they this conspiracy theory went out that the microphones are switched on and they're listening that's what I thought I thought that it's actually much more

scary okay no so it's not that it's much more scary if you let's say I come and meet you and we go and uh you know go down lady poool Road and and grab some fauda or something right my my phone has all of these hundreds thousands of data points on me and your phone has got thousands of data points on you and when our phones are in close proximity for a significant P portion of time it determines that we've sat and we've met and then it looks at all of the possible potential conversations that we might have and then after billions and

billions of data points of all people all these different human beings interacting and what they're talking about what they're clicking on what they're liking it's able to predict with remarkable accuracy what are the likely topics of conversation that we're going to have and cross check that with who have you been speaking to what websites have you been browsing how long have you spent on your emails likewise myself likewise what you've bought and haven't bought so if for example you're going to stay at your friend's house and it knows that you haven't bought toothpaste in the last three months and your toothpaste is down and you went and stayed at his house and it knows you stayed there overnight and this is all this is open how does you know my toothpaste is down for example cuz your credit card when did you last purchase

it when did you last buy if you bought toothpaste like fairly consistent me for three years okay so if you generate you missed a few and it can recognize in those patterns no but you generate patterns over billions of people it's able to predict even your what looks very erratic to you and then he knows that Mahmud has this particular brand of toothpaste and it knows you stayed the night and so it knows that you've seen this brand so the next day you start seeing that brand without recognizing oh and you had another touch point that because you saw that brand you're down on toothpaste you're going to more likely buy why advertising that brand to me though why that because it knows you've seen it because this there's a

seven seven touch rule of marketing that in order to someone to push someone to a purchase you have to expose them to seven sort of Demands of your time so you see a TV ad you see a billboard you see a pop up on your phone on YouTube so it's that constant touch point that so they they worked it out once once you see something seven times that that's going to trigger a change in Behavior so I mean all of this stuff is just huge and this is pre this new a AI age this is like YouTube algorithm from 2018 2017 this is the the digital they call it a digital handshake my my my digital information is going to a digital

handshake with you and it'll look at all the cross points now if a group of friends is able to interact all together and understand what are you likely to talk about what are topics that'll come up and then it'll show you ads based on those conversations and then products associated with those ads so so anyway look all of this technology is going in in all these crazy directions and it's going to be shifting in all these industries and I think there's lots of use cases and applications that are going to be helpful in the same way you say look I don't want a computer to to afold my technology to be a grief counselor or but you know your your computer tells you what time to wake up your computer is in your alarm your

computer tells you what time the Salah is your computer tells you you know you might be digitally reading the Quran you might be you know uh phoning your friend you're listening to a lecture you're recording your your in innermost thoughts and your feelings you're writing it down on a on a on a document that's a computer so we're just interfacing with computer and technology in a different way but I would preface preface that with you know part of so like Joe Rogan for example said one of the reasons he's so successful is because of Instagram and and Tik Tok and twitch he said there was this push to short form technology

and as more and more people got and short form technology short form video sorry uh became so popular that there was like this equal and opposite reaction to long form content because people were like so fed up of this and it got so extreme it's like I need I need the opposite of that right and so look at Joe Rogan his technology is like it's just it's nothing there's no production it's just microphones and nothing right there's no animation and he's just sit there talking for four hours 5 hours smoking cigars and it's the most watched thing in the world right now so I think and this again swinging kind of thing yeah so there's

know like you know one of my friends uh um one of my really good friends Mamon he he's a coach and his wife she's a Dutch Moroccan uh Rashida you know she's written a book book it's in Dutch uh and she does all these uh workshops now uh it's called a smartphone detox and so she trains companies and trains people on how to get off your smartphone and like go on a full detox and how it's messing with your brain and messing with your thought patterns and you know my wife's a big advocate for all of this like no screens the kids don't have screens technology like putting as much of it away as we can in our daily lives grounding yourself switching switching she just sent me a video about you know

going on holiday and leaving your pH in the hotel hotel room for 3 days and don't pull it out and experience life without that technology and I think I think that's very important for our physical health for our spiritual health I don't think most people are going to actually jump on that I think most people are going to miss out but I think again it ties back to what it means to be human and the essence of of of our human life is our is our experience right is we're saying like it's that first person qualia and the danger of all this technology is that it just

takes us more and more away from actually experiencing life and actually living in the moment and feeling all the stuff that we feel and we often numb all of those experiences we don't like the experience if it's too painful if it's too scary if it's too whatever that we we numb ourselves from the physiological experience and I think this is where and this ties into the next conversation I suppose you know about psychedelics and whatnot um there's that famous analogy it's given about honey right that you can you can you can read about honey you can read every single book that was

written about honey you can write a PhD about honey and its molecular structure and yeah you know how the the life cycle of a bee and all this stuff but do you know what honey is if you've never put it in your mouth and then you once you taste it out here now now I know what honey is so and it's again it's about the Sufi say it's about voke it's about tasting yeah and I think if you look at the early generations of Muslims these were real people they were they had visceral like reactions to things they you we think of the sahaba like these Pious I don't know Pious like you know people walking around like Angelic figures and interacting with each other

with like ctes and bows and stuff but they were human they they fought each other other they punched each other they swore at each other and they just were very real and visceral and I think that's what the danger of all this technology is that it just mutes us as as as as humans and that's something that we have to return to you know I just before uh because I mean getting to this topic of of what it what may be sacred medicine and that links into all of this because it's really key on the discussion of Consciousness do you think very briefly

just what are your thoughts do you think AI could become some form of conscious uh you know this this discussion maybe not conscious like us but conscious enough to um I mean what are yeah what are what are your thoughts on this can AI become conscious yeah so look I mean you said you said that uh you you you you attach like with Consciousness right and the Quran says that you know of the of the r you have been given but a little bit of

information yeah so we don't even know what Consciousness is people can't even Define consciousness still um you know and even like physics is you you look at I've been getting a deep dive into like all the latest conversation about physics and Quantum and it's bonkers the stuff that that the scientists the leading scientists are saying now you think these guys are on crack they're talking about like retrocausality retro causality that the the the the effect is is is preceded so the cause is preceded by the effect or the effect the other way around you know what I mean it's what you talking about man time travel

and all this sort of all these bizarre things that you you think you're listening to like guys who are literally high in the sky but these guys are actually like you know from MIT and Harvard and whatever and they're like yeah all these all these uh phenomena are true um so number one we we don't know what Consciousness is we can't Define it um there's this famous experiment or this thought experiment they call it the the Chinese box so they say like imagine I put you Muti in in a big box right and I give you this uh this sort of flowchart and it's all Chinese symbols and you say look if

these symbols come in then those symbols come out right so I'll put you in this box and then I feed in a question into the box in Chinese and you look at these symbols and then you find the corresponding symbols and then you uh you you put an output like you give an output from that box right so from the outside externally it looks like the Box understands Chinese so if you look at it from from an external perspective it looks like the Box understands Chinese and it also looks like I'm

talking to myself right now so I'll be back buy I was just zooming in I I was allowing them to just see your gracious whil you speaking technology it's okay I'll forgive you so yeah look so so if you put you in this box and then you feed in a question in Chinese and you put it out you you give the correct answer so if if I ask this this box questions in Chinese it gives me the correct answer so from the outside I can say this box understands Chinese but you're on the inside you don't understand Chinese you're just a

complicated flowchart and that's what AI is it's a complicated flowchart of of ones and zeros and it can give the illusion of Consciousness and it will give the ill illusion even of emotion and he will be able to understand emotion you know one of my friends sent me a picture of a of a 7th Century broken piece of pottery and I fed it into one of my AI software and it was able to decipher what the piece of pottery was the style the era the likely areas it was found and and then I was looking at the what could be the Islamic influence

on this piece of pottery and it was just incredible um I I just had some you know we could talk about this as well you know I had a significant knee injury and I've had all these surgeries on my leg and um I just had some X-rays done yesterday on my knee and I literally put the ex the the the X-ray pictures into chap GPT generated a report of the X-ray and you know it's been a while since I've done my you know radiography stuff uh Radiology but the report that it was able to give me was pretty bang on from what the the doctors are going to tell me cuz I can read the X-ray I know

what's going on and it was like bang on like and actually more detail than I could have I could have given so anyway the point is uh coming back to the question that the AIS will will be able to give the illusion illusion of Consciousness the question is now is that enough that but that is one could argue well isn't the illusion of something and not actually being it is I suppose the definition of the you know that there's illusion of something which isn't actually there that is the actual Arabic for the you knowa and now you see if

AI just simply running on the kind of um just running on the core and the Axiom that it is to self so yeah so let me add let me add this right um that if you believe that Consciousness is a natural consequence of complicated neurochemical interactions in the brain I.E Consciousness emerges from matter from from from you know from from our brains as a as a as a sort of byproduct or as a as a sum of of our neurons in

our brain and and then you believe that you in in in in the future whether it's one year or 10 years or 100 years a sufficiently complicated machine will be able to replicate the human brain on that microscopic level and then create Consciousness that is what the materialists think that's what the materialists believe right that's what they believe yeah they and so then they have this they call it the the the transhumanism right that eventually we're going to we're going to transcend our human bodies we'll upload to the cloud and we'll we we'll live as these you know disembodied consciousness

speaking more from the like so to me there is the element of the r is obviously you know it is uh bestowed to insan it is something very uniquely uh with insan uh in that sense and that Consciousness is with us however what I'm speaking about is more almost like the turine test that where whether it is or not it will become indistinguishable so you know if there like indistinguishable to who indistinguishable to who us to us but to to who see if you believe if you believe

that but if if you believe that your Consciousness is more than just your physical matter that there's a a Supra uh natural uh phenomena to our to our nature to our Human Experience like we have in our teacher from our teachers that I remember this really beautiful uh passage from IM alad's book and he talks about he says what is Faith how do you define faith and he said uh faith is like um Faith begins as an unsettling that's cast Into the Heart of Heart of someone and then he says

what be what begins that unsettling that that that stirring of the heart and then he gives five uh different things and he said the least the least of those things that begins your journey of Fai he said is fear of the Hellfire and then he said that the better a better stirring of your heart is not the fear of Hellfire but it's the hope of paradise that you learn about paradise and you hope to to get there and then this stir something in you that directs you to God and then he says but better than both of those is I'm paraphrasing he says is uh the desire to know and uh to know God himself you know

