Post Tag: History

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The War on Drugs Was Never About Drugs. Psychedelic Healing Must Reckon With That.

Diversion Room in Community Center - GPT generated.

Every time a psychedelic bill fails, we hear a familiar and urgent warning that veterans are suffering. First responders are suffering. Lives are at stake. While that sense of urgency is valid, when I look at who the psychedelic drug policy movement keeps centering, I notice an absence, one that has become impossible for me to ignore. There is another population facing profound trauma, mental health challenges and nearly every imaginable barrier to healing.

That group includes people from heavily policed, low-income communities who have and continue to live with the direct consequences of the War on Drugs. People who are disproportionately Black and Brown.

When my colleagues in the psychedelic field mention the War on Drugs, the conversation typically stops at “we need to address the harms” and, even then, it starts and ends with record clearing. Don’t get me wrong, expungement matters, but if our response to decades of deliberate devastation begins and ends with paperwork, we are not talking about healing.

Nixon’s domestic policy adviser, John Ehrlichman, said the quiet part aloud in a 2016 interview. The administration knew it could not criminalize being Black or against the Vietnam War, so it associated Black communities with heroin and antiwar communities with marijuana, then criminalized both heavily. The damage has not been limited to long sentences. It has come in the form of violence. Intergenerational trauma. Families ripped apart and continued disinvestment in communities where children witness murders and grow up to understand that as normal.

The numbers reflect this. Since 1971, America has spent over a trillion dollars enforcing its drug policy, according to research from the University of Pennsylvania. The incarceration rate for drug offenses has increased tenfold since 1980. Black Americans are nearly four times more likely than white Americans to be arrested for cannabis possession, despite comparable usage rates across racial groups. These are not side effects of policy. They are the policy.

The psychedelic field has developed a deep well of compassion for veterans. It should, but there is a near-complete silence around people of color from historically oppressed and exploited communities who are dealing with the same mental health crises. 

Trauma does not exist in isolation. When violence, incarceration, instability, and loss become common features of daily life, they stop feeling exceptional. They become normalized. A 2019 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that exposure to community violence is associated with elevated rates of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and anxiety at rates comparable to those seen in combat veterans. Yet the communities carrying that burden are barely footnotes in conversations about psychedelic healing.

When conversations about psychedelics and system-impacted people do happen, they tend to focus on reentry, offering healing after incarceration. The instinct is understandable, but why are we only talking about healing after the most traumatizing part? Why respond to trauma after someone has experienced the full punishing weight of the criminal legal system, rather than as an alternative to incarceration in the first place? The documentary The Alabama Solution illustrates this reality with painful clarity. 

Let’s imagine a different model. Picture diversion programs that combine trauma-informed care, wraparound social services, community support, and, where appropriate and legally available, an option to participate in regulated psychedelic-assisted treatment. Conversations are underway right now, involving a district attorney, community members, researchers, and national trauma experts, to build the first criminal diversion program in the country that would include voluntary, regulated psychedelic treatment as part of a wraparound support model. This is exactly the kind of work the field should be amplifying and funding.

Can you already hear the objections? Why should people who have caused harm receive these opportunities? From my vantage point, the United States is the most individualistic society in the world. There is a deeply ingrained assumption that success is entirely self-made and hardship is entirely self-inflicted. That assumption ignores how interconnected we are. When the difference between people’s access to resources is vast, harm finds its way past security systems and gated communities. Because, as my favorite African proverb says, “a child who isn’t embraced by its village will burn it down to feel its warmth.”

Surveys of survivors increasingly show that what they actually want is not retribution. They want the harm they endured to never happen again, to them or to their loved ones. The only way to get there is to give the people who have engaged in behavior we fear sustainable, transformative healing opportunities. Punishment has never healed trauma, and it has never made anyone safe.

Too often, psychedelic advocates talk to other psychedelic advocates. Criminal legal reformers talk to criminal legal reformers. Both groups are holding different pieces of the same problem and few even know the other exists. We need intentional, open dialogue and genuine collaboration between the psychedelic field and criminal legal reform spaces through shared policy development, joint pilot programs, and community-led solutions.

The most important innovation in psychedelics may not be a new molecule. It may be a new system, one that treats healing as a right rather than a privilege and urgency as something that belongs equally to combat veterans and to people whose communities have been under siege for decades, dating back to the founding of this country

Every time a psychedelic bill or initiative fails, we are reminded that veterans are suffering and lives are on the line. We should bring that same urgency to the communities devastated by the War on Drugs. For too long, this country has ignored, criminalized, and stigmatized people who are poor, system-impacted, and disproportionately Black and Brown. If psychedelics are truly about healing, that promise cannot stop at the clinic door or the prison gate. It must reach the communities that have borne the greatest harms for generations.

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The Place of Incilius Alvarius Within Indigenous Society

Sonoran Desert Sunset - Gemini_Generated_Image

The Sonoran Desert toad (Incilius alvarius) secretes a bufotoxin containing 5-MeO-DMT, a potent psychoactive tryptamine. While Iconography in ancient Mesoamerican artifacts and temples potentially allude to historical use, modern researchers say there’s no definitive record of traditional indigenous practices involving this substance. This topic is complex, as to what is considered “definitive” evidence, yet there is a deeper story and understanding to be explored here.

Recent years have seen a surge in mainstream interest, fueled by celebrity endorsements and media coverage. While potentially well-intentioned, this attention has led to increased psychedelic tourism and environmental strain on the toad’s delicate desert habitat. As well, media portrayals gloss over the intensity of preparation and integration required for using this potent medicine that, as Tim Ferriss and Michael Pollan both have publicly cautioned, is not a fit for everyone.

Local tribes such as the Comcaac Seri, Tohono O’odham, and Yaqui have in recent decades incorporated this medicine into their practices. While some researchers and advocates have become vocal proponents of using only synthetic 5-MeO-DMT, it’s crucial to recognize that such arguments, specifically how they are being explained, can inadvertently discredit the practices of the Sonoran Desert tribes. 

The original peoples of Sonora have a deep, symbiotic relationship with their land, which includes all the medicines and plants within their territory. 

“They [Comcaac] view the land as an extension of their own bodies: mountains and rocks represent their bones, soil their skin, sea and rivers their blood, and the wind their breath.” (Source – Sacred Land Film Project)

Just as many indigenous cultures evolve and adapt their practices over time, these tribes have thoughtfully integrated Sapo (the toad medicine) into their existing medicine bag. 

We must be respectful of how we paint the picture to honor the people of Sonora’s practices with cultural sensitivity and respect for indigenous sovereignty. The tribes’ choice to work with Bufo Alvarius, which they lovingly call “Sapo” is a continuation of their long-standing tradition of living in harmony with their environment and adapting their practices as they see fit. 

What if other tribes outside of Sonora also decide to adopt Sapo as a traditional medicine? 

With innumerable blended Curanderismo and Mestiza traditions that have been practiced longer than the United States has been a country. Do we actually have a say in what is “sincere”? Our legal definitions fall within the bounds of religion, which has historically opposed indigenous practices. Perhaps, it is not our place to get involved with intertribal exchange. 

We must be sure to be respectful of those traditional practitioners that are working with Fair Trade Toad or with local toad sanctuaries, as these are the lifeblood of the Sonoran communities. Fair Trade Toad is Bufo Alarvius that is harvested using safety and sustainability practices and also supports the local indigenous communities. 

This area has been hard hit and impoverished for many generations.  The Comcaac struggle with water, poverty, resources and crime. But recently have faced the consequences of the “toad boom,” including ecosystem damage from tourists and Mexican drug cartels. While extracting the venom is not typically fatal to the toad, it does leave it vulnerable to predators. Aside from new land developments, what is most harmful is tourists driving around in 4x4s in search of toads, breaking up the desert’s thin biofilm and harming the fragile ecosystem—home to the bark scorpion, the rare grasshopper mouse, and the Sonora mud turtle—which could take decades to recover. But this is a way of life for the tribes of Sonora and despite the threats, potentially a new dawn. The big question is how can we be in solidarity with these tribes and their cultural heritage, and align our messaging going forward?

The understanding of medicinal plant and earth medicines spans thousands of years and interweaves with cultural beliefs, practices, and accumulated wisdom, creating deep bonds between botanical diversity and the societies that have mastered their therapeutic uses. As Mexico shifts on the political front and more original peoples across the territories have fought to protect the practices that the Spanish Colonialist tried to abolish, the Ancestral Medicine Congress and First Congress on Traditional Medicine and Herbalism (FTCMH) represent an important moment for traditional medicine practitioners in Mexico. These events, held on April 20-21, 2024 at the Polyforum, and FTCMH at Cencalli (September 6th -8th, 2024) brought together indigenous medicine practitioners from various cultures and regions. The event covered various aspects of indigenous healing, including midwifery, traditional massage therapy (sobadora), and general healing practices. It offered participants an opportunity to learn about time-honored practices and remedies that have been passed down through generations. The congress addressed the growing phenomenon of ” Ancestral medicine tourism,” where people travel to experience traditional healing practices. While this interest can be positive, it has also led to concerns about exploitation and misrepresentation of indigenous medicine. Through this event and future gatherings, indigenous healers aimed to take control of their narrative and practices, ensuring that their ancestral knowledge is respected, properly transmitted, and practiced ethically in an increasingly globalized world.

Natural earth medicines have protection as biocultural heritage and traditional knowledge of indigenous peoples under United Nations sanctions of UNESCO, Nagoya Protocol and UNDRIP (United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples). These rights are sacred. Synthetic forms of these medicines do not carry these protections. As the Original people of Mexico protect their rights, and also in some cases the protection extends across the borders of other countries, these legal protections continue to protect the indigenous people’s original way of life and livelihood.

The Great Lakota nations have a longstanding biocultural relationship with Peyote, a indigenous medicine that was not native to their lands, but was integrated into Lakota traditional practice when it was introduced in the early 20th century. The formation of the Native American Church in 1918 helped formalize and protect Peyote use among various tribes, including the Lakota nations. This is right that first nations fought for, and rightfully won in American courts. 

Here are just a few highlights from the 29 page, UNDRIP policy states resolution adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 13, September 2007

Article 8
1. Indigenous peoples and individuals have the right not to be subjected to forced assimilation or destruction of their culture.
2. States shall provide effective mechanisms for prevention of, and redress for:
(a) Any action which has the aim or effect of depriving them of their integrity as distinct peoples, or of their cultural values or ethnic identities;
(b) Any action which has the aim or effect of dispossessing them of their lands, territories or resources;
(c)Any form of forced population transfer which has the aim or effect of violating or undermining any of their rights;
(d) Any form of forced assimilation or integration;
(e) Any form of propaganda designed to pro- mote or incite racial or ethnic discrimination
Article 11 
1. Indigenous peoples have the right to practice and revitalize their cultural traditions and customs. This includes the right to maintain, protect and develop the past, present and future manifestations of their cultures, such as archaeological and historical sites, artefacts, designs, ceremonies, technologies and visual and performing arts and literature.
 2. States shall provide redress through effective mechanisms, which may include restitution, developed in conjunction with indigenous peoples, with respect to their cultural, intellectual, religious, and spiritual property taken without their free, prior and informed consent or in violation of their laws, traditions and customs.
Article 12
1. Indigenous peoples have the right to manifest, practice, develop and teach their spiritual and religious traditions, customs and ceremonies; the right to maintain, protect, and have access in privacy to their religious and cultural sites; the right to the use and control of their ceremonial objects; and the right to the repatriation of their human remains.
Article 24
1. Indigenous peoples have the right to their traditional medicines and to maintain their health practices, including the conservation of their vital medicinal plants, animals and minerals. Indigenous individuals also have the right to access, without any discrimination, to all social and health services.
2. Indigenous individuals have an equal right to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health. States shall take the necessary steps with a view to achieving progressively the full realization of this right.
Article 31
1. Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain, control, protect and develop their cultural heritage, traditional knowledge and tradition- al cultural expressions, as well as the manifestations of their sciences, technologies and cultures, including human and genetic resources, seeds, medicines, knowledge of the properties of fauna and flora, oral traditions, literatures, designs, sports and traditional games and visual and performing arts. They also have the right to maintain, control, protect and develop their intellectual property over such cultural heritage, traditional knowledge, and tradition- al cultural expressions.
2. In conjunction with indigenous peoples, States shall take effective measures to recognize and protect the exercise of these rights.
Article 46
1. Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, people, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act contrary to the Charter of the United Nations or construed as authorizing or encouraging any action which would dismember or impair, totally or in part, the territorial integrity or political unity of sovereign and independent States.
2. In the exercise of the rights enunciated in the present Declaration, human rights and fundamental freedoms of all shall be respected. The exercise of the rights set forth in this Declaration shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law and in accordance with international human rights obligations. Any such limitations shall be non-discriminatory and strictly necessary solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and for meeting the just and most compelling requirements of a democratic society.
3. The provisions set forth in this Declaration shall be interpreted in accordance with the principles of justice, democracy, respect for human rights, equality, non-discrimination, good governance and good faith.

Furthermore, UNESCO’s 2023 definition describes intangible cultural heritage as encompassing the traditions, knowledge, and abilities that communities and individuals identify as elements of their cultural identity. Also referred to as living cultural heritage which includes these forms: oral traditions; performing arts; social practices, rituals and festive events; knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe; and traditional craftsmanship.

While historically tribes had to take their battles for their rights to the courts, under the United Nations sanctions, there is no need for any tribe to defend their positions any further. This is important to consider in the oral teachings and secret information that is passed through initiatic rites. This is sacred information that deserves respect and privacy. Fernando Suárez Bleck of Autóctono, an organization working closely with the Comcaac Seri to support essential needs and sovereignty, says,

“Another point of view [to consider] is that, in order to be able to discuss about it, first the first Nations would have to open the secrets and share it but there is not a motif to do so. Doing so means that they would have to do it on every secret that becomes trendy at different moments in time. There are many other medicines that were kept safe in secret. Therefore, the only way to know is when you practice and witness in person such practices and is information that is meant to be kept intimate and personal experience. There are many secrets that have not been revealed to the West, colonialism made some very good at hiding these for decades or even centuries. The indigenous practices are alive and are not an object to be handled as an archeological evidence from the past, at least not when they are still present in our time.”

So, as many herpetologists and 5-MeO-DMT researchers say, “Leave the toads alone.” Don’t go to the desert. Please don’t harvest medicine on your own. Some herpetologists recommend letting local tribes do this harvesting, if any at all. Those who respectfully and organically maintain relationships with local Sonoran tribes could potentially access the medicine in a humble and supportive way. While for others, opting for synthetic 5-MeO-DMT as a more sustainable alternative. 

Saurez says, “Some claim that Sonoran Tribes lost that knowledge and even further as if they don’t deserve because some individuals do not behave ethically or in good faith, but only as personal gain. Which can be true in specific persons but that doesn’t invalidate the tribal knowledge. Even though that argument is used to validate foreign practices from new people including private companies.

Usually the people that judge the bad behavior of an indigenous individual do not understand the level of poverty, broken relationships, violence and suffering that those people come from.

In the end it is not about who is entitled to work with the medicine, but to give honor to those that have worked with it before.”

Scientists are saying Sonora tribes have no history by relaying their message in a dismissive way. The other concern is how many of those spreading this message have stakes in synthetic 5-MeO-DMT intellectual property (prospective drug patents). The new tone we encourage people to adopt is honoring, acknowledging, and then adding that synthetic as alternative and solution to support sustainability. 

Lastly, there is proof for historical use of 5-MeO-DMT throughout the Amazon via yopo seeds. The somewhat recent “discovery” of Bufo Alvarius makes it clear that all conversation should also include reciprocity. Technically, under United Nations Nagoya Protocol (2010) there is a legal requirement for this reciprocity.

There is a direct correlation to the rise in popularity of Bufo Alvarius and the development of Patents related to 5-MeO-DMT. Reciprocity is owed to the Original People of Sonora, as this surge started in Sonora, which led to all of the development currently within the psychedelic field. Supporting local Sonoran communities will support conservation and allow the communities to flourish without the pressure for psychedelic tourism to support some of their needs.Most importantly, the indigenous peoples of Sonora deserve respect for their traditional way. 

While western hegemony has led the narrative, it’s no longer ok to speak on behalf of the traditional medicine practitioners. Mestiza (mixed) practice has been happening for over 500 years, much longer than the psychedelic movement. The right of indigenous peoples that are using Mestiza traditional practices are protected, but synthetic 5 MeO-DMT does not offer them these same protections.  

As we navigate the complex intersections of traditional practices, conservation, and modern interest in psychedelics, it’s crucial to prioritize respect for indigenous sovereignty, environmental protection, and responsible use. 

The story of the Sonoran Desert toad serves as a poignant reminder of the delicate balance between cultural practices, scientific discovery, and ecological preservation. Hopefully, this new information will help evolve this conversation. Keep in mind, no one is speaking for anyone here. We must take all ideas and ways into consideration. 

My hope is that this piece is a framing to bring consideration, depth, nuance and a more expansive understanding  into our approaches while respecting complexities between worldviews.

If you are interested in supporting local indigenous led projects in the Comcaac Seri community, please visit Ancestralheart.com to donate.

Resources

Tahéjöc and the Comcáac Territory

Felger, Richard Stephen and Mary Beck Moser. People of the Desert and Sea: Ethnobotany of the Seri Indians. University of Arizona Press, 1985.

Concejo Indígena de Gobierno – http://www.congresonacionalindigena.org/cig-movil/

Mexico-Tenochtitlán Agreements on the Implementation of the United Nations
Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples –https://www.gob.mx/cms/uploads/attachment/file/909808/declaracion-seminario-latinoamericano-english.pdf

UNDRIP – https://www.un.org/development/desa/indigenouspeoples/wp-content/uploads/sites/19/2018/11/UNDRIP_E_web.pdf

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Manvir Singh: Shamanism, the Timeless Religion

PT 646 - Manvir Singh - Shamanism

Manvir Singh PhD joins us to unpack what shamanism means and why the term matters now. Singh is an anthropologist and author of Shamanism: The Timeless Religion. He argues that shamanism is not limited to “remote” societies or the past. Instead, it reliably reappears because it helps humans manage uncertainty, illness, and the unknown.

This episode is relevant for the psychedelic community because “shaman” often gets used loosely, or avoided entirely. Singh offers a clear framework for talking about shamanic practice without leaning on romantic myths, drug-centered assumptions, or rigid definitions that do not fit the cross-cultural record.

Early Themes With Manvir Singh

Early in the conversation, Manvir Singh explains why many classic definitions of shamanism break down when tested across cultures, including in Siberia where the term originated. He discusses how popular images of shamanism often center “soul flight” and fixed cosmologies. However, ethnography shows more variation, including possession, spirit proximity, and different ways practitioners describe altered experience.

Singh also traces his path into anthropology, including long-term fieldwork with the Mentawai people off the west coast of Sumatra. There, he studied ritual specialists known as kerei and saw how central they are to healing, ceremony, and community life.

Core Insights From Manvir Singh

At the center of the episode, Manvir Singh offers a practical three-part definition. He emphasizes these shared traits as the “beating heart” of shamanism across many settings:

  • A non-ordinary state (trance, ecstasy, or another altered mode)
  • Engagement with unseen beings or realities (spirits, gods, ancestors, witches, ghosts)
  • Services such as healing and divination

Singh also explores taboo, restriction, and “otherness.” He explains how shamans often cultivate social and psychological distance through initiations, deprivation, and visible markers. This helps communities experience the practitioner as different in kind, which increases credibility when the practitioner claims access to hidden forces.

Later Discussion and Takeaways With Manvir Singh

Later, Manvir Singh challenges common psychedelic narratives that treat psychedelics as the universal engine of religion or shamanism. He notes that many shamanic traditions do not rely on psychedelics at all, and that rhythmic music, drumming, dance, and social ritual can reliably produce trance states.

He also clarifies a key mismatch in many contemporary “ayahuasca tourism” settings: in many traditional contexts, the specialist takes the substance to work on behalf of the patient, rather than turning the participant into the primary visionary practitioner.

Practical takeaways for the psychedelic field include:

  • Use definitions that fit cross-cultural evidence, not marketing language.
  • Avoid assuming psychedelics are required for mystical experience.
  • Notice how authority gets built through ritual, training, and otherness, not only through pharmacology.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Manvir Singh a shaman?
No. Manvir Singh is an anthropologist who studies shamanism and wrote a book analyzing it cross-culturally.

What definition of shamanism does Manvir Singh use?
Manvir Singh emphasizes three shared traits: non-ordinary states, engagement with unseen realities, and services like healing or divination.

Does Manvir Singh link shamanism to psychedelics?
Manvir Singh argues the link is often overstated. Many shamanic traditions use music, dance, and ritual instead of psychedelics.

Why does Manvir Singh call shamanism a timeless religion?
Manvir Singh argues shamanism repeatedly reemerges because it provides compelling tools for dealing with uncertainty, illness, and unseen forces.

What does Manvir Singh say about “authentic” shamanism today?
Manvir Singh suggests shamanism is dynamic and adaptive. He cautions against rigid purity tests that ignore how traditions evolve through contact and remixing.

Links

Shamanism: The Timeless Religion

Manvir’s UC Davis Profile

Transcript

Joe Moore: Hello everybody. Welcome back to Psychedelics. Today. Today on the show we have Man Veer Singh, author of the book Shamanism, the Timeless Religion that came out earlier this year. How are you doing today, man? Veer.

Manvir Singh: I’m doing really well. Yeah. Thanks Joe. Thanks for having me.

Joe Moore: Absolutely. This is, um, it’s an exciting book to discuss with you and, um, excited to, um, you know, dig in and get in some fun nuance and, um, hopefully help folks in this psychedelic ecosystem understand shamanism as a, as a term and as a thing a little bit better.

Joe Moore: Um. You know, I, I think, uh, let’s just take a moment. Can you, can you explain like what high level is your, is your book and then I have like one or two questions.

Manvir Singh: Yeah, for sure. So the big thesis of the book is that shamanism is not a tradition that is confined to like remote or far off or archaic societies.

Manvir Singh: Shamanism really, uh, like [00:01:00] in the popular discourse carries this like primi vista imagery and the, the argument is that shamanism is m much more timeless, much more perennial. That it, yes, it, it would probably characterize very early religion. Um, but it manifests in the world around us today. And I think it will perennially reemerge that it is a hyper compelling means of dealing with uncertainty that humans just recreate over and over in myriad forms.

Joe Moore: Yeah, I love that. I can’t wait to get into it more. And, you know, with the, the popular narrative, um, in, in psychedelics is don’t call yourself a shaman. But, you know, then we have to like, understand what, what are we actually saying? ’cause this isn’t like an Amazonian term or a Mexican term. This is like a Russian term, like deep Siberian term that kind of, I don’t, I don’t know who the first anthropologists are, but you, you probably studied that a little bit, but you, we were seeing characteristics like soul flight, things that looked like magic.

Joe Moore: Um, are there kind of like classic categories of what is shamanism? Like, what are the features of it?

Manvir Singh: Yeah, so I mean, that [00:02:00] is like an incredibly debated thing, I think.

Joe Moore: Mm-hmm.

Manvir Singh: The image that is very popular is this one developed by this Romanian historian, MEChA Ade, who wrote this book, it came out in English, I think in 1964, shamanism, archaic Techniques of Ecstasy.

Manvir Singh: And he argued that shamanism has this paradigmatic form in Siberia and then it exists in all these other places. And the key. Features for him were soul journeying. This idea that your soul leaves your body a tripartite cosmology. So there’s an upper world, there’s a lower world. Your soul goes into these different like worlds to engage with God’s spirits, whatever.

Manvir Singh: Um, and then he saw key features like fire flight. Um, but the, the tricky thing about Eliade that we now recognize is that his scheme. Doesn’t apply cross-culturally, let alone to Siberia. Um, I mean, even if you look at the groups from where shaman, the word shaman comes from, they understood these ecstatic states in [00:03:00] much more kind of diverse and fluid ways.

Manvir Singh: They understood, yes, sometimes soul journeying, but also possession, um, sometimes understanding that like a spirit is next to you and you’re speaking to them. Um, and so the, the definition that I prefer, which I think, um, is, is more justifiable is, is on the basis of three traits. First, some kind of non-ordinary state.

Manvir Singh: So the specialist enters, it’s been called trance or ecstasy, altered states of consciousness, but some state, some behavioral or psychological state that is formed from foreign, from normal human functioning. Two, engagement with unseen beings or realities. Gods ghosts, witches ancestors. And then three, um, services like healing and divination.

Manvir Singh: Um, and I think, you know, when we look to the various traditions that have been called Shamanic, Amazonian shamanism, Korean shamanism, what you see across Siberia in Indonesia, it, it, it, like, if you wanna find out what is [00:04:00] common among the things that, that seem to people to be shamonic, I, I think those are the only three that they, that they all really fundamentally share.

Manvir Singh: But I think they’re really important.

Joe Moore: So non-ordinary states services and then unseen some sort of interaction with the unseen world.

Manvir Singh: Yes, yes. And then you have a lot of things that are often associated with that dramatic initiations music. But I think of these three as kind of the beating heart, the core of shamanism.

Joe Moore: Yeah. Right. ’cause you know, sometimes people, people fall into it. Um, that’s really interesting. Um, cool. So let’s rewind the tape. Um, how did you end up studying anthropology and then picking something like shamanism to dig into?

Manvir Singh: Yeah, how did I end up in anthropology? So I actually, I used, I am and grew up like a big animal nerd and a big mythology nerd.

Manvir Singh: Um, and in college, um, really shifted into studying animal behavior and [00:05:00] slowly was like excited about using this, like very rigorous. Framework that I had learned to study animals, especially like evolutionary theory, was excited to, to use that to study human behavior. And everything I found like puzzling and interesting and intriguing about humans, myth, magic, morality, um, religion.

