Hakan Hisim | Translating Xenoglossolalia: The Psychedelic Tricksters & Spiritual Liberation
The great visionary artist Hakan Hisim returns to InnerVerse! In the four years since he last appeared on the show, Hakan has completed a massive magnum opus called The Universal Transmissions Codex, a culmination of his lifelong fascination with xenolinguistics and the strange glyphs and symbols that astral explorers and psychedelic adventurers often report seeing overlaid on our reality. We also discuss the mindsets necessary for making it as a professional artist, as well as the technological language that are our bodies and chakra systems. This one is jam packed with wisdom!
In the oversized Plus+ Extension, Hakan shares a deeply personal account of his spiritual dark night of the soul, in which he found himself locked away in a maximum security prison in Turkey with no light at the end of the tunnel. In this tale, Hakan recounts his encounters with tantra teaching dream guides, the experimental psychedelics that turned his life upside down, and the incredible self-realization he achieved while in jail that ultimately transformed his reality and set him free. Easily one of the greatest stories ever told in any podcast, anywhere, so don't miss it.
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In this episode
Core themes
What Psychedelics Did and Did Not Do
Hakan traces his turn toward visionary art to one stretch of time when he found the work of Alex Grey and had his first DMT experiences, which pushed him from oils and acrylics into digital tools so he could show people what that realm looked like. Yet he says plainly that psychedelics did not make him a better person. They pulled him out of a bleak spell of devout atheism, but years of solo experimentation, Erowid trip reports and festival hedonism became an excuse to get high. He then quit everything cold turkey for four years of tutorials and effects work, and in 2012 his Serpentine Apotheosis went viral.
Creativity as a Spiritual Path
Chance pushes back on the evangelism that sells psychedelics as a cure-all and argues that creativity is the most authentic spiritual path, because translating imagination into form eventually demands that you drop an addiction, clear your head and grow healthier in mind, body and spirit. Hakan agrees and extends the idea to fatherhood, with two children and a third on the way, as the so below version of creation and a passage through the alchemical crucible. That is why he calls himself an alchemist: everyone transmutes matter and information, and being aware of it is the realization.
Alien Scripts From Childhood Dreams
Long before any psychedelic, Hakan spent roughly ages ten to fifteen filling journals with alphabets he did not understand, scribbled each morning from his dreams and folded into Dungeons & Dragons games with friends. When he later tried DMT he recognized the same writing, and found other visionary artists recording similar script. In 2013 his Tetragrammaton piece seeded the Universal Transmissions series, a brave swerve away from the style that was selling. A decade on, he says, the Codex Kickstarter raised nearly double its goal with no advertising, releasing a 150 page first volume of a planned 450 page trilogy meant to feel familiar yet alien.
Language in Geometry and the Body
Hakan's own explorations convince him that alphabets are cymatic imprints of real vibrations, and that modern scripts are watered down versions of older ones built on toroidal geometry. Chance connects this to the Oera Linda alphabet, whose letters can all be drawn from a six spoked wheel, and Hakan adds the Hebrew letters fitting together into the Star of David. Chance then reframes technology in its older sense as a specialized language, casting the chakras as a language you speak to your body through, something he learned doing biofield tuning. Hakan, raised around New Age chakra books, says the centers only became real to him through breathwork and meditation.
Making a Living From Your Art
Asked how to turn art into a livelihood, Hakan says early work is fragile, so lean on feedback from people who love you and ignore strangers. He advises against expensive art school, where he learned more from an older student than from any professor, and recalls a teacher warning that only two of thirty classmates would become artists, which is exactly what happened. Mostly, he says, just do the work: after drifting into cinema and animation back in Turkey, he ground past ten thousand hours before a concept art forum post opened doors. Chance names frustration as the trap, tying it to the sacral chakra, whose positive pole is satisfaction.
Quotes
“Using psychedelics and having these experiences, I don't think they made me a better person overall. They didn't.”
“Creativity is the most authentic spiritual path a person can engage in.”
“We always transmute some form of matter, some form of information into something else. And being aware of what we transmute and what we transform, that's the realization of being the alchemist.”
“From my own personal explorations and experiences, I've found that all of the alphabets and languages, like the alphabets themselves, they're imprints or they're cymatic imprints of actual vibrations.”
“Sometimes I think that our physical experience here, our bodies, are a way for universal consciousness to experience its own creativity from the inside.”
“Everything is interconnected. We all know this. We say this, everything is connected. And it's not just words. It is.”
“Frustration is a feeling that is part of the negative or stagnant aspect of sacral chakra energy.”
“I think that feedback and support from the people you love is most important because those people are the people who will not break your spirit.”
Hakan Hisim is a visionary artist and author whose work, including "The Universal Transmissions Codex," explores xenolinguistics and the esoteric symbols encountered during psychedelic and astral experiences.
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