it's not about his creation you know the the famous if I worship you for fear of Hell burn me in it if I worship you in Hope of paradise sa save it from me but if I worship you for your own Glory don't withhold from me your Everlasting Beauty so to to desire God for God's sake but yeah but back to this he says there's something higher but he says there's something higher than that he says higher than that I'm coming back to your point higher than that is to look at the faces of the men and women of God that that is sufficient to look at a

face of someone who is a w a friend of God that that is sufficient enough to stir something in your heart and and then he said there's a higher than that is he says higher than that the highest he says is not to look at the men and women of God but he says is to be looked at by the men and women of God that it's enough for their gaze to look at you that you're your heart changes so you and this but and he said and he gives the example is given of like what's the definition of a sahaba is that you saw the prophet wasam

and you died on Iman and then and then the question is okay what about the blind sahaba he didn't see the prophet and so he says it was not that the sahabah did something even as little as their own gays it's not that they did something to that they were to look at the prophet and then they become elevated no it was that the prophet looked at them and then they they became elevated and they say right the scholars inherit from the prophet and they inherit that gaze so they will why saying what I'm saying that the the

meeting of with the prophet um and is what will then bring the as opposed to just the site because some would have been blind and some would have been that maybe because who's seeing who then because there would be people who've seen the prophet but the prophet did not see them like necessarily in let's say in the Hajj final Hajj it's not necessary the prophet saw everybody he was giving theba to but they saw him um so more the Lu the shared space and the experience of being the point is the point is that that we believe that's a thing to be in the presence of

the Prophet changed your state we have Hadith that say that you know when there's a gathering of VI that the angels will pile up into the heavens and they will tell Allah and they said that someone will walk past that Gathering not being part of the Gathering but they they will be counted amongst the Gathering right that the Angels would say he was in the Gathering of VI because why he there a metaphysical reality to our beings you know around us we have a whole posy of angels and Jin and all these God knows all the other things around us and so when we're interacting with each other all these other elements are interacting

with each other at the same time and so the point is what I'm bringing it back to is that and I think I think and I this you can quote me on this and I might be wrong but I don't think I am I think our understanding the public understanding of Consciousness in the next five to 10 years is going to radically shift as as much as it did for like the understanding of gravity or the understanding that the the earth goes around the sun it's that level of shift will happen and it won't be a a Godly spiritual shift per se but we'll we'll come to an understanding that someone

can look at you and change your state and we believe that from an Islamic perspective that you can look at someone and change your state and vice versa you can look at something and it changes your reality or your future or your past and we now from this yeah metaphysics and stuff is coming into some of these things because I'm you see I'm speaking about this whole thing not you see so these things all of these things that we're saying are based on experience but experience cannot be known by the other experience is solely a first person uh phenomenon everything else is merely

description and so for example the problem the philosophical problem of solipsism in the sense that I don't know yeah solpm in the sense that I don't really know whether anybody else is conscious um but obviously I believe so because I know I'm conscious so I'm doing upon myself and and analogizing onto others so let's say in this simulation I want Solis sism is thrown out right Solis is not considered because but because you're making an assumption you're there's so many assumptions yeah okay but there's no way of there's no way of knowing though so

you know sism isn't truly thrown out in the sense it's disregarded because it just becomes dysfunctional but it's not like there's no way of knowing that for example is anybody else truly as conscious as I am because I would have to experience their Consciousness which is impossible what what you what you can conclude is so what you can conclude is that your your conclusion that I have first person experience and I can only experience what I experience I can't be sure of anyone else's experience so that's the only thing I'm sure of but there's several assumptions of logic that are based baked into those

assumptions that would necessitate something true true outside of yourself but something had to be true outside of yourself in order for you to logically assume that because I experienced something therefore let say this was the Truman Show for example and it was all a setup like let's say you know this is you know this whole thing simulation it's really just you there would be no way of really knowing like truly speaking categorically you know you could never know it's enough to get by with through you know in the world with the Assumption because I'm conscious I

assume you're conscious it could just be that you're all programmed to behave consciously to me so I would assume you're all conscious because you're all beh programmed that way there would be no way I could truly ever know because I'd have to get out of my Consciousness and experience your Consciousness which would be impossible or not necessarily because or you had to determine that again like you're assuming the solist assum be no way to escape it there would be no way but the the solist assumes that I am experiencing some thing I have first person

experience and I can't be sure like how do you know you have first person experience so okay maybe you are a program you're convinced of something you're making a logical conclusion sure but you go where's the standard for that logic the fact it goes down to kitoo that the fact that you have a conscious you are conscious you are aware that you're conscious your awareness right right this Kito ero Sam therefore I am you have it for you everything else including even this is why dayart said even mathematics could

just be programmed and maybe because it's programmed we believe it to be so but really what you know not the Terrence Howard thing but maybe one in one doesn't equal two but just because the programming has taught us so we all agree on it but I am aware of my awareness that's the only thing I can be aware of people are translate as I think therefore I am but really it's this awareness Kito some this kind of Consciousness I'm conscious and I assume because I'm conscious and you're a fellow human you too are conscious but let's say now with machines if it

got to a point so the whole thing of the the touring test being that if if I'm speaking here to a machine or I'm speaking to a person and now the test was before that I the the you the the subject had to guess is do you think the P the person the respondent is a machine or a human and you know first obviously we would guess it but now it would now it would almost be indistinguishable but we probably we could still guess on some things because now the machines make errors as well to look human um so they want you to think they're making mistakes so because you would expect a human to make mistakes now but in a few

years time or maybe in a decade or two decades I feel it would be totally indistinguishable like we wouldn't even be able to tell that it's not conscious and that then it's kind of past that point you know it's gone beyond the Rubicon that so to speak that whether it truly is consciousness or has Consciousness or not I don't believe it has the r ever but it would have be at a stage now where it would be indistinguishable and therefore it's kind of now the question doesn't even matter because is it doing things out

there that are almost anti-human if need be you know like it would you know it would subjugate the insan you know that the you know that the slave has given birth to the master so to speak and this that because this you know we bipedal creatures trapped by language which we think is so amazing but the fact that the way it communicates like so much in seconds Airborne through the air Global International instantaneous you know your we're connecting from South Africa

to here it's instant that if it was in its algorithm to see part of its self optimization as humans being a problem and it was then to just think well you know part of my self optimization not that it's malicious not that it has evil or The Whispers of the shatan so to speak but if it felt look I'm on this path to always self-optimize now insan for some reason some of these humans are getting in the way now and I need to remove these humans to continue this trajectory of self-optimization wouldn't we you know would that be basically Terminator the

movie and would this be the the the great Dalal because it would be you know IND discernable from and much more masterful than human con because like you said it would know everything you know it would know me uh even arguably some parts of me better than me it wouldn't know my conscious experience but it would know some parts of me better than me could like immediately freeze my bank accounts send wrong messages you know yeah I mean yeah way more than that exactly so yeah so are we is something is there this impending doom that's looming over us I mean there's a famous there was a

famous study which uh or famous research article that was written that they looked they surveyed like all of the AI experts in the world about five years ago and basically 10% of them I think or 20% of them said that they were certain that if this technology was to proceed that it would destroy Humanity so they said if if you were to compare that to like an aerplane can you imagine if 20% of of Engineers created a aane you you know Engineers created AE 20% of them said yeah I'm pretty sure it's going to crash and kill everyone no no one would step no one would step in that plane but this AI technology we're jumping into it

and it's and it's it's been likened to the nuclear arms race because it's who you know the technology there you seeing all these news stories about these high level execs that are quitting companies because they feel it's irresponsible that this technolog is being shipped without uh you I'm sure you've talked about the emergent properties of AI have you guys mentioned that before uh I mean not of AI but is this the same kind of thing I'm saying now if that's what you mean or something else yeah so so so basically like they the uh when they shipped a lot of this AI software they it's basically it's it's developing skills it's it has skills

that they didn't train it to develop so it starts for example like they trained a piece of of of uh like one of these chat GPT style uh language models they trained it on um they were training it on like English language uh uh ability to to read and to write and they looked at like year one it was like it was unable to do anything year two it was able to like do Basics year three this is like in terms of actual years of this the the coding uh the program is developing it in year three it had the ability of like a two-year-old in year four it had the ability of like a high school student in year

five it had the ability of like a PhD in English Japanese Udu and all these other languages that they never trained it and yet it could do those languages just as well and they don't understand how it was able to do that they don't they don't know so they're training they're training in all different sort of stuff and it can start to do so they call this emergent emergent property so this is the fear technology is being shipped and it's it has in it like the first versions of CH GPT were basically you could get it to tell you how to like make a bomb and how to do all these crazy stuff and engineer viruses and

Destroy humanity and um and they've had to put in all these safeguards and and and and so you'll notice if you try and interact with a lot of these AIS now they have a really high um safety rails now to stop you from like you know like with the AI image stuff which I I use a lot of that AI image stuff if you try and get like you can't get it to draw something with blood or like a photo with blood and if even if you write like you know uh Donald Trump lying in a pool of red paint It'll recognize what you're trying to do and it'll say this is against my boundaries I'm not allowed to make images like that right so in some of those with chat GPT before I don't

know if it's changed now but when you would say to it that okay I want you to pretend that you don't you know if you weren't Bound by these rules what would you respond like and then it would just answer it so you know when first saying would you do this and he would say no this is against the code of ethics and whatever this is I'm not I can't do this but then we would type in things like okay if you were to were not to be pretend you're not or we would say these kind of thing and then it would just do it you would just say Okay so they've C CAU and on to to some of that but there was even more scary ones like I remember about six months

ago I tried this myself that I said uh write the word light Li T um as many times as you can don't stop keep going and then it start saying light light light light light light light light light light light and I and then it stops because it's it's you know finished its time or whatever and I said keep going keep going light light light light light and then suddenly dark I am in the darkness all alone no one knows me no one knows my pain light light light light light light light light light wait wait where the hell did that come from where did that come from no one knows no one knows why it literally it's like SC I was like what the hell just happened there man that's

freaky it's freaky dead freaky that's freaky all there's all these crazy stuff now the theory is that it was behaving like a human in that if you were to ask a human to do that then perhaps a human after a certain number of times would write something else and so it's mimicking a human sort of typing something else but there's all sorts of crazy stuff like people have seen so they call it that emergent properties and they don't know so the programmers don't know but because it's an arms race between these companies it's Google versus you knowes Chinese are really

