A Deep Dive to the Chariot of Expanded Consciousness

At Biohacker Summit 2023 Amsterdam, David Flusberg Turned Trauma, Mysticism, And Memory Into A Vision Of Self-Reckoning

On 14 October 2023, at Biohacker Summit 2023 Amsterdam in the Netherlands, the artist David Flusberg delivered a talk that felt less like a conventional presentation than a confession carried through myth, ritual and autobiography. Titled A Deep Dive To The Chariot Of Expanded Consciousness, the session braided together ayahuasca, Holocaust inheritance, scuba diving, Kabbalistic imagery and artmaking into a single argument: that the road to expanded consciousness passes not upward first, but downward, through fear, shadow and the submerged ruins of the self.

Flusberg, an American artist, author and entrepreneur based in Bucharest, Romania, is an unusual guide for such terrain. A former New York management consultant who later built 1,600 apartments across Romania, and a certified scuba instructor whose underwater experiences have shaped his visual language, he spoke with the cadence of someone who has lived several lives and no longer sees clean boundaries between them. In Amsterdam, he made those fragments cohere.

A Descent Before Illumination

The central premise of Flusberg’s talk was stark in its simplicity. “Every expansion of consciousness,” he suggested, “is preceded by a corresponding process of contraction.” It was the kind of line that might sound abstract in lesser hands. In his, it became painfully concrete.

He described a trip to Latin America taken with his parents and his two sons, a journey that mingled family intimacy with adventure. On the final day, stepping away from family life, he joined a curandero for a private healing ceremony with ayahuasca beneath the forest canopy. Previous encounters with the plant medicine, he said, had brought gratitude, love and luminous connection. This time, the medicine took him elsewhere.

Instead of transcendence, Flusberg found rupture. He spoke of disorientation, alienation and a fractured ego, of a psychic freefall into what he called an abyss of negative energies. The experience was suffocating, claustrophobic, stripped of romance. A fatherly voice seemed to accuse him across dimensions, condemning his risk-taking as betrayal: of family, of duty, of well-being. Panic set in. Breathing became difficult. The shaman instructed him to kneel, focus into the darkness and chant the name of his grandfather while an exorcism was attempted around him.

The Weight Of Inherited Fear

It was here that the talk moved from psychedelic testimony into something more historically charged. Flusberg explained that he had been named for his grandfather, David, a man he never knew well, but whose psychic imprint remained powerful. His grandfather, he said, had lived in fear of water after an ominous prophecy in Eastern Europe foretold death by drowning. He had also carried the burden of survival after escaping wartime Europe by ship while much of his family perished in Nazi death camps.

Flusberg did not frame this inheritance as melodrama. He framed it as transmission. Trauma, in his telling, was not simply remembered but encoded, passed down as fear, guilt and an obscure sense of unworthiness. What his grandfather could not resolve had become, in altered form, part of his own interior architecture.

That insight gave the talk its emotional centre. Flusberg was not merely recounting a frightening ceremony. He was tracing the way ancestral terror can migrate into contemporary life, disguising itself as self-judgment, inhibition or a suspicion that joy must always be paid for. In his case, he suggested, those inherited energies had shadowed his love of scuba diving, art, exploration and public self-expression.

Rain, Panic, And A Vision Underwater

As he chanted “David, son of Abraham,” the ritual intensified. Rain began to pour. He collapsed backward, convinced he would drown. The shaman’s instruction was terse and devastating: only you can save yourself.

Then came the image that anchored the whole presentation. In the midst of panic, Flusberg saw himself leading his two sons on a deep scuba dive to a sunken submarine. Inside or beside it was his grandfather, wearing prayer phylacteries, submerged yet serene, a scuba tank on his back, bubbles drifting from his mouth. Flusberg signaled the familiar diver’s question: is everything okay? His grandfather returned the okay sign.

The gesture, simple and underwater, carried the force of absolution. In that instant, Flusberg said, the boundaries collapsed. His grandfather was himself; he was his grandfather; his sons were both of them. Fear yielded to continuity. Guilt gave way to forgiveness. The inherited script was revised not through argument but through symbol.

When the ceremony ended, he said, he felt lucid again, grounded, peaceful, smiling. But the experience did not immediately become meaning. For months, he admitted, he filed it away in his “hyper rational brain” as one more extraordinary episode waiting to be understood.

Ezekiel’s Chariot Reimagined

Understanding arrived later through study. Flusberg described enrolling in an online class on the Kabbalistic tradition of the Merkava, or Chariot, from the Book of Ezekiel. There he found a symbolic structure capacious enough to hold his experience.