Manvir Singh: And so in short, you know, I started my PhD and I decided I wanted to do field work. Then I wanted to like go to a place live with a community, um, and really study their culture in depth. And I was very interested in indigenous religion and indigenous law and justice. And I ended up deciding just for that first summer to go visit a community called the Min.

Manvir Singh: Um, these au people, they live off the west coast of Sumatra. So this is, there’s an island chain, it’s called the au Archipelago. Some of your listeners might know it as, um, like a, a really great surf spot. It’s like one of the best spots in the world to surf because it’s all the way on the edge of [00:06:00] the Indian Ocean.

Manvir Singh: So you have these swells that build up and then break on the island chain. But anyway, um, in addition to being an amazing spot for, for surfing, it, it’s the home of these indigenous people, the au Um, and I arrived there and before going there I knew that they had what people would sometimes describe as shamanism.

Manvir Singh: So like if you Google Mentali people, you’ll see pictures of, you know, people in loin clots. And you’ll sometimes these see these images of, of specific individuals whose bodies are tattooed. So I, so I had some association, like I knew there was, there was something shamanic there and, and I think like a lot of people, I had this.

Manvir Singh: Just general intrigue in the, in the term shamanism and the idea. Exactly. So these are, these are some aui people and all of these are actually re, or, or these are shamans? Um, I’m pretty sure. I think I know, I know at least one of these guys. Oh, wow. Um, but so I arrive in Aui and. Immediately on my first day, I, I actually, I meet someone, and I think [00:07:00] he was the, the second guy from the left over there.

Manvir Singh: Um, I meet him within a couple of hours. I talk about it in the book. I like, just end up in this situation. Um, but, but pretty quickly, I see how important these figures are in Mentali society. These individuals called re and they’re really salient, they’re really striking. Um, first they’re just like super visually striking and you could see that there, their bodies are tattooed.

Manvir Singh: They still wear loin cloths. You know, the au have adopted clothes, but they still wear loin cloths. They grow out their hair. Um, during ceremonies, they dress their bodies in turmeric, so they rub their bodies. So they’re all yellow. They put on leaves, they put on bells. Um, so they’re very visually striking, but then they’re also like really important social pillars.

Manvir Singh: They’re at like the nexus of religious life, of medicinal life, of political life, of ritual life. Um. And I was just like very intrigued. Like I would see from afar there, there would be these shamanic healing ceremonies. You would hear bells. Um, I would see children kind of pretending to be shamans, doing shaman [00:08:00] dances.

Manvir Singh: We would stay with, with these shamans, they’re called re and sometimes at night they would sing, um, they would sing their, their shaman songs and their incredibly beautiful and kind of haunting. Uh, they’re like, sometimes they’re, they’re usually songs to communicate with souls and spirits. Um, and so, so that first summer, it was two months and, and I just had like a glimpse of this tradition, but I was incredibly, I.

Manvir Singh: Enchanted and fascinated and like wanted to learn more. And I came back. I was, I was doing a PhD at Harvard, so I came back for my second year and that’s when I read this book by Eliade, this Romanian historian. And then I realized that, you know, there’s this incredible literature, this deep anthropological history, and that what a lot of what I found really intriguing in striking and evocative with the AU actually has these really curious echoes and parallels outside of it.

Manvir Singh: And then I came to, to really study it more in depth and, and, you know, now that was a decade ago and I still, you know, I’ve spent more than like 14 months at this point [00:09:00] with the au I’ve lived with shamans, I’ve done a lot of research there. Um, but then I’ve also done research in other places in the Orko.

Manvir Singh: So, so that summer really kind of jumpstarted this interest. Oh,

Joe Moore: thanks for sharing that. Um, and I’m glad to know that you, you kind of got that much immersion with a culture like that that’s like really fascinating. Just wanna show people the cover of your book here. Um, who, who published this

Manvir Singh: one? This is kno.

Manvir Singh: So it’s a, it’s a part of Penguin Penguin Random House.

Joe Moore: Yeah. Um, it’s gorgeous. Thanks. So, um, and then, you know, I, I imagine things kind of took a life of their own to some degree, where you’re like, what is this? And how do I kind of do some sort of cross-cultural analysis and. What is this thing, shamanism?

Joe Moore: Is that, is that kind of how it went for you?

Manvir Singh: For sure, yeah. I mean, immediately, even that first summer I was like, you know, so I grew up in New Jersey. [00:10:00] My family is from, from India, but I’m very, you know, western in a lot of my worldviews. And so I’m looking for like an analogy. How do I understand these figures?

Manvir Singh: Are they like doctors? Are they like priests? Um, and I came back and I was reading up more on them and, and something that really intrigued me was like the, the taboos that the que observe. So the, the que are really, uh. Um, respected as sources of ritual knowledge and taboo knowledge and, and religion. And yet the religious system seems to really disadvantage them.

Manvir Singh: They have all of these taboos. They can have sex a lot of the time. They can’t eat a lot of the best foods, eels, certain monkeys, certain fish. Um, and in all honesty, I was just like, why? Like incredibly intrigued by this. Why is it that these individuals seem to have so much power and prestige and influence and yet the system that they can influence?

Manvir Singh: I mean, I have kind of a, uh, [00:11:00] um, you know, I think humans are self interested. I think they’re great, but I think like a lot of humans, if they had control, they would, they would use it to, to. Benefit themselves. Um, and so I, I really started to study the taboo in depth. Mm. And it was through studying the taboo that I came to understand something really fundamental about Mente shamanism, but also shamanism around the world, which is how fundamental otherness is.

Manvir Singh: Um, and so studying the taboos and studying as the

Joe Moore: shaman being other,

Manvir Singh: yeah, the shaman being other. And so like now how I understand a lot of shamanism is the cultivation. Of otherness. And I think about that happening on two stages. Um, so first there’s kind of like the essence of the shaman transforms that you look at a lot of shamanic in shamanic initiations across cultures.

Manvir Singh: And, and what’s really central to a lot of them is this sense that this individual has become a different kind of human. We took them into the desert. We cut open their body, we put crystals inside. Um, [00:12:00] you know, they had, they died and they came back to life. Um, we have worked on their eyes with magical substances so that now they can see gods and ghosts or you know, there’s a, in, in some parts of Africa, they’ll take them into a tent and they’ll kill a dog and they’ll say, we replace their eyes with a dog’s eyes.

Manvir Singh: Um, but then in a lot of them, there’s also deprivation that to become this kind of specialist, you have to di deny yourself food. You have to deny yourself sex, you have to deny yourself social contact. And I think all of these promote this sense for the community, but also for the practitioner themselves, that they are a different kind of human and that.

Manvir Singh: And that’s kind of more credibly endowed with the powers to engage with the beyond. So that is one form of otherness. And then I think about the other form of otherness as in the moment, which is the ecstasy, the the altered state. Um, and as an example, you might come to me and you might say, or I might come to you and I say, Joe, I know that um, you really want rain lately, and I can talk to some rain goddess, you would say like.

Manvir Singh: Here’s a regular human, like [00:13:00] what makes you special? And yes, you know, maybe I had died and come back to life. Maybe I have a new skeleton. And that might promote some sense of credibility. Um, but if in the moment, you know, you can imagine two scenarios. One, I’m like rain goddess. Rain goddess, like come and change the reign.

Manvir Singh: And then another where I lose consciousness and I see a rain goddess and my mouth is frothing and I forget the moment afterwards. You know, I think there’s something so experientially powerful, both for the community and for the practitioner of the altered state as a demonstration that this person is doing something normal.

Manvir Singh: Humans cannot. And so that really, uh, through just like starting to think about taboos, I really came to understand otherness as this really fundamental thing for what the shamans are, are cultivating both in the moment and essentially, do you know what I mean?

Joe Moore: So, right. They need to be something, they need to present as something useful.

Joe Moore: Special maybe, [00:14:00] um, in order that they can deploy these services that they’re offering. Right. And, um, religious or otherwise, it sounds like. And, um, the otherness, the taboo isn’t necess the taboos and like the, i, I guess restrictions on behaviors and diets and whatnot is like a thing that can elevate that.

Joe Moore: Yeah. Like one way I’ve seen it worldwide is, is kind of like, these spirits aren’t gonna interact with us in the ways we want unless we’re ritually pure enough in these ways. Is that part of it, or is that different, or, um, yeah,

Manvir Singh: yeah. Well, so I think that intuition manifests in different ways. So, I mean, in menti, this is maybe a, this might seem a like a slightly different example, but if you wanna practice really.

Manvir Singh: Like malicious magic, you know, I want to attack someone. There’s a sense that I have to deprive myself food and sex for several days, um, to, to almost to like force the spirits [00:15:00] to work for me. Um, that if, you know, if someone hurt me, then I can much more easily use black magic, but if I really want to do it more intensely.

Manvir Singh: Um, but I think there’s also this sense. So, so, um, there’s often this sense of like, and you see this like in a, in, um, Christian stories about asceticism in the desert, that through denying yourself and going to the wilderness, you can, you know, by going to the edge, you can, you can become something different and, and align yourself more with, with the supernatural world.

Manvir Singh: Um

Manvir Singh: mm-hmm.

Joe Moore: Mm-hmm.

Manvir Singh: And again, I think of, I think of, of the self denial as just one of many pillars. Or many kind of mechanisms by which shamans cultivate otherness, both in, in the community’s eyes and their own.

Joe Moore: And we can see this, I guess in like the cultural frame too, where cultures actually deploy certain taboos in order to create that [00:16:00] otherness from other cultures.

Joe Moore: And, um, like, this is us, this is our taboos, this is what we do. Um. Yeah, I remember reading about taboos in my undergrad and like, um, how, like when, when you encounter those things in your world, like definitely investigate and like what is that? Like why, why shouldn’t I do this? Like, is it actually harmful or is it made up, or what is it?

Manvir Singh: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, there’s a whole discourse. I mean like, maybe this is slightly tangential, but the ment are coming into contact with Abrahamic religions. Mm-hmm. And like Islam is coming in fast and hard and there’s a, a big discourse about like, what is the deal with the pig taboo? Um, and people will say things like, well, a shaman cannot eat eel because if a shaman eats an eel, they will die.

Manvir Singh: Um, but all of us can eat pig. Like why is the pig taboo such a big deal? Um, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think taboo has big social weight, but I think it also, like, it’s something people have to often contend with.

Joe Moore: Um, I [00:17:00] love that example of the eel, the, you know, perfect shaman logic, right? It’s like, um. Exactly that.

Joe Moore: If we don’t, we don’t have like, because it’s like, um, it’s not exactly like causal. It’s like, it’s, it’s neurotoxic. Your brain’s gonna go ill, it’s like, you know, there’s, there’s like a lot behind that. And I see this in kind of like shamanic storytelling and logic in the Amazon. Yeah. And elsewhere too.

Manvir Singh: Yeah. I mean, yeah. So the in min, the, the, there’s, they’re contrasted with normal humans who are called simha. And simha means, it’s also a, a word that refers to food that has not yet been cooked, like raw food or fruit that is, uh, not yet ripe. So it has this implication of being immature, of not yet developing.

Manvir Singh: Um, and so there’s this sense that queda are kind of matured, cooked individuals, but in cooking them, in maturing them, um, their essence has changed such that they can eat what are called, um, uh. [00:18:00] Iba mata, like evil food, bad food, rotten food. Um, and these, it’s more kind of on a spiritual sense. So eel is one of them.

Manvir Singh: Another one is the white kobu monkey. So on ment Ment is really cool, and so far it has a lot of primates that you find nowhere else. And one of them is white and associated with ghosts. And re shamans can’t eat that. They can’t eat. Flounders, flounders are very weird fish. They’re, they’re actually in Vento, they’re called like, uh, cut in half fish.

Manvir Singh: Um, yeah, so, so a lot of the things they can’t eat are these things that are kind of like psychologically potent. They also can’t eat Gibbons. Um, and then there’s, there’s a, there are a couple that still puzzle me. They can’t eat like a certain kind of squirrel, which is e everything else is like, so kind of psychologically and spiritually potent eels, white monkeys, the gibbons, and then the squirrel kind of intrigues me.

Joe Moore: Um, and you haven’t been able to uncover like what their kind of story is around that?

Manvir Singh: I mean, in the moment I’m forgetting, I’m wondering if they’ll say like, the squirrels call [00:19:00] sounds like maybe it’s like a summon or a signal that someone’s dying, but I, I, it’s been a long time since I’ve interviewed people about that.

Manvir Singh: Yeah.

Joe Moore: And did you get to encounter things like possession in their traditions? Like did they, that that’s a thing and they, and similarly, like a spirit right next to ’em talking or like a sort of donations? Yeah.

Manvir Singh: Yeah. So they, they’ll, they, there are many ways in which the Cade interact with spirits. The, the.

Manvir Singh: Kind of paradigmatic or quintessential practice or, or treatment is called lare. And so this is when they’ll put, they’ll cover their bodies in turmeric. They’ll, um, and then they’ll go on a dance floor, and then someone will produce music typically on reptile skin drums. So like a Python skin drum or a monitor, skin monitor, lizard skin drum.

Manvir Singh: There would be a, a drumming, you know, it has a particular beat.[00:20:00]

Manvir Singh: Um, and then the re these shamans will go on the dance floor and then they will start tapping their feet. So they’re adding a second, uh, layer of rhythm. Um. And then they will dance and um, and they’ll have feathers, they’ll have beads, they’ll have this turmeric and all of that is understood to be very, very beautiful for the spirits, uh, for people’s souls and for good spirits.

Manvir Singh: And then there’s a sense, there’s an understanding that these souls and spirits are flooding the dance floor. Um mm-hmm. And then you’ll start to see pat like observers falling into trance. Often women will, will then start entering trance. Um, and the, the trance the women enter is, is interesting. It’s kind of like an enduring long trance.

Manvir Singh: They might chant and, and go back and forth, but then this, the shamans will start to enter trance. Um, it’s called gobo. And, um, I’ve had different, this kind of comes back to the, the different, the fluid ways in which people describe. Trance. So some people will describe it. I’ve had it described to me as possession, but I’ve also had it described as [00:21:00] like, the spirits are near you and their energy is kind of coming into contact with you.

Manvir Singh: They have a word bajo. Um, so their bajo is, is pushing you into this state. Um, but then, yeah, they’ll, they’ll start dancing. And then one by one, several of them will fall into trance, and that’s a sign that the spirits are there. And then after a while, the dance will kind of fall apart because a number of them have fallen into trans People have to take care of them.

Manvir Singh: They’ll slowly be pulled out of trance, and then they’ll, they’ll dance again. They’ll fall into trance, and that’ll happen over and over and over. Um, and it’s, it’s understood to be very curative and therapeutic. This is often in the context of a healing. Um, and so the really important thing, you know, connecting this with psychedelics was that with the menti trance is induced totally by dancing and drumming.

Manvir Singh: And, and rhythm. I mean, they’ll, they’ll smoke tobacco, but everyone smokes tobacco and it’s not to a degree that’s like excessive. Um, so yeah, it’s, it’s overwhelmingly induced through [00:22:00] music. Um, and what I noticed in, in leaving Aui, which is how I, I started to get into the, the whole like psychedelic discourse, is that when I would talk to people, they would just assume there, there is such a, a, a link in people’s intuitive minds between shamanism around the world and psychoactive drugs and in particular hallucinogens and psychedelics.

Manvir Singh: Um, and I started to see that a lot of the claims that I was seeing about psychedelics, and they’re linked to shamanism and they’re linked to shamanism, both historically and cross-culturally, seemed to miss the boat that they, um, that there was often a misrepresentation of, of what shamanism looks like across cultures and the, the, the history of psychedelics.

Manvir Singh: And um, and that is how I started to kind of enter this space more and more.

Joe Moore: There’s so many ways in which we can instantiate these non-ordinary states. Um, and like list is kind of endless almost. Um, [00:23:00] I think like I, is there an example of like, um, let’s say, I’m trying to think of like negative examples. So like, um, so we have like positive examples that look just like shamanism.

Joe Moore: We’ve got Shabo shamanism, we’ve got like the assorted African diaspora religions get like, you know, um, stuff all over the world that fits these kind of primary categories. But is there kind of like one that, I don’t know, hyper commercial, ayahuasca, shamanism or something like, I don’t, is there something that kinda like breaks the mold from these definitions?

Manvir Singh: Well, I mean, one thing I would say, so I guess there are, there are two things there. Um. So, so like ayahuasca shamanism, when people go and they say, you know, they go take ayahuasca and they, they take it with a specialist who gives them a psychedelic, looks nothing like shamanism, almost anywhere in the world for a couple reasons.

Manvir Singh: One, [00:24:00] I mean, the biggest thing is that overwhelmingly in shamanic traditions, including those that include psychoactive substances and in particular hallucinogens and in particular serotonergic psychedelics, it is the specialist who is consuming the substance. Um, it is like the, the intervention is often understood.

Manvir Singh: The specialist is, is, you know, maybe consuming a substance or, or a medicine to engage with some unseen reality and through that engagement, treat the patient. Um, yeah. And so, so in that way I, I guess my feeling about neo shamanism is both that, like, on the one hand, I think a lot of what people call shamanism doesn’t look like a lot of shamanism, but on the other hand.

Manvir Singh: There are a lot of neo shamans who are sometimes it sometimes said, oh, that’s not real shamanism, that like, if you go to Burning Man, you go to Shaman Dome and there are these dudes and these people, they, they call themselves Shamanist as they’re like drumming on a drum and then they’re going to the spirit world and, and treating [00:25:00] people that, that’s like not authentic shamanism.

Manvir Singh: And if anything I think that is shamanism. I think it’s a very like, peculiar form of shamanism. It’s like one that’s informed by the western academic study of shamanism and it’s like roots in itself in this like, global story. Um, but I think that is shamanic and like, who am I to say that something is authentic or is, is not.

Manvir Singh: Um, and so far as it like embodies these key features, if you know what I mean.

Joe Moore: Yeah. Like it hits those three categories quite well. I stay the hell out of that area. But, um, you know, this idea of yeah, like we’re turning the customer client into the shaman. It’s kind of interesting and, and we kind of.

Joe Moore: Clearly know that in ayahuasca shamanism, that usually the patients didn’t drink anything or drank the lightest bit. Um, and it was the shaman’s job to go into the other world. Um, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Manvir Singh: Um, I mean, and, and linked to that, just in terms of like claims that I think are, [00:26:00] are sometimes a bit misrepresentation, you find so many of these claims that, um, like cultures around the world.

Manvir Singh: Have been using serotonergic psychedelics in shamanic context for thousands of years. Um, and my understanding with the exception of, of Southern Africa, which is like very complicated and like we’re discovering new things constantly. Um, my PhD student has been going to Southern Africa to investigate, with the exception of Southern Africa.

Manvir Singh: It looks like serotonergic psychedelics have been used in traditional context only in the Americas, like the Rio Grande area, southward, so like the native range of peyote and southwards. Um, and even there a very small proportion of societies, maybe 5% of societies in the Americas we’re using serotonergic psychedelics, or at least we have evidence of that.

Manvir Singh: Um, and so, so I, I think like this deep link between psychedelics and shamanism, although I think there are like important lessons to be drawn there. And a, you know, a bunch of the [00:27:00] psychedelics that are, that are growing in popularity do have. Histories in, in shamanic context. I think it, it actually underplays the incredibly like diverse ways that humans have, have devised to tweak consciousness, if you know what I mean.

Joe Moore: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Um, that’s fascinating. That’s really fascinating. And you’re right, like, like at home, um, at home, psycho knots are hitting a lot of these categories. Um, well, there’s only three categories and sometimes people come back with divinations or weird spirit contacts, or maybe we’re gonna get rain now.

Joe Moore: Um, and that was just like the person smoking DMT on the couch in the suburbs, and it like, looks really strange, but it Yeah. That’s fascinating.

Manvir Singh: Yeah, I mean, I, I think it speaks to just like how. I mean, my, my, my, my main thought here is that there is something so psychologically compelling about those three [00:28:00] features tied together that like we live in constant uncertainty.

Manvir Singh: We live in a world of illness and, you know, uncertain weather and uncertain, uncertain economic events. Um, and we also have this feeling, this conviction often that this uncertainty is, is linked to some unseen agents and some unseen reality. Um, and so what way is more compelling to humans of engaging with that unseen reality than to like, put yourself in a different state?

Manvir Singh: Um, I, and I, I think it’s just that simple logic that, that is so attractive and so compelling that, that leads shamanism to reemerge so easily and so reliably. Um, and, and which is the reason that I, I call it a timeless tradition, I think like. More than, um, a lot of the institutionalized religions, they will emerge, they will fall.

Manvir Singh: But the incredible like psychological gravity and pull of the ecstatic as a way to engage with the beyond, I think is a perennial human tendency. [00:29:00]

Joe Moore: And I guess in terms of like the popular uses this, these days of the term shamanism, like, are you, like, you’re, you’re clearly well aware of these debates, right?

Joe Moore: People calling themselves shamans, like you’re not a real shaman. Like is it, is it helpful in popular culture to use this term? Like in terms of like, I, I have sha people lineage and I’m a shaman. Like, it feels kind of like, let’s pull from Siberia and that makes it a little awkward. But also it’s the term of art.

Joe Moore: These days, I guess.

Manvir Singh: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is something I even struggled with in writing this book. Like I wanna describe a cross-cultural phenomenon, the power of ecstasy or the ecstatic or the non-ordinary, as a way to engage with the beyond and the fact that it’s so often specialists, do I use the, the term shaman?

Manvir Singh: And I think there are, there are arguments in favor and against, um, in favor is the fact that like, this is the term that’s so often associated with this practice. Um, and, you know, do I wanna just devise some new term like [00:30:00] tram, trans practitioner or something? Um, on the other hand, of course, like the pushback I often get is, and I can go over some of it, like you said, this is a term that is often associated with Siberia.

Manvir Singh: It spread into Western European languages from, um, ic, from a Siberian language. Um, and it also has so much baggage. It has, you know, the associations that MEChA Ade put on it of Soul Journeying and these different journey, uh, different realms. It has a lot of Primi Vista imagery and primi Vista associations.

Manvir Singh: Um, but I, I think both of those criticisms are a bit complicated. On the first, on the one hand, yes, it entered. Like European languages from Siberia, but it may have entered Siberia from Sanskrit. Um, and it continued, it has clearly continued to evolve since entering Western European languages. So I don’t, I, I’m, I don’t think it makes sense to treat, you know, whatever, 1600 as the, the authentic [00:31:00] snapshot of the word.

Manvir Singh: That what it referred to in that year is, is how we should use that term. I think like all concepts, it’s evolving. I mean, we’ve, we’re even using the word taboo in this conversation. Taboo is a Polynesian word. Um, but it has come to have a cross-cultural meaning beyond that. Um, and then towards this other point that Shaman has all of these complicated associations.

Manvir Singh: I mean, a part of my goal with the book was to show that, um, that this isn’t, like I said, something that is like necessarily only archaic or Siberian or esoteric or remote, but instead something like timeless and perennial. So one of my goal was to. Try to get it beyond this, this imagery. And, and, um, I mean, I I, I did that also by, by like saying some things that, that some people have really pushed against.

Manvir Singh: I argue that like a lot of the Hebrew prophets were shamans as far as we can tell, that like some Pentecostal pastors are shamans, um, that like trans [00:32:00] channelers are, are shamans that you might find in the streets of LA and that the neo shamans that you see at Burning Man, for example, or that I used to visit in the Cambridge Shamanic Circle in the Quaker Lodge outside Harvard are shamans because all of these are, are exhibiting these, these really fundamental traits that we find over and over and over the non-ordinary states, the engagement with the unseen and services like healing and divination.

Joe Moore: Hmm.

Joe Moore: Yeah. I love that. And, and I was thinking about that, like contemporary evangelical Christianity is like, you know, especially like the Pentecostal flavor, it can look very shamonic. Um,

Manvir Singh: for sure. For sure. And like, um. Yeah. And, and it there this impulse to say that is not shamanism or, or as soon as it’s applied to Christianity, it stops being shamanism.

Manvir Singh: I don’t think it’s like a, a valid one. I mean, if you saw that practice, you know, if that practice was observed among some different religion in Korea where you have, you know, ritual leaders, for example, who [00:33:00] are talking to sky gods and entering these non-ordinary states and speaking in tongues and healing people, people would much more easily call that shamanism.

Manvir Singh: I think just because it has a particular religious pedigree in history, people are a lot more apprehensive. Um, and I don’t think that’s justifiable. I think like if you’re gonna call a practice in Korea, in Siberia, in the Amazon, in Indonesia, shamanism, then you should let it describe whatever it’s describing everywhere it, uh, recurs,

Joe Moore: right?

Joe Moore: If we’re, if we’re gonna be consistent and intellectually honest and, um, yeah. So. I, I love that framing and, uh, assume you kind of saw Rick Strassman’s book, what was it? DMT and the Soul of Prophecy, that kind of framed psychedelic use and prophecy in an interesting way, um, as part of the Abrahamic tradition.

Manvir Singh: Oh, interesting. No, I haven’t, I haven’t read it.

Joe Moore: Yeah, I didn’t love it. But, uh, you know, I think it was an interesting take to say like the, so the, [00:34:00] the core of like, Abrahamic faiths came from prophecy, like obviously, and then psychedelics as kind of prophetic agents in some, in some cases. And I find, I find that interesting.

Joe Moore: Um, for sure. I mean, you have the speculations around like huffing a ship smoke and maybe DMT and whatever else is going on there, but you know, no. So the

Manvir Singh: argument is that like early Hebrew prophets are using psychedelics.