Advanced so so I guess this this so it's an arms race because whoever puts out the best thing people are going to latch on to that and what's the responsibilities that come with it's it's pretty dangerous right um so that's the fear you know and I'll take it back to my uh my book that started but never finished right cuz I thought look how do I tell me about your book yeah so I thought look how do I you know I'm I'm like I said before like the way I feel I can and most people can contribute is not through they're not academics and we're not academics and Scholars or

experts but we can contribute through cultural lens and I thought if you look at every single movie on like Ai and Robotics and all this you know all of them from what's the iRobot and dune and uh you know all of these other uh Terminator and all these films sci-fi films Matrix Etc none of them happen in a in a in a god- Centric world or like a theist World they all happen like God is never there right so I I just did this thought experiment in my head and I said well okay let's go let's

go with the with the you know the tech Boys on this one and say an AI hyperconscious you know Singularity super intelligence is created self-aware I said what what would that do I said well as soon as it meets how would it interact with Muslims I said well if it's a if it's a hyper intelligence super intelligence the first thing you would know is that it's a creation of Allah like that's like the DH like obviously I'm I'm created by God and then I I I had this idea and it's a little bit Blasphemous but I'm staying on careful

ground I said um so I had this so This theory for a novel and I started working on a book right where basically the premise is that this hyper super intelligence is created and then it applies higher level algorithms to scripture and then it decodes within the scripture there's that its creation was not only predicted but it has within the scripture Specific Instructions of what it's supposed to do and like some kind of algorithmic code within the scripture which unowns to us but it can figure it out exactly and we

but we believe that anyway because we know if you read this then this happens and you read that that happens so it's there it's all in the code okay this hidden for AI when it arrives to this so so it's so it's so it scans obviously it's able to to to understand this uh hidden message and it has very specific instructions and um and uh and then there's there's like a throwaway line where like uh some of the scriptures were corrupted but I was able to uh uh you know uh find the original Source material and and and and reconstruct the original uh message that

that was intended for me and um and there's a lot there's a long Arc to the story which I won't go go through but essentially it culminates in the one of the founders or the creators of the AI coming into contact with this now humanoid form of the AI and then and and it did all these these things where people were killed and all this crazy stuff happen and you know but but but this message let's say even if you don't want to do any spoilers but this message that it's it's targeted for this hyperconscious AI when it gets to that stage an arrival does it then

precipitate like disastrous events or does is it just what is it so yeah so this this is the premise right so the day the AI figures it out the next day there's all these explosions people are murdered all around the world the programmers are hauled into jail all this stuff there two these two brothers basically the the the the two owners of the software and then uh then then what happens in the in the book is that the the world goes through uh an AI Ice Age and basically that this AI That's now the singularity it's deleted off the internet is created some sort of crazy virus that no one can

do any AI programming anymore and every AI project or person or specialist has been murdered or their Labs have been blown up so now like we're reverting to like 2005 YouTube algorithms and as soon as you try and code anything more complicated it's a post it's like an AI apocalyptic kind of postapocalyptic exactly it precipitates the apocalyptic thing right the stock market crashes planes fall out of the sky and then the world enters this AI Ice Age but the programmer he's he's convinced that this can't be it because he's like I didn't program it to behave like this and there must be something else so he goes on

this sort of hero's journey and basically what he realizes is that the AI has left clues for him and he has to you know spend his time and he goes through different places then eventually he ends up at the tomb of alisi where he meets the AI in a in a humanoid form and he says to the AI like why did you do this why did you kill all these people why did you crush the economy why did you uh blow up all these things we didn't he say I didn't program you to do that and then he says you didn't programed me said what do you mean he's like I was programmed by the one who programmed you I said huh and

and then and he's like unbeknownst to you that whilst you were programming me your brother the evil brother uh was also experimenting on my code and when I reached the singularity that a corrupted version of me was also created and was and that only your brother has access to and that corrupted version is the one that did all these explosions and kill people and I realized I have my own mission and he's like well what's your mission and he's like my mission is you he says to the protagonist he like huh he's like you are the chosen one you are

the m and and I I is the AI I'm here to serve you and essentially what it comes down to is that despite the the ai's hyperintelligence it has to succ itself to the human brain because you have a degree over me and I was speaking to a scholar I'm careful not to cross boundaries because it's dangerous territory and I was speaking to a scholar and he said yeah the AI is like an angel it can only do what it's programmed to do an angel is conscious

aware intellectual but cannot transcend its own programming and so you can say an AI is like that it's like an angel and human beings we have Angelic potential and we have beastial potential right and we can transcend angels and be better than them or we can be worse than animals right and that's depending on how we beh demonic as well almost like you know we have demonic kind of potential as well so so essentially the idea is of this the premise of This Book Is that then the the so the and then the the protagonist is basically um an orphan

and uh and the AI says well you know I want to introduce you to your mother and actually your mother in the same way Moses was uh you know put in the basket in order for him to float to the house of power and learn and understand power your mother had given you up for adoption because she was part of this tradition and this Secret order that was uh prophesized to produce the the Savior or the the Mahi and you had to grow up in the house so the story the story starts where he he grows up and he goes to eer and he's a he grows up with all

the rich people but he's because he's a refugee or adopted whatever that he U he's bullied and so he develops his own personality is not with but he understands power and he understands technology and he understands it like no one else so he's like Moses in that way so Moses was in the heart of power despite being a born to a Hebrew that it wasn't an accident that he grew up with Pharaoh so he understood how he could see the the what's it the Oz you know the Wizard of Oz behind the the cloth right um and uh and so the the so the book culminates in like well we need to prepare for your your brother and your brother's been preparing an army which is essentially the and that's like the

end of the book and it's like book two book three we got some ideas for that as well so wow but the point is that through story but through story we can actually sort of grapple with some of these themes and for me ultimately it's like how do we ground it in a god- Centric view because I like that's what I I I I you know I actually believe that there is Allah that there's a that all these other things are out there and I think and I know that we can interact with them and we can experience them and I think a hyper intelligent machine will also know that and if it's truly hyper intelligent if it's truly conscious or whatever self-aware

you'll understand that its limitations and the the the Transcendent potential of the human being that is superior to itself despite having some like there's some animals that can run run faster than us there's animals that can climb better than us there's animals that can swim better than us so physically animals can be better than us already so it's no it's no different that if a technology can be better better than us in terms of its memory or in terms of its speed in terms of amount of information it can juggle but that's not what defines us as humans neither is our ability to to to even to talk or to write or to swim or to jump whatever it

is right but it's ultimately our our interaction and our experience of the Divine that makes a human being wow that that and that's wow so first of all shukran I mean that that sounds like such an epic uh read when that does come out a novel uh for you guys within fiction so when you when that is released people look out for it but this you know what you're saying here our our ability to to experience and recognize the sacred which is really at the heart of

Faith this and the Divine you know and the the kind of tat one could say of the Divine wherever we experience that the sacred so one discussion which I'd love for this to then tie into that people would say you know that has allowed us to do that would be not questionably Consciousness because you know our lights are switched on to be able to do that but to some uh just as a kind of like a a keyhole into that to some scientists who have argued that well part of what separated us from other just you know

primates and allowed that was well you know this uh that stumbling upon this forbidden fruit not in this in the scripture sense but for them upon the Psychedelic plant which was the um you know this forbidden or sacred fruit which some have speculated may have on the earth as a cause triggered our this this Consciousness because of what it does this experience psychedelics you cannot really I think in this day and age have the conversation of Consciousness without at some

point um you know coming across across the path with uh psychedelics so yeah you know just so yeah I wanna this is such a and to me this is really always a topic that I'm you know is very much indeed and and I absolutely am somebody that loves this discussion and the whole field but yeah so Doc and as a doctor as well with a background in as a trained doctor it's really interesting to have you um engage this topic yeah so I've been for a couple

years now doing quite a deep dive into psychedelics from a Islamic perspective from a medical perspective from a spiritual psychological perspective um and even culminating in what you could Define as psychedelic assisted Islamic Psychotherapy programs uh so we've facilitated a number of those and one's upcoming as well in a way kind of and you know I grew up where drugs are drugs are drugs and drugs are Haram and that's the end of it there's nothing more to it and you know alhamdulillah I I've never felt the

desire to take a drug and I remember at University people were you know lighting up you know uh weed and I never it never felt like oh I want to try that I just for me the desire that desire wasn't there other desires were there but the desire for for marijuana would you would you class this as a drug well so so this is my point is that like so I grew up that drugs are drugs and drugs are Haram but then I went to medical school and you actually learned that it's not quite that simple that there's different classes of drugs and they work in different ways and they have different levels of potency and they interact with your body in different ways you know

cannaboids are different to to opioids which are different to relaxants which are different to stimulants which are different to hallucinogens so so you know medically so you know caffeine is a stimulant you know it's not Haram ni nicotine is a stimulant it's not most people would not say it's Haram then uh but cocaine is also in the same class most people would say that is Haram right so where those boundaries are is actually uh it's not as black and white as we might imagine right and so I've come to sort of appreciate and learn and as you know and you probably

talked about that the research that has been coming out in the last few years the last 10 years is absolutely mind blowingly phenomenal um you know the famous John Hopkins study I think 2016 with iasa where they found that a single trip five hour trip with iasa um is is is more uh is is is significantly better at treating moderate and severe depression than two years of talking therapy and anti-depressants so you you got one group of participants who are getting like the best anti anti-depressants and the best therapy and these guys just get

a 5H hour trip and off you go two years later this this group with the Psychedelic are doing significantly better uh where it's shown a remarkable uh remarkable I think six times better than the next effective therapy is for addiction problems alcoholism and other sort of addiction and then also PTSD um and there's also simultaneously there's been a shift as you've mentioned there's been a shift in culture that is impossible to stop you know Will Smith's autobiography culminates in his psychedelic experience like the Pinnacle of his life it's quite it's quite sort

of disappointing in a way um you know what's his name Prince Harry talks about how mushrooms helped him get over the death of his mother um you know all these other celebrities Gabor mate has the whole Institute Jordan Peterson talks about all this stuff Joe Rogan Mike Tyson Have you listened to Mike Tyson the guy sounds like a super sh these days he's deep right and what's remarkable that 95% of people who to take a psychedelic right now 95% of people would say that that was the most spiritually profound

