by Alia Shirzad

God hired me to do this job.

Or I volunteered first, asking how I could help and then he hired me. And he said that my pay for this job would be exactly what I wanted to see — that people will understand that happiness is their birthright and can be achieved in this lifetime.

May I ask your permission to speak, please. I believe that I earned a little humble place for my voice that is not actually mine, but His. I am here to speak about the Creator in a nonreligious way. It won’t be about religion as we know it, but about a system of beliefs from a scientific point of view.

My name is Alia, and when people ask me whether I am religious and what religion I am, my response is this: yes, I am religious, and my religion is Science of the Mind. And yes, this religion of mine has a Creator, a Designer. This is what I’m here to talk about.

The Science of the Mind and the Mind as an Organ

Is it psychology? Is it psychiatry? I see it differently. It is a system of beliefs and rules that govern your life to ultimately make it happy, outlandishly lavish, unutterably bright, and filled with meaning and purpose.

Terms like Consciousness, Superconsciousness, Subconsciousness, Ego, Superego, and the definitions of the Mind and the soul are commonly seen in textbooks, but a clear relationship between them is not defined or explained. There is no clear understanding of the hierarchy of parts. We are often using these terms loosely and without a strong grasp of what exactly each term entails.

It is surprising that over the course of my 13-year anesthesia career and all my experience in psychiatry, no anesthesiologist or psychiatrist could express clearly and fully the understanding of each of those terms and their relationship to each other, or give them recognition as a significant part of our psyche. How can you fix the whole if you do not know nor have a clear understanding of its parts? How can you fix a car without a clear working knowledge of its mechanics in relation to the whole?

Unfortunately, they do not teach this in school. It is neither in the curriculum for anesthesia nor psychiatric nurse practitioner schools. Teaching people to manipulate consciousness, it is, in my opinion, of utmost importance to concentrate on explaining what consciousness is first, and its relationship to the brain, the Mind, and the soul.

I do have to, however, shout out one name I know of in my profession pioneering this kind of consciousness research — Dr. Stuart Hameroff and his colleagues — but those like this group are a minority in the field.

The Mind is an organ. I am suggesting we start treating it as one. It has precise laws and rules by which it operates.

Listen to the verbs we use when speaking about the Mind: we can manipulate it, we can influence it, and thus we can operate on it, as we can surgically operate on an organ. We commonly say, “my mind is blank,” or, “I’m brain dead” when tired — meaning it can shut down as any other organ when overworked. When we say “I will cut you off,” or, “out of sight, out of mind,” we suggest removal, cutting someone off from our thoughts, memories, and experiences — manipulating, cutting our mind like we do organs in surgery. When we ask “what’s on your mind,” we suggest something can be placed on it or removed from there. Another example is “on the top of my mind” when prioritizing something.

Mind undergoes stages of growth and evolution as any other organ, and decline and deterioration of its function at an advanced age, most of the time. And if not, we say “his/her mind is so sharp.”

My job in the operating room as an anesthesia provider also gives me multitudes of examples of how it is material, an entity. As anesthesiologists, we learn how to manipulate and control the conscious state of mind — we have a precise time when to remove it temporarily and a precise time we invite it to return, like a physical entity. We can turn it off and on, make it float in between realms and different frequencies, manipulate memories, and control emotions as material things.

How do we study an organ? Let’s define it first.

An organ is a part of an organism that is typically self-contained and has a specific vital function.

An organ is a department or organization that performs a specified function.

We study organs by dissecting them. Where do we get organs to study from? From the body of a deceased person who contained the said organ. We can study the mind in a similar way and look inside, but in order to dissect the mind, its container, the ego, has to die as well. Only then could we get access to the inside, into the very deep and dark corners of the psyche, to see what is there, why it’s there, where it’s coming from, and whether we need to keep it in the same place or discard what does not serve a good purpose.

Imagine a surgical theater and a dissection of the abdominal cavity in progress. I hope our average reader has seen it in movies, shows, anatomy books, etc. Remember your first reaction? You can see the whole person from the outside and not even suspect what is going on inside the abdominal cavity.

In a surgery called exploratory laparotomy, we are set to explore the abdomen to figure out what could be causing a problem. The inside is an entirely different-looking world, with intestinal loops a few meters long, good and bad bacteria, blood, stool, food, vitamins and minerals, and even an entire functioning nervous system. In order to actually see the intestinal structures, you have to irrigate, wash out the blood, mucosa, and other organs to have a clear view of the structures. Only after lifting the superficial layer can you visualize the deeper structures such as the liver, gallbladder, the pancreas, etc.

It is the same when you open the mind up for dissection. We can use a special set of tools available to open up the mind, just like we would use a scalpel to cut and retractors to hold the view. In order to visualize deeper structures, we need, metaphorically speaking, to irrigate and suction out everything that obstructs that view and look at what is hidden in the dark, obscured corners.