Joe Moore: Right, right. And, and that, that’s very similar to prophecy as they understand it in the, in the scripture, I guess.

Manvir Singh: Yeah. Well, I, so yeah. I mean, I think if you look at the scripture, what they’re, the way that prophecy is often described is very paradigmatically, shamanic. It’s like, you know, they’re behaving in these non-ordinary ways. They’re, in some instances it even sounds like they’re going on soul journeys. If we wanna invoke iata, you know, the hand of the Lord is on my head and I’m carried to the valley.

Manvir Singh: Um, or it’s, it’s often associated with music. And [00:35:00] divination is what prophecy is. It’s, it’s saying, you know, sharing opaque information from a divine source. Um, but it’s interesting, this, this thing that you just described where it’s like, okay, we see all of these behaviors that it seems like they probably come from, or there’s a good reason to think that that, that is related to a serotonergic.

Manvir Singh: Psychedelic is, is the kind of. Honestly, like, I don’t know the right word to describe this or the right way to describe this, and I don’t mean this in a mean way, but I think there’s almost a, a lack of an imagination or a lack of an appreciation for just all the ways that people have have induced the non-ordinary and the mystical.

Manvir Singh: Um, something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately has been soma. You know, there’s this big mystery supposedly about what Soma is, and there’s a lot of claims that Soma was a psychedelic. Um, but archeologically and ethnographically, it really seems that Soma was a stimulant. It was e fedra. [00:36:00] Um, and I think in many cultures, people have used stimulants in, in mystical states, and I think we just as a, as a society in the West have kind of forgotten that like s.

Manvir Singh: The mystical does not have to be psychedelic and hallucinogenic that, um, an incredibly diverse ways of tweaking consciousness have been understood to be mystical. I mean, coffee is often understood to be mystical. Alcohol is in some contexts associated with shamanism. Tobacco is associated with shamanism.

Manvir Singh: There’s just this deep fixation on psychedelics and the hallucinogenic as the gateway to the ecstatic, which I, I think really underplays, um, what the mystical can feel like.

Joe Moore: Absolutely. Yeah. A few things here, like, uh, Carl Hart kind of in hi number of his books, um, kind of discusses that opium and like a lot of Persian traditions, uh, using opium look quite mystical.

Joe Moore: And we demonize [00:37:00] the hell out of that. And I, I think there’s, there’s a certain kind of function of the psychedelic culture trying to set itself apart by ignoring certain parts of history and anthropology. And then there’s a historical figure of the, uh, psychedelic counterculture, Neil Cassidy, who is really, um, an amphetamine enthusiast.

Joe Moore: And he was, you know, a. A really important figure for people like Jerry Garcia and I think even, I think he came outta the beat generation. He’s kind of like a Jack Kerouac kind of era person, if I’m not mistaken. So there’s all sorts of interesting stuff there, and I, I forget sometimes about how impactful stimulants can be, because you know, you’re tired, you’re hanging out, slept kind of poorly.

Joe Moore: And then all of a sudden you take this superhuman thing and you can become a little bit more than you were earlier that morning. Or at least radically different.

Manvir Singh: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you read the Rigveda, I, I could pull up passages, but like, it’s often like, he took Soma and that gave Indra the [00:38:00] power to defeat the, the serpent that gave him the power to like, pull apart the worlds.

Manvir Singh: It’s always, it’s often associated with like, incredible feats. Um, just coming back to the sense of like, it makes you feel like you can do things you, you otherwise could not.

Joe Moore: That’s, it’s like a weird, I love this. I love this. It’s like, it feels, it feels, uh, naughty. So it’s like hitting a taboo for me, which I think is fucking kind of hilarious right now.

Joe Moore: Um, wait, what do you mean? Oh, ’cause so, so like Rigveda, like the idea of Rigveda being kind of like, um, theoretically from Ephedra is fucking hilarious and amazing and like po like possibly quite true. It’s like a far more obvious thing. Yeah, I mean, it’s described

Manvir Singh: as a press plant. It’s effects are overwhelmingly like those of a stimulant if you mm-hmm.

Manvir Singh: Look at substances that have, that are emo etymologically related. So there’s HOA in related traditions. HOA is very often ephedra. Um, yeah, I mean I, if you look at the evidence for why it’s a mushroom and in particular something like [00:39:00] psilocybin mushroom, it’s incredibly thin. Um,

Joe Moore: yeah, fuck yeah, of course.

Joe Moore: Of course. And I’ve, I’ve read the, uh, the Rock Watson book it wrote to Lucas. It’s like radically speculative. I think you probably saw the academic article kinda like taking down their argument. Um, yeah, the newer one. Yeah. And what’s his name? Brian Mur rescue’s kind of like interesting attempt at an argument and like, certainly not academic, but you know, very popular.

Joe Moore: It changed a lot of minds. Um, and I’m still battling it like that. It’s not necessarily, this isn’t the real thing. This is like a great story, but it’s not like hard evidence. And, um. I wanted to like circle back to something you said earlier about, um, potential Sanskrit precursor to Shaman. Okay. Yeah. In terms of like word.

Joe Moore: Yeah. What, what do we have there?

Manvir Singh: Yeah. So, you know, my pronunciation, I, I would have to look up exactly how you pronounce it. Maybe it’s something like Reman or Strana. Um, I think it meant priest or monk, something like that. And the idea is that I think it [00:40:00] spread into Central Asia, possibly with Buddhist monks.

Manvir Singh: Um, but you know, this is like etymological reconstruction that far back gets, gets a bit, a bit shaky.

Joe Moore: Um, that makes sense. And you know, I think the idea that people didn’t travel from, you know, south to north ever, you know, seems a little flaky. Um. So I think, you know, why not? Totally, why not? I think that’s an interesting concept, um, especially with like how much culture kind of emanated from India, um, like long time ago.

Joe Moore: Um, and then, you know, circling back to Lucas here, um, I chatted with a lot of people recently about Lucas and this concept of like, we have to justify what we’re doing today by making it really old.

Manvir Singh: Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Moore: Um,

Manvir Singh: I mean, I feel like that is what I’m often pushing against and what I’m [00:41:00] partly pushing against at, at parts in this book.

Manvir Singh: Um, yeah, there’s, there’s this, so, so, uh, yeah, there’s this real sense among many psychedelics enthusiasts that to justify this or to make it appealing, we have to kind of connect it to some global psychedelic religion. Um, that it softens the edges, that it makes it less scary. Um. And, and I think that does a real disservice to our understanding of human diversity, to our understanding of, um, of shamanism, of religion, of, of human history.

Manvir Singh: Um, and at the same time, like there are, uh, there are groups that that use search anergic psychedelics apparently in traditional contexts that have been doing it for a while. And I think also by like linking modern usage, especially in like, you know, psychedelic or, uh, psychedelic assisted [00:42:00] psychotherapy by, by rooting that in this like supposedly indigenous worldview, you also blind yourselves to the really interesting or one blinds themselves to the really interesting ways in which groups do use psychedelics and all of the like, really fascinating psychopharmacology that they’ve developed.

Manvir Singh: Um, so like with. My colleague, Sandeep Nayak, who, he’s a professor at Hopkins, we’ve been going to Columbia and visiting some of these groups that use ypo. And you find an incredibly interesting diversity of usage. You find like mystical apprenticeships where a shaman and a non shaman will have years of, of use of ypo, where they will use it to experience the beyond and, and, and think about it and discuss it.

Manvir Singh: You have groups like the PME in Venezuela where like all adult men, every third night will take several blasts of YPO and dance. Um, you have, you know, you have groups like various two kaan groups who as a group would take ayahuasca or something similar to Ayahuasca where [00:43:00] there’s an M-A-O-M-A-O-I and and some sort of DMT.

Manvir Singh: And then they would travel to the Milky Way. And each of these groups has, has whole discourses about what are the effects, how do you manage it, um, you know, how do you manage dose with history? And yeah, I, I think like by, by continuing to exist or insist or claim that the, the particular usage that appears in trials or, or which people are trying to sell is an echo of some, some ancient and, and widespread use really misrepresents all of the like, actually useful and interesting information about indigenous use in those places where there, there does seem to be a history of psychedelics, if you know what I mean.

Manvir Singh: Hmm.

Joe Moore: Yeah, absolutely. Um hmm. Yeah, that’s fascinating. And. There’s this really interesting story I just heard yesterday. I’m, I’m kind of like interested in the, the western esoteric tradition, right? Like these, these manuscripts, Rosa Cru, magic alchemy, et cetera, and kinda like, [00:44:00] plays into a lot of things that psychedelia is sitting with these days.

Joe Moore: And there is this, um, newish book. I’m not gonna cite it or anything, but like, the idea is that this is kind of like an unbroken chain of manuscripts and ideas, you know, from ancient Greece and before. And, um, the, and the discovery was that somebody 14 hundreds, 15 hundreds, like hired a, um, a, a Jewish magician and they were kind of, this other person was kind of like a scribe and, um.

Joe Moore: Kind of a, uh, magician of their own right. And they just kinda like merged things and made like some sort of manuscript that became like the template for the next hun couple hundred years of this theme Yeah. Of manuscript. And it was like really fascinating to like hear some people who are like really deep in that tradition, really like, believed in it and cared about that kind of like unbroken chain.

Joe Moore: And they’re just like, their heart collapsed, but it’s like, you know, you’re still hitting these three categories of things like the OSCs, the services unseen world. And it’s like, you know, it’s, it’s fascinating to me and [00:45:00] it’s, I think I’m interested in that whole field because it kind of like shows that yes, there, this stuff was happening in Europe.

Joe Moore: It didn’t necessarily always have to be drugs. There could have been other things, but there could have been drugs, there could have been plants.

Manvir Singh: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean plants, I, I, I, um, I, I’m often pushing against serotonergic psychedelics because they’re talked about so much, but I, it’s definitely the case that like, plants are often involved and, and an, in an interesting ways, um.

Joe Moore: Right, like des like mandrake, there’s all sorts of like, really sketchy plants that they would use that are super dangerous. It’s not, it’s not that like they weren’t using dangerous things that weren’t serotonergic. It’s just, you know, and they could have been doing all sorts of things like fasting for 40 days plus or whatever, you know, in a monastery, there’s a lot of room for experimentation.

Manvir Singh: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure. For sure. Um,

Joe Moore: yeah. So, um, what were like for you, kind of the most [00:46:00] surprising things or, or challenging concepts as you were kind of working through this book?

Manvir Singh: Challenging. What do you mean challenging?

Joe Moore: Um, intellectually challenging just to piece together and or challenging for pop culture.

Manvir Singh: Well, yeah, I mean, I, I’ll tell you something that I, I’m often trying to work with. Mm-hmm. Um, so there’s something like. And just building on, on what we’re talking about. If, if we use Soma as an example, let’s say like the, the evidence suggests that Soma is not a psychedelic and is instead a stimulant, but the story of it being a psychedelic is like very rich and, and kind of beautiful and interesting.

Manvir Singh: And, and, and so something I i a challenge sometimes is like, how do you be deflationary but still in invoke or evoke wonder? Um mm-hmm. Do you know what I mean? Like, how do you say that? Like, well, in fact, only a minority of the world’s cultures have used psychedelics. But, um, but that’s like, nevertheless still interesting and [00:47:00] wondrous.

Manvir Singh: Um, because I think like so much of the discourse finds wondrousness in history and in diversity through psychedelics as a lens. Um, and, and. Trying to see wonder in that I think has been a really useful exercise. Like that is what kind of gave me an appreciation for, um, for the ways in which we no longer appreciate stimulants as, as, as ways to, to get into the divine or, or, you know, the, the larger kind of under-appreciation for the many, um, for the many like methods that people have used to, to discover non-ordinary states.

Manvir Singh: So I think that’s, that’s just like the project of being deflationary, but nevertheless finding wonder. I, I found a really kind of like useful exercise. In this kind of work. And I think that’s something that like a lot of academics have to contend with and maybe often don’t do well enough. Because I think like there’s some stories that, that, that succeed because they’re interesting and [00:48:00] cool and rich and like narratively compelling.

Manvir Singh: And I think some scholars sometimes try to push against them, but they don’t have the story to replace it with. Like, I’m thinking of Graham Hancock, like mm-hmm. In whatever corner of Twitter I’m on, as a lot of people who like grumble about how Graham Hancock really misrepresents archeology and history.

Manvir Singh: Um, but I think the people they’re talking to often don’t care about the facts. They care about the story. And so I think that the, the thing that you often have to do is like, how can you build stories, build narratives that, um, that feel as compelling and rich as the ones you’re trying to, to replace?

Joe Moore: That’s gonna be a forever problem with Graham. I don’t, I don’t, I don’t think academics can, like generally speaking, tell such a compelling story. Right. Um. So I want to kind of double up on your kind of wonder and deflation story. ’cause I, a lot of our work here at Psychedelics today is not about psychedelics, it’s about hocher breath work and things in that lineage where it’s, it’s about group and music and body.

Joe Moore: Yeah. And, [00:49:00] um, how it makes the human body a little bit more wondrous that we can do these things. Yeah. Without substance. Yeah. It’s already there. You’re the ma, like that kind of thing. I, I was saying is that you’re the magical thing. Yeah. Like how amazing is that, that you’re already magical without it?

Joe Moore: You just have to try.

Manvir Singh: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, I think about that. So like, and another thing I write about in the book is about like the question of how old shamanism is. Um, and so to answer that people, one of the things people look at is rock art. Um, and you know, there are these things called thi and ropes, which are like human animal hybrids.

Manvir Singh: Um, so there’s a very, I laugh ’cause

Joe Moore: of the Graham Hancock link and that’s one of his. Kind of deals that he loves to get into.

Manvir Singh: Oh, interesting. Yeah, I honestly have not read enough Grand Hancock to like even know what’s a, what’s a trigger or what’s relevant to him. Um, but, but so yeah, so, so, so I visited one of these caves where you have these theory and tropes, um, and like my honest appraisal is like, who knows [00:50:00] if that’s related to shamanism?

Manvir Singh: Um, but I think by like insisting that it is, we are kind of similar to what you’re saying, we underplay like human imagination and human creativity and like the things that hu the places human minds can go to, um, to like often, oh yeah, we need, we need, um, hallucinogens or psychedelics or plants or even trance to, to, to like think about the wondrousness and the imaginative, I, I think does a real disservice to just like humans.

Manvir Singh: Um, yeah. So, so just to say that that’s something that’s, uh. I, yeah, I mean I think that actually links to like a lot of the claims that are made about psychedelics when psych, you know, psychedelics has the origins of religion. I think also similarly does a disservice to like the human capacity for religion and the human capacity to, to feel kind of divine presence.

Joe Moore: Right. Absolutely. Like does it also like devalue music in an interesting way? Yeah, I, I think there’s a lot here. Um, yeah. Like a lot of [00:51:00] the things that humanity is expressing does become devalued. We’re saying it’s only with drugs.

Manvir Singh: Yes, yes, for sure. I mean, like the, the healing ceremonies I’ve seen in ment are so rich and evocative and like transporting, um, just the, the social presence, the, like, it’s a collaboration among so many people to create an incredibly kind of immersive healing environment.

Manvir Singh: You have people drumming, you have other people who are heating the drums. You have the shamans who are dancing, you have observers who are falling into trance. Um, and all of that is giving the, the patient, the client some sense that, that whatever source of affliction is being contended with. Um, yeah.

Manvir Singh: Yeah. And so to boil that down to a drug, I think like really ignores all of the cool ways that humans have devised to, to transport ourselves.

Joe Moore: Hmm. So people should obviously read your book, but like, if they want to go beyond their, your book and, and want to kind of understand Shamanism a little bit, you know, more deeply [00:52:00] in different ways that maybe you don’t cover, like what are, who are some authors or books you might recommend beyond yours?

Manvir Singh: Yeah. So of course I think my book is like the best or no, I, I mean, I think it’s, I think it’s a, I think it’s a great introduction. Mm-hmm. Um, but if I were to recommend like, where you should go, I would, I think I would really emphasize going straight to the ethnographies. Um, so there’s this book, boiling Energy by Mm, I believe the first name is Richard, Richard Katz, about trans healing among the Kalahari Kung.

Manvir Singh: Um, and so, you know, that’s a tradition. The k Harry Coner, uh, like hunter gatherers, former hunter gatherers who lived in like Namibian Botswana and Richard Katz did a deep study of, of just their trans healing practice, their like chapters, entire biographies of particular healers. Um, I think that’s a great book.

Manvir Singh: I think the Catalpa bo about Shamanism in Japan is a really great book, I think, um, the Fallen Sky by Davi Awa and Bruce [00:53:00] Alpert. So this is an, an, a collaboration between a Yana mama shaman and a French anthropologist. It’s like, um, an autobiography of this Yana Mama shaman. But I think that’s an incredibly powerful book, and I think the footnotes are alone, are like a great lens or perspective into the Yana Mama worldview.

Manvir Singh: Um. Yeah, I mean, is there

Joe Moore: anything around like pre Hindu shamanism, like pre kind of like whatever, like came Yeah. Like in Iranian. Right, right. Oh, that’s, that’s interesting. Yeah. That makes sense.

Manvir Singh: Well, yeah, so I mean, I have a separate like total obsession and fascination with like Proto Window European, the early Indo-European traditions.

Manvir Singh: And so there’s this great book, it’s like

Joe Moore: proto Zoroastrian kind of traditions or,

Manvir Singh: well, yeah. So it’s, it’s, so you know the Indo-European language family? Mm-hmm. So that’s like Germanic, you know, German, whatever, English, um, Norwegian. Swedish [00:54:00] Icelandic. But then all the italic languages, you know, so all the romance languages, all the Slavan Slavic languages, all the Baltic languages, but then also Iranian languages, and then also Northern European languages.

Manvir Singh: All of these come from a single language called proto Indo European that was spoken probably on the step mm-hmm. In Ukraine, north of the black. Um, and so we’ve done, you can, the story essentially is that these peoples who, these step peoples who lived north of the Black Sea had horses and were like pretty warrior ish.

Manvir Singh: Um, and then came to just like spread and conquer or, or at least, at least spread, um, throughout much of Europe, Iran, central Asia, and then Northern India. Um, and you can get like a, a, a good lens into their worldview through texts like the Rigveda or the Homeric Epics or the early Zoroastrian texts like the Avesta.

Manvir Singh: Um, that’s all to say that. So there are some really great books about the religious worldview of the Proto [00:55:00] Window Europeans, where people have like, through comparing texts like the old Zero Austrian texts and the rig via and the Homeric epics, um, you can, you can get a sense of what the mythology and religious practices of these people looked like.

Manvir Singh: And in there you can also get a, a, a, a rough sense of, of what some of the shamanism looked like. Um, so a great book on that is Martin West’s, I think it’s called Indo-European Poetry and Mythology, or Indo-European Myth, myth and Poetry, something like that. But by Martin West, that’s a pretty scholarly book.

Manvir Singh: And it’s like a lot of like, this is what the rig day says. This is what, like, you know, this passage of Homer says, this is like what, you know, this passage of this book of the Avesta says. But, but I think it’s an incredibly cool book because I think the fact that we have reconstructed this world from, you know, 5,000 years ago, um, is super, super cool.

Joe Moore: Right. Absolutely. And it’s, um, we’re I guess finally at a moment with all these ancient texts and scholarship where we can do these analyses. Um, like I [00:56:00] remember, I. I dunno why, but I was studying the Bible a bunch in my undergrad and I was like, oh, all these different kind of texts informed like this particular edition, I made it here and here and here and like, yes.

Joe Moore: You know, you could kind of like track down missing manuscripts. Um, and yeah, I, I love that kind of analysis of like there being yeah. A sort of kind of, um, horticulture that informed all these other things that are still around today. And yeah, the idea of the same thing that informed the rig data informing ho uh, rig beta informing Homer is really interesting to me.

Manvir Singh: Yeah. Yeah. I mean there’s, there’s good reason to think that Indra Thor, Zeus, Jupiter all partly come from the same God, from God Enos, um, a big red bearded thunder, God who drank a lot, got in a lot of fights, defeated a serpent, um, was a bit rambunctious.

Manvir Singh: Yeah, no, I think it’s super, super cool. You know, we know there was probably a dog named something like Berros who, you know, looked over the [00:57:00] underworld. There was probably a figure who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humanity. Um, yeah, it’s super cool.

Joe Moore: Wow, that’s fascinating. I’m just thinking about Zeus’s misbehavior, but also his like, kind of figure had his king like Yeah, it’s fascinating.

Manvir Singh: Yeah. Zeus is an interesting figure. Zeus and Jupiter are interesting figures ’cause they actually seem potentially like fusions of two proto Indo-European gods. There’s like Deus Pater, the, the Sky Father, Deus Patter, um, which manifests then in Zeus pater and Jupiter. Jupiter is just like a fusion of essentially sky and Father.

Manvir Singh: Um, so the sky father became fused with the thunderer God. Mm. Um, in Jupiter and in and in Zeus

Joe Moore: wild. And um, oh gosh, we could go on So many fun tangents now. But I, um, uh. Really wanting to read what Charles Ang is working on around proto, [00:58:00] I think like pro proto solar cults in, in that particular area. Um, I don’t know when that is gonna come out, but I’m, I’m hopeful that I can get him on to, to chat about that and how that might inform kind of an interesting kind of larger, I don’t know, expanding the scope of psychedelic conversations beyond drugs.

Manvir Singh: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. That sounds super cool. I did not know he’s working on that.

Joe Moore: Yeah, I, I I think that’s what he said pro. Yeah, that sounds right. It was well over a year ago, um, that he told me that. So, uh, hopefully my memory’s right. But, um, yeah, so I think the takeaways are, yeah, this, like the three things that make up this thing that are shamanism is non-ordinary states, unseen world and services like divination and, and healing.

Joe Moore: And I think that’s like. I think that’s really important for us to take away here as we get a little sometimes inflated over what is and is not shamanism and like, maybe that’s not the fight that we wanna make. Um, yeah. Yeah. I

Manvir Singh: mean there’s mm-hmm. Like [00:59:00] a, a point that I I like to make is that like all shamanic traditions are dynamic and changing and like adapting and, you know, com importing influences.

Manvir Singh: And so this idea that, like for instance, just to choose one example, Neo shamanism is like not is, is some newfangled modern form of shamanism and there’s, it’s, it contrasts with so-called traditional shamanism, I think like. Is is diluted. I mean, all shamanisms are are constantly evolving and I, that’s something I learned and recognized w working with the ment because like so much of what characterizes menta shamanism, the, the cre, uh, came in from, from contact with outsiders.

Manvir Singh: They have bells that seem to have come in from trade with the Dutch. They wear dance skirts. They covered themselves in beads. Um, all of these came in from the, from the outside world. So what looks like very traditional shamanism is actually just as like a much a product of, of globalization and, and colonialism as, as, um, as some of [01:00:00] these like so-called newer forms of shamanism.

Joe Moore: Yeah, I think, I think I heard somebody I, I respect recently saying like, all, all of like this cultural development stuff is kind of like, not all of it’s just like the most disgusting of colonialism. Like a lot of it’s just kind of natural humanity. Um, like being kind of like a, like a scavenger bird.

Joe Moore: Like let me take that. That looks good. Um. Yeah, for sure. Right. Lemme try that.

Manvir Singh: Humans are constant remixers,

Joe Moore: right? And I, I was, I was hearing recently that some of the traditions in like Brazil were taking some of the European kind of manuscripts and integrating that into their kind of like, um, traditional practice, like, you know, kind of African diaspora, tra traditional practice.

Joe Moore: It’s like fascinating to know that it’s still evolving. Um, and you know, I think that’s, that’s the thing. Everything’s just gonna keep changing and moving around. And now, now, thank you. I have kind of a good foundation for going forward. I really appreciate that.

Manvir Singh: Yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah. Thank you.

Joe Moore: [01:01:00] Yeah. Um, so where, where can folks find your book?

Manvir Singh: Yeah, so my book should hopefully be in most stores. And then you can also get it on like most web platforms, amazon bookshop.org. You can get it on Audible. Um, if you do read it, I hope you enjoy it and like. Recommend it to someone, but also to consider rating and reviewing. ’cause I increasingly really, um, recognize how important that is for just helping find readers.

Manvir Singh: But yeah, I hope, I hope people get in. I hope they enjoy it and if they do enjoy it, they should feel free to reach out to me.

Joe Moore: Hmm. I love that. All right, well, I tragically only caught a few chapters in and I wish I got through the whole thing, but soon enough. So thank you man, for being here. Um, I hope, uh, we can check in again in the future and, and good luck with the book.

Manvir Singh: Yeah, thanks a lot for having me, Joe. This was a lot of fun.

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Areyto Boriken – Ethnobotanical Adventure

Areyto Boriken Ethnobotanical Adventure Puerto Rico

Where archeology meets art in an ethnobotanical adventure!

Areyto Boriken, presented by Ethnobotanical Adventures, is the first event in our annual series. We warmly invite you to explore the cultural and ethnobotanical heritage of the Taíno people of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean, focusing on the sacred cohoba plant and its use. Our intimate journey begins Sat, Jan 24, 2026 with a lecture and walk at the Tibes Taíno Museum in Ponce, Puerto Rico and continues with specilaized workshops and presentations at Campamento Behiques in Maricao, Puerto Rico. On Sun, Jan 25, there are options that include a guided tour to the Batey-Delfin Del-Yaguez Archeological Park and a visit to Caguana Ceremonial Park or staying at Campamento Behiques to relax and enjoy the waterfalls.

Our lineup of special guests include pre-Columbian art historian, Dr. Constantino Manuel Torres; botanical illustrator, Donna Torres; archaeologist and Puerto Rican indigenous artist, Daniel Silva Pagan; renowned mycologists William Padilla-Brown and Kurk Miller; and legendary, visionary painter, Mark Henson. Together, they will offer an accessible and enriching experience of Taíno heritage and the mycology of the island of Puerto Rico.