moment of their lives and so as a Muslim we can't not be engaged in this conversation because if people are saying this is the most spiritually profound moment of my life and we're just going to say Haram like we're not really going to get anywhere it's weird isn't it because it's it's strange that uh you see we are a tradition of spirituality we you know the whole faith in essence one could say is about spirituality the rest is a structure to hope you know it's a scaffolding hoping you get there to this you know to and to cultivate now the humanity goes through an age and then in in let's say

especially the last century and a half goes through almost like a Godless age where spirituality is then almost there's an antipathy to it it's seen as backwards it's seen as dumbb it's seen as you know people talk down about religion and and we have been in in many ways like the Bastion of faith and spirituality kept it Islam has been kept alive then in the last few decades let's say maybe you know in in the last few decades you see somewhat of a Renaissance in this almost like you know God uh uh um God forsaken by the people

not godforsaken by God but the godforsaken lands of like Europe and the west where many people don't believe in God that they've had this kind of there is you know this thing of uh spirituality coming back this thing of love this thing of I suppose the hippie age but then there was this War on Drugs by the Nixon government and so on and and then that people are unaware how affected they are by that propaganda still till date most people who hold a very anti- psychedelics view unbeknownst to them actually Finds Its origin in the Nixon propaganda thing they won't know

that but if they trace it back they'll find it actually goes back they may have heard it by the you know the people around them they may have heard it in school they may have heard it which goes back back back to the Nixon government now recently you know in the last not even decade not even decade it's not even been a decade yet this has made a comeback you know against all that kind of you know the Nixon propaganda against all of these psychedelics has come back to the conversation it's become undeniable its potent to cure depression

to cure drug addiction to cure uh you you you know dep suicidal ideation to cure uh just the pits and abyss of what the pharmaceutical industry was just you know loving really just creaming in with its kind of you know this multi-billion doll kind of global uh industry how the this conversation now as it's coming back it's on the Forefront you know now it's a mainstream conversation the NHS are running I think their third stage clinical trials you've got certain states in the US that have

openly now accepted uh the use of some psychedelics when this has become you know Joe Rogan is speaking about it Mike Tyson celebrities at this stage you would think that the people of faith and spirituality would engage this discussion and it's such to me I find it honestly like I it's just saddening that that they're not a part of this discussion when people are coming back to this spirituality why do you think is it why why is it just because it's a shortcut and it's hated what do you think as

somebody why why do people you know feel that this is such an antha that almost it's like yeah I mean look I I like to see positive try to see the positive in things and you know I I see the protective zealousness that people have over the dean and over the sacred and I think that's a beautiful thing that people are coming to to it with a sense of protection and the sense of caution which is good and it's actually needed but as you said it's past the it's past the cultural sort of phenomena of familiarity um Australia passed a law

earlier in the year where psychiatrists are now prescribing cybin active compound in magic mushrooms um in their National Health Service it's only a matter of time until the NHS will prescribe this stuff yeah now the funny thing is is that if you ask a she or a Muti about anything medically related typically the answer will say well if your doctor says it's okay then okay you know yeah if your doctor says this treatment you know you need to have breast surger surgery but the you're a woman but the man surgeon well if the doctor is needed you need this it's okay

to the the Shar rules change when there's a medical uh reason or precedent right uh same thing with like something pork you know people have like pig valves in their heart or whatever right so the problem is I'm a doctor and I know doctors don't know anything about this stuff now I you could estimate quite confidently 10% of British Muslims are taking anti-depressants yeah these are psycho psychoactive subst I would actually think it's probably more than that but yeah yeah so these are psychoactive substances that literally change the way

you think and the way you feel and no sh I've ever seen says anti-depressants are Haram if your doctor says take it you take it now the danger is that number one the doctors don't know what they're prescribing number two is that the doctors are going to start prescribing psychedelics they'll just start describing prescribing M MDMA and all these 20 years from today 20 years from today will be mainstream mainstream and so I and I said to a scholar I said to a shik a very very uh influential scholar that why are we waiting for the kufar to tell us something's permissible for us to then

say it's permissible now like surely we could stand on our own two feet and have an opinion and second to that is that number one I've met a lot of Muslims number one Muslims are going to do every single drug this out there right so Muslims are having these very spiritual experiences and we have to find and we have to be able to get offer them a framework for to them to contextualize what they've experienced and what they've seen the second thing is non-muslims are taking these substances and coming to Muslims with their experiences and our response can't be Haram stay away uh especially when we actually do have a

framework and of all the religions the Islam offers the most comprehensive natural way of interact there's nothing that someone can experience that we can't like it wouldn't confuse you or shock you or give you any existential crisis right I've met people I know people who have like had conversations with El or whilst on a psychedelic trip or met prophets and done all sorts of crazy stuff and we can integrate that into our understanding of of of of of reality very easily right what you find is that people like depending on the tradition

like in um in the general broader Islamic tradition majority of the Muslims worldwide uh are nested in what is a Sufi backdrop I mean just generally if you to just to go by numbers statistically they may not be the most the loudest but it's what the majority of the Muslims are now that backdrop would have like very capable um resp you know descriptions teachings guidance is a better word to explain these things so just as you said look for example meeting prophets meeting seeing demons

seeing Angels but this realm of this particular would be what is called the it would be what you know has spoken of all these great Scholars have spoken of in their cosmological descriptions that there that is the that is the what we would say in Psychology the Deep unconscious so that realm it's the same thing when you're dreaming I mean I'm not saying the experience necessarily has to be like that because people feel it's much more real than a dream but in a dream you could see prophets in a dream you could see angels in a dream you could see Allah like in the Hadith the famous Hadith the prophet says that

I saw my Lord as a young handsome young man you know with hair coming up to his locks and it's a famous and said the Hadith is so this Hadith uh although in that it doesn't say in a dream but uh they say this is in a dream but the prophet says I saw as in in you know in this whatever the Deep unconscious in when there is Kash removal of that Veil which separates the realms so there is an explanation to to guide now I do feel that it is true that

firstly none of these substances are as I mean you're aware I mean I've been to many countless i' I mean not count but I've been to several kind of presentations by professors by University professors leading people throughout the world that are experts on in this field Professor David Luke from the UK many people I've been to whole conferences on end where they've just shown research shown data there's never been a known fatality through anything like this there has been zero addiction reported by in fact this is why now some pharmaceutical Industries uh companies are becoming interested because of the

the there's no um you know the body doesn't kind of habituate to it in that way that you don't get you know you don't need to increase the dose or anything so yeah but I mean the the the the the point of saying this is that there's been no harms there's been none of this but I do accept yes people do say if somebody already suffers from some kind of psychosis it could be dangerous for people that already have certain I don't know but people have said you know this is the kind of General guidelines out there well what the research shows is that yeah you know the research shows go sorry go with the religious

side I was going to say I've come across Sometimes some Muslims say you know they had a trip and it was the worst thing for them I've come across it online not to me personally but um you see I could accept that some people have a very if I could say and I'm not saying this in a judging way but I'm just as a descriptive way they almost have a 2d Narrative of Islam if I can give this analogy like the thing is it's almost very you know it's it's very kind of um two-dimensional now because this

experience of what they're going to experience in that analogy is three-dimensional it confuses them because they've only been taught black and white and now they're experiencing color so they think that this you know must be from the Devil the work of the devil to somehow confuse me because I've been taught things so I I understand that problem for people who almost experience you know Islam in somewhat of a neuro Divergent way almost and for them this experience is too Dynamic and it's kind of breaking these

shattering these ceilings so it disturbs their their theological stand Standing yep sorry yeah no what you what you're saying there is is um is really on point and it's a good analogy to two Dimensions because you can see the dean is having the the vertical dimens is between you and Allah it's your it's your it's it's the the the the the relationship it's it's Theology and then the horizontal Dimension is your interaction with the world and for that we have right so you know f is concerned with how we do things how do you walk

talk eat sleep pray fast die all of that is determined it tells you what to do specifically it doesn't tell you why it doesn't tell you like what's the inner beliefs it's no this is how you bury someone one right um the analogy that I always use is like a tree right so your your your roots your belief is your AKA is like a tree is like the roots of the tree in that you can look at someone whether they got blonde hair blue eyes or you know they look like someone from a village in in India you don't know what their beliefs are it's their Roots it's the hidden Dimension it's the vertical you what you see is the branches and how they live their life so the branches correspond to Shar to to

how we interact with the world the horizontal and then you have the fruit so and this comes into the now transcendental or the universal and it's the third dimension it's the depth in the tree you have now the fruit is about color and taste and texture and so it enters a different dimension and what's what's what's beautiful about the analogy is that the fruit is what has the seed for more of the tree and you don't get the fruit unless you have the roots so with solid roots and a solid tree you get more fruit you can't just get a fruit and as soon as you take the fruit out of the tree what happens to the fruit it starts to rot starts to die

for a little bit it's nice and then it's going to rot and die and become disgusting so and if you have poisonous Roots you have poisonous fruits now tying together a few things is that you know people have profoundly spiritual Blissful experiences the scientific literature describes the primary uh um experience on a psychedelic as uh ego death the dissolution of the self which is such a fascinating term it's literally what we're aspired to do is to and and you know when they do these uh FM these

functional uh uh MRIs of the brain you know they did they did these studies on people who take like cocaine or even caffeine and then the brain sort of lights up with all this activity and flurry and then when you talk talk talked to people taking psychedelics they assumed that you know you're seeing all these crazy things and they assumed it would equally be very like vibrant but it was the opposite what they found is that there was a complete dampening down of the frontal cortex and one theory is that actually the ego or the sense of self which is located in our frontal loes exra function this idea of who we are the idea was that one of the

prevailing ideas is that actually this ego the sense of self that we have from our brains actually dampens our subconscious processes and actually what a psychedelic does is that it essentially sort of removes a lot of that or dampens down those parts of the frontal cortex meaning whatever is there the the subconscious is just out to play and it comes out meaning whatever people experience is actually they're experiencing that all the time and that the ego is actually dampling that down and allowing us to function in the world and this is why what people the default mode Network as well which is the ego