Usually that something is the cause of the problem that interferes with life — something that runs the program and dictates day-to-day actions, thoughts, and behaviors that are out of control and almost impossible to correct on their own, even with very strong will and determination. I am referring to potential childhood traumas and events a person may not even remember happened that become the showrunners in real life.

Also, we need to look inside to learn and be able to see that there are definite structures and elements that our mind consists of, the organization of which is paramount. So this process of opening the mind and exploring it — speaking as an expert of both worlds, surgical and mental — through analogy compares to exploratory laparotomy. Let’s call it exploratory “mentalotomy”: a surgical procedure, an exploration of the mind with finding and extracting of the problematic areas.

Surgery is the branch of medical practice that treats injuries and deformities by physical removal, repair, or readjustment. This definition fits perfectly to explain what happens during our treatment of the mind. I call it “mind surgery,” because this treatment does exactly that: treats mental injuries (we call them traumatic events) and deformities (we call them depression, anxiety, PTSD, addictions — as they literally deform your life) by physical removal (we successfully remove them and substitute them with something better, most of the time) or readjustment (we readjust problematic areas to more suitable and desirable positions, views, and behavior) with almost absolute surgical precision.

The only difference between surgery on the body and surgery on the mind is that a little more cooperation from the client is required. Even in surgery, studies show that if the mind is not set for healing, they can cut open numerous times and yet the problem will come back. In bariatric surgery, 85% of the patients who undergo gastric sleeve procedures gain back the weight within a period of time. Why? Because oftentimes the primary reason for excessive weight gain is not physical but mental, and until doctors recognize that on a wide scale, they will keep removing organs and yet not fixing the root cause.

The same applies to autoimmune disease. The body speaks to you in this way. It cannot say it in words, per se, but that communication will show up as pain or other symptoms and conditions, such as fibromyalgia, asthma, or migraine, among others. We call it a psychosomatic representation of the problem. It is the body’s language to tell you: “I’m so tired of you doing this and this wrong to me.” What remains unhealed will inevitably repeat.

I like Jim Carrey’s definition of depression. He said depression is when you don’t accept what is, and when you are playing a character in life. Your body is basically saying: “I don’t want to play this character anymore!”

Treating mental illness in a traditional manner, psychiatrists prescribe pills to simply suppress, not cure, a symptom. For lack of sleep, they prescribe you a sleeping pill; for depression, an antidepressant. But how often do we question said lack of energy or desire to engage in pleasurable activities? Isn’t that what life is all about — pleasurable activities?

I had an 18-year-old patient whose mom was worried about her daughter going to college due to her struggles with mental health and being at risk for drug addiction, when her psychiatrist himself had put her on lifetime psychotropic medication on which she wasn’t showing progress — medication that ultimately became the reason her psychiatrist resigned her as a patient. That is how she found me, using our treatment as a last resort when conventional psychiatry failed her case and couldn’t put her on more medications after she was already on a series of antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, and antidepressants — when the root causes were developmental and existential crises. When questioned about suicidal ideation, she said: “I don’t feel alive anymore. I’d kill myself if I felt alive, but I don’t. I can’t even cry, and I’m completely numb.” How tragic it is to be numb to life at such a young age.

Still, don’t get me wrong — conventional psychiatry does have a role and may prove very helpful to some as a bandaid or a quick fix. But traditional medicine, especially psychiatry, oftentimes does only that, ignoring the root cause and providing only a patch instead of a true cure.

There is an eastern philosophy which says, “if you cut a branch, another branch will grow elsewhere on the tree.” The branch represents symptoms. We tend to treat one symptom with a pill, and then another symptom will appear somewhere else, creating an endless cycle until you look at the root and cut the root of the problem. Only then will you be able to eliminate or eradicate the issue.

That is what we do in mind surgery: we open up the mind using special tools such as hypnosis or entheogens, or both combined. We look at the darkest and deepest of the mind’s corners to assess the root — how strong it is, how far it grew into the psyche, and how extensive is the damage. Then, with surgical precision, we remove the problem and substitute it with a desirable outcome using precise techniques.

It is important to note that this process requires highly trained and qualified practitioners, masters of this art and science. Would you let your friend operate on your abdomen, or would you do it yourself? For the exact same reason, you should not and must not use these tools to open your mind or explore it without the help of a qualified master of this art and science. Not only is it a waste of precious and sacred material, but it could even be dangerous at times, wasting an unspeakably useful and necessary condition — the altered state of consciousness — which is a conduit to achieving what you want in life and removing whatever it is you don’t want. Doing this yourself would be akin to self-performing abdominal surgery and hoping for good results.