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Joe Moore & Kyle Buller: Breathwork, Somatics, and Foundations for Psychedelic Work

Headshots of Kyle Buller and Joe Moore from Psychedelics Today

Holotropic Breathwork sits at the center of this wide ranging conversation between Psychedelics Today co-founders Joe Moore and Kyle Buller. Drawing from decades of personal practice and assorted types of breathwork facilitation, they explore how breathwork methods from the Grof lineage including Dreamshadow Breathwork can prepare people for psychedelic work, support difficult journeys, and deepen integration over time. Kyle shares how his near death experience, somatic training, and breathwork facilitation shaped this new course on breathwork foundations, while Joe reflects on how reading Dr Stanislav Grof and years of experience in Holotropic Breathwork changed how he approaches psychedelics.

Early Themes: Roots, Lineages, and First Encounters

The episode opens with how each of them first found breathwork. Joe discovered Grof’s writing in college, then traveled to Dreamshadow workshops long before he worked seriously with psychedelics. Kyle came to Holotropic style breathwork while studying transpersonal psychology at Burlington College, arriving as a skeptic who assumed people were exaggerating until his first session opened into a full psychedelic level process.

They trace the roots of breathwork in modern psychology back to Wilhelm Reich, character armor, and early somatic approaches, then follow that thread into Grof’s work and later branches. Joe and Kyle map out the different schools that emerged, including Grof Transpersonal Training, Grof Legacy Training, and Dreamshadow, and explain why the term “breathwork” has become a huge umbrella that covers everything from Wim Hof to short online sessions that are not actually Holotropic Breathwork.

Core Insights: Breath, Nervous System, and Working the Edges

In the middle of the episode they move into what this new foundations course actually covers and why it matters now. Rather than promising quick fixes, Kyle frames breath as a flexible tool for:

  • Preparation before psychedelic sessions
  • Navigation during intense or destabilizing moments
  • Integration and nervous system support afterward

They discuss window of tolerance, fight flight freeze responses, and how fast, deep breathing can open powerful experiences but also risk overwhelm if there is no somatic literacy. Kyle shares a vivid story from a ketamine training where his near death trauma was reactivated and how simple breath awareness, slow belly breathing, and body based skills kept him from panicking or fleeing.

Throughout, they return to a key point: Holotropic Breathwork and related practices can restore agency. The breather chooses when to intensify, when to slow down, and how far to go, which can be deeply reparative for people whose trauma involved a loss of control.

Later Discussion and Takeaways: Holotropic Breathwork as Foundation, Not Shortcut

Later in the conversation, Joe and Kyle caution against “keeping up with the Joneses” in psychedelic culture. They talk about people chasing ever bigger doses, accruing trauma, and then needing years of therapy to sort it out. Breathwork, including Holotropic Breathwork in a well held group setting, is offered as a slower, more grounded way to explore non ordinary states while building skills that transfer into medicine work.

They outline the core components of Grof lineage breathwork: intensified breathing, evocative music, focused body support, expressive art, and group sharing in a safe container. Joe highlights how group process, mandala drawing, and simply being witnessed can be as healing as the inner journey itself. They also flag practical next steps: Kyle’s self paced breathwork foundations course at the Psychedelic Education Center, upcoming live online sessions, and in person weekend workshops in places like Breckenridge.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Holotropic Breathwork?
Holotropic Breathwork is a structured group process developed by Stan and Christina Grof that uses accelerated breathing, evocative music, supportive bodywork, art, and integration sharing to access non ordinary states of consciousness without substances.

Is Holotropic Breathwork as intense as psychedelics?
For some people, yes. Joe and Kyle both describe Holotropic Breathwork sessions that matched the depth of powerful LSD or ayahuasca journeys, while also noting that some sessions are quiet, restful, and focused on simple nervous system regulation.

Can I do Holotropic Breathwork alone at home?
They strongly suggest caution. Gentle breath practices can be explored solo, but Holotropic Breathwork as taught in the Grof lineages is designed for a trained facilitation team and a group container to reduce risk and support intense emotional or somatic processes.

How does Holotropic Breathwork help with psychedelic preparation and integration?
Breathwork helps people learn their own nervous system, practice staying with difficult material, and build trust in inner process. These skills often translate into more resilience, flexibility, and agency before, during, and after psychedelic sessions.

Is Holotropic Breathwork backed by research?
Research on breathwork is growing, especially around heart rate variability, stress, and subjective mystical type experiences. Joe and Kyle emphasize that early studies suggest overlaps with psychedelic states, but they avoid framing Holotropic Breathwork as a cure and instead present it as a powerful tool within a broader healing path.

In a culture that often treats psychedelics like quick fixes, this episode makes the case for slow foundations, embodied practice, and honest respect for the risks. By placing Holotropic Breathwork and the other Grof lineage breathwork practices inside a larger conversation about trauma, agency, and community, Joe and Kyle offer a grounded path for anyone who wants to explore non ordinary states in a safer, more skillful way.

Learn more about breathwork in the Foundations class here.

Transcript

Joe Moore: [00:00:00] Hi everybody. Welcome back. Joe Moore, Kyle Buller, psychedelics today talking about breath work today. Kyle, how’s it going?

Kyle Buller: Pretty good. I actually just wrapped up a interview, which was pretty fun. So just hopping off of that right into here. How are you doing today?

Joe Moore: Doing pretty good, you know, um, staying really busy, uh, doing, um, you know, the snow dance every night, so hopefully we get a lot more snow soon here.

It’s, um, it’s just so everybody knows, it’s a really low snow situation here in Colorado right now, so I always like for it to be at or above average. So, um. All right. So Kyle, today we’re gonna talk about breath work. You and I have a long history with breath work and, um, I, I don’t know. I started reading Stan Goff’s work in 2001 or so.

Um, breath work probably as early as 2003 I think in [00:01:00] my dates. And then, yeah, it’s just been a big part of my life ever since. Like did, can you talk a little bit about how breath work kind of came on your radar?

Kyle Buller: Yeah. Breath work, um, came on my radar through my time at Burlington College. Um, I was doing my undergrad there in transpersonal psychology and they just happened to have a weekend workshop in hold your breath work.

Um, and so you could sign up and you could get one, uh, credit for it, which was pretty cool. And. It was interesting, like, ’cause your entry point was through Stan’s work, right? Like, and then, so like you read Stan and then got introduced to Breathwork that way as well.

Joe Moore: Right? So yeah, I started reading Stan’s work.

They, there was like three or four books at the school’s library, which is astonishing. And then, um, Lenny had set up hollow interest and Hollow Cert, like these email lists that you could get on. And I just started kind [00:02:00] of, you know, stalking that way. So yeah, I hadn’t been exposed to drugs really other than cannabis at that point.

Um, maybe one or two people I knew had, you know, the exotic mushroom stories that I coveted but, you know, couldn’t access, um.

Kyle Buller: And were you, were you introduced to like breath work theory before actually doing breath work? Or did you do breath work? Yeah, for

Joe Moore: sure. I read tons before, tons and tons before I, um, ever got to dream shadow in Vermont to do breath work.

Um, which is fascinating. You know, certainly a different doorway and like how do we, uh, I love the idea of people prepping a ton before experiences, but also maybe you don’t need to. Yeah. Um, and that’s maybe what we’ll get into later after your story here, but Yeah.

Kyle Buller: Yeah. ’cause it was interesting ’cause I just read like Stan’s book, like Ls d Doro to the newness and then I was also reading.

There’s another book I read, I think [00:03:00] that Summer Inner Paths to Outer Space. And it was like Groth, Rick Strassman, a few other authors. And I don’t think breath work was really mentioned, um, in any of that text. Like I don’t remember reading too much about it in LSD Dora to the Ness. Um, but so when I, I heard about it, I really didn’t know much about it.

Like I obviously knew a lot about Stan ’cause I was already reading a bunch of his work, but I was reading his psychedelic work and didn’t read his breath work work. Mm-hmm. And so when that class came up, I also didn’t really know what to expect because I-A-I-S-I didn’t actually read any of his breath work material, but I kept hearing a lot of the students talk about it that went and they just kept saying like, oh man, that’s a really wild thing.

It’s like so psychedelic and like, I’ve had like really profound psychedelic experiences, um, with it. And I kept like kind of rolling my eyes going like, yeah.

Joe Moore: Sure. Yeah. Whatever you say. [00:04:00] Yeah. And then, um, you know, my first experience or experiences were relatively mild. There was stuff happening. Um, but you know, what I saw in the room, other people having pretty robust experiences was potentially the more compelling thing than my own experience to say like, oh, these people, you know, they’re, they’re having some really robust things.

Go on. I think I wanna come back.

Mm.

Um, and, uh, you know, a lot of hard work and a lot of weird experiences. And I started, you know, having big, helpful things happen. Where you say like, your first experience was like, mild. Like what was that experience like? Um, you know, a lot of effort, um, not much like, you know, robust stuff happening.

Um. I had some, you know, quasi transpersonal looking things, or at least symbolic things happening at the end. Um, and you [00:05:00] know, I thought that was pretty interesting. I think like, uh, what was it? I, I don’t, I don’t love putting this out on the air. Everybody, like, I’ve tried to keep this stuff secret. It’s been mostly like a decade, so I’m happy to come out with it.

But, you know, very large black snake in the background, very large. Um, and then, uh, Sanskrit letters on all the fingers, you know? Mm-hmm. I didn’t know Sanskrit, but I was putting a lot of weight in Sanskrit at that point in my life. So it was like an interesting kind of symbol set. I looked at my mandala recently and it was pretty, pretty neat, um, to go, look, look at that years later, mandala.

Um, it’s kind of our breathwork lineage term for. The picture you do at the end, a little bit of art or expression, visual expression. You do? Yeah. We’ll get into that later. You, you have a ton of

Kyle Buller: them too. It was really cool seeing some of those, like at the recent workshops where you brought those out for folks to look at.

Joe Moore: yeah, I think it’s a really cool learning tool. ’cause you know, you’d tell people you have to do [00:06:00] art and the first thing they do is panic. Um, but artistic expression is a core part of it. But how do you make it okay for people to like, you know, understand that a stick figure or a couple color blotches is fine.

Yeah. You know? Mm-hmm. Um, and you know, leading with vulnerability is the way, is my way at least.

Kyle Buller: Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for doing that. So did your, uh, we kind of had like different entry points, and I think we’ve talked about this before, but like, you know, you, ’cause you’ve done a lot of breath work before psychedelics and I was like the opposite where I just like, was doing psychedelics and then breath work was like pretty grounding for me.

So like, did your breath work experiences change after psychedelics or did breath work also like, like Yeah. Inform how you approach psychedelics in a way.

Joe Moore: Radically informed how I approached psychedelics. So my first time trying to consume mushrooms, I grew, um, after years of breath [00:07:00] work. Um, and then, you know, really, really light doses and a fairly safe container.

Um, and then, you know, the first time I tried to soup, you know, really, really go for it, you know, I was all alone. But, you know, I did the music, I did the laying down, I had the eye shades. Um. Yeah, all with stuff I grew, which is fascinating. So I was trying to like use gro method for how I was approaching psychedelics.

GR method, breath work, is that what we want to call it these days? Um, gro method, let’s call it gro lineage breath work practices. Uh, yeah, that

Kyle Buller: works. Yeah.

Joe Moore: Cool, cool. And just so everybody understands, there’s a number of organizations that, um, facilitate and teach people how to do this stuff. As of 2025.

Kyle and I do not teach people how to do breath work. I’m not even certified to facilitate breath work with any organization. That hasn’t stopped me [00:08:00] from facilitating a lot. Um. The organizations that we’ll kind of like talk about in this context is, uh, Graff Trans Personal Training. They were the ones that, um, that Stan and Christina kind of started way back.

It’s operated by Carrie Sparks these days. So long time kind of student of Stan. Um, there’s GR legacy training, which Stan is now a part of. Um, there’s a number of people we know and are friendly with that are in that organization too. Um, we’re mostly affiliated with Dream Shadow. And Kyle, you’re a certified facilitator in Dream shadow broth work, right?

Yep. Yeah. Yeah.

So.

Kyle Buller: I was gonna say GTT, they certify holotropic breath work facilitators. So, uh, when they talk about holotropic breath work, that’s certified through GTT. And then, um, yeah, the Graff split off and created Graff breath work a few years ago. Um, and then our teachers, LA Elizabeth, um, they kind of branched off and created dream shadow.

Um, so just some [00:09:00] context there as we navigate terms and trademarks and stuff like that.

Joe Moore: Yeah. Cool. And, um, we’ll get into some of the differences and all that later, but, you know, really, let’s set the stage. Kyle, you just spent a lot of time developing a program introducing the concept of breath work to a psychedelic audience.

Can you. Share a little bit about what you built there.

Kyle Buller: Yeah, so we ran this course actually live, um, what was that? Last spring? And it was six weeks. It’s really fun. Yeah, it was. Um, and now we’re starting to, I’m rerecording it, um, just so it’s, uh, yeah. Not, not just like the live presentations with everybody, um, for self-study, uh, on our psychedelic education center.

And the idea, um, is really, it’s like how do we integrate breath work into our psychedelic practice? And so how can we utilize different breath practices for preparation? Also different breath practices for navigating the psychedelic [00:10:00] space and then also for the integration side of things. So really looking as breadth as a tool that we can start to use in our preparation in the navigation and in the integrations.

Of psychedelics. Um, and so we just kind of outlined the foundation of like, you know, where breath work started, some of the different theories in schools, um, how it impacts our physiology and, and mind. Um, and then talk about these different traditions, talking about like holotropic breath work, dream shadow, kind of a little bit of the differences there.

And then, um, some somatic theory and trauma-informed theory. So we can start thinking about like, when we are working with folks, whether it is just in preparation or if you’re holding space for others, how can we, you know, give those clients tools or yourself these tools as you’re navigating it as well to do some self-regulation.

Um, so you can like, you know, hopefully. Regulate and titrate the experience. What happens when it gets too much [00:11:00] and you’re like, what do I do? You know, this is becoming a really bad trip. Um, you know, being able to use the breath and different somatic stuff to work through, um, that experience. And so, yeah, we’re just really kind of like outlining, you know, what does it look like to incorporate breath and somatic practice into our preparation and the navigation of the psychedelic experience, and also on the integration side of things.

Joe Moore: Yeah. Well, thanks for that. And it’s, um, it’s an impressive looking program, so nice work there, but I love teaching it live. That was so fun. Um, you know, sharing it with so many people, it, it was a substantially big audience from what I remember. Um, yeah. Yeah, it was huge. Yeah. Um, so yeah, what we did here is prerecorded at your own pace.

We’ll probably throw in some kind of, uh. Meet with us times so you can kind of do an a MA office hours deal. Um, but yeah, so it’s kind of like back up like breath work. When we say breath work, [00:12:00] I, I’m almost at the point where I’m like a little annoyed when people say breath work. Now I’m, I do breath work.

I’m like, cool. Like, what do you mean an

Kyle Buller: umbrella term? Yeah. It means a lot of different things.

Joe Moore: Yeah. And I, I’m like at the point where I don’t love asking, so I’m like, you know, did you do yoga training? Did you go to Wim Hof? Did you do like this nine D thing? Like there’s a few other somewhat popular schools right now, right?

Kyle Buller: There’s ton. There’s like neurodynamic transformational breath work, shamanic breath work. Um, yeah, you said nine D breath work. There’s soma breath work, there’s Wim Hof breath work. Then you get into like the more of that holotropic gr style with holotropic or grof breath work or dream shadow. And then you have people just like branching off in, you know, doing all sorts of different stuff.

You have rebirthing breath work, so it is an umbrella term and there’s so many different, um, you know, perspectives on this. And so it’s just trying. We’re also trying to like. Not go through every little thing. ’cause there’s so much out there and I feel like it’s [00:13:00] so hard to cover every little, um, you know, technique out there.

But what are just like, kind of like the foundations of a lot of these? And I always think about like something my advisor in my grad program for my somatic, uh, courses such like, you know, there was so much splitting that happened in the somatic world where it seemed like this is kind of how she described it was like, it’s like Pat Ogden.

Ron Kurtz, Peter Levine, they were all kind of doing some stuff together and then they all split off and Pat Ogden created sensory motor. Ron Kurtz created omi. Peter Levine CR created, um, somatic experiencing. And so you do see a lot of like splitting, um, that happens. People get trained, they start adopting the practice and figuring out like what works, what doesn’t work.

Maybe they’re gonna change it. Maybe there’s a different philosophy that they’re approaching things from. Um, and then they branch off and, and create like a different school. Um, and so. That’s why, yeah, [00:14:00] it is an umbrella term. It can mean a lot of different things and there’s also differences in, uh, the techniques that people are, are creating.

Um, so it can be really confusing to navigate. Um, like I do hear a lot of folks say like, oh, I had a holotropic breathwork session like online that was like 30 minutes. Um, and I’m like, well, that’s not ho every work. You know? So terms also get tossed around, uh, a whole bunch. Um, and so, you know, just something to be mindful of as if you’re interested in breath work as you’re seeing, like, what, what do I do?

Um, yeah, it can be really important to like just do some research on like who do they study with? What is the practice and et cetera.

Joe Moore: Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for that. Yeah. I was at this retreat in Costa Rica. We did breath work for 42 minutes. Exactly. There was a lot of talking and coaching and that was ho breath work.

I’m like, oh God. Like, um, there’s a lot going on there. It’s an, it’s a convenient term for people to throw around. Um. You know, and I think, um, [00:15:00] you know, they’ve tried to protect it as a trademark done, you know, almost okay there. But I think it’s, you know, it’s a very specific technique and a very specific context and, um, yeah, it requires a lot of attention.

I, I love the question, Kyle, like, oh, do you do, do you do this at home by yourself? Yeah. I’m like, oh God. Like, no. ’cause it’s like not, that’s not what it is. It’s, it’s, it’s a technique that you do in a big context, right? Yeah.

Kyle Buller: Um, yeah. Like group process is part of that, right? It’s meant to be done in a group, not versus at like home.

And there’s nothing wrong with like, some of those techniques at home, right? Like I do it sometimes and really need it, and it’s really helpful

Joe Moore: and yeah. Moving energy. Go for it. Like if, if, if you know yourself, you can trust yourself. You know, I, I try to tell people not to do it because I think people can theoretically end up in somewhat spicy situations.

It’s like mm-hmm. You know, for the same reason I’m not telling people to eat mushrooms at home alone. [00:16:00] Right. You know, you can have very, you know, intense experiences that could get you in a little bit of trouble or, you know. Yeah. So, you know, I think people with this kind of breathing technique need to be a little careful, but also play with your breath.

It’s yours, you know? Yeah. You can experiment. You should have agency over what you do at home.

Kyle Buller: Agreed. And in this course, you know, we do explore different breath practices and it’s stuff that you, you will be doing at home, maybe by yourself, but some of ’em are a little bit more gentle. Um, and, you know, I always really encourage people to kind of feel into what feels right for them and not needing to make, you know, big experiences happen, especially if you are doing this by yourself.

Kyle Buller: yeah.

Joe Moore: So let’s kind of talk about a little bit of the history. Well, yeah. Let’s just say the history of breath work in. Psychiatry, psychology, psychoanalysis. So, you know, the [00:17:00] first thing that we generally talk about, Kyle, and you’re, you’re gonna have some things, so, you know, fill me, fill in. Where I’m kind of missing, um, is we talk about Wilhelm Reich doing breathing exercises while he’s doing psychoanalysis with his people.

So maybe the first 10, 20, 30 minutes of his psychoanalysis sessions would be accelerated breathing. Um, and I think a lot of that was to, you know, disturb, I don’t know his language. The, um, character armor. I want to define the original term, but the character armor get a little disturbed and disorganized.

So you could actually work on stuff underneath it, right?

Kyle Buller: Yeah.

Joe Moore: Yeah. Understanding of the first,

Kyle Buller: that was the idea. Yeah. And I think like that’s where I start also in the course, like describing like Wrike and talking about his work. ’cause yeah, he, in the somatic world, they do call him like the father of somatic psychology.

Um, and always kind of preface too, Wrike had a pretty [00:18:00] controversial life, especially towards the end and kind of like a pretty interesting figure. Um, but um, yeah, so I mean he was really, I think the first more kind of like in the western development of breath work and more kind of like psychology, psychiatry.

And that idea was that, yeah, we have this. Quote unquote character armoring, that’s like really like chest, abdomen. Um, and how do we loosen that? And how does character armoring play a role in like psychopathology? And, you know, you would always, uh, say something along the lines that like, neurosis can be like found throughout the entire body.

So like, even just paying attention to like how somebody’s posture is, how they’re showing up, how that character arming is presenting. Um, we can maybe do an assessment around that posture and maybe what people need. And I know. Alexander Lowen also takes that through bioenergetics, who’s, again, another example.

[00:19:00] Alexander Lowen was a student of Reich, took some of the reiki and stuff that he learned and created bioenergetics, and then I forget who studied under, um, Lowen. But then they took that and created core energetics. Um, and so you can see kind of how that, that starts to, to happen. Um, but yeah, body posture, deeper breathing to start to work with, um, this character armoring, um, character veto analysis, I believe is the nice word.

Yeah. It takes pull.

Joe Moore: Um, yeah. I’m reminded of a Robert Anton Wilson play, um, that he wrote, uh, called Wilhelm Reich in Hell. Hmm. Which I really wanna see it. See if anybody has a video, send it over. Um, but yeah, this idea, that breath, you know, where did this come from? I think there was a current. In European psychology of mesmerism, like proto hypnosis and breathing would’ve been part of that.

Um, so he probably had some exposure to [00:20:00] that and um, yeah, who knows really where it came from. Anyway, there’s a whole history of it. And, you know, globally we have a huge history of breath. You know, all of us are breathing, that’s cultural. We stop breathing, we’re in big trouble. Um, and then, you know, if you breathe in different ways, you can modify your psyche.

You know, this is one of the very few, maybe the only things that’s in between the unconscious and conscious mind. Like you stop paying attention, you’re breathing still. Um, but. The idea is that because we can manipulate that thing potentially, this, this is kind of an abstracty kind of like fun idea. It’s be between subconscious and conscious.

And when we’re playing with this function, the breath, we can then access things that we wouldn’t be able to access otherwise through, through more conscious means. Um, and Wim Hof kind of plays with this a little bit, some of the other schools do too. Um, yeah. And, you know, in psychedelic sessions, like I remember my, my, my big ayahuasca [00:21:00] session where I, I was just like holding on and part of my holding on was helping stay focused, like staying really focused through the breath and like staying with it and that being an a, a constant anchor for hours and hours and, um, really helpful.

I couldn’t imagine if I was so disorganized that I didn’t have my breath, um, jumping in there. Um, yeah, which I don’t know, maybe that’s a crux keeping me from too many ego deaths, uh,

Kyle Buller: um, or being able to manage the ego death in a, a different way, you know? Um, being able to stick with it, um, a little bit more than maybe just being completely overtaken by fear and anxiety.

Joe Moore: So the, well, a few things. So a lot of people here at Breath work, they kind of roll their eyes like you did, and you’re just like, oh, maybe, maybe this is just kind of junk. Like, why would I do that if I could eat [00:22:00] these psychedelics or smoke this thing? Um. And, you know, there’s, there’s a lot of reasons to do that.

Fair question. Um, but yeah, let’s talk about like, the big obvious one that people have is like, can I still have big experiences here and are they as meaningful? And like, can you have ego death here? I, I, you know, annoyed by the ego death term, I’m gonna try to stop using it. Yeah. What do you think? You can definitely have

Kyle Buller: big experiences with doing breath work for sure.

That’s what got me turned onto it. Um, when I first went to that workshop in, uh, 2010, um, I breathed on Halloween and I did it the second day. So I was able to be in the room and watch everybody, and I just kept thinking. You know, I’m watching everybody kind of like have these big emotional catharsis, physical catharsis, and in the back of my mind I’m like, people are making this shit up.

Like this is not real. There was a part of me, I’m like, what is going on right now? This stuff seems so wild and weird and [00:23:00] people are probably just overexaggerating, uh, a lot of this stuff. So again, my skeptical mind was like still on and thinking like, what’s going on here? Um, to the point where I’m like, do I leave?

You know, like, what did I just sign up for this? This also seems really weird. Um, and when I had my first experience, I mean, I was completely blown away. I mean, it was a full on. Psychedelic experience for me, um, reliving things that I had in a psychedelic experience, relive like a birth process. Also relive like parts of like this near death experience that I often talk about.

And I was just like really blown away by like, how could that be possible? Um, by just like breathing deeply with music in a group. Um, and, you know, just really, really got me so interested in it. And that’s not all the time, you know, and I, I always like to remind people that like, yes, sometimes this [00:24:00] happens and we can have really big experiences.

Other times you fall asleep and it’s boring and you rest for three hours. Um, and so you can have the range of experience and there’s nothing wrong with that rest. The times that where I’ve had those rest experiences and quote unquote nothing happening, I’ve also found great benefit in it where I’m like, oh wow.

Like I actually just spent three hours just turning my brain off and resting for a bit and actually really needed that. ’cause I haven’t been able to create that time in my life to just do that and in that type of capacity. And so there’s also benefit in there of like when the quote unquote things don’t happen, um, can actually be the medicine that we’re probably looking for.

But in terms of your question around also ego death, um, yeah, that’s like an interesting thing. ’cause I think like, I don’t know, I’ve examined my near death experience where I’d say like, was there a loss of ego? Did I have ego death? I don’t know if it [00:25:00] was like full on. Um, you know, dying of the ego. There was a part of me that felt like that I, well, I was physically dying, but like there was a part of me that was still online.