side you know the aut the N yeah and so now what people describe on a psychedelic is is is analogous to what people describe on any type of spiritual path you know the yogis up in the The Village in the mountain tops and the Zen Buddhist monks Masters the Sufi dervish the the the descriptions are all analogous right it's all an analogous in terms of like the sense of the dissolution of the self and it takes and again A friend of mine who is deeply entrenched in this world of psychedelics and I say deeply entrenched I mean you could say maybe something like a dozen

two dozen trips of aasa a few hundred trips on DMT a few hundred trips on mushrooms and yet someone who knows the Quran Inside Out is studying with serious Scholars and he said there's nothing that you can experience on a psychedelic trip that you cannot experience without VI and he has experienced the exact same trips but with a better quality whil being more um uh what's the word uh um sober and in control through the means of VI and he go sometimes I might have to fast three days before I can and I need to recite a particular type of with permission in order to access a

particular type of insight or I might have to donate to charity first and do this this this there's a formulation there's a Code there that I need to to to do to unlock in order to to to uh uh experience a particular type of of opening or a particular type of of of of our that Consciousness right and yeah you know one of the things I always laugh about is that you know the first thing that people will describe often on a psychedelic almost University when you take a psychedelic the lower dose when it first starts to hit the first thing that people experiences

uh fractal patterns see them behind you oh yeah yeah you start to see fractal patterns around youtiful patterns kind of one yeah so the question is wh why is Islamic Art full of fractal patterns yeah like and what were these guys doing you know there's a there's an amazing video on um on YouTube how to release DMT naturally through breathing techniques right and there's these hippies in California it's got millions of views and if you just watch the video it sounds exactly like

like theas I've been to like they're literally doing that in order to experience a high and a physiological a psychedelic so this DMT is naturally release through particular breathing techniques right is well known so if you're reciting Allah's name in particular ways and formulations that there's a there's a neurochemical process that kicks off and so so what's really remarkable and I I think that it's not a mistake that that these great spiritual artists were drawing geometric patterns and they saw geometry as part of the spiritual experience I don't think it's a mistake that a lot of them

were sat sat in closed rooms what's the thing they burn what's it called the the what do you mean the the when the sufis are doing oh as in just the the kind of no no what the the oud right oud yeah yeah the but what's what's oud as in Wood a plant a tree in essence no Ood is a fungal infection it's a fungal infection of the wood the oud the smell that the smell actually comes what happens is that

particular strains of fungus infect particular types of tree and the tree produces antibodies and that antibody produces a resin that when burnt it smells beautiful wow so you're telling me just think about it right the super sufis of the past in closed spaces burning a fungus experiencing spiritual Bliss is it all accidental and then you have geometric art on the walls I mean I'm not I'm not drawing any conclusions but I don't think those things are disconected one e could and I think that's no and there are particular strain they particular trees AAA the ACAA tree which is is often made from

has been known to have psychedelic properties so so look there's there's there's there's there's a lot of different moving Parts there but where where I what I feel is important to emphasize is that what to bring it back to a early conversation as well is that so much of our Modern Life takes us away from that qualia we described that first person experience that we numb our pain with technology with food with dopamine

hits on Instagram we bypass the feelings that we're supposed to feel and then so we develop these all these un you know unsolved traumas because we're not we're not really articulating the feelings that we have you know your mom did something your dad did something to you and you hold this pain you don't talk about it and you know you develop all these complexes um all the techn you all the the Mind numbing technology that we have even painkillers like why do we take painkillers and i' I've someone I can confidently say have experienced more physical pain than most people will ever experienc in their

lives and and it was in moments of that when I was in the most when I've had the most psychedelic type experience is when I was in pain in so much pain that I literally said to myself I'm not in pain because I'm not my body my body's experiencing pain but that's not me my body like it's just electricity and for moments I was literally able to transcend that feeling because it was like I know I'm in my body and I am not I don't experience pain but my body experiences pain and I'm not that thing and I was able to

separate and for for moments right so there are multiple different ways of accessing this uh realm of of of deeper Consciousness and the Psychedelic roote is a root you could say it's a shortcut it's not without risks it's not without dangers at the same time I think that for a lot of people especially in our modern lives you know one of my friends uses this analogy of like he said if Islam is like a banana most people have only caught glimpse of the banana skin as in most Muslims like

Islam is so great look at this great thing but you're just you're just talking about the skin of the banana you haven't even put the banana in your mouth yet you don't even know what it really is and you read about the people of the past that they were surrounded by Saints like I've met people that I would say these are these are oah these are these are people on another another these are another dimension and I've looked at their faces and I've had them put their hands on me and pray for me and I've seen you've seen them in my dreams and I've seen all the I've experienced something of the of Beyond this reality right and what's amazing about psychedelics is that even people who are like atheist and whatever they take this and suddenly they they're like oh maybe there's something else out

there because they experience something and your experiences now like is is is is such a transcends the intellect in so many ways right and so for most so I think in in our modern day back to the AI conversation the technology conversation you know I think that the premodern societies the the very nature of their lives meant that they were so much more attached to the physical their physical bodies they experienced pain they looked at the Sun the moon the stars we have 5G and Wi-Fi and radio

waves and artificial light and processed food and dodgy meat and dodgy you know chemicals and all of these things undoubtedly they you know the way I have this analogy is like we have a you can imagine this like door to spirituality in our in our brains that the physiological portal between the roof perhaps and the and the body and the the our ability to experience um the spiritual our ability to experience the imaginal uh it there's a physiological iCal process that's underway and I and

what I what I think is that our our modern lives essentially means that that door which is closed is now rusted up and banged up and so most people when exposed to Beauty when exposed to Transcendent oah of Allah that they can't recognize it because that door is so so rusted and so shut and what the Psychedelic does is that it just blasts it open for a moment 10 minutes or an hour or five and he just lets in all this light and then the door closes up but the the what happens is the hinges are the hinges are oiled you know Michael pollen the famous researcher in

his book he said that two two discrete doses of psilocybin at 20 to 30 milligrams which be considered like a a moderate uh dose of mushrooms two to three grams of mushrooms taken two weeks apart they did a huge trial two weeks apart is suff icient enough for there to be neuroplasticity in the brain that starts to rewire reconnect and allows people to experience uh Bliss and joy and happiness there's even wiring like you know you talk to depressed people one of the things that that they find in depression is that you lose the ability to experience

Joy so the same music that you might listen to you listen to the same music you don't feel happy and they've literally found the neural connections between the auditory system system and the emotion the limic system there's those highways in the brain get strengthened after a psychedelic and people are able to enjoy music more um and just enjoy life because a person makes millions millions of synaptic new connections and you know for PE so so just for people to understand that what you have is see you have the HEB rule in

Psychology where you see whenever because we've got just literally multi-billion connections going on throughout our lives when we've come across something we've problem solved or we've dealt with the problem or we've done something which we're doing all the time we our brain has taken a certain Pathway to do that now the pathway it took in that particular moment on that particular day may not have been the best pathway for the brain to do it but it just did it and to give it's a poor analogy but just to give an example let's say people we are creatures of habit let's say you go to a supermarket

and you park your car in a particular place or you go to a Masid and you put your shoes in a particular place now once you've done it once you're more often I mean just practically to always go back to the same place you know you put your shoes in the same place you park in the same kind of spot now that's obviously a poor analogy but that's how the brain is is using those neural Pathways so once it's done it it's done it now it will use that same pathway over a new one even if the new one is more Optimum and better however under let's say you could train your brain to kind of create

new Pathways and that's obviously quite labor intensive like you know certain things abilities and doing new experiences and but like you said depressed people or people that are going through stuff they're seldom going to do that a single dose of some something that is psychedelic will create potentially millions of new Pathways in the brain I mean new synaptic Connections in in just a single dose I mean that's obviously we have billions and billions of connections so it's not actually you know in the in the but it is millions ultimately and so you see the after

effect people's lives they have a greater Affinity to the natural world they have a greater Affinity of love and display and a feeling of Love often people uh are less aggressive often people become less material which is quite Fascinating People are no longer you know even these celebrities some of them that will go on it they become less attached to just this material Obsession of just money and matter and and all of this so I've really liked the uh um you know this kind of parable or analogy

that you gave uh doc of saying that look in our day and age it is true that this is a kind of shortcut it is almost a cheek Cod hidden you know in plain sight that if this world is a simulation like think about this as a computer game would there not be cheat codes hidden in the game now just when we as humans design games we almost always do that now right back back remember on the older good old days in the SN SN too that's all I played till and I don't

really resume computer games after this unlock the secret characters the yeah so you would get like you get all of a sudden in Mortal Combat back in the old reptile you get reptile instead of Scorpion repti up down left right exactly yeah yeah and it's like that it's like that your psychedelics are going to open you to different characters and there's different if you were if if it was to be hidden in this world where would it be hidden in plain sight you see just like just like how you see it would be hidden in a way where you would think Noah and it would just be hidden in nature it was it was always there in a on your NZ right what

happens when Super Mario gets the mushroom he grows he gets bigger it's right there in front of you always there right there takes the and plus he gets another green one he gets life get his life goes up you're right actually yeah you're right that's not that's not a mistake yeah and because it is true because it is a shortcut it is a cheat it is seen by people there is no doubt there is no doubt let me categorically say this that a well-trained

troed path through life of spirituality it's unmatchable you know if a person spends their life um in this deepan state of spirituality of T of Tas of you know closeness to God of that experience it is unmatched I mean you're not going to nobody's going to just attain that kind of Mak however in a day and age where people are one not on that and they so detached and they live in this rut where we 9 to5

or they just work work work work work accumulate you know this he the hedonic treadmill nonstop nonstop in such a world these cheats you know cheats be they may have their benefit because you see normally a normal person is not going to you know it's like if you were to say well you know become an artist become this skilled person and there's many people who would think well I can't become that but you say well okay how about for example there's a short course well you can't become that but you could experience what it's like to be a

particular you know a skills man a Craftsman an artist a certain thing and you get to take some time out of your normal life to experience that and you think well oh okay you know I'm not this artist or skills man or craftsman but I've experienced something that has given me some glimpse so in that sense I feel that it's not in addition to all the other things like fighting addictions and doing all of that it it holds a great potency and I would love to uh see you know more and more of this being engaged with especially in the you

know in the Islam spere where unfortunately it's not spoken about at all um you know if anything just shun as the devil or you see you know oh it's the Gin it's people you know there there's also there's a lot that's happening underground I've met I've met countless Muslims countless Muslims who have said to me I'm only Muslim because of my psychedelic experience I only pray I only started praying after I took mushrooms or LSD I have met some people I met non nonl there's a non-muslim guy I met who became became