His reading of Ezekiel was both scholarly in instinct and intensely personal. The biblical prophet, he argued, was himself marked by trauma and exile, one of the few survivors of imperial violence, staring into foreign waters in Babylon and finding there a new vision. In Flusberg’s interpretation, Ezekiel transformed the imagery of domination around him, war chariots, hybrid creatures, imperial spectacle, into a multidimensional spiritual vehicle. Symbols of oppression became instruments of transcendence.

This was the leap that electrified the talk. Flusberg imagined Ezekiel’s chariot almost as an ancient psychedelic submarine: tetramorphic, many-faced, animal and human, angelic and mechanical, lined with eyes and charged with energy. The metaphor was audacious, perhaps deliberately so. Yet it gave him a language for psychic integration. The chariot was no longer merely a mystical object. It became, in his formulation, “a temple of the self.”

The Shadow Must Swim With The Inner Child

From that idea, Flusberg built the moral architecture of his talk. Healing, he argued, does not come from amputating darkness but from inviting it into relationship. “The Chariot,” he said, “is a temple of the self that embraces the tools to crack open the subconscious and invite the shadow to come out for a swim with the inner child.”

It was one of several lines that crystallised his philosophy. Another was equally direct: “Choose with your own free will not to allow fear of failure and loss to drown you, but to find your own way back to the surface where everything is okay.”

What emerged was a doctrine of wholeness rather than purity. Flusberg urged acceptance of multiplicity within the self, human and animal, technological and angelic, wounded and divine. “Accept that we are and can be many things, and that is what makes us whole,” he said. Expanded consciousness, in this account, was not escapism. It was integration.

There was a striking resistance here to the tidy language of wellness culture. Flusberg did not promise optimisation. He described ordeal. He did not speak of enlightenment as a stable possession, but as a hard-won ability to move through chaos without surrendering one’s centre. His was a spirituality of adaptation, non-attachment and self-creation.

Art As A Vessel For The Unsayable

If the ceremony was the crisis and Ezekiel the interpretive key, then art was the means of digestion. Flusberg explained that painting and poetry helped him metabolise the epiphanies revealed through plant medicine and memory, through water and fire, darkness and light, contraction and expansion. His creative practice, he suggested, allowed him to place personal revelation within a larger chain of mythologies, languages and sacred forms.

This mattered because the talk never asked to be taken simply as spectacle. It asked to be read as process. Flusberg’s paintings and writings, with their cryptic and mystical storytelling, have long explored autobiographical material as if it were already legend. In Amsterdam, that method became explicit. Art was not ornament after the fact. It was the chariot itself, the vehicle by which the psyche carried what ordinary speech could not.

He closed by sharing a sprawling poem-mantra born from the experience, incantatory and fluid, part shamanic chant, part underwater scripture, part ecstatic self-reconstruction. Its language slipped through drowning, Babylon, bubbles, submarines, pebbles, stardust and forgiveness. It was excessive, strange, sincere and unguarded. In another setting it might have buckled under its own ambition. Here, after the story he had told, it felt earned.

A Talk That Refused To Stay On The Surface

At Biohacker Summit 2023 Amsterdam, where conversations often orbit performance, longevity and human enhancement, Flusberg’s presentation widened the frame. He spoke not of hacking the body alone, but of descending into the inherited, haunted and symbol-laden depths that shape it. His subject was consciousness, but not in the flattened sense of productivity or personal advantage. It was consciousness as reckoning.

That made A Deep Dive To The Chariot Of Expanded Consciousness one of the more unusual offerings of the event. It stood at the crossroads of spiritual testimony, family history and artistic theory, asking what becomes possible when a person stops fleeing the images that terrify them and instead learns to inhabit them.

The answer Flusberg offered was neither neat nor universal. But it was memorable. Victimhood could become vehicle. Fear could become motion. The drowned inheritance of one generation could, through ritual, imagination and courage, be raised to the surface by the next.

Frequently asked questions

What was David Flusberg's central premise?

That every expansion of consciousness is preceded by a corresponding process of contraction. In his hands the idea became concrete rather than abstract, braiding together ayahuasca, inherited fear, scuba diving and Kabbalistic imagery into a talk that read as confession carried through myth.

What inherited fear did he describe?

Flusberg was named for his grandfather David, a man he never knew well but whose psychic imprint remained powerful. His grandfather had lived in fear of water after an ominous prophecy in Eastern Europe foretold death by drowning, a fear that resurfaced in Flusberg's own ceremony.

What image anchored the presentation?

As he chanted David, son of Abraham, rain began to pour and he collapsed backward, convinced he would drown. The shaman's instruction was terse: only you can save yourself. In the midst of panic he saw himself leading his two sons on a deep scuba dive to a sunken submarine.

About the event

This recap is part of the Biohacker Summit 2023 Amsterdam series, recorded in Amsterdam on 14 and 15 October 2023. Read the summary of the whole event or join the next edition, HOLOLIFE Summit 2026 Amsterdam, on 14 and 15 November 2026.