And then there was a part of me that was like kind of elsewhere when I had my first ego death experience with psilocybin and psychedelics. That part, like wasn’t online at all. Um, it was like, who the hell am I, like when I was actually dying, there was a part of me, I knew who I still was, but there was also like this weird, mystical, spiritual thing unfolding.

And I’ve had that with psychedelics, but there’s this part where I’m like, I don’t know my name. I don’t know anything about myself. I don’t know what year it is. I don’t know where I am in space and time. And I’ve kind of had like a little bit of that in breathwork experiences where like, maybe, I don’t know what time it is or like.

Maybe I’m so in an experience where I’m just kind of like confused. But [00:26:00] I don’t think I’ve ever had like a full on ego dissolution, ego death like I’ve had on psychedelics. And maybe psychedelics are just really unique with that. Um, where it’s just like, yeah, you can forget your name. You can forget like where you are, who you are, like what the hell is going on.

But I’ve also had that with cannabis too, you know, not just even psychedelics. Um, like so, but I don’t think I’ve ever had like, full on ego death with breath work. Have you, or like how do you define ego death and how do you kind of explore that? I

Joe Moore: find it so problematic as a term. Um, ’cause we don’t, as a culture have a great definition for ego and then like, ego death, it’s like, what are we talking about and why?

Like, I, I like a way I’ve heard Stan talk about it in the past where it’s like, um, you know, the persona. Like kind of loses its energy. Maybe this is like wildly deep paraphrasing, so, you know, yeah. I, I’m not quoting stand here at all, but like, the persona [00:27:00] as a mask. Like we think about the Greek, like the persona just kind of like fading away and then the real, you still persists.

So like the, those elements that aren’t the real you, that are kind of like, um, your construct through which you, it helps you kind of like navigate the world, you know, that goes away and then you’re just there, you know, realizing that those things are kind of constructs. Um, you know, I don’t, I don’t necessarily think you need to have like the, I’m dying, I’m freaking out.

I’m scared thing. Yeah. For that, for it to be like ego death. Um. Yeah. So, you know, I don’t know. I’m not one of these redditers that’s like focused on ego death competitions or something, you know? I think there’s potentially value there clinically, but I don’t, I don’t know. Um, yeah, so anyway, I think the point I like to make about the intensity in breath work is that it can be as intense as psychedelic sessions.

Like [00:28:00] maybe certain features of the experience would be a little different. Mm-hmm. But, you know, maybe not. Maybe there’s a lot of overlap too. Like, I think, um, my biggest breath work experience is on par with my monster LSD overdose and my big ayahuasca experience. So that’s how I, I feel

Kyle Buller: too. Yeah.

Joe Moore: Yeah, and Stan and Lenny had conversations about this same thing.

Like, you know, Stan Stan’s in a lot of LSD and, um, sad for a lot of LSD and, you know, I don’t, I don’t think he would be a believer in hoja breath work and, and these other methods if, huh? Same method, different trademark, I guess. Kind of, kind of not, don’t sue me, anybody. Um, but yeah, like the idea that there’s, um, you know, a lot of similarity and a lot of overlap.

And then I model it Kyle to say like, there’s, this is all just us. Mm-hmm. Yeah. You know, like, and we have the ability to [00:29:00] have this magic on board all the time. I remember talking to some DMT people about it and they were like, this actually makes it feel less magical. Mm. That have these experiences without a drug.

Yeah. Mm-hmm. I’m like, I don’t, I don’t follow. But you know, I think it’s really cool that it’s all in us.

Kyle Buller: Well, I mean, if we look cross-culturally throughout, like history, right? It’s like humans have always had some sort of relationship with consciousness, whether it was through meditation, whether it was through breath work, different breathing practices, whether it was through psychedelics, whether it was through yoga, you know, really intense rites of passages to bloodletting, to isolation, to other types of vision quests like.

We humans have figured out a way to engage with this, and they sometimes get to the same place, right? And maybe it’s not as colorful or geometric as like one technique. And so I always think it is that amplification of our [00:30:00] ourself in our relationship to the universe, however you wanna define that, but we’re able to open up to ourselves and whatever else is there when we can engage with these, these practices.

And, you know, if you have yogis or, you know, uh, meditation teachers and gurus and talking about a similar kind of like enlightenment experience that somebody on DMT or psychedelics is having, you know, how do you. How, how do you analyze that? Right? It’s like, okay, well one had like, you know, all these geometric forms and like entities.

This was like a different type of experience where, you know, it’s maybe you’re not having those entities, but then you, you get into some traditions and they talk about entities in their meditation and they have their whole realms that they go through. And it’s like, you know, if, if you were to hear that at face value, you’d be like, wow, this sounds like a DMT trip.

You know? Um, but maybe you’re not getting all the fractal geometric hallucinations with [00:31:00] it, but it’s a different type of experience. And so I always do like to frame it that way. I think Lenny has done a good job framing it that way too. Is that like. These are all, these are vehicles and they’re amplifiers of ourself.

Um, and there’s just different avenues to get there. Um, and I would say that they’re all valid. Um, you know. Mm-hmm. One’s not val, one’s not, not valid because, you know, you didn’t take a drug and you, you didn’t have this like, really profound experience, you know, if somebody found or relived a trauma doing breath work, is that just as valid as, you know, taking MDMA and reliving your trauma and healing from it and say, yeah.

You know, there, there are different paths.

Joe Moore: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And sometimes we want to think like, oh, I’m on this one path with ayahuasca and, and the things that I learned there aren’t gonna show up in my other kind of worlds. Which isn’t really true. Like, it’s the things that you developed elsewhere are gonna show up.

It’s all, it’s always ingredient in the [00:32:00] experience in the current moment. Mm-hmm. That’s, that’s developing. And I think, I think it’s, it’s, it’s complicated because there’s so many ideologies in metaphysics. We get pushed. Being in psychedelic space, it’s so hard to navigate. Um, but you know, I’m just giving you all compassion out there.

Like, this is not an easy space to understand.

Kyle Buller: Definitely complex.

Joe Moore: Um, all right. So there, so again, let’s, let’s just remind everybody, this is promoting a class that Kyle just put together that we taught earlier this year, maybe in the spring. And it’s a foundations of breathwork class. It’s gonna help you wrap your head around the breathwork topic in a framework that’s, um, compatible with the psychedelic, you know, frameworks that we teach.

Is that fair?

Yeah.

Um, yeah. So we’re not giving you facilitator training here, but you’re gonna walk away with some stuff you can do on [00:33:00] your own, some stuff you might be able to try with clients or friends here and there. Um. But yeah, it’s, um, it’s a step one

Kyle Buller: and I think it is important to like, for us to like cultivate these practices ourselves, especially if we are doing a lot of this inner exploration.

Like, you know, as you said, Joe, like I wish everybody could like, you know, do these practices before engaging in psychedelics because it helps to provide that foundation. Um, and I think the more I’ve been doing this work, the more. I think I’ve been focused on what are these foundational skills that we can use when we go into these spaces without necessarily just jumping into the deep end.

Like most of us wouldn’t jump into the deep end maybe, unless you’re pretty naive or kid and your friends are daring. You too. I used to be a lifeguard and that used to happen, but like for the most part, people were scared of the deep end. If they couldn’t swim, you know, they would wanna dip their toes in a little bit and, and get used to the water.

Um, you know, you wouldn’t ride a black diamond if [00:34:00] you’re a beginner skier snowboarder. You’re gonna take the bunny slopes and learn those foundational skills. And I think right now in our culture, psychedelics are very trendy and people are just wanting these quick fixes and big changes and, you know.

Psychedelics are kind of being sold like that. And you know, I think we’re probably guilty of talking about it in early days and probably having podcasts and headlines that kind of show that. But it’s like, you know, what’s the work that we’re bringing into the psychedelic experience and how do we build those foundational skills?

Um, you know, if we look at like other traditions, like in shamanic practices or yoga, right? Like you didn’t just go blast off. There are usually stepping stones to get there. But, you know, we live in this like interesting time in the world where we just have instant access to things in a way and we can just jump into the deep end, um, without necessarily building the foundation.

Um, and so. I think that’s a big, also part of the reason [00:35:00] of like putting this type of course together, it’s like how do we start to talk about these foundational skills that we can practice before actually doing these deep dives? And I think, you know, I’ve, over the years I’m like, wow, like my, actually my psychedelic experiences have changed since doing more of these practices.

It allows me to hold traumas that are emerging. It’s, it’s making me more aware of my window of tolerance versus like, before I was just in the deep end, I’m like, just drowning. You know? I’m like, what the fuck is going on right now? Um, where’s like, you know, that can still happen. Um, but it’s just like, I feel like I’m a little bit more aware on like how to work with the difficulty that, that that’s coming up.

Um, but you also just never know. Psychedelics are unpredictable and, you know, sometimes you’ve been having really great sessions and all of a sudden you get struck by lightning and you’re like, what the hell just happened there?

Joe Moore: Yeah. I’m like, uh. One of the risks and one of the dangers in [00:36:00] psychedelia is kind of keeping up with the Joneses.

You know, like, oh, this is an interesting community and scene. I’m gonna try to get as many experiences I can so I can be part of this community and scene, um, and be more accepted. Um, and that’s really risky. Yeah, I think people should really, if they can go slow, do as little as possible for the first while, um, because it’s a lot less work.

You know, if you, you could, you know, if you do too much LSD or something, you might require a reasonable amount of therapy afterwards. Or you could end up with HPPD, which not very many people have good frameworks for treating or whatever it is, right. It’s, um. I think that’s an important Don’t Pokemon.

Kyle Buller: Yeah. I feel like that’s like an important conversation that like we don’t always talk about. Like I think about when I ended up going to Burlington College and like studying transpersonal psychology and [00:37:00] psychedelics, it’s like I was actually, I think using that as a way to treat all my psychedelic trauma.

You know, it was like I needed to do all this work from like all the stuff I was experiencing with those psychedelics where I’m like, I think I just traumatized myself by like all this big stuff coming up too quickly and not knowing how to contain it in my nervous system and actually work with it. And I think like, I just was like, oh man, I’ll just do more.

I’ll just do it again and see what happens. And, you know, that’s probably not the best way to go about doing things. Um, you know, take, take your time and, you know, really integrate.

Joe Moore: Mm-hmm. Yeah. So the idea is that we have this body, body-based practice that. Allows you to experiment with these states in a really, really safe container, uh, with other people.

Um, all around. It’s not even just one-on-one, which is a little exposed. It’s not even, you know, you [00:38:00] alone. Um, but it’s you within a big group, so you have some safety there, and I think that’s huge. Um, and let’s kinda talk about graph lineage, breath work and like the components. So we have accelerated breathing, we’ve got.

Kyle Buller: Evocative music.

Joe Moore: Thank you. I got stuck on the body work component ’cause we had some interesting conversations about body work recently. But yeah, we’ve got the evocative music, body work, artistic expression group process. Um, and then, um, a friend told me once safety is the sixth ingredient. Um, should, you know, we don’t really name that usually when we give the list, but it’s important and I think it’s clever to, to use that as a sixth ingredient.

Um, you know, body work stuff comes up in your body. Sometimes it helps to get a little pressure or express it or press against it or whatever it is, wherever it is. Um, this is not doing [00:39:00] massage. This is not any kind of like programmatic technique. This is like, oh, my hands feel a little funny. Maybe. Maybe press.

Or, uh, mm-hmm.

Kyle Buller: Yeah, I’ve been thinking about like other terms. I know like there’s some people that call it focus body work. I forget like what some of my other friends and colleagues have called it. Um, but I think body work is part of it, but yeah. Is there like a, a different term there too? Like I, ’cause I’ve been, I think we talked about this on like the one, uh, podcast that we did last month or two months ago.

Um, I kind of see it more as like a supportive process for a person. They have a type of experience that needs, they want to express or that they, that might be coming up in their body and how do we support that process? And so that expression might be. I have tingling in my hands, my hands wanna push against something.

So it’s like, how do we support that process of somebody pushing, um, or, you know, somebody needs a supportive process [00:40:00] in, uh, yeah. Um, you know, relaxing. You know, I, that’s something I’ve been also exploring. It’s like, you know, sometimes people say, I have a hard time relaxing right now, or I have this like, you know, pit in my stomach.

So I also think it’s like, how do you support people in that? And that might not actually be hands-on. That might just be actually asking somebody. I was like, what does it feel like to relax right now? And then they’re doing kind of like their own process into that. Um, and so, you know, sometimes people can do their own body work, right?

But it gets in this position where it’s like you get an angle where you can’t do that. Like I do a lot of my own stuff when I do breath work, but then I get into these situations where I need to like push or I wanna express something. I just can’t contain that and I need support in somebody to create that container to express that.

So, you know, maybe it’s just like the towel thing comes up a lot for me with the neck and it’s like I need somebody there to like do this towel thing with my neck to, ’cause I can’t, I could do that [00:41:00] myself, but it’s actually really helpful if somebody else is holding that tension there and I’m, you know, projecting that feeling out onto the towel there.

So

Joe Moore: I don’t know how you kind of describe that. Towel technique, the neck technique, just not everybody’s watching the video, right? Yeah. So it’s a, it’s a weird one. It feels edgy.

Kyle Buller: Definitely. Definitely edgy. Um, and you don’t do it with everybody, right? It’s like, not something you always bring up, but like the idea is, and I found this to be helpful, so it’s, I think some, I have a lot of energy that comes up in my neck and my jaw when I do breath work.

And, um, so you can have two people sit beside you and they hold a towel just above your neck. And the idea is that the breather takes it and grips it, and then you’re kind of transferring that energy into the towel. And so. You could say anger lives in this area, right? Stress and anger. And so if somebody’s just holding and having the tension on the towel, so it [00:42:00] creates that tension that I could grip it in a way, and then I’m actually like just gripping the towel and projecting that anger out onto it.

So it might look like this, and I’m like screaming into it. And so like, I’m not choking myself. I’m not doing anything. I’m just using this as a way to like, take that anger outta my hands and my throat and using the towel as a way to use it, project onto it in a way. So that’s kind of like the, the basic idea.

Um, and yeah, I don’t know. I’ve always found that to be helpful to express an experience, um mm-hmm. And doesn’t, you know, sometimes it doesn’t work and then I go, I don’t wanna do this. You know? And Yeah. And you don’t do it,

Joe Moore: do you? Like, so, so it’s funny, right? Because there’s like the facilitators, the support people, like that’s, we’re not really doing anything.

Other than standing there in that one. Yeah. And kind of like, Hey, maybe try this. Um, and if you don’t, all good. Um, and [00:43:00] then, yeah, it’s, it’s funny how it can get a little kind of complicated to express that, but we wanna, let’s keep staying on, but breath work more generally. We can do kind of like a series on, um, body work again in the near term, or let’s say work that relates to the body, um, come up with, with a new term maybe.

Yeah, maybe if anybody has ideas, info at psychedelics say, or pit us up in socials. Um, but yeah, like really there’s, you know, this artistic expression thing, which is super cool. Um, there’s, you know, uh, the music, I love that I’m building a music class. We should have that out in a few weeks, hopefully. Um, so stay tuned, everybody for that music psychedelics, but informed heavily by the gro uh, breathwork lineage.

And then, uh, let’s see, what else. Group process is interesting. Like it’s, you know, doing something alone versus doing something when [00:44:00] 10 people are watching you or doing it at the same time. So different. I was thinking about this in the context of, uh, did you ever see the meditation studies where it’s like meditators meditate together and they have this like kind of coherence effect on each other and there’s like enhanced effect when they’re doing it together.

Kyle Buller: Makes sense. I don’t think I’ve seen any of those studies, but, um,

Joe Moore: a lot of the transcendental meditation people, like were, you know, it was so expensive. So they had a lot of money for, for research. Um, uh, yeah, I didn’t get training, but I got pretty deeply indoctrinated there. But the idea is that when you’re doing the same thing, you can kind of get entrained.

Kind of like, um, uh, mirror neurons. Maybe there’s some sort of energetic thing going on. But, you know, chanting together, like doing cureton together, super interesting feeling versus doing it alone. And then, um, even watching movies in a theater versus watching at home alone. Super different experience.

Mm-hmm. Um, concerts, like listening, listening to Phish at home [00:45:00] and recording versus being there very different energetically. Yeah. Um, you know, watching basketball, you know, same thing. Anyway, so being in a group doing kind of this inner work together feels more supportive to me. Sometimes it can feel exposing to people if they’re not ready to come out about material that they don’t wanna share, which is totally fine.

You don’t have to share stuff. But I think there’s something to these group. Things. What do you think?

Kyle Buller: Yeah, I definitely, you know, I always think about something Lenny always mentioned like, we’re the descendants of successful tribes and folks that usually went off on their own, usually didn’t make it. Um, and that is our most primal fear, right?

And it is like almost embedded. Like, what if I’m not accepted into the group, you know, then I’m all alone. And so, you know, we are working with like some of that primal energy of like, you know, we are meant to be in relationship, but that can also be scary because of maybe, you know, being [00:46:00] out pushed outside the group.

There’s a really great book by, uh, Luis Kino called The Neuroscience of Human Relationships, or maybe just the neuroscience of relationships. Um, and you know, he goes into a lot of details around the brain being a social organ, um, that it’s really wired for communication and connection. Um, and he also talks about like, um.

You know, uh, mirror neurons and how powerful that is. Um, and how yeah, getting in that residence, how much the brain actually tries to pick up a lot of nonverbals. Um, and how we are kind of just sending messages to each other sometimes by not always verbalizing things. And so, yeah, I think, um, the group experience is really powerful.

It’s also. You know, not just like the breath work experience, but also like the sharing to be heard, seen and witnessed by your peers or by a group to know that you’re not alone. Um, that’s also really powerful just to come together with [00:47:00] like other like-minded people and share a story and not feel judged.

Um, that’s really profound, you know? ’cause you might be in circles where you share something and there’s judgment that comes up and then you shut down and you don’t wanna share, um, because of things that have happened in the past. So I think the group process is a really big part of this. Um, and I think a lot of like therapeutic work, um, that is kind of done in group.

It’s like how much does the group actually play a role, um, in that, in that healing or therapeutic process,

Joe Moore: right? And then there’s this aspect of agency and you’re the world’s foremost expert in you. And like, I, I love this kind of, I don’t know about inversion, but the, the idea that. You being supported in your process of self-discovery versus like being told about you.

Um, and there’s also this element of by controlling the breath, by [00:48:00] controlling, you know, if you’re gonna do body work or not and what kind, whatever, you know, you’re actually gaining more agency and healing through agency. Um, and I, I find that really clever. Did you, was that part at all of your, um, your capstone project, trauma-informed

Kyle Buller: work?

Yeah. Um, I might have written about it. Um, but I know that was also part of my process too. Um, where I think when I was. Doing a lot of healing work seeking after like, you know, different healers, different techniques, substances, and trying to like place all that agency and authority onto that person. And I think when I came across breath work, um, it was like, oh wait, this is me.

Like I’m doing this. Like I don’t have the acupuncturist like sticking needles in me to try to heal me. I’m not taking a psychedelic to try to heal me. Um, and having like this external like substance [00:49:00] impacting, I’m not going to my shamanic. Healer to try to get healing done. Um, it was like, oh wait, this is me.

This is my experience. And I get to also control it. If it’s getting too intense, I slow the process down and stop breathing, you know, and I can just lay here and nobody’s gonna tell me to keep breathing. You know, like I can just lay here if I wanna lay here. And, you know, I think that is something that’s like really nice about that practice is like the agency.

’cause I think a lot of in healing too. A lot of us were ripped from agency. When we think about traumas and things that have happened to us to try to, you know, just regain control is terrifying. To trust again can be really terrifying. And so I think that whole process of like trusting yourself going where you need to go, um, can be really profound.

And I think that was a big part of my, my healing process and why I really started to gravitate towards breath work. It was like a stop trying to put this on everybody else to do this for me. [00:50:00] I now have this like container where I can like explore this myself. Um, without that external factor. I mean obviously there’s external factors, right?

You have the group, you have the music, you have all this stuff, but um, it feels like it’s you.

Joe Moore: Yeah, I know. Temporary, uh, temporary relationship with a group of people that can be really helpful. Um, a thing I never really got the chance to ask you, Kyle, is around this, um, window of tolerance concept and trauma.

And you’re talking a little bit about like, um, with some psychedelic experiences you could push the gas a little bit too hard and end up with some traumas. And I’m wondering about the relationship of that kind of concept to this window of tolerance framework where like, if you can tolerate something as opposed to like kind of falling apart in these upper limit experiences, I, you know, I high stress outside.

Is that like, is there some sort of way to skillfully speak about [00:51:00] those periods of time outside of your window of tolerance being traumatic? Is that a framework that people talk about? Um,

Kyle Buller: I think we’re, I think like people are starting to talk about it a little bit more, um mm-hmm. You know, now that like somatic and nervous system stuff is becoming a little bit more like buzzwords and like trendy.

Um, so I’m glad people are starting to, to talk about this stuff. Um, but yeah, it’s like what happens like when we take on too much stress? Um, too much fear, too much panic, right? It’s like body either goes into like fight or flight or freezes and shuts down, right? And it’s like, it’s just our nervous system, like can’t really tolerate it.

So we go into like these survival mechanisms and like when we’re having like these really difficult psychedelic experiences, like how is that flood of like information. Putting you into fight or fight. Fight or fight. Um, or you kind of go into like a freeze and shutdown mode, right? And it’s like just too [00:52:00] overwhelming for you to actually like process, uh, the information.

Um, and you know, how can that then compound and possibly leave a little bit of like, yeah, trauma and distress in the nervous system where you’re like, am I gonna do that again? Right. And you hear this from folks that have had really bad trips, you know, and they’re still processing it like a year out or like two years out and they’re like, I don’t know if he’ll ever touch psychedelics again.

Like, that was terrifying. And you know, I know Terrence McKenna got criticized for this, um, because there was a point in his life where I think he actually stopped eating mushrooms. Um, and I forget where it’s written, um, or who talks about it, but it’s like he had just one really. Bad trip. Um, and it freaked him out supposedly, and he kind of stopped, um, for, I don’t know if he stopped completely or it was for an extended period of time.

Um, and it’s like, how is that continuing to live inside of you, you know?

Joe Moore: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Uh, best we know [00:53:00] it was the rest of his life and as you know, stuff can be really scary. Yeah. Yeah. And really leave a mark. Um, and I, yeah, I wonder, and we’re talking about like, uh, like actual trauma, not like I’m traumatized ’cause I missed the bus.

You know, like really serious stuff. Um, and yeah, so breath work I like as a, a means towards regulation, A means towards, I have agency over my body, nervous system. And then, um, with psychedelics, I think it’s a really helpful way to, um, help people kind of. I don’t know, swim through the experience, float through the experience a little bit.

Um, stay

Kyle Buller: grounded, you know, uh, an example that I sometimes give, it’s like I was doing a ketamine training and after the second, uh, shot, and it was a pretty low dose, like compared to [00:54:00] like what everybody got. I mean, it was pretty low dose. Um mm-hmm. And that started to bring up all my near death experience trauma.

Um, and so it’s like here’s a trauma that lives inside of me. It’s starting to then hijack my system as I’m starting to relive this experience under the ketamine. And then coupled with like the dissociative effect of ketamine. And now it’s like playing onto, am I dying actually? And so it’s like coupled with I feel like I’m back in the er.

I just got these shots, which I hate shots because like when I was in that situation and my veins were collapsing, they just kept jabbing me with needles. Sorry if that’s triggering for folks, but it’s like, you know, this was starting to come up in this session and this is starting to then activate my, my nervousness and then I’m starting to get into like this fight or flight response I need, what’s going on?

Like, I need to distract myself. I need to like get outta here. Like I [00:55:00] almost took off my eye shades and like almost like got up ’cause it was like, it was just too much for me to like go through that again. Um, and you know, I’m like sitting there checking my pulse and I’m like, okay. But then I’m like. I’ve been through this so many times, you know, like it’s, it’s part of my story.

I’ve been working on this for like over 20 something years at this point, but I think that just shows like how these experiences can still live inside of you. And so my nervous system just can’t tolerate this experience. It’s getting too overwhelming. And again, like I’m kind of getting into like, I need to get outta here.

I need to like, you know, get up, leave. I need to distract myself to make sure I’m like, okay. Um, and then I had to come back and say, I have my breath. I know this is part of my story. I know I’m actually okay. I’m gonna take a nice big, deep breath into my stomach. I’m gonna sit with the anxiety, ’cause I know this is gonna pass.

And just starting to breathe with the discomfort and starting to like, figure out like, why is this anxiety coming up [00:56:00] right now? Oh, okay, this is an old trauma, this is an old narrative. Um, I can SI can be with this. And so being able to stick with the breath and the breath started to become the anchor in that situation where I was able to really just ride through that experience without, you know, um, going into like complete panic mode, right?

Like, I think if I like didn’t have all that experience and, you know, spent years working through this and like, it was just like, again, new. Like, I probably would’ve tried to take off my eye shades and got up and probably left or walked around or like, you know, probably start screaming like, help, you know?

Um, and that happens, right? People that like, it’s too much too quick and like you don’t have familiarity with that terrain. It can be really, really overwhelming. Um, but again, I was like really thankful that I’m like, okay, like I have all this training, all this experience with like more somatic techniques and breath work.

I can actually stick with this and let this experience ride out. I don’t need to shut it down. I don’t need to [00:57:00] stop it. I can actually be with it and let it unfold. And that’s what I did. I let that unfold by just sticking with it and breathing through it. Um, and, you know, I was able to get out on the other side and, you know, again, this is something that just comes up pretty often in, in these experiences.