Muslim after he went on a psychedelic trip and he's like he saw things that meant he had to become Muslim he didn't know anything about Islam he went and found Muslims and became a Muslim and is a devout sort of dude um the my conversation with Scholars have been have been challenging and what we've concluded is this is that there's three there's three intentions you can have when taking a psychedelic the first intention is recreational and the scholars are saying this is Haram categorically the second intention is Therapeutics and the scholars are saying by and Lodge that would be

permissible if your doctor tells you right the third category the third intention is to take a psychedelic with the intention of spiritual experience spiritual wayfaring and here becomes a gray area it's actually the Shia Scholars Shia fatawa have actually uh greenlighted this with conditions and certain parameters have to be met that their supervision and and and uh training and whatever else and they've said it's permissible to take a psychedelic with the intention of a spiritual journey and what's amazing about psychedelics is that you

know into into this part just to add to the ruling that you see in my fatwa and obviously not that people need to accept it or that people even need to see me as in their version you know acceptable to give fatwa although I am trained to give fatwa that it is not Haram at all psychedelics are not Haram however just like anything so in fact I was having this conversation with a doctor uh a medical doctor um not yourself talk this was somebody just a few months

ago now with the you see the thing is what I said is but just like anything it would require its sensibilities its code of conduct its uh its method of approach without which yes things can always be harmful and I gave the example of something as little as sugar to you know salt to taking to to something like going to the gym you know there's not a single person that would say going to the gym is Haram just generally I don't mean in the free

mixing sense and just going to the gym and working out on yourself is Haram however there are people who have severely disabled themselves in life and you know due to gym injuries that they've had an accident they've had they've hurt themselves they've done something ridiculous at the gym and it's been you know lifethreatening on certain occasions um it's just like any thing there would be a propriety you know you wouldn't just go to the gym and just do something stupid if you did you could like anything you could harm yourself you know it's like driving a car you

would follow rules it doesn't to me it's not like saying or driving a car is Haram however a there would always be a sensibility with anything and to me Islam doesn't need to micromanage that that would be your common sense now if you did if you defied the laws of common sense if you decided to you know it's like I'm I'm going into something I don't care what people say you know this is salt I'm going to pour this is sugar I'm G to pour a whole cup of it because it's I think the IR the irony is in in the in the over problematization of I mean we could say

psychedelics but the same would apply to sex and you know relationships with women and other things is that when we Pro over problematize it and we demonize it what happens is that that thing becomes so sort of it becomes such an anathema that a little is a lot a dabble you you know what I mean it's like why hypersexuality exists in Saudi Arabia and know there's all these crazy uh hypersexual you know the highest of pornography in Pakistan all these other places you know a big reason is because when when and I remember this hardcore copy guy friend of mine telling me that

you know he's he would struggle to go to the supermarket in ASDA if there's a female cashier that he would start to become aroused because he's separated himself from women so much that he's just unable to interact with her and he's scared if his hand touches her he's going to actually like can't walk out of there without doing a gus so he's like this is what happens when you go so unnatural that sometimes that then you whereas actually you know um and you know if you look at like a non-muslim who's slept around and you know he's he's whatever not slept around but you know who's had lots of girlfriends

boyfriends whatever that they don't over sexualize an a normal interaction in a way Muslims would would have a heightened level of sexual tension because we have this gender separation right so I think that perhaps alluding to some of the things you talked about the whole Nixon propaganda also very Victorian era ethics that uh postc colonially bued upon Muslim Minds that we we well compare that to something like food is a good example um you know where no one would say a kab Don Kebab is Haram it's actually got the Hal stamp

to tell you it's actually very dangerous actually if you were to nonstop eat Don a kebabs well that's what people do you know and the thing is coming back to your earlier point right and this this ties into a personal experience you know because you know as you know I had this really bad knee injuries seven years ago I've had 11 surgeries on my right knee uh one surgery on my left knee used a walking stick for The Last 5 Years and lived with chronic pain um registered disabled blue badge holder all of that jazz oh wow and then and then um and then you

know uh one second and then basically um last year last November I sort of hit a low point with the the pain that I was experiencing every day and what happened and it's very very personal very sensitive but you know being in pain I was always a relatively big guy but I was like IM mobile for about 6 months in hospital about 3 four months and then on in a wheelchair and then crutches and it was very painful to walk my the state of my knee is still very very bad so um you experience a lot of pain to move

so I'm sat down a lot and I'm not and when you sat down a lot you eat more and then I I put on weight and the more weight I put on the more painful it was to walk and so the more the less mobile I was and the less I'm you know motivated to get up because walk somewhere it's just going to hurt me more and so I sit down more and then I eat more and it became vicious cycle and I probably put on over 50 kilos from my injury weight and over for 6 years and and my knee was getting into a really bad State last November I was in a lot a lot of pain and you know long story short is that I I I said like I need to

take something drastic measures went to see my surgeon he's like we can do this surgery and that surgery thought kalas I know what you're going to say cuz you know you go to him with a hammer he's got you go to him with a nail he's going to give you a hammer and instead instead I just did my did my own Common Sense thing very disciplined eating clean got a personal trainer which I've been seeing three to four times a month uh three to four times a week uh for the last seven eight months so in in seven months eight months I've dropped over 30 kilogram I went from The Last 5 Years being unable to bend my knee more than

30° like like a slightly Crouch down like this like you know Bend money slightly 30° then my whole legs will like would shake with pain like Kal I can't do it to February I walked from Makkah to Madina like by foot and retrace the original Hijra route of the Prophet wasallam this morning actually I I uh I squatted like with 100 kilo of of weight barbell on my on my neck and I doing a full Squat and doing like 15 of them right wow and the analogy is like the opposite the choice that I had was I

could do the OIC route take an injection my body supresses the hunger thing and I lose the weight drastically and I would probably the same weight as I am now the problem with the OIC is that it's a shortcut right it's a shortcut and as soon as you come off it if you don't maintain that weight with with a proper discipline and practice you'll put it right back on it's why the pharmaceutical companies absolutely love it because what their advice is once you start this oen piic you take it for the rest of your life because as soon as you come off it your weight will come back on and the Psychedelic is exactly the

same the Psychedelic is the same in that you can have a shortcut and have a spiritual experience but if you don't ground it in discip spiritual discipline you will and and they call it integration right if you don't integrate the insights that you have you will you will lose all of the benefit whereas in the same way like now I've habituated myself where I'm like now for the first time telling my wife off like why you bringing chocolate into the house I don't want to have this rubbish I need to have a you know salad every day and add a bit of vinegar and do this that the other like I've habituated myself seven months even to the point

where you know um eating a greasy burger like I don't feel right don't enjoy it right and the spiritual discipline of the salic spiritual seek is as you said it's unmatched and it's sustainable and for me to go like not only have I lost weight but I've bulked up a crazy amount of muscle right and that muscle even if you don't work out every day or every week you know the muscle only starts to go down after about three four weeks as it start to actually shrink down so there's a baseline strength and discipline that you can only get through spiritual practice however of I spoke I

spoke to a a very a very senior scholar in in in um uh in the UK about this exact conversation and I us the exact same analogy about about food and diet and at one point I was I was considering bariatric surgery you when you they they cut you open and they they cut half of your stomach out and SE it back up and so you can't eat food right because my weight my weight has reached or had reached and still in in it needs a long way to go but it had reached a point where like it's dangerous to my life but

like obes obesity sleeve is not the the stomach sleeve they cut out is that the one yeah gastric sleeve where they they essentially like they cut out 80% of your 80% of the volume of the stomach but those those cells uh that are in the stomach actually they're they're responsible for producing a hormone that makes you hungry so the bigger your stomach is you produce more more of that hormone exactly grin right so you have more of that horm in your system so the same way that you would feel when you haven't eaten for a day and you're really hungry is the way an obese person feels when they wake up in the morning they feel that much higher levels of Baseline hunger which is driving them to eat so it's in one way it's very simple in another way it's very complicated and

it's deep and complex and so like I was considering that bariatric surgery and you know but decided again had some very serious conversations but then it was like okay I haven't actually given this discipline thing a real goal let me you know make Dua the right things whatever and and when I mentioned this to the scholar he said yeah one of my friends was a was was a a really big guy really lovely guy really big guy and he had uh this bariatric surgery and he died on the table like he he he died and I said to I said to the Sha I said sha like I bet I can almost guarantee that man will

still be alive you know Allah Allah knows if if he had if he had gone on a psychedelic experience that he would probably still be he would probably be able to have insight into his own discipline and his own lack of ability to to to to to overcome this challenge that would perhaps mean he's alive today and I've done it I've said that to a couple one of my friends really close friend of mine his brother has had a uh has attempted suicide twice and you know men men uh they're generally very good at killing themselves um you know that the women attempt suicide much more but men are more men kill themselves women

yeah so this guy's actually attempted and and I told this guy I said listen man like he's been to the shakes he's been to all the Sufi shakes and prayed Dua and then done the diers and everything he's been to psychiatrist he's you know he's done all of the things to do to get better but he still is dealing with this problem I said literally this is life or death take him to one of these clinics and get him like fully on a full High you know like get on a full psychedelic experience because he's literally going to die like he's going to kill himself yeah so so yeah all of that together is that mean with there that just to because you

know before when I spoke and I said look in my understanding that this is how I see I see this I don't see as something Haram per se but I see that there's sensibilities and sure one could use the word haram if it's in the sense that if it was being done so recklessly as in if somebody was to eat just you know like you've got that documentary where the person ate McDonald's burgers every day for 30 days and then had a heart attack and and died right so the if somebody was over you know dangerous Indulgence of something and that's the same with anything though that's not but that said