I’ve made it my mission to become a master of this art and science, so let me introduce and explain my vision for the new future of mental health, as well as introduce myself as a designer for your mind.

A Designer Mind and Designer for Your Mind

Let me introduce the concept of Designer Mind. Mind Haute Couture — the high fashion mind: clear, sound, bright, trendy, cool, and possessing all attributes of high fashion and contemporary design. The concept is the same: it’s not cheap, it’s an investment, but not only does it make you look good, it also makes you feel good.

Designer for your mind is everything that designer clothing, shoes, or accessories are for your body — giving you prestige, class, and status. And a designer for your mind, like Versace or Mugler and their designers for their fashion houses and the clients they dress and style, is a practitioner who upgrades your life, essentially becoming your stylist — your mind stylist.

As a practitioner, I am also “wearing my designs” myself, like Coco Chanel wearing her silk pajamas outside and starting an iconic trend. Looking back at my life, there was nothing that I wanted that I could not get, following the rules of the Science of the Mind. Coming from a third-world country, I married the man of my dreams, got the job of my dreams, had the child of my dreams, got the exact salary of my dreams, and own my dream home and dream office. I was able to achieve the attractiveness and physical and mental health I desired — the dream life as I imagined it. It was a divine intervention to give me this dream and idea, to make me do what I’m doing now: working towards the cause, generating funds for my mental health nonprofit to make this Mind Designer concept available to those who desire and care to earn access to it.

My clear mission is to remove the stigma from mental health and make sound, healthy, obedient minds fashionable, popular, cool, and trendy. I emphasize the obedient mind because, for most, it’s hard to control something that controls you (i.e., old patterns, traumas, addictions we described earlier).

I would like people to be proud of owning and wearing a beautiful, healthy, sound, clear, high-quality mind — one that makes them look good, sound good, feel good, and works for them and not the other way around. Just like one would be proud of wearing a designer item of their dreams, or one they desired to own for a long time. I want great mental health to be carefully crafted and designed, and in style. That is my goal, and thank you for helping me with that.

The Design: How Does It Work?

To explain the principle of how psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy works, I would use a metaphor of a nut in a shell. Imagine the brain as a nut, enclosed inside the skull (shell). I will choose ketamine — the only legally available psychedelic substance.

What ketamine does, figuratively speaking, is crack the shell and let the nut see whatever it can see outside of the shell. There is so much more to see outside, because inside the shell it is very restricting. Ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic by drug classification. It does what it is classified to do: it dissociates your mind from your body, showing the person — the nut (yes, we are nuts, no pun intended) — that the mind is a completely separate entity by itself, existing outside the shell. It has distinctive properties, and is an object. Your mind becomes an object for observation. You can observe what it consists of; you can observe your emotions, thoughts passing by, and retrieve the most impactful events, such as physical and/or emotional traumas.

I argue that you would experience significant difficulty observing and processing events and emotions while inside the shell, where everything is scrambled with no space or light to look inside the darkest corners. Under the influence of the substance, it expands the space of your mind tremendously — to the extent that you will be able to see events and memories that you may not even remember happened at all.

There is another analogy that I like. Imagine you live inside a house — a locked square box, even if furnished and well designed. But that is all you know. You only know what is inside the box. You don’t know that the outside exists. It’s the only world and setting that is familiar to you. Until you open the window and look out the door, you won’t be able to see that there is a whole, entirely different world — much bigger and more expansive than just your house, even if you live in a palace. That is what ketamine does for you: it opens up the door, gets you outside the house of your body. Then you will be able to see what your house looks like from the outside, or even take a bird’s-eye perspective on it and see how small even the biggest castle is.

One more allegory is a very bright example. Imagine you are watching a Formula One race from a stadium seat. You can see only a limited perspective — only part of the route and a few passing cars. You can’t see the entire racing circuit and all cars at the same time; you can only enjoy part of the full experience.

What ketamine does is take you on a helicopter ride — it extracts you from your limited-view seat, which is inside your body, and shows you the whole show, where you could see all the cars at the same time, all the people at the same time, and the entire stadium layout. How cool is that? As a result, you gain a more complete situational understanding and see the main players. It gives you a completely different perspective on your emotions, your past, and your life in general. It gives you a perspective on your future as well, but not at the beginning of the journey. With such an expanded perspective, you could build a dream future that is entirely your own, and differentiate the objective/critical mind from the emotional/irrational one. You will begin figuring out the patterns and relationships between all constituents of your own psyche.

I emphasize that you can only see and build your bright future when you clean up your past and all the unattended garbage collected over the years.

Entropy and the Mind

Ketamine increases the brain’s entropy — meaning, in simple terms, it breaks down the default mode, the pattern of thinking that constructed a problem and resulted in problematic behavior.

Let me explain the process of entropy with regard to your mind, applied here in two ways.