Um, and something that, you know, I’ll probably continue to work through for the rest of my life in a way. But at least it’s like I have that skill. I think in those early years. What would happen is that I would black out, like it would be too much where I would just like kind of close my eyes and like just go into panic mode and like, and or I would start distracting myself.

Um, and like, just like, yeah, I would get into this like high alert panic mode and just like, just be completely like, you know, in, in fear. Um, and you know, it’s like I’ve tried to learn to work with it in different ways over the years. So that’s like an example of like how that, that psychedelic could bring on an old trauma that [00:58:00] could get you outside that window of tolerance and then your nervous system is starting to react, whether it’s that freeze as a shutdown or you’re trying to like, get out of the situation, you’re in panic and fear anxiety and it’s like, how do we use our breath to come back to this baseline so we can stick with the experience to not fully suppress it, not fully get distracted by it, but, you know, be able to, to be with it.

Joe Moore: Mm-hmm.

Huh. So that’s kind of a good overall outline of breath work. I think it’s a really safe method. It’s an important method that people should learn. It’s, um, for me it’s the foundations of how I like to approach psychedelics generally. Um, it’s kind of, uh, very much in line with, um, you know, being as

light on dogma as possible and high on technique. Like, here’s the technique, here’s how you be safe, and [00:59:00] then go for it. Whatever happens is for you to sort out and we can help you. Um, yeah, and there’s so many ways, guys, there’s so many ways to approach breath work. This is, this is, you know, our thing is one method, one framework.

There’s so many ways. You know, um, I think it’s really important for people to spend time with breath work, things like vagal tone, um, assorted, you know, things pro. I wouldn’t be surprised if, um, heart rate variability was impacted by different breath work practices. I actually remember. Oh, totally. Yeah.

Yeah. I remember some clinicians actually doing that with me after my brain injury. Um, yeah, so, you know, there’s a lot of fun stuff there and a lot of room for. Growth. So yeah,

Kyle Buller: I’m glad to see that there’s like more research coming out too. So like, I think like one of the breath work, uh, practices that has research around like, um, heart rate variability is like resonance breath.

So you’re trying to drop your breath to [01:00:00] around six breaths per minute, so you’re really slowing the breath down. Um, I was just digging up some papers around like the, uh, similarities between breath work and psychedelic states. Um, and showing like what those breath work, like how breath work does have similar, uh, mechanisms as psychedelics with like, you know, default mode network.

Also the types of experiences of like this oceanic bliss that can come up in psychedelics and, and breath work. Um, and then yeah, also like the um. The increase in heart rate variability, which is really great to see. Um, and yeah, there’s these different types of breath work, right? You can do the more activating, intensified breathing, or you could do like this slow parasympathetic, uh, breathing that helps with the rest and digest and, and calming the nervous system.

So then you can see breath is a tool, right? It’s a flexible tool in which, how do you use it in whatever case that you need. Um, and, you know, I think that’s why there’s lots of different breath work practices and techniques out [01:01:00] there. Um, lots of different ways to approach it.

Joe Moore: Yeah. So, um, if you want to learn more about breath work, which I hope you do, please, please, please check out the course that Kyle just built.

Psychedelic education center.com. Uh, we’re doing a discount for a few days. Um. For the, what are we calling it, the holiday, call it end of year

Kyle Buller: sale or something like that.

Joe Moore: So it’s very limited time, so check it out if you wanna save a little bit of cash. Um, and it would be really great if you, um, took it, let us know and tell your friends how much you liked it.

We really liked teaching it live. We wanted to make it more accessible. So here’s the more accessible version. Uh, and we’ll

Kyle Buller: have some open office hours where you can drop in and chat. And then, um, also planning some live online breath work sessions. So there are those exercises. You can do everything online as like self-paced, but as you’re talking Joe with like [01:02:00] group process, like, you know, it might be nice to find a time to get together to do an actual online breath work experience with others, um, wherever they’re calling in from.

So we’ll also plan a few of those where if you do join and then we can do some also live online breath work as well.

Joe Moore: Yeah. Great. And then, um, stay tuned everybody. We have so much coming, um, so much on the, on the menu. Uh, we’ll have some breath work workshops that we’ll be facilitating in the near term.

Um, so kind of full weekends, um, or full days, which are exhausting, but still pretty good. Um, and then, uh, we’ve done, what was that, two in Breckenridge this year, which is really great. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that’s fun. Um, yeah. And what else do we have coming up that music program I’m developing, we got the digital security class that people should check out.

It’s really important if you’re keeping records, that you keep those records safe, um, from all sorts of people. And then, um, [01:03:00] yeah, I don’t know, there’s just so much. And we have some film screenings coming up. Uh, we’ve got a book club trip sitting by Julian Vay, um, is I think coming up mid next month. And in January we have the, um.

Film Last Journey, uh, reason tv. Put that together. Um, and it’s a, it’s a short film of people in their, um, kind of end of life era, uh, trying mushrooms and getting some relief. Cool. Yeah, I’m really excited about that. Um, and that’s part of our navigators community to do the club and video, you know, so psychedelics today.com/navigators if you wanna join that.

And, uh, Kyle and I are also offering up some coaching. So if you wanna learn more about that info@psychedelicstoday.com, that’s for business and personal transformation stuff, or hopes and dreams or, you know, on my side, if you’re trying to plan out what you’re gonna do on New Year’s, I’m happy to help. Um, you know, and then, [01:04:00] you know, stuff like Burning Man, what are you gonna do?

How are you gonna have a strategy for next year? You know? Yeah. Or if you’ve had like a client with

Kyle Buller: difficult integration or psychedelic and needing some support or consultation there, happy to chat with folks about that too.

Joe Moore: Yeah. So stay tuned, keep keep tuning in. Psychedelics today. We’ve got a lot coming.

Uh, we want to keep helping you. And thank you all for tuning in. Um, yeah, we’re just peaking at 103 viewers right now on the streams, Kyle, so I’m like, do stay. No, we should wrap. Got more, got more work to do other than streaming. Um, yeah, anything you wanna mention before we wrap

Kyle Buller: one day? That might be fun.

Just hang out on here and answer questions and stuff. Um, no. Yeah, if you’re interested in learning more about breath work, and again, this breath work course, um, just doesn’t go over kind of like that long form. Go, go over like lots of different practices and techniques there. Um, and yeah, check that out.

Psychedelic education center.com. Um, and yeah, for those that are [01:05:00] celebrating holidays and traveling, safe travels wherever you’re going or whatever you’re doing. So hopefully you guys have a wonderful week. All right. Thanks

Joe Moore: Kyle. Thanks everybody for tuning in, until next time.

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Alexander Beiner – Psychedelics, Culture, and the Games We Play

Alexander Beiner - Psychedelics Today - Episode 640

Alexander Beiner joins Psychedelics Today to explore how psychedelics, culture, and power shape each other. A writer, facilitator, and co founder of the conference Breaking Convention and the media platform KAINOS, he has spent years thinking about how psychedelic experiences ripple into politics, economics, conflict, and community. In this episode, he and Joe trace the path from early internet forums to today’s psychedelic renaissance, and ask what it would mean to bring a truly psychedelic perspective into our institutions.

Beiner is less interested in psychedelics as a niche medical tool and more interested in how they can help us see through destructive cultural “games,” reconnect to our bodies, and relate across deep divides.

Early themes with Alexander Beiner

The conversation starts with Beiner’s origin story. He describes formative psychedelic experiences as a teenager, and how early access to thinkers like Terence McKenna, Timothy Leary, and the Shulgins led him onto the Grow Report forum and its associated podcasts. From there he launched his own visionary art podcast and eventually co founded Rebel Wisdom, where he focused more broadly on culture, systems, and meaning rather than only on psychedelics.

He explains that most of his writing has not been about psychedelic substances, but about a “psychedelic approach” to reality. That means paying attention to complexity, paradox, and relationship, and asking what a psychedelic form of education, politics, or media might look like. He also touches on his documentary “Leviathan,” which looks at breakdowns of trust, disembodiment, and the social forces that pull us away from what is real and relational.

Core insights from this conversation

In the middle of the episode, the discussion moves into concrete tensions in the current psychedelic resurgence. Topics include:

  • How medicalization can both help and constrain access
  • Cognitive liberty and the right to alter one’s own consciousness
  • Psychedelic capitalism and the “Moloch” problem of destructive competitive games
  • The risks and potential of psychedelic religions and new spiritual communities

Beiner highlights work on ayahuasca circles for Israelis and Palestinians, noting how “we are all one” language can sometimes block necessary truth telling about power and harm. He returns often to embodiment as a key corrective. When people slow down, feel their bodies, and notice what is actually happening in their nervous systems, they can hold disagreement without dehumanizing each other.

He also points to emerging work on psychedelics for creativity and problem solving, including stories where psychedelic insights contributed to breakthroughs in science and complex systems thinking. For him, this is one of the most exciting frontiers, because it shifts the story from “fixing a deficit” to “creating something new.”

Later discussion and takeaways with Alexander Beiner

Later in the episode, Alexander Beiner and Joe talk about cult dynamics, religious freedom, and the need for better checks and balances in emerging psychedelic communities. Beiner stresses that humans are naturally drawn into strong groups and narratives, so the key is not to eliminate “cults” but to spot harmful patterns early and build better accountability.

They explore how double binds and mixed messages can create mental distress, and how psychedelics can sometimes resolve these binds by adding new context and perspectives. From there, the conversation turns to third spaces, communitas, and the urgent need for more embodied, in person culture beyond screens, work, and home.

Practical takeaways include:

  • Work with psychedelics in ways that reconnect you to your body, not just your ideas
  • Treat medicalization as one path among many, not the only legitimate route
  • Pay attention to group dynamics, power, and accountability in any psychedelic setting
  • Look for ways to bring “psychedelic virtues” like flexibility, curiosity, and compassion into your workplace, family, and community

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Alexander Beiner?
Alexander Beiner is a writer, facilitator, and co founder of the psychedelic conference Breaking Convention and the media platform Kinos. His work focuses on culture, systems, and how psychedelic perspectives can reshape society.

What is Alexander Beiner’s book about?
His recent book, The Bigger Picture, (discussed in this episode) looks at how psychedelics interact with politics, capitalism, and culture, and asks whether they can help us navigate multiple crises without getting captured by the same destructive games.

How does Alexander Beiner view psychedelic medicalization?
He sees medicalization as useful but limited. He supports access for people who need it, but worries that a purely medical frame reinforces class divides and hands too much power to psychiatry, instead of centering cognitive liberty and community based use.

What is Leviathan in Alexander Beiner’s work?
“Leviathan” is his documentary on the breakdown of trust, disembodiment, and large scale systems that pull us away from what is real and relational. It connects mythic images, embodiment, and modern crises of meaning.

What is Kinos and how does it relate to Alexander Beiner?
KAINOS is Beiner’s Substack based media platform, focused on surfacing novel perspectives and stories about culture, psychedelics, and the future. It extends many of the themes explored in this episode.

This episode places Alexander Beiner within the wider psychedelic resurgence as a voice linking inner work to outer systems. For clinicians, researchers, and community members, it offers a rich invitation to think beyond individual healing and ask how psychedelic perspectives might help us transform the cultural games we are playing.

KAINOS

The Bigger Picture

Breaking Convention

Transcript

Joe Moore: [00:00:00] Hi everybody. Welcome back to Psychedelics Today. Today I am joined by Alexander Beaner. Did I say that right?

Alexander Beiner: Binner? Almost

Joe Moore: binner. Oh, so close. Uh, sorry about that. I All good. You’re not the first rushed through your book yesterday, which was actually quite the journey. Um, it was my first full day back from Burning Man.

Alexander Beiner: Oh, welcome back.

Joe Moore: Thank you. And I learned quite a bit, and I was a little shocked that it was kind of my first real, like in-depth exposure to your work, other than breaking convention, obviously. yeah, so excited to get to know you here, excited to, you know, see what you’re up to these days and maybe explore some of the ideas in your book a little bit further too.

Alexander Beiner: Sounds great. I’m, I’m happy to be here. It’s nice to, yeah, nice to connect. I mean, I think I’ve did done a few things with, psychedelics today, but I don’t think we’ve ever, uh, properly had a conversation, so it’s, it’s nice to be [00:01:00] doing this.

Joe Moore: Yeah. Yeah. Likewise. Cool. So can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Like how did you end up in this kind of interesting corner of psychedelia in the internet?

Alexander Beiner: Yeah. How did I end up here? Well, I, um, I guess like many of us, you know, I had, uh, very meaningful psychedelic experiences, uh, in my case when I was like, I think like 18, 19, and the, well, I was particularly interested in.

Well, I guess the question Terrence McKenna used to say like, why isn’t everyone talking about this? I still feel like that a bit. Um, but now a lot more people are. But then, uh, so this would’ve been like 2005 or so. Um, you know, people like McKenna and Leary and the Shulgin’s, that was what was available.

And the first, um, the Johns Hopkins study that is often seen as the beginning of the psychedelic Renaissance, um, came out in [00:02:00] 2006. Uh, although Rick Strassman’s, DMT. The spirit molecule and his DMT research was quite a bit before that. Um, so I think it’s fair to say that Rick’s work is, you know, the beginning of the psychedelic renaissance.

Um, but I was on a, you know, I started out on an internet forum, um, called the Grow Report, which was actually originally a cannabis forum. Same by the way. Oh, really? I didn’t realize that. Yeah. Oh, man. Yeah. Yeah. We, we must talk about what, what our, uh mm-hmm. What our hooks were. Um, so I spent a lot of time on there, and there was a, there was a podcast on there called Psycho Nortica, uh, by Max Freakout.

Uh, and he became, I became good friends with him. He sort of introduced me to the world of, um, you know, the thinking around psychedelics, you know, for me they’ve always been deeply, the experiences have been deeply meaningful, you know, really changed my life in many ways on a personal level. And I’ve also been very interested in.

Uh, how can these have a [00:03:00] social impact beyond just our own personal experiences? Uh, which I think was really the question in a lot of the, the, the years between, you know, when research stopped and started up again, that was what kept the flame burning, was that, so that’s kinda my background in it. And I started a, a podcast on that network called Visionary Artists Podcast, which was, uh, interviewing visionary artists.

Um, uh, ’cause I’m, you know, a writer first and foremost. I’ve always, you know, been writing and, um, so I, yeah, I guess things just kind of cascaded from there. And, but I think even with, with the bigger picture, that’s kind of a culmination of many years of, you know, research and interest in this idea of how can psychedelics not just change our minds, but change, uh, society or change culture.

Joe Moore: Yeah. I appreciated the care. Um, with which I, I wanna jump right into the book and then we can start going back into our backstory. Yeah. Yeah. The book’s so fresh. Um, I, [00:04:00] so just for everybody out there, I, I kind of, um, I just got back from Burning Man. Listened to the book in a, in a Hurry. It’s available on Spotify.

Um, and I, I loved it. It was pretty great. I, I had been thinking about a, a book, some, I can’t say similar because the, the way you structured it was good because it was like actually accessible the way I Thank you. I was gonna put something together. I don’t know that it was gonna be accessible and like, really great interviews you got with amazing folks.

Um, do you, do you remember offhand the name of the, um, physicist at cern, you?

Alexander Beiner: Yeah. Bernardo Castrop. Yeah.

Joe Moore: He got some press in the, um, the DMT entity Encounters book a little bit too, um, by one of the, um. People who spoke at that conference. And I was like, okay, now he’s coming up twice in two months for me, so I’m gonna have to like really dig into Castro’s work.

Yeah. But this this really amazing arc [00:05:00] that you did, uh, around like, okay, we’re in trouble. Psychedelics might be able to help. Here’s all the problems with psychedelics. You know, um, here’s, does it really matter? Which is of course a thing you’re gonna have to get through eventually. And then, you know, what, what can we do?

What, what meaningful things can we do? And, um, I appreciated our, our kind of alignment on drug policy matters it seemed like at the end. Um, kind of how do we just keep folks safe mm-hmm. Generally, and, you know, not let money run away with it. Yeah. The whole, the whole story, um, gonna be an interesting balancing act.

But yeah, it was, um. I think it, you know, handled complexity well, handled a lot of things well. Um, and yeah, just generally very impressed. And again, a little bit embarrassed that this is the first thing I’ve read by you,

Alexander Beiner: so. Oh, no, that’s fine. Thank you. Well, thank you for the kind words and I’m, I’m glad you enjoyed it and it’s, it’s really nice to, um, that is still fresh as well, uh, sort of like, you know, front of mind.

That’s, that’s great. [00:06:00] Um, and yeah, and I, you know, it’s funny because a lot of the stuff I write isn’t actually about psychedelics, you know, most in, in fact, most of my writing and films aren’t about psychedelics. Um, you know, I, I was one of the founders of a, a platform called Rebel Wisdom, and that ran for about five years.

And we had a, you know, fairly sizable audience on YouTube and Substack and a few other places. And then that ended a few years, about three years ago. And since then, um, I’ve been mainly writing, although I just created a documentary, and so none of that stuff, I would say like 10% of what I’ve written is about psychedelics.

Um, partly because, I don’t know, there’s something about, uh, sort of not looking at the finger, but looking at the moon. You know, if someone’s pointing at the moon, there’s something that I’m really interested in about, like what does a psychedelic approach to, uh, well, anything really, you know, um, what does that actually look like?

What does that mean? And so, and part of it’s also just my own [00:07:00] interests, I guess. I’m really interested in sociology. I’m really interested in, um, trying to understand what’s going on in culture, um, from a deeper level. That’s the thing that gets me really fired up and, and gets me, gets me going. Um, and so, you know, there, there’s also a, a way in which like, I’m also just a bit of a lone wolf sometimes.

And so I’m like, you know, when there’s a whole, you know, I do feel part of the psychedelic field and, and you know, I love it. And, you know, breaking convention is probably my most active, uh, in it. Um. Uh, and I also am a big believer in, hey, let’s, as psychedelic people, let’s take our minds and perspectives and put them into different areas.

’cause I think that’s one of the arguments I make in the book is like, how can we have a more psychedelic perspective transforming our institutions? And, you know, for example, what is a psychedelic version of education look like? You know, that’s a big question. Like, we have to first agree on what we mean [00:08:00] by that.

And I do explore that, um, in the book. Like, you know, I, I think there’s something of psychological flexibility and creativity and flow and compassion. I think there’s a lot of things that people generally agree are an aspect of the psychedelic experience, you know, deep interconnection, and there’s a lot of research on all these different sort of facets of it.

And so what does it look like to actually bring that into culture, you know, fully,

Joe Moore: you had a couple. So many good things, but one in particular is coming to mind now around, um, to, to really make good, um, progress on complex issues, working together with people. There needs to be some sort of attunement or healing kind of already done, and which could kind of come from that psychedelic education that you kind of mentioned.

It’s like, how do I sit with these uncomfortable things and go, okay, maybe those four things are right. Can we discuss that and then we can build on it together? And I, I thought that was skillful, especially around kind of this, I’m, I’m gonna spill a one, [00:09:00] a small amount of being here and say that like the, the narrative is woven into your involvement in the, um, kind of extended state DMT work at Imperial.

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Joe Moore: And, um. It was kind of a lesson you were learning in the experience, but also saying, oh, this is actually very important and kind of what we need now if we’re going to have depth and meaning in our conversations and make progress here intellectually.

Alexander Beiner: Yeah, definitely. I and I, that is. Yeah. I mean, yeah, you described it really well.

Like there’s something of, there’s a temptation I think, often with psychedelics of going beyond. ’cause they can take us to mm-hmm. You know, very transcendent places and they can take us to deep imaginings of what could be. And then there’s also, you know, deep traditions in many indigenous cultures and, and elsewhere of psychedelics being used to, uh, enhance communit tasks like connectedness and coherence and cohesion within a culture, often through rituals.

Not just the [00:10:00] psychedelics, but it’s the psychedelics with a ritual or as part of a ritual practice. And we really lack that in the sort of, you know, advanced economies in the, you know, the, the, the west, so to speak. We were very atomized and individualistic. And there’s nothing wrong with, I think, individualism.

There’s a lot of benefits to it, but there’s something of, you know, rave culture and burning man and, you know, the, the, this kind of deep need. That we have to come together. Um, and psychedelics can enhance that togetherness and not just in a, you know, there’s an interesting example I, I give in the book of Lyor Rosen’s work, which you, you might be familiar with and people watching might be.

And if you’re not, it, you know, Lyor along with, uh, a Lyor Israeli, along with the Palestinian activist Sam Wa, they did a really fascinating study on Israelis and Palestinians who drink ayahuasca together. You know, uh, that was the first study. And then the second study was [00:11:00] actually bringing them to sort of a neutral space in, in Spain and doing ceremonies with the intent of conflict resolution.

And one of the things with that which really struck me was that, you know, Lior Lior is a really brilliant researcher. Um, and he points out the nuance of like, sometimes we’re all one actually got in the way of having the real conversation about the realities on the ground and the situation. And so. It’s really complex that holding that, you know, we are all one, I think.

And at the same time, conflict is real. Inequalities are real. Um, strife is real. And so I think psychedelics can really help us to hold that nuance. But as long as we approach it with that in mind, you know, if, if we approach it with a kind of spiritual bypass of like, let’s not talk about anything difficult here.

We’re all just wonderful star children, then it can take us further into disconnection. Ironically, I think.

Joe Moore: Yeah. [00:12:00] Um, you had this really great analogy, um, story around Moloch. Could you kinda share a little bit of that and, and how that was kind of, um, important for you to include?

Alexander Beiner: Yeah. So, so Moloch is, was a Canaanite guard of war that people used to sacrifice.

The thing that mattered most of the, you know, the person or the thing that mattered, most of them in order to have material success, like to win a war or, you know, gain money, it’s often they, they would sacrifice their children, you know, so it’s this really powerful metaphor of like the darkest aspect of human attractiveness and greed.

Um, and a brilliant, uh, essayist, uh, called Scott Alexander who, um, wrote a blog called Slate Star Codex, which is now called Astral Star Codex. Um, he has this great piece called Meditations on Mooch, where he, he uses that metaphor to personify the system we [00:13:00] live in, which in a sense is capitalism, but it’s deeper than capitalism.

It’s more the impulse for what he would call like zero sum games, right? So like race to the bottom dynamics that is just everywhere in culture. And so, and it’s about game theory. It’s about the way that the rules of society are structured and so. You know, I apply that in the, well, more recently, my, my documentary Leviathan is, is taking that metaphor and expanding it into the deeper levels of human psychology.

Like what is it within the human condition where we have both, you know, a, a deep connection to, to the sacred and this incredibly blind, abstractive, greedy, self-destructive aspect to us. And like so many cultures have talked about that. So that’s, that’s, it’s a metaphor that I think about a lot. And in the book I talk about how psychedelic capitalism and the way psychedelics are coming into.[00:14:00]

Mainstream, um, runs the risk and it’s already happening. It’s, you know, I think a lot of us knew this would happen is that it gets captured by mooch effectively. And so what is a deeply transformative experience suddenly gets caught in the game. The dynamics of like, say big pharma with the dynamics of the market basically.

And the market as it stands isn’t about human flourishing or truth. It’s about profit. It’s about winning the game. And psychedelics aren’t like that. You know, psychedelics won’t, I think, ever fully fit into that model. They can maybe for a while, but then there’s, you know, major consequences of that. You know, I think they, they, they challenge that system in many ways.

And so that’s a really, you know, I’m a, I’m in two minds in some ways of, of. Whether psychedelics should be medicalized. It’s kind of a controversial thing to say, but I, I’ve moved more or [00:15:00] back more towards a cognitive liberty argument over the years. Seeing how, seeing the worst aspects of psychedelic capitalism and then also seeing decent aspects like I was in Australia early this year, and there, because they’ve legalized psilocybin for medicinal purposes.

There’s actually a lot of interesting cool stuff happening there. So it’s really about, you know, it really depends. It’s very highly contextual. But overall, I think the, one of the biggest challenges we have as a species is that we are stuck in this really messed up game, and my hope is for psychedelics to help break us out of it instead of enhancing it.

Joe Moore: Right. And I think as any technology develops, we’re gonna have these, you know, bright sides and shadow sides and there’s no kind of way, a way we can, you know, work around that. And you use the internet as an example of that in your book. And any, any technology really, you know? Um, so it’s something that I think we’re just gonna have to face as [00:16:00] squarely as we can.

Um, yeah. ’cause that ship has sailed, you know, it’s nice to have opinions, right. But yeah, yeah, yeah. Opinions maybe, you know, what should we do in the next three months and, and 12 months as opposed to, I wish, I wish Rick did it different.

Alexander Beiner: Yeah. Yeah, I completely agree. I completely agree with that. Yeah. We gotta ride, like, it’s like a, it’s like a psychedelic trip.

We gotta ride the wave. You gotta go in and through it. Yeah.

Joe Moore: Yeah. Um, and I, I keep circling back to like the Grow Report Forum and like all these other, like, um, there’s so many podcasts in there. I don’t, I don’t know if people understand how influential that was on like, the kind of early 2000 psychedelic scene, but it was radically influential, at least on me.

Yeah.

Alexander Beiner: Yeah. Me too. Yeah, it was major. I, I spent a lot of time on there. It’s pre-social media too, so it was where you could go to mm-hmm. Talk to people, or in my case, argue philosophy for months with the same person, which really was actually a lot of fun.

Joe Moore: Yeah. I probably read a lot of those. [00:17:00] I, I was thinking about what my handle was on there.

I have no idea. Um, if you remember, let me know. Yeah,

Alexander Beiner: that’s, it’d be interesting to see if I remember it. Yeah.