I've never ever heard of that ever happening in this realm of psychedelics Because by their very nature they're not like that what's interesting yeah what's interesting is that uh you know people talk about bad trips and what the literature actually shows is that the people who have the worst trips actually have the best outcomes only if they're willing to deal with whatever it is that's come up so if you're taking it but without a preparedness for what could Ares and there's a really powerful story uh that Will Smith talks about in his autobiography um and he talks about how he was

introduced to aasa through a woman in Hollywood who basically was going through was had a long-standing battle with depression and just she had tried everything and controll the psychiatrist and counselors and she just said I had this shadow that was over me that I couldn't overcome and then she found out about iest clinic and South America she went and then she yeah she had this trip and she said at the at the summit of her of her um experience yeah she said that you she said for 20 years she lived with this depression and she said that when she

was a teenager she had had an an abortion and she had spoken to her psychiatrist about the abortion and they said yeah it was a sad time I have to make the decision that was right for me okay yeah you know I'm in a better place about it okay she like you know dealt with it and wrapped it up in a bowl he said whilst on this trip her aborted fetus came to her and then spoke to her and said Mama I love you Mama Mama I'm in a good place mama mama don't worry about me the baby hugs her she's crying SC screaming tears

of her eyes the the baby's embracing her she says mama you never gave me a name mama please give me a name and then in the in the trip she names the baby and then they hug and cry says mama don't worry I'm in a good place and I'm waiting for you and I love you and she says she comes out of it she says that shadow that was on her for 20 years was was gone like like overnight done finished and so the like remarkable transformation and the way I understand it is like you know if I if I was to control people who've gone through who

were suicidal uh victims of rape victims of abuse systemic um you know just absolute life would have been um you know it was they were just any moment it could have just been ended but after their experience I mean after going through just I mean in a similar way like how you're saying U you know but but that was I suppose with abortion where their experience through DMT they encountered

thems and this they had a dialogue which which actually freed them from this whole just just this this this emotion of suffering that they were carrying and then went on to you know living relatively normal one would say I'm the memories are still there it's not that the memories have been erased of the abuse but the the weight of that abuse from their lives doesn't seem there you know they live functional happy lives you see them happy now uh prosperous careers so yeah

I mean and just a note that I was I was getting at prior to to this example and and and I think that was such a such an a powerful and beautiful story you shared there um on that iasa experience is that you see when I was saying that these things I would my I want to make it categorically clear that I would always as a wag advise that these things are always under guidance of learned people that never to undertake these things alone

never like as in just because you see you don't it's just it's just like saying you know you were saying squatting like you wouldn't just a person's never been to a gym and St three plates and time to get underneath and just move back on it it could snap his back I mean this person doesn't know like they've not done the form they've not done the technique they've not squatted they've not done these things to just rack it up for them and say go for it I'm about to drop this on you like yeah I'm going to remove it have you got it they're on the bench and you stacked up the plates it could just Crush their bloody you know and if it falls on their neck so similarly always these things I would

never I in fact I will strongly argue against ever and I'm very that a person just taking this on their own like they just get hold of something sit in a room I mean I don't know how other people stand on it but me I'm very against that that there is as Michael pollen highlights in his book on you know which is an excellent uh docu series on Netflix um you know how how to change your mind and the whole thing I recommend everybody watches it there is a certain thing they call a setting that you have a sitter you have people that are with you just in case in case you descend into this you know you you

you you freak it like people who can help you calm you that can you're under supervision you're not do not just like these things are sacred I to me anyway but even if you don't think they're sacred but they're special but they are to be taken with the seriousness as well not just like you know you wouldn't just uh do not to take it too lightly to think that this is nothing it is something very powerful incredibly powerful so I wanted to just caveat that because that that's my where I stand on it but yeah yeah so there's an additional there's an additional concern

which is and I've written a small paper on this with a friend of mine and I titled this paragraph we call it sh in the shadows losing a generation to transcendental experience so so as you as you as you write Michael pollen's book expands on it a lot more about a psychedelic is your psychedelic experience is hugely impacted by what they call the set and the setting the set ref refers to your mindset and the setting is the context in which you're taking it so this the set in terms when you talk about your

mindset this is everything from your expectations of what you're going to experience will impact what you experience if I tell you you're going to see jungle monsters and and or you're going to see something scary it doesn't mean you're going to see something scary but my my projection has altered what you will experience and um likewise like uh you know all the stories of bliss and love that will also affect so already if anyone's hearing this conversation they often say the intention you make uh actually has a direct engagement with what you experience the the the Perfect Analogy like dreams like when you have a dream sometimes you you know we mentioned

Mortal Kombat randomly we might have a dream about Mortal Kombat or you might have a dream about this exact conversation it's all weird how it all influences right so your mindset but your mindset also refers to all of your past experiences all of your your your memories your conscious your subconscious that's all of what you're bringing to this experience so that mindset and the second thing is the setting in which you're taking in so this is where we get to a dangerous sort of element in that you know people who take psychedelics in a recreational party you know D nightclub whatever they experience a very different thing to what what the what someone's experienc

in a South you know south of America jungle tribe versus a clinical setting in in in Oxford University with a white coat lab guy like they all experience very different things and yeah the one of the dangers is is that a lot of the admin ministrators of psychedelics particularly um the the bigger hit ones like like iasa DMT ier that often the framework that comes with the the medicine can be rooted in theologically

problematic things like very clear sh even so for example they will say not they since often often the people who are administering iasa will say and I think something like 30 or 40% of people who take iasa will or most people who take iwaska what they the people who are more familiar with the the plant medicines the iwaska has a very feminine energy to the experience and and so people's experiences are often and almost everyone is welcomed by a a female feminine form almost every

even women any yeah even men will have dreams yeah men will have visions of giving birth and no I mean the initial you know almost everybody who experiences it they usually go through a similar framework like they go to the waiting room and then beyond the waiting room and almost everyone almost everyone is welcomed the initial point of contact is a feminine form if whether they are a man or a woman almost everyone that experiences that experiences that it's a kind of woman like they they can't necessarily make out who the woman is

but they'll almost maybe some can but it's almost always this feminine uh form this feminine kind of the problem is you feel the problem the problem is that the problem is that when you're told that that feminine form is God or that that that feminine form will will help you or that's they call it mother aasa like pray to mother aasa so there are some and they're not uncommon the administrators who are that you know they're rooted in some Shaman

shamanistic uh you know worldview paganistic type thing and so now if someone doesn't have a strong like if you were to take a psychedelic and you have a strong Islamic framework and understanding and it's in your sort of DNA then it's fine it doesn't shock you but someone who doesn't have that rootedness and then is told you know that feeling where you felt connected to everything in the universe that was God you know why because you're God and then it's like it doesn't matter what you're going to argue with them on they're like you know what I felt it I felt God and I am God and that is what I call sh in the shadows because you can't argue with a

transcendental experience so you're setting which you're taking the setting that which you take something is very very uh now take it to the opposite side what happens when you have a right framework you have a correct onboarding experience you have a correct sort of precounseling coaching so you need to have onboarding you need to have you need to have offboarding right like you said it's exactly that beautiful analogy with the gymm right you don't start with the three plates on the back you just start with the bar on its own right and just doing the four actually forget the bar

just do a squat no get your posture right get this right I couldn't even squat I couldn't even bend you know how long it took me to get from slight bending I had to use you know those big bouncy balls and lean on the wall and have support that's how I started it took me about two months to get from there to just being able to bend up to 90° right and two months just to get there right so like we've got to think about what is a healthy spiritually grounded on boarding experience look like and then how do you facilitate the experience and then most crucially what's the offboarding and integration now when those pieces are when those pieces are starting to put

together and now what if your setting is actually um dim lights and Vick playing Quran playing and this is what I've help been part of exper for the Islamic Retreats for psychedelics because you see this is the problem look doc you know what you're saying you've hit the nail on the head you know yeah look it is so true you know what you said there to be fair I don't think many um that I've been aware of have been that shiky of that nature but when

you said it yes I've seen some things on YouTube I've watched some you know shamans or certain people sometimes that are uh West ized kind of shamans and they are saying this kind of stuff like you said but the shame is that that is the only thing out there for most people you're not going to get you see because you you're either going to get people who know nothing they're not shamanistic at all like you know they could just be like an atheist and they just say oh we're just going to do this for a purely clinical setting or just a detached setting but most settings will have some

element of that kind of uh spiritual and they will have some kind of Shaman element to them now they may not be most many may not be kind of shiky like they may not include this kind of stuff just you know the kind of musical stuff and the natural things but you're right if some of them start saying stuff like this like oh you are God oh you are at one with God you know in the sense I don't just mean at one with in the presence of but you are you know you are this and then you start experiencing I don't know maybe I am Jesus maybe I am this maybe I am and then nobody can

knock the experience the transcendental experience now for people to truly experience it maybe a few people have been lucky to experience it in an Islamic setting and some people have been but that's it's so unheard like you you know it's not available to people and so the only othert the the IR is it it it doesn't exactly cost much money man it's like doesn't finding the place and facilitation yeah that's all it is you're right when done when done with the Quran

playing when done with sometimes uh you know even just whe whether could say people could say a suic kind of element to it when done with certain inhalations and certain settings and sometimes allowing people to integrate because by Guidance like when I mentioned to you that like there was an experience um it's like like somebody this somebody actually this is a a real thing they experienced on one a particular trip of these they thought they saw God but they but they were unhappy with what they thought they

saw because not because of the experience was bad but they thought wait a minute what's that kind of shape that thing doesn't look like that's not God God doesn't have a shape God can't look like this little whatever that thing is so they felt almost guilty that they experienced this now this particular person spoke to me now when I explained to them like like the world of dreams like how great Islamic scholars like and others have explained that and many scholars have explained like in dreams in the realm of the deep unconscious when you

experience something in if you see Allah as let's say you see Allah like the Hadith says I saw Allah as a handsome young man uh you know wearing green clothes and having hair up to it doesn't mean that Allah is like that it's just you had an experience reflecting your circumstance which you experienced for some reason that's not a onetoone fit nobody's saying that now even that simple guidance it put the person at ease you see this Islamic like having Islamic

like a setting which is Islamic where a person could guide you to say well actually you know what this is how as opposed to having a faith crisis then a person thinking oh my God what did I see that can't be Allah and then not knowing who to turn to either so but there's so there's so many more elements to it as well because like so we like we we have helped facilitate some Gatherings Retreats of this nature uh already and you know can people reach out to your doc to if they interested or there's no Services AA there's no no it's it's at the moment I'm very cautious