Entropy is one of the most important forces in the Universe. It is the force that breaks things down. For example, when a dropped vase is broken, it is in a state of entropy — pieces of glass are shattered, and it cannot immediately be put back together to become a vase again. You can glue it together, but it will never be the same again.

I love the Japanese Kintsugi philosophy, because their broken vases are glued back together using gold, and the golden cracks bring a special and unique beauty to the vases, adding value. Kintsugi philosophy states that a broken vase — like a broken heart — has a much higher value than a new one, since by surviving hardship it gained special, valuable knowledge and wisdom. And if cracks are loved and cherished, and repaired with pure gold, they only add beauty and character. That is where a broken piece becomes an art piece that brings the joy of imperfect beauty to so many. “Perfect imperfection” is the motto of this art form.

I’d love to apply this philosophy to humans, and consider that broken hearts are so much wiser and so much more beautiful when repaired the right way and handled with gold and special gloves — meaning handled by a compassionate and professional master, well versed in the art of mind tailoring and alterations: the designer.

One of Murphy’s Laws states that “left to themselves, things will always go from bad to worse.” This law deals with the concept of entropy in a different manner. This humorous prediction states simply that entropy is a measure of the disorder of a system. It correlates with the second law of thermodynamics, which states that “entropy must always increase in the universe, and in any hypothetical isolated system within the universe.”

The practical application of this law for the mental health field would say that to offset the effects of entropy, energy must be injected into any system. Without adding energy, the system becomes increasingly disordered. By this reference, the law explains why a kitchen or garage becomes increasingly cluttered until a cleanup (an injection of energy) is initiated. Unmaintained buildings or engines break down without a constant infusion of maintenance energy. The body will atrophy without physical activity, and a potted plant will dry out without water.

After years of experience in the medical field, and my own anecdotal research and experiments, I concluded — supported by literature — that the majority of autoimmune diseases are directly related to unresolved emotional issues. We call it a psychosomatic manifestation of stored and unprocessed emotional or physical trauma. Just to give an example: a few patients who have asthma had a drowning experience or, according to their parents, had an umbilical cord wrapped around the neck during birth, or some kind of serious choking or suffocation.

Traumatic events are marked by the release of a significant amount of stress hormones like adrenaline, accompanied by higher-than-usual neuron firing, and are stored as a memory for preservation purposes. This release of stress hormones and extensive firing forms a kind of scarring in the brain — a pathway, a shortcut to access information about danger for preservation purposes, to avoid similar events. When a person gets stuck on this pathway at all times, seeing danger when there is none, we call it the default mode. It is how problems are constructed, which may or may not result in problematic behaviors, such as constant worry about future events that might or might not happen (anxiety), or depressed moods that interfere with normal life.

That is why, following the analogy of Murphy’s Law, we must take care of our computer (brain), our engine (heart), etc. — to declutter, to clean up the stored files and clogged pipes, to avoid an issue from getting progressively worse. Just like our desktop files that no longer serve a purpose need to be moved to the trash bin, that is where ketamine plays an invaluable role: to shake up the brain, expand consciousness, get out of the shell of the body, and process the stored files and memories to see which ones no longer serve us.

The memories will stay preserved and intact, but you will gain a different, wider perspective — take the lessons learned, remember them, and finally move toward a brighter, unobstructed, and unclouded view of your own future. This is how you get the opportunity to reshape your life, remove what no longer serves you, and replace it with what you want instead. You will have the opportunity to become a Designer — a creator of your own future.

Remember, you cannot see the future without cleaning up the past. And this is where a Designer Mind practitioner comes in, to guide you through this convoluted matter of affairs.

I believe in the practicality and effectiveness of this particular approach to mental health treatment. The things that can be achieved using these mind-expanding substances are nothing less than miracles. It is the first time in over 200 years in the history of psychiatry that we can say the word “cure.” If someone believes in this method, has done their research, and is ready psychologically, they will overcome their fears, hate, inferiority, guilt, and every form and manner of defeat.

Two Paths Forward

There are two paths within psychedelic mental health treatment and the Designer Mind approach. It is greatly beneficial and effective for those in need of real physical and psychological healing. It is also beneficial for exploration, and under guidance, it can be used for creative problem-solving.

Working with this medicine presents a spectrum of possibilities for both healing and exploration. However, it is crucial to approach its use with awareness and caution. I think it is always important to be aware of the potential for adverse effects. But these adverse effects, or challenging experiences, can either be avoided or supported in ways that turn them into truly valuable experiences. These challenging experiences within an expanded state of mind are very valuable, and could be a silver lining.

It is also hugely important to have the right guide or practitioner — the Mind Designer who can support you in a healthy way through your individual experience and through the integration process. Because ultimately, every challenging experience presents an opportunity to grow.

Wishing you the best on your journey.