Joe Moore: But you, um, had you always been in London, so you, you’d kind of been near these folks

Alexander Beiner: kind? No, kind of, I mean, no. I mean, I grew up, I’m half German and half Irish, so I grew up in Germany and Okay. I went to university in Dublin and it was when I, it was sort of at the end of that, it was when I moved to London in 2009.

I think it was already on the forum actually, but yeah, maybe 2008. No, it must have been earlier. Actually, it was earlier than that. It was way earlier because it was like, yeah, I was already on there. I was already doing the podcast. But yeah, the, the, the London kind of, there were a lot of people on that forum who were in London.

Um, and my brother lived here at the time, so, uh, yeah, that was kind of where I connected with them. There used to also be an annual. Gathering in Amsterdam. I dunno if you’ve ever made it to one of those, but like, I wish of course on April 20th, on four twenties, [00:18:00] which was always quite fun as well. Um, yeah.

Joe Moore: Yeah. And I guess, um, in terms of a continuing thread from, there was kind of Lorenzo Haggerty’s work with the psychedelic salon being kind of affiliated deeply there. And he, he kind of went by the pod father, which is super funny. And um, yeah, I would say that that was a huge, that network of things is a huge reason I got involved in media and I assume like helped you write a lot, so definitely.

Were you doing media projects outside of writing on the forum shortly after that?

Alexander Beiner: Well, I had this really weird trajectory because I wrote a novel in my last year of university, a psychedelic novel called Beyond the Basin, which I self-published. Um, and so I was already writing and already deeply involved in psychedelia, and my hope was, oh, I, I’ll become a novelist and won’t have to get a job.

Um, and then I realized that I, you know, I kind of almost, I kind of eventually got there, but like, [00:19:00] I moved to London and I actually got a job in marketing, um, which I was good at, but hated as well. And I felt really torn about, like really conflicted. Um, it was like post-financial crash, you know, so it was just like, if you got a job, you gotta, like, you take the job, you know?

That was it. And London is a very expensive city as well, so I did that for, like, I did that for like seven or eight years while writing novels. Um. That was my life, basically. And then we set up Rebel Wisdom myself and, uh, a guy called David Fuller. And then I left my corporate, my kind of, you know, agency job.

I was, at that point I was working like event marketing and like experiential agencies, which I quite enjoyed. Um, and then Rebel Wisdom did well. And then, um, I started writing again. You know, I actually stopped, I was writing, I, I sort of stopped writing novels because I, I wasn’t getting anywhere with it.

Um, and [00:20:00] in retrospect, I think I just needed to mature as a writer and as a person. And now it’s funny, like now I’m sort of working on fiction again, which feels like a nice, uh, you know, full, somewhat full circle journey. Um, but yeah, so I was sort of involved in like, media, media related stuff, I would say.

Yeah. Great. Yeah.

Joe Moore: That’s fun. I, um, there was. In a book, right? Like, you have to be really deliberate about what you can and cannot include to like support your story. And, you know, um, there’s one person that didn’t make the cut that I was kind of curious about. At one point, if you got much exposure to him, um, not Whitehead, but Robert Anton Wilson, um, didn’t seem to get a mention, but like in a lot of the ways you were thinking, I was like, this is, there’s a lot of Wilson here.

Alexander Beiner: Yeah. That’s really interesting because I am not very well versed in Robert Anton Wilson, like a little bit [00:21:00] here and there, but I’ve never mm-hmm. Properly read. I think one of my main ways in is like Eric Davis wrote a book about him and McKenna and who was the, who’s the third dick? Yeah, that’s right.

Philip k. Yeah. Whereas, you know, bizarrely like McKenna and Philip k Dick, like in college, I, I, you know, in my dissertation I was writing about Philip k Dick’s work. I actually think Dick is an incredible, um, uh, storyteller in the sense of, like, his ideas are amazing, but I think he’s actually quite a poor writer, his actual stylist.

Like, I’m like, oh dude, clunky. That’s

Joe Moore: pop pop sci-fi

Alexander Beiner: pop sci-fi. Yeah, exactly. So, but yeah, Robert Anton Will Wilson’s work, I, I’m really not that familiar with, and it’s one of those, like, this happens all the time, I think, well, to me at least, where, um, yeah, like what I was doing, I was doing some chat GPT research and I realized that like, Leviathan and my documentary, um, is like [00:22:00] real, like the, the core thesis is really like.

Almost word for, or like structure for structure. Something that Lahan, the psychologist Lahan had pointed out. And I was like, I don’t know anything about, like, I know a little bit about Lakan. I was like, holy crap. Like, okay, nothing’s new under the sun. And then, you know, there’s, that’s happened, um, a bunch of times for me.

So I really should delve in to Robert Anton Wilson, like that, that’s definitely high on my like sort of stack of things I wanna read more on. Yeah,

Joe Moore: it’s fun. It’s really fun. He, um, was really kind of rigorous and fluid in his thinking and um, you know, he partnered with leery around a lot of the eighth circuit model stuff and, um, definitely more of a generalist than a, you know, specialist, which actually I think we need more generalists.

Yeah, yeah. Which is what I’m here for, I guess. Um, and yeah, then you know, the European perspectives on on Tim Leary were interesting to me ’cause they’re kind of like, you know, quick [00:23:00] hits. Like hit and pivot and I’m like, okay, I get it. I get it. ’cause like it’s, it’s like important to the narrative. But I, I, um, I’ve been doing a lot of kind of work around leery lately, and I, I just like, for having been one of the first people to have done what he did, I think he did it with about as much grace as any human could.

Alexander Beiner: That’s interesting. Yeah. I mean that’s, it’s a, he’s a complex character, right? Yeah. Like his, uh, you know, um, and maybe it would’ve been nice to spend a bit more time on him in there, but Yeah, it is, it is tough when you have like limited space. Um, but you know, he, I, you know, the politics of Ecstasy, one of his books, I was really formational.

I mean, I think it’s excellent. Mm-hmm. You know, also, he was one of the first people to suggest a drug license, um, which is a really cool idea. And that’s come back, you know, I’ve seen that idea come back over the years and when it does, I’m like. Leary said this like a long time ago. So he was in, he was incredibly brilliant, you know, and so it’s a, yeah, it is a, it’s who else is an interesting [00:24:00] character who didn’t make it in there is, uh, Castaneda.

Um, because that was wildly

Joe Moore: complicated, wildly complicated character. Have

Alexander Beiner: you listened to, um, trickster, the podcast that, I forget the name of the guy who made it, someone made a really brilliant podcast about Castaneda called Trickster, which I recommend to everyone because it is brilliantly done and it is absolutely insane.

Like, you know, it’s, it’s, he is insane. But that was my first book on psychedelics I read was Don Juan. Like, it probably was for, well, like a whole generation, you know, like before us, right? But like, so that’s another, you know, strand that I think is, is very interesting.

Joe Moore: Yeah, it’s very fruitful. Yeah. When people bring up the, the pilot pilot’s license model, I’m like, okay.

Um, I’m not gonna let you claim that that’s the leery thing, but they’re looking at doing it in New York State. That’s a big par portion of what the Oh, interesting. I looks like that’s interesting. Um, yeah, it’s on one hand I like it. On the other hand, it’s like, you know, [00:25:00] living in a country as ridiculous as America these days, like it’s too, um.

It seems to me like it’s just gonna make more laws repressing people with less generally. Like, okay, yeah, you’re too poor to go through training even though it’s free because it takes time, so therefore jail or tickets or whatever. I’m like, how do we make it equitable and safe? It’s, I, you know, we’re taking our way out of a trillion dollar war on drugs and US spent alone since the seventies.

So I think there has to be proportional spend to like dig our way out of it, um, if we can figure that out. Um, but it’s about fairness and safety.

Alexander Beiner: Yeah. Yeah. And that, that’s also sort of like echoed in the medicalization of psychedelics where already there’s class and, and racial and other demographic disparities that will not go away when they’re, uh, you know, medicalized.

Because, you know, you know, [00:26:00] working class people at least, you know, here in the UK very often are like, that’s not form even with therapy, that’s not for me. And we don’t do that kind. Like, there’s a kind of like, kind of, it feels shut out of it. And it, the, the, and it’s in incre, like if you go to a psychotherapist in London, they’re very middle class, almost always, you know, with some exceptions.

But like, there’s a, you know, the class system here is quite, um, I would say entrenched. In a lot of ways, in a way it isn’t, for example, in Germany or Ireland. So it’s, it’s interesting for me to kind of observe it as an outsider. And you’re often classed by your accent. So I get free ride ’cause they’re like, where the hell are you from?

Because I’m a foreigner. So, um, but you know, that’s a, that’s a, that’s a big question. I, I also have it, um, explore the book a bit. It’s like, okay, great. Psychedelics become legal medicines and are used by exactly the same people who can afford to use them. Not just moneywise, but like you said, time-wise or just a sense that they’re welcome.

You know, like that’s a huge thing. There’s a massive cultural factor as [00:27:00] well where it’s like, now this is our thing. And that’s, it’s implicit very often, right? Yeah. And, and so that, that’s, that’s a major question. Yeah. I agree with you on the license piece. It’s like how to navigate that, because also who gives the license, you know.

Um, that’s, that’s like legitimacy. Yeah.

Joe Moore: And yeah, haven’t these folks lost, uh, enough legitimacy over the last couple decades and Yeah. You know, why, why put faith there, trust there anymore anyway. Like this, the thing that I think we agree on, uh, beyond this is that medicalization is one of, should be one of many pathways.

Agreed. Um, and that who’s to say how you would best benefit from it or who cares about best benefit? How, how do you want to include it in your life? Like, shouldn’t you have that level of agency over your own kind of temporary meet suit?

Alexander Beiner: Yeah, I totally agree. And then, you know, it’s like, which power? Like as soon as it’s medicalized, the, the kings and [00:28:00] queens of that become the psychiatrists.

And by virtue of being a psychiatrist, they don’t need to have taken a psychedelic in their life, but they get a legitimacy and status over people who’ve. Maybe I’ve been guiding people for 20 years and have a lot of psychedelic experience and a really deeply immersed, like, so there’s a kind of absurdity to it.

There’s a, there’s a, there’s some validity to it as well, you know, it’s not black and white, but Yeah, I agree. Like, I think having multiple strands of access goes a long way to solving that. And there’s of course there’s, there’s cognitive liberty and personal use, which I think is essential on a, just on a kind of philosophical level as well.

It’s like, who, like the, the idea that the state can tell me how to change my consciousness if I’m not hurting someone else is, it’s like if you allow that, you open the door for a lot of other really messed up things. It’s like, well they can, you, you gonna, the state’s gonna tell me how I can control my consciousness, but maybe they, they’ll then tell me how I should control my consciousness.

Right. Which in a way is [00:29:00] propaganda. Um, the reli, I’m curious your thoughts on like the religious, uh, freedom aspect because I think the states, because of the laws. Around religious freedom. It’s a bit more advanced in this area, but like are you, what’s your take on that movement right now and how it’s going?

Joe Moore: Um, well, uh, I’m actively involved in something legal that’s not super pleasant, um, that I’ll share with you offline. Um, but the, generally speaking, you know, if the Christian right evangelical movements and Scientology are taking advantage of religious freedom here in the states and the tax benefits of all that, and you know, um, just because it looks Christian, they’re getting kind of a thumbs up and like, go for it.

And you know, that’s honestly a big portion of the reason the Native American church got um, kind of a federal exemption is because it looked a little bit Christian. [00:30:00] I dunno if you read Mike Jay’s book on masculine, it was, uh, brilliant. Um, and. Uh, you know, we just started seeing churches get federal exemptions, um, that don’t look Christian.

And then I think we just saw our fir ’cause they look very Peruvian. Um, and then I think we saw one recently that looks, um, might actually be a multis sacramental church. Um, so like, not just Ayahuasca for instance. And then, you know, the next step is, you know, how do I, how do I turn? Um, maybe not say I, how, how, how do, how does some people get together and say, this is what we do and this is our religious practice.

Mm-hmm. And yes, it includes everything from. Mushrooms to LSD, to GHB and whatever. And, and that is our religious practice, and this is what we do and this is how [00:31:00] we connect with each other. And, you know, that transcendent thing, some called God or whatever. And, um, I, I, so in short, I’m generally in support of this kind of thing that said, there’s tons of traps.

I, I see people doing legal work that’s very risky. Um, I, I, I think we’re gonna see a lot of people going to jail soon around psychedelic religions, um, given the way the country’s going. Yeah. I have a friend who almost went away for 15 years after the church leader told him. We’re good. We got the lawyers to tell us we’re good.

Um, like multiple federal agencies rated their mushroom grow in Denver. Wow. And he was, he was almost all the way gone from psychedelic history. Wow. Thankfully, Denver decriminalized at just the right moment and he got off and he’s able to still contribute. But I think, um, people who are following church leaders should not [00:32:00] blindly trust.

Like perhaps they have religious expertise of some kind or another perhaps, but they don’t have legal expertise guarantee that. And you know, just because you might win at the federal level does not mean that you could, you might still get incarcerated for years, so you have to be really careful. Um, so I’m into it.

I just think people need to be very cautious and I think you should be working with three different lawyers who don’t really have business relationships. Like, you know, maybe do all the work here, but just get double checked by a few other firms. Um,

Alexander Beiner: yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, what I mean for, for me not being, you know, in, in the us not knowing what the, the, the kind of legal structures.

Um, my concern is always around, um, checks and balances and, you know, basically preventing massive cults from forming or harmful cults from [00:33:00] forming. Right. So that’s a big question. You know, harmful. Harmful, yeah. Because everything is, I mean, culture cult, you know, like, you know, I think there’s, I, I’m not of this kind of, you know, I think it’s human.

I think it’s human to come together around a shared experiences and shared beliefs. So I’m not like, that doesn’t kind of bother me. And I think we need that and we need to, you know, share connection to the sacred. I think we also need systems of accountability and checks and balances where, you know, whereas.

Which you get, you know, Carl Young talked about the difference between creed and religion, right? Creed is like, you go to church on Sunday, but like, it’s just a social thing you do. You’re not actually deeply connecting with a, a mystical experience in that. And then religion itself, like that’s the real deal.

That’s, that’s, you know, where you’re actually having an encounter with a sacred, um, the benefit, well, not the benefit, but one aspect of like religions that have a place in the community and the larger sort of social [00:34:00] body is that they’re part of the society. And so there is not necessarily checks and balances we’ve seen with various churches that that can go very south no matter even if they are embedded in the culture.

But at least, or is there a way, I guess, to have a level of transparency around these, you know, organizations and experiences. You know, it could even be like a kind of Wiki style kind of like, these people are solid, these people aren’t, you know, people have talked about that for retreats. So I don’t know.

There’s, there’s maybe clever ways to, to go about it, but, and, and again, it comes back to psychoeducation or education in general. It’s like, okay, listen, Jamie Wheels done some work in this with like ethical cult building. Um, is the person claiming to be God? Like, you know, is this happening? Have they asked you to give them all your, uh, money?

You know, like, just like that, that kind of thing. Um, so that, yeah, there’s, it’s lots of questions around it. Doesn’t mean I, I I’m also with you. Like, I think [00:35:00] it’s a really important and promising avenue, um, and a human right as well. You know, psych, I think psychedelic religion is a human right. It’s, or psychedelic spirituality or psychedelic practice.

Joe Moore: In our meaning crisis bring from back in for a second. Like what other way to do it than communitas and like shared practice and experience and, you know, the, it’s hard. People want to use like the government as like a thing that can help groups like this improve governance. I don’t, I don’t know that that’s the case.

I think people should be going to jail if they’re offending. Mm-hmm. You know, people’s body autonomy and like, you know, doing harm to them. Absolutely. They should be, you know, locked up. God, God can’t prevent you from, from that, hopefully. Um, and then, yeah, it’s, I think there’s, there’s something that went around somewhat recently, um, around kind of [00:36:00] when.

When people take an extreme position and they get entrenched. We see this in the internet, we see this in maga, we see this probably in like, um, Mormon church. Like, you take a position and you dig in and you get energized by that. Kind of like that tension away from it. And I think there’s probably something where like, how can we avoid shaming people for having taken a ridiculous position and say like, oh, I still love you.

Like, let’s talk about this. And you had a really great quote. I, I, I’m remembering this wrong, but I think you said something like, Voltaire’s father said, like, I’m trying to like, you know. I’m not trying to be right. I’m trying to learn from the best of what you have and come to some new higher truth and kind of like a, um, synthetic thing there, which I think is, you know, perhaps what we all need to be leaning towards.

It’s like, oh, we all have particular slices. Yeah. Including these sketchy, harmful cults. Which, [00:37:00] here’s where there’s actually a lot of measures. There’s actually a lot of like scorecards you can go through to like, analyze groups. So like

Alexander Beiner: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s

Joe Moore: not just Jamie. It’s like a lot.

Alexander Beiner: There’s a lot.

Yeah. There’s a whole academic kind of, um mm-hmm. Uh, I know. Discipline around that. Yeah. No, I mean, I think that I, it’s funny you mentioned that the question of like how not to shame people for having gotten into cult dynamics, um, because I think that’s vital as you know, I think it’s actually like, it feels like evolutionarily important for the human.

Species because we do it all the time. And to get, to move forward the, the sort of victim perpetrator cycle of like, wow, you guys were wrong. Now we’re gonna punish you. That sort of retribution, it’s, you know, so many religious traditions have shown this, like in i for an eye, you know, it makes the whole world blind effectively.

And one way that I think is promising is that, like, [00:38:00] to talk about vei, like, you know, I think I mentioned this in the book somewhere, like intelligence according to like, you know, the, the cognitive science approach that vei John Vei takes, like all intelligence is bias. Like we talk about everyone’s bias.

It’s like, yeah, actually the way that we come to any kind of perspective is that we filter things out and we just select what’s important and relevant that is bias. And so. It’s very natural as human beings, as the Buddhist pointed out as like kind of many traditions have pointed out that sometimes, or actually all the time, very often we are self deceptive and we make the wrong things important and we focus in on that.

But I think if it can be framed as this is a nature of the human brain and the nature of humans and groups and the nature of what it is to be human, then that that reminds everyone that we all do it and that sure, some of us might. Go even more extreme. I think often though, people who join really messed up groups have a lot of, [00:39:00] uh, vulnerability.

You know, they might have had very traumatic childhoods. They might be in a really difficult position in their life at that point. It might be the wrong place, wrong time, or I guess from, from the perspective of someone abusing them right place, right time, right? So, so there’s all of this stuff that is actually, if you really understand it, like if you read a novel about that person’s experience and you got it and you got where they were coming from, you would immediately forgive it.

You’d be like, yeah, okay, that’s, I get it. I get why you got so wrapped up in this particular ideology, or whatever it might be. So I think it’s, well, I guess it’s about compassion and it’s also maybe about understanding that it’s part of being human

Joe Moore: right and being tactile. Like what are we actually trying to do?

Are we just trying to show that we’re wrong and Mag is right? Or like, well, sorry, fresh back from Burning Man. You know, like, what are we actually trying to do with this conversation and interaction and like, do we want, do we want open good lines of communication? If that’s possible. And that’s, that’s [00:40:00] quicker than, you know, another element from your book, like the economics of Twitter are such that you have to be pithy and like, you know, just win your fights all the time.

That’s not really what humanity, you know, our biology wants, I don’t think, or soul wants. Um,

Alexander Beiner: yeah, that’s like a mooch great example of it. And, uh, or um. CT Engin who wrote this great book, um, games agency as art. He makes this point about Twitter, like it’s called value capture, like the values of Twitter, which is getting, you know, like you said, pithy, uh, pissing people off being as contentious as possible.

Or like the values of Instagram, you know, being like grabbing attention, um, you know, appearances. There’s a bit more to it than that as well. You know, there’s like, but there’s something of the values of a social platform or of a company or of a country sometimes, uh, very often might not be our values.

Like we actually want deep conversation, we want deep connection, we want, you [00:41:00] know, you know, thriving community. And so, but in order to play the game, it’s like the Mooch thing again. You have to. Well, you either defect and you’re like, I’m outta here. But that’s really difficult to do if money, if, if your income is reliant on it, or you have to play the game and betray yourself in the process.

And that’s kind of what it’s, you know, what many of our experiences are like if we’re in like a corporate job or whatever it might be. So it’s, uh, you know, and I think liberation from that is very possible, but it just requires enough people defecting, like, you know, and, and just being like, no, this game sucks.

I’m not gonna play this game,

Joe Moore: man. So there’s an article, um, I saw, it was like the first kind of sciencey article I saw when I came back from the burn. And it was about this like, um, rise in schizophrenia with cannabis, um, use high potency cannabis. And like we don’t have a hundred percent [00:42:00] certainty that that’s, this causes that, but they’re kind of just showing correlation and, um.

I’m gonna circle this back in an interesting way and bring in Matt Siegel. Oh, nice. Uh, so if I can, um, so Artie Lang, this is kind of, um, amazing psychiatrist. He talked, I think a lot about this kind of idea of, okay, here’s what government, and here’s what family is supposed to do for me, but they keep stabbing me and they keep harming me.

And like that creates this kind of like proto schizoid thing where we’re just like, oh, I can’t actually trust reality because of the way I’ve, I’ve told this should be operating is it’s not playing out that way. And, um, this, uh, philosopher French philosopher at this, um, kind of Whitehead conference we did ages ago and Claremont called, um, conference was.

And exceptional experience save the planet. So can see this is a recurring theme. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3: Awesome.

Joe Moore: And [00:43:00] he, he was amazing. Uh, he very kinda like critical theory esque. Um, I couldn’t understand him very well at the time, but I think about him a lot still. But he just kept talking about this kind of like schizo nature of reality where like, this is what we’re told, but this is our experience.

So we’re just like constantly having this kind of like, um,

impossible void between, between those two things and how that energy can make a lot of, let’s call it madness for right now. And um, you know, psychedelics can give us some sort of like direct experience of like, oh, this is actually what’s going on. I sometimes call it like the, you can see right through the Babylon system, like bring a reggae thing in, but like, or umra the thing in and I’m just like, ah, how do we, how do we actually kind of land that.

That’s interesting, right?

Alexander Beiner: Yeah.

Joe Moore: Matt Siegel was there in the room. I think that’s the best I can do. That’s

Alexander Beiner: good. [00:44:00] You did it. You tied it back. So that reminds me of do you know, um, uh, Gregory Bateson’s work or Nora Bateson’s work at all? Like,

Joe Moore: she’s doing the warm data thing now. I just finished tripping on reality, which is extraordinary.

Um, yes. Is about Baton and, um, Mar Lee, oh, I know it

Alexander Beiner: very well because I did a, uh, I was gonna do a piece, well, Nora did a guest piece when it came out because she, she disagreed with, um, the, uh, what’s his name? The author is, um, Benjamin, uh, it’ll come to me, yeah. On my bookshelf somewhere. But, um, she disagreed with, with some of the characterizations, and so I got, they, they were going to write a piece about.

Uh, the book. And then eventually she wrote a piece about some other themes, which was an excellent piece. It’s on, it’s on the Substack, but, so I did, you know, I I was back and forth between the two of them for, uh, about a month. I bit off way more than I could chew journalistically. This is [00:45:00] like, oh man. But it was, um, we got there in the end.

So, but the, the reason I thought of, um, Nora and then also, uh, you know, her father, Gregory Bateson, who if people aren’t aware is it was a very, uh, yeah, instrumental figure in like, um. Sort of systems thinking and, and cybernetics as it was called, and a bunch of other fields. But he, he got involved in, uh, psychiatry for a while, and he, um, came up with a theory called The Double Bind.

As a, as a kind of, yeah, as for, for explaining, you know, schizophrenia, um, which at that time, like in the fifties meant a lot of things that I think doesn’t quite mean now. I think like psychotic, episode B, many things. But his take was that it comes from what kinda what you’re describing, you’re caught between two impossible things.

Like you, uh, you know, it’s like your mother, um, says, come and give me a hug. But [00:46:00] when she, you give her a hug, she rejects you. It’s like, oh, I’m asked to connect. But then connecting means rejection, but you’re stuck, you know, it’s like back and forth. You can’t, you can’t solve that problem. Or it’s like, there’s so many different, you know, examples of a double bind.

Yeah. Even someone saying, um. Why don’t you tell me you love me? It’s like, but you know, to tell someone you love them is a natural kind of free expression. And if it’s asked for, it becomes impossible to actually give that free expression. So you have to do a thing that’s not real as soon as you do it.

And, but you have to do it to keep the relationship, you know, so that’s the kind of like, it’s an example she’s given. And so his solution for that, which kind of takes us back to psychedelics like, well, how do you get out of a double bind? You add more context, right? Because right now you only have two points.

You’re stuck between two points. So what you need is you need to zoom out and find out that there’s like a thousand other points connecting to those two points that give you new options, new new ways of responding to the situation. And I think that’s one of the things psychedelics do, they expand our perspective, [00:47:00] they give us more context and we see things and we see connections between things that we didn’t see before.

And so I think they can really take us out of uh, personal double binds, but also potentially cultural double binds as well.

Joe Moore: I love that. Um, kind of, Hmm.

Yeah. There’s just so many, um, individual things we can contribute to. And I think that was one of like, when you’re kind of landing the book, I’m like, okay. There’s no, I don’t think like hyper specific call to action. It’s more like, what do you, what do you want to contribute? Where do you want to go today?

Alexander Beiner: Yeah. Yeah. ’cause it’s really hard to, like, I really like hyper-specific calls to action, like, and if you can get one, but the thing is, when you’re dealing with like entire cultures and complexity, there is an element of like, who is one person to be like, everyone should do this. The, the one, the exception to that I would say is, uh, I, I like Jonathan.

He’s work a [00:48:00] lot and he wrote, uh, a book that did very well a couple years ago, the Anxious Generation about social media. Mm-hmm. And its, and screens and its impact on children and teens. And the end of that book, he’s just like. We need to do these five things. But that’s quite specifically, you know, and I really like that because actually schools have started doing it.

It’s like, no, no screens before I forget the age. Like five, no social media before 16. That simple. No phones in schools. So schools have been like, that’s super easy for school to implement. Ah, okay. No phones. You, you lock, they lock kids, lock them up at the beginning of the day. Kids are crafty though, so it’s, my understanding is that they, they find life finds a way to cheat the system.

But, um, so that’s a, you know, in that, in that case when there’s a clear issue, which is new technology that’s affecting young brains in this way,

like that’s kind of simple. And there might be some complexity around it, but when you’re looking at what do we do to [00:49:00] change a culture that’s careening towards its own destruction and a society that is fundamentally broken but could be transformed. That’s a massive, massive question. And as I point out in the book, like, we’re dealing with complex problems, which is problems that change as you’re trying to fix them.

You know? So it’s like, you know, and every time you try and map out a solution, it’s like you’re drawing a map on wet sand and the water keeps changing and washing it away, and you can kind of see a bit of it. And so, so what’s needed is like a dynamic changing relational process, not dissimilar to kind of a psychedelic way of approaching it where we experiment and we iterate.

But I do think specifically one thing to, that we can all do is have a think about like what is a psychedelic, what have I, what ways of being have we learned in our psychedelic experiences and what would it look like to translate that way of being into a way of being in an institution or a company, or a family or a community?[00:50:00]

That I think is a very practical thing that we can like, reflect on and go like, okay, you know what, like. This is too rigid, this system, how can I make it looser? Maybe I need humor here, maybe I need it, you know, whatever it might be. I really do think there’s a psychedelic approach to changing, uh, institutions, organizations, systems, system.

You know, family is a system, you know? So, uh, yeah. So that, that I think is promising. But of course, as a writer, I’m like, I don’t know who’s reading it. Maybe someone’s maybe like a president’s reading it. I’m like, yeah, go for it. Or maybe it’s someone who can make a, you know, we all have different spheres of agency and maybe it’s like, you know what?

There’s a way I can change my local community really significantly. It would change 10 lives. That’s much more significant than, you know, not doing anything.

Joe Moore: So I want to throw out one kind of interesting thought, um, on medical psychedelics, and then I want to ask a couple more questions about your film.

Um, so we [00:51:00] talked about how, or you mentioned. This is a paranoia I have as well, that as psychedelics kind of unfold in the medical establishment, psychiatry will be kind of the default owner of this category of drug. A thing that I have been doing, and I, I found some allies along the way is saying, what conditions can, um, be helped by psychedelics in a clinical capacity that psychiatry would, should theoretically have no jurisdiction over whatsoever.

Mm-hmm. And what we’ve landed on is chronic pain conditions. And I think what Nolan Williams kind of discovered recently is traumatic brain injuries too. Um, ’cause psychiatry isn’t necessarily about the, uh, or organic damage in the brain, but, um, are you familiar with, um, uh, cluster busters?

Alexander Beiner: Yeah, I, I am because they, the very first breaking convention in 2011.

There was a, a group of people sitting [00:52:00] on like a table outside. Um, and they just looked really different to the rest of us. It just like wearing, wearing normal, you know, none of them looked like hippies and they looked a little bit like, um, they were a bit weirded out by the whole thing. And so I went and sat and had a chat with them and they were cluster, but they were from ClusterBusters.

It was like three really lovely people. Um, yeah. So a cluster headache sufferers who for whom? Psilocybin and maybe LSD. I don’t know about it. Well, LSD as well, I would imagine so. Had similar but different effects, but different, yeah. Um, and, and actually it’s funny, I used to get really severe migraines and I was a kid and they went away.

Uh, I’ve never had one since taking psilocybin. I don’t know if that was just because it was a, maybe I went through puberty and it changed, or like, but like, um, yeah, it’s interesting, like I, I’ve, as far as I understand it, cluster headaches are serotonin, noic, right? To do the serotonin system. Um. Which is why like normal painkillers don’t work.

They’re like, you know, awful headaches that make you wanna kill yourself. Uh, [00:53:00] but yeah, so, so what’s, what are they up to now? Are you connected with them or?

Joe Moore: Yeah, I work really closely with Cluster Busters because I think that’s such an amazing hedge against like, um, psychiatric dominance. ’cause you know, I no shade on psychiatry as a field necessarily.

I just think we need to face a few more truths squarely psychiatry. But, um, you know, cluster, cluster headaches, like we don’t really know much. Like we know some things that kind of work, some things that don’t work. Um, really great book called, uh, psychedelic Outlaws, um, by Rutgers, uh, sociologists, or sorry, maybe even medical anthropologist, say Joanna Kempner, um, wrote that one.

Amazing history of ClusterBusters in the intersections with maps and crazy Harvard and other times. Um, so they’re, they’re doing really great stuff. They pretty much just help people figure out how to. Help themselves. Yeah. Because nobody else is helping them. So it’s kind of a peer support thing. And they’ll, they’ll actually do some work here and there with universities to develop new research, um, and [00:54:00] get this, um, it looks like DMT pens vape immediately get them out of their cycle and they can go right back to bed.

Alexander Beiner: Oh, amazing.

Joe Moore: Right. And they don’t have to deal with eating mushrooms or acid at an in hour or tripping for four hours. Yeah. Wow. Right. It’s like, oh, I gotta go to work tomorrow. Like, can I please go to bed? And, um, yeah. So the, the degree to which chronic pain conditions, including headaches, like disable huge portions of the world is we’re not even, you know, having the best language for it.

ClusterBusters. And, um, yeah, I, I worked with, uh, my friend court wing from Remap Therapeutics and. Bob WD from ClusterBusters to form a new charity, uh, that’s we’re almost legally formed. We’ve been at it for a couple years though unformed called the Psychedelics and Pain Association. And we’re working to coordinate pain researchers, um, who have an interest in the psychedelic topic as well to kind of develop the new science of pain with [00:55:00] psychedelics being an amazing, um, footprint there huge amount of free education available to anybody worldwide.

Um, top tier scientists and, and medical doctors contributing. And, um, we’ve been publishing case studies into the literature, which is amazing. And, uh, all sorts of really cool stuff in the Horizons, including a conference. Um, in a couple weeks it’ll be the third psychedelics and pain symposium. Nice. That re puts on.

Yeah, it’s really cool, man. And I just, the ability to take really serious doctors, spin them up on this topic. Psychiatry doesn’t really enter the equation. Like of course there’s comorbidities with pain and depression. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But if your pain goes away, maybe your depression goes away too, you know?

Yeah. Back to your life.

Alexander Beiner: I love that. That’s really cool. Do you, are you connected with James Close who did the Imperial Yeah. Uh, study. I don’t know that’s published yet, but, um, you know, I know that, well, I think

Joe Moore: it just came out a couple weeks ago. Oh, great. Okay. He works pretty [00:56:00] closely with court from Remap and, and some of the others in the PPA team.

Alexander Beiner: Yeah. ’cause I remember while it was going on, uh, ’cause we live, I used to live on a, a mooring with, there was like, so like a on houseboats in London. There was like at one point, like 12 psychedelic researchers or people in psychedelics in the same place. Um, and, uh, James, uh, was one of them. And, um, yeah, I remember while this study was going on.

Uh, the, the results were really positive, you know, and I’m, so, I’m actually looking forward to reading the paper. There’s something really clever about pain. Um, you know, uh, I mean, firstly the main thing is like, amazing if chronic pain conditions can be healed by psychedelics and that can become something that people have access to.

And then also, you know, strategically in terms of the movement, pain is qualitative, right? Like, it, you can maybe see correlates if you put someone in an MRI, but you can’t really see the pain. ’cause I could have a same correlate in my brain, but I’m like, nah, this is fine. We have different pain [00:57:00] tolerance.

So it’s this qualitative experiential medical, medical thing that is nevertheless pretty much like one of the most important things in medicine. It’s like, we want to remove this pain. We want to deal with this pain. So it’s actually, yeah, it’s a really good, um, way in, I think. Yeah.

Joe Moore: Yeah. Um, and you know what it.

I try to say hyperbolic things just to, to get pushback, you know, as one does. And I, you know, I think I said something along the lines of, I, if we can do this at scale, we could reduce chronic opioid prescriptions by 80% mm-hmm. Um, globally, which then decreases addiction to opioids. And then as we have better addiction treatments coming on, we’ve just left less people disabled by addiction, less people, you know, off, out of, out of the world by pain.

And so there’s like a lot of other implications here, not to mention the hopeful psychedelic worldview. Yeah. To stick around.

Alexander Beiner: Yeah. Yeah. No, that’s, that’s, that’s quite [00:58:00] promising. I mean, another area that I find really promising that takes psychedelics. Out of the domain, even of the medical domain is mm-hmm.

Um, is psychedelics for problem solving and, and creativity, you know, and that’s, I’m, I’m, uh, an advisor on, uh, to Minds, which is Bruce Damer, um mm-hmm. Organization, which is really focused on, on that like, you know, like how do we solve humanity’s greatest challenges with psychedelics? And that’s a really exciting area for a few reasons.

One is that it just completely removes it from even a sort of, um, a mindset of let’s fix the deficiency with psychedelics, you know, which is what the medical establishment inevitably kind of moves it towards, into let’s create something incredible with psychedelics. And for me that’s really exciting.

And so that is like. For me, you know, one of the, yeah, it, it, it’s complex. ’cause on the one hand it’s the one that’s most easily captured by Mooch because like, [00:59:00] corporations being like, great, everyone in Deloitte’s gonna take acid. Um, but I think that can be

Speaker 3: Yeah.

Alexander Beiner: Yeah. Which would be kinda hilarious. Uh,

Joe Moore: I’d go

Alexander Beiner: weird.

Yeah, yeah. Try it. Yeah. A sub serious, deep consultancy. Um, so yeah, but you know, that, you know, and Bruce’s story is, I won’t get into it now because, um, it’s a long one, but, you know, he, he effectively had a, uh, an insight on ayahuasca that, you know, not single-handedly, but really significantly changed the entire study of the origins of life.

Um. Globally, you know, and it was peer reviewed and led to, to research that verified what he saw on the trip, which is wild. Yeah. Yeah. So that’s a really interesting, and there’s a whole history of that with it. Carrie Mullis and Polymerase Chain Reaction, and Baby Francis Crick, although that’s really contentious.

You know, the, do

Joe Moore: you know the stories out of Palo Alto with Fatman and uh, Harmon? Where they were actually doing it in a more rigorous fashion. [01:00:00]

Alexander Beiner: A little bit. Yeah. I’ve, I know about like, yeah, yeah, I know a bit about that, but I don’t know any, like, I can’t remember any, like, specific inventions or stuff.

I’m sure there were a bunch of things, right? It was like

Joe Moore: architecture solutions, molecular solutions. It wasn’t anything like PCR, you know, or origins of life. It was more like pr, middle sized ideas. Is that Yeah,

Speaker 3: me kinda, yeah. Yeah. Um, yeah. That’s cool. Yeah, and

Joe Moore: it’s, I, I got the opportunity to speak about this concept at, um, the Stanford School of Design this year, and Cool.

The, the idea I was presenting was, Hey, everybody we’re maybe a hundred inventions or ideas away from being able to save the planet, like total bullshit number, right? But like, prove me wrong, you know? Yeah. Yeah. And if we could leverage psychedelics in that way. We theoretically could have major innovations that could hopefully reduce the worst of, um, the climate damage and, you know, the coming kind [01:01:00] of migrations and everything else.

That’s kind of looming.

Alexander Beiner: Put it that way. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, absolutely. I bet they love that hearing. Uh, even if it’s made up number, it’s like, yes. I mean, it’s like, it’s a, it’s galvanizing, right? I told him

Joe Moore: I made it up too. Yeah,

Alexander Beiner: yeah. And, you know, and then the, the, the question to my mind, uh, that at least falls into my skillset as, as a, as a facilitator, um, is how do you create a process, let’s say a five day process that, um, reliably helps people to solve those problems.

You know? And it’s very complex. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s same. It’s like, there’s like, there’s a few different, you know, which should coordinate in some way. It’s like, talk about offline, but, you know, there’s a few of these different like approaches and. One of the things I’m fascinated by is that it’s not as simple as, okay, okay guys, we’re gonna have, we’re all gonna trip.

Okay. Get a bunch of people working on solar panel design. It’s like we’re all gonna have a journey, facilitate a [01:02:00] journey with the aim of problem solving, naughty problems. But within that journey, almost inevitably is going to be deep personal insights, you know? Mm-hmm. And there’s gonna be like, oh, I’m experiencing some childhood, uh, processing, some childhood trauma right now, but I’m not solving the problem.

It’s like, no, like there’s, there’s a way in which all of these things link together. And like Bruce Damer story is interesting because it, you know, it starts with him, you know, on an ayahuasca journey, processing his, the fact that he’s adopted and then goes to him. Asking the ayahuasca, can you take us back?

Can you take me back to when we were all born? You know, so there’s something beautiful link between the personal and what takes us beyond that. Actually, I make this point in the book, it’s one of the main points I make is that they’re not separate, you know? And I think this is where mm-hmm. You know, as much as I love McKenna, um, and it’s one of the most influential people on my life, this is where I think he was not, he was wrong.

You know, his, he was like, no, you get past all the in individual personal stuff and then you go into hyperspace. I think it’s [01:03:00] wherever you go, there you are. Even in, in the. Deep, non-dual experiences. I, I believe that’s true. Which is probably controversial for some people, but I, I stand by it. Yeah.

Joe Moore: Yeah. No, I, I think that was potentially one of the bigger issues with, uh, and Chris Bees talks about this in his book Yeah.

Where he is like, I kind of wish I handled more of my biographical stuff before I started all this other craziness. Yeah. Um, and I, I don’t blame him. Like, it’s, it’s an interesting, you know, he must have been on a really weird rocket ship ride for a long time. Yeah.

Alexander Beiner: Yeah. That’s an incredible book. Um. LD in the mind of the universe, isn’t it?

Yeah. Just like so many. Its like months or even years where it’s just like the ocean of pain I think was that segment. Yeah. Just like, I mean, he’s a brave man,

Joe Moore: right? Kept going in. Yeah. O it’s, you know, I’ve touched it here and there. It’s not the funnest, but it’s important to touch. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And I think he came back again because of, for me, because of the DMT Entity Encounters book and his kind of [01:04:00] like talk there before his book came out. I was like, this is really great. Yeah. Um, yeah. So I want to talk about your documentary for a minute. Um, I know we’re kind of getting to the end here, so thanks for hanging out with me.

Yeah. It’s been a joy. So, have you done a film before or is this your first film?

Alexander Beiner: I’ve done smaller films. Um, like Rebel Wisdom was very much a film, uh, platform, but mostly I, I did like, you know, the, the most in-depth one I did was a film about psychedelic capitalism, which was like half an hour long. Um, a kind of short kind of documentary.

So this was by far the most, um, uh, complex and ambitious film project I’ve ever done. And I learned a lot in the process as well. I mean, it was wild how much more complex it is than writing a book because, and I loved it as well. I absolutely, like, I just loved the process. You know, one of the things is that.

Um, you know, one of the things I had to learn is the fact that when you’re writing, there’s a relationship between you and a reader where they are [01:05:00] affecting, you’re, you’re providing the, the, the writing, and they’re imagining it and making their own connections. Especially in fiction, they’re really picturing things and you’re kind of, and, and in nonfiction it works similarly and there’s kind of one medium.

And then as soon as you have film, then you have the words, you know, the voiceover, the interviewer, interviewee, whatever it is, the guest. Then you have the images, which are more powerful than the words. And then you have the music, and then you have the combination of all of them. And so the images are the story as much as the words.

And that, that was the biggest learning curve. Um. But the documentary Leviathan, it’s, it’s, uh, about, effectively it’s about the breakdown of trust in society at a, a deep level. Um, what John Que calls it, you know, the trust apocalypse and others have called it that. Um, and how do we get it back? And that’s kind of a way into some kind of deeper exploration of what is it that gets us so profoundly disconnected from each other and from any, [01:06:00] from our own embodiment and anything real and relational that we can actually touch, share together.

That we kinda get into these, you know, whether it’s ideology, whether it’s an economic system that is based on fantasy of just like money that is not connected to anything except for more money culture, where, you know, like Bo Ard argued, you have symbols and ideas that don’t connect to anything else just themselves.

You know, so you, you have to get cultural ideas that don’t actually. Can’t actually be put into the culture and explore. So it’s a real exploration of, of that. Um, yeah. And so the embodiment is actually a big theme in it. We have actually filmed two dance, two amazing dancers who kind of run through the whole thing.

Yeah.

Joe Moore: Yeah. That’s excellent. Um, I do, I do think we don’t talk about embodiment as like success often enough. Mm-hmm. Um, and uh, you know, some people are kind of call it born that way or raised that way, and other people have substantially different nervous systems that just [01:07:00] won’t let them get there. Yeah.

And definitely it’s, um, it’s a whole thing. And I think, yeah, you kind of touched it in your book sometimes too, like what if we just took a moment and was like, where is this anger showing up in my body? What happens when I focus on it? And I found that, you know, helpful, helpful framing for, for broader audience.

And I’m. I’m glad you’re going in, in a direction like that. Yeah.

Alexander Beiner: Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, I mean, the thing is, everyone has a body and everyone breathes 22,000 times a day. And if you stop doing that, you won’t have any ideas about anything. You won’t have any ideologies as far as we know, you know? Um, and so that I think is a really, I, I think it’s true from my perspective that the foundation of reality is our embodied experience, at least in this, you know, as human beings.

I’m not making any claims about consciousness, uh, in general, or that consciousness only exists in that form. But I’m interested in like society and culture and I’m like, okay, we’re gonna change culture [01:08:00] and change how we behave with each other and change the things we build functionally. Uh, embodiment iss a really useful place to start because also we all share it.

Um, you know, we all, um, we can all meet each other on the embodied level, even if we have massive political disagreements. Like if we sat and breathed in unison for five minutes. We might, we would still have political disagreements, but the way we approach them would be different. And that’s, that’s, it’s good we have political disagreements, like we shouldn’t all think the same thing.

That would be really weird. Right. And so it’s more like, it’s not the disagreements outta the problem, it’s the inability to actually connect as human beings around them. Um, I mean, disagreement is li kind of, in my view, like what power society forward. It’s like, no, I disagree with that. Oh, great. Cool. Why?

And then ideally, if we have that kind of flexibility that I think psychedelics can train us in, then we can let go of ideas that aren’t working. Um, because there’s some, I do think psychedelics can really orient us to truth. And that give us a feeling of like our own internal truth [01:09:00] mainly right? To like, how do I really feel about this thing now I’m lying to myself.

I, I have that experience a lot in psychedelics where I’m like, Hmm, no, I think I’m still hiding to some level. Or I don’t buy it. Like, I’m like, I don’t, I don’t quite buy that. What’s really going on here? Okay, I feel sad, or I feel this, or I feel angry. And I think that translates really nicely to political discourse where it’s like.

I mean, a lot of the time the, the propositions, like the facts. Yeah. Okay. They’re one level, but really what’s driving the facts we choose to focus on is our underlying emotions about it. Like, you know, what we feel, do we feel valued? Do we feel looked, do down on in our society? Do we feel unimportant? You know, those are the things that really drive politics at the end of the day.

Um, so yeah, so that, and psychedelics can really connect us to that in a deeper way and in a really compassionate way. ’cause if we’ve gone to that place ourselves and we know the depth of complexity of what it is to be a human being and how contradictory and weird and, you know, uh, it is, and how embarrassing it [01:10:00] can be to really face our stuff.

You know, like then we can have compassion for like, hey, okay, I disagree with this, but you know, that’s fine. Doesn’t matter. We’re still kind of human to human.

Joe Moore: So we used to have a lot of institutions that allowed for kind of like, oh, hey, we’re gonna come in here, we’re all gonna be equals and we’re gonna be, you know, um, you know, having a nice time.

And then, you know, out there we can still have our disagreements. And, um, I think like, you know, clubs for instance, like we don’t, at least in the United States, like there’s not really very many clubs that give people any kind of like, sense of belonging, which I think is partly the reason why evangelical churches are coming up.

’cause you get that experience. Yeah. That you kind of mentioned some of my, some of my friends in their youth got that in, uh, Catholic groups too, which is fascinating. Interesting. Um, you know, how do you retain your, your base? Um, and I think, you know what. W [01:11:00] other than new weird psychedelic religions, like what kind of stuff have you been thinking about in terms of like, how do we get people to at least spend time together, um, and, and be with each other?

I know that people are doing kind of, you know, regular meals together, like once a week people come over. Um, but like, what, what have you seen or what might make you excited in that vein?

Alexander Beiner: Yeah, I mean, I’m working actually on a project I can’t go into detail about, but you know mm-hmm. That relates to how do you, okay.

There’s, there’s, you know, traditionally called like third spaces in society, so first space being home, and then there’s work, and then like, there’s other spaces like cafes and bars, and that’s kind of it. At least in London, there’s like, like if you’re out in London, there’s like, there is nowhere to go aside from that, or a gym is a third space.

Right? And so there is this kind of. Movement to make those third, there’s actually a place in learning called Third Space. Maybe it’s in the States as well, but it’s kind of like a nice gym, right? But those are all quite lacking, you know, it’s like, okay, great. They’re, they’re centered around, [01:12:00] you know, the particular activities.

And that’s fine. You know, uh, Robert Putnam wrote a book called Bowling Alone. Um, I think in the early two thousands, a sociologists, I think. Um, and he made the point, like, people in America used to bowl a lot, and that was one of those spaces you’re talking about. Mm-hmm. And it’s like, yeah, you might have political differences, but you all have the shared activity and now people bowl alone, or if at all, right?

So I think is there a way to create, and I think there is spaces where the shared activity. Hey, shit, it could include bowling, but it could also include very simple relational practices that bring people together. Uh, like circling. I dunno if you’ve come across any of those before. I’m not necessarily into circling specifically, but I, you know, there’s very simple ways that in a non cheesy way, you can get people to break down those barriers actually super quickly.

’cause I’ve been running workshops for like, you know, 10, 15 years and part of your job there is to go, okay, how do we build trust as quickly as possible? That’s real, you know? And part of that is [01:13:00] just shared experiences together, shared state experiences, and also shared honesty and vulnerability with one another.

And that can really, like, you know, the immersive theater world, for example, is really good at this. You know, you go into like, some kind of immersive theater experience and you’re like, holy crap, that was mind blowing. I’ve only been here for two hours, but my, my mind is blown. So that’s the kind of thing I’m, I’m quite interested in at the moment.

And then also just the question, the, the perennial question of like, in cities for example, how can there be like spaces where people actually are. There, there’s a, there’s an incentive to do something other than sit by yourself drinking a coffee or a beer or whatever it might be. Obviously you go there with friends Sure.

But then that’s people you’ve already self-selected, you know, so that, that, that’s, that’s always a question mark for me.

Joe Moore: Right? Yeah. I remember, I, I always forget this guy’s name. I, I was listening to the Tim Ferris show, and he had one, you know, billionaire VC on, and he was talking about ideas like this, that he would invest in, in the wake of like, the catastrophe that is [01:14:00] AI on, you know, a lot of things.

And he’s like, I would invest in a nautical themed mini golf social club. Yeah, that’s great. That’s, that’s so weird. But it’s, it’s not far off from bowling, right? It’s like a

Alexander Beiner: Yeah, for sure. For sure. I mean, like paddles, I’ve never played it, but paddle seems to be extremely popular, right? Like, it seems really fun.

Healthy

Joe Moore: cult. Healthy

Alexander Beiner: cult, yeah. Right. And so it’s just like. Uh, low barriers to access doesn’t require some, okay. I guess you need courts and stuff, but is there like, you know, ping pong, ping pongs a great exact, you know, you can, I can imagine a ping pong resurgence. There’s actually some pretty cool ping pong, um, uh, bars, I guess in London.

You just go and play ping pong. But like, so that’s a kind of, um, it’s just a bringing a bit of imagination into those spaces where they’re like, Hey, we’re gonna do ping pong where you have to play with something you don’t know, you know, whatever it might be.

Joe Moore: Yeah. I love

Alexander Beiner: that.

Joe Moore: Cool. Um, well, where can people find all your work, including breaking convention and, and any other fun stuff you’ve [01:15:00] got going?

Alexander Beiner: Yeah. Um, well pretty much everything is on, uh, the ki So Kin Os is the name of my new media platform that I started at the beginning of, uh, this year. Um, which is, which means new in ancient Greek. Uh, so, but a different kind of new, there’s new like Nios. It’s like new in form and then Kinos is new in substance, like something that hasn’t been, ’cause that’s, that’s kind of the, the impetus of it is like surfacing novelty from different, you know, stories, people, you know, perspectives.

So that’s all in Substack mainly. Um, which is, uh, yeah, well I, I’ll give you stuff for the show notes, but it’s byner.substack.com or just Enos, K-A-I-N-O-S. Um, and Substack. And then I do a lot of stuff on Instagram under my own personal, uh, just at Alexander Byner, um, where I put a lot of the clips and stuff of interviews we do and other, other bits and pieces.

Um, and so yeah, that’s the kinda the main place and breaking convention, uh, is if [01:16:00] people don’t know the, I believe we’re the largest psychedelics conference in Europe. Uh, and we are. We do it every two years, but we do, uh, one day events, um, in the off years as well. So we’ll have a one day event coming up, uh, next year.

Um, and then we have our full three day conference at the University of Exeter coming up in, what year are we in? 20, 20, 27. Yeah. Not next year, but the year after. ’cause we