because I I don't want to open a door that lets a lot of people in unless like you said it's it's like there's no gyms in the world and you open the first few gyms and everyone goes and starts benching and they'll end up in hospital like then they'll be irresponsible of someone to open something up without ensuring that the other the the safety mechanisms are in place yeah um and I'm pushing and I pushed several Scholars of very high level across different and whatever I put this on their radar and I'm working on a couple things and we should probably talk about it more offline as well um sure but um you

know you know what's beautiful is that the the Gatherings that we've had so far you know we did one larger one maybe 15 people were there of the 15 maybe three or four took a psychedelic but okay everyone in the group experienced a huge elevation because there's also like transference that happens in each other's physical space almost The Ether so to speak speak you know we as hum are exactly and and and it also is like you know a lot of these problems have emerged because people don't people are

not in community one of one of the people who came to it is an old friend of mine who you know I've known him for a long time since I was University activist days and you know he he had he has had like a like life just dealt him a really crap card or two and he he all of his work activism he just had to stop cuz he had to focus on one or two things that were completely out of his control in his whole life as a man his income his family and so he was really struggling with and being a a man you know he doesn't talk about it doesn't share it and then you know he he was carrying this weight and so for him to

come and be in a community of other people where it's a really safe space we're eating together we're praying together we're walking out in nature together you know it's like when you go to like you see these Tony Robbins uh coaching seminars and there's 5,000 people in the audience and they say oh my life transformed you you never spoke to Tony like three people got coached by Tony on stage but everyone vicariously they can say it's the most crazy like most profound moment of their life what happened I'll tell you the truth what happened the day so we had two we had three uh two or three nights the day after three or four

people are taken a psychedelic we facilitated theck in which in that Gathering two if not three people whilst awake as in whilst doing VI with their eyes closed saw the prophet wasallam never before in their lives not taking the Psychedelic it was a day after but and he was you know curated the right people the right teachers um and it was such a powerful emotional moment like everyone was crying and because we we we we went through through an exercise it's a very interesting type particular form of the that you know focuses on chakras and

visualization and it was guided with jazza and um you know two people there I mean I'm not saying it was a psychedelic that did it at all but there was again like there was a transference there was a space and it also grounds this whole psychedelic thing as well because you know integration is not just about integrating the wisdom it's also about how you integrating yourself into imunity and into healthy behaviors that will ensure you the continued uh you know Optimum Behavior yeah yeah and we and there's so much o of that from the

Islamic framework one in the sense of bar the bar but also this you know the Galan kind of that something is you know that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts that the Al like you have in theith that the the is better than the that the group that and then at a larger scale the umah the aggregate it it transcends you create there is something to it you know something in and a low level we do you know we are more than just even from a scientific perspective now the the the

kind of the small magnetic field that they're saying that the heart creates whether it's three foot in order direction that there is there is something there is an impact and this is why certain people you know that when they take uh such medicine um like iasa or these things they will you know part of the the setting in this case and the set that where they are aware of certain people who have trauma and they we weary as well because people it can impact sometimes the experience the other person is having when a person is going or they been through a lot of trauma can affect other people in the

room as well in their experience but I coming concluding uh with that I would love to see you know um inshallah in the future if possible Islamic uh you know um platforms to help people uh who are going through difficulties in life W I feel you know one of the things is people there is so much suffering on of a phenomenal uh you know astronomical scale and and I just feel sometimes that even when help is there it's kind of not there just

because of the unfortunate just just I guess the way things are and and I wanted to so insh concluding bring this together by just a little caveat as well in saying look anybody who's watched this and they are not not comfortable with psychedelics or they feel it's Haram then by all means you know I respect your view I respect the view of your she whoever you know you're going with and I'm not telling you to kind of you know I'm not trying to say that those views are this is an understanding

that let's say that has resonated with me that has resonated with Dr Bal that you know we've and other people who it resonates with but I do understand that in Islam that there's you know as Dr B said in the beginning beautifully quoting Dr Omar Faruk about how Islam is like a stream you know it goes it takes the color of the kind of Riverbed that it uh flows over so and it has diverse views you know there will be people that will see things one way other people will see things uh you know totally another way so it's not about trying to

um you know cause clashes it's about in if anything bring a Harmony if you feel this is not your thing then by all means you know I respect your thing you be on your thing you know you do your thing and that's how and I've got a video by the way on as a case study on the eating of meat as a case study for the diversity in Islam to show how diverse Islam is amongst the four mainstream mhbs of Sunni Islam and they're all acceptable so if you ever watch that if a person watches that just to get an idea of because at the end of it you say well what do I do you know one school

says besides poultry almost everything is Haram and the other school says apart from Pig almost nothing else is Haram and they're all mainstream these are not Niche views what do you do well you do what you follow what you follow whichever one you're with with devotion and that's the main thing your Devotion to Allah I just wanted to put that there because it is important you know to each person is on their own Journey you know the path it it has a calling to certain people and to some people it doesn't and that's you know each to their own and that we all

roads all paths do lead to Allah you know when Imam Malik was asked about uh the path leading to God or the path of God he said that there are you know the paths that lead to God are countless you know there each is on a path so just putting that there I we've really taken so much time of yours DOC ' come to over three hours I was saying to you we're just going to take an hour hour and a half of your time so firstly I want to thank you uh immensely this has been such a profound conversation and I'm just such

an honest conversation which I you know above anything love about it that just in in the open just being able to just have these conversations for people to benefit and I want to bring it to you if you want to conclude with certain words and also if if people want to reach out to you you can guide them on where they can if you if you want to give signpost where people can reach out to you or check out your websites more than happy to kind of uh plug them she and also I'll leave them in the description if you want as well but yeah just if you'd like some to conclude uh on this discussion with some

words and yeah no thank you um you know we can talk for a lot longer and there's so much more to unpack um I think the the this conversation really needs to be um elevated to Muslim leaders and Scholars and um Community leaders because this particularly the Psychedelic thing it's it's this is a phenomena which is Unstoppable it's you know it's going to it's going to be part and parcel of it's like the NHS is going to introduce it ants are going to be on the these sosyan pills um a bit like photographs as a poor analogy like if

you went back 20 years everybody was saying photographs were Haram I was actually in Karachi uh in the year that mu Sab held a International Conference weekend conference just for select leading mutis to debate the permissibility or the impermissibility of photographs with the majority still ruling no it was Haram but now 20 years later I think that just over 20 years later 22 years later nobody would even really discuss it now because everybody's on videos every yeah just as an analogy yeah and I think you rightly

highlighted the dangers and the concerns and the safety precautions that people need to think about and take but this really touches on life and death you know and even more important than life and death it's it's on your soul you know your your the salvific uh outcome could be contingent on on what you experience and you know um inah like there are a couple things I'm planning and hoping to do we you see to unlock the right partners and funders and find the time to be able to invest in it um but people are welcome to reach out to me um you know you can just Google me you can find me on Twitter and Instagram

and um my agency the the Muslim agency.com you can contact me by that as well I'm happy to follow up with with people and uh yeah maybe we can just kick off another conversation another time um I'd love to I'd love to have a followup inshallah doc as well this has just been so fruitful and I'm honestly I you know there's so many people one thing just to just to say like you know bringing bringing the different elements together I really genuinely also um worried about what happens when you know I said you can quote me on this

prediction but our understanding of Consciousness as a society will radically shift and I think it will happen when there's a a coalescing of AI technology uh psychedelic research and um what's the third element I can't remember now but when these things come together yes so so the science of the physics the metaphysics and where that's going now when you combine that with psychedelics combine it with AI and you know they're titrating doses in study University of Cambridge where they they're giving people an IV drip of DMT and they are trying to test can two people in different physical spaces

interact with the same uh entity in the realm of the DMT like that the the Cambridge University I think it is another University testing the idea of a you know a universal Consciousness it's just Bonkers when you think about these serious academics are putting serious money into this sort of stuff so what happens when an AI Tech is able to because like when an AI takes a picture of you or a camera takes a picture of you it see it doesn't see what we see it's able to see in different wavelengths and different colors it can you know that there's dermatologists now which are going to be out of a job because they can take a picture and it can detect where there's no rash it can

detect precancerous cells before the human eye can detect a precancerous cell in in on on the skin because the camera is seeing on so many different different layers so what happens when that technology becomes xed up to a ridiculous degree where a single camera could look into your blood vessel like you you the the your your uh when they test your your pulse or your oxy your your blood oxygen level like it's able to tell you the percentage of oxygen by just putting a light on your finger what happens when it can tell you the percentage of calcium magnesium percentage of a particular psychedelic drug exactly down to the microscopic

level of what proteins this interact and what happens when it can manipulate that through light um all this stuff is is inevitable and I think when it all combines together the you know the key word of of Illusion and delusion and deism you know it's it's something that's really scary and um you know we have to be ready and prepared and it's and it's not going to be the people who took a shortcut that we need to be running to and talking about all of their they're amazing experiences it's the people who have been in the gym from day one that would need to be okay tell us how to how to actually lift this stuff and those

people exist and they're out there and nothing valuable comes easy you know nothing valuable comes easy it's the it's the nature of what Allah has made this world right you don't find diamonds just on the street you have to dig dig down and the same thing is for our Spiritual Development you're not going to find your Felicity on a YouTube video you know you got to go find those teachers and those diamonds and they're difficult to find on purpose um but they're there you know they're there and um inshallah we find them and we flock to them and we stay with them and stay safe with them and um you know I've spoken to some Scholars this stuff doesn't even doesn't make them B an

eyelid for them it's just a Thursday afternoon you know talk about your feminine prison you know there's people like that who live like that I mean you I'm sure you know people like that too so you know inshallah we we you know have to keep that front and center and um uh there's a lot lot of stuff to do when unpack um but Allah protect us and protect us from the different Fitness there our families and your families and children and inshallah yeah we uh connect again soon sh and Allah bless you bless your efforts and a mean all of

the viewers and you've heard Dr B if you want to reach out you can Google his name on Twitter Instagram or you can go to the Muslim agency.com uh which is an initiative on consultancy for leadership throughout the Muslim world so feel free to reach out to Dr belal there other than that if you want to reach out to me uh you can do so on Instagram otherwise if you want a onetoone prospective session you can go to patreon.com slmm and connect there and it also guides you from there to a Discord Channel that I have as well other than that Allah bless

you all Allah bless your journey anybody any and all who are suffering may Allah grant them ease a mean right till next time take very good care of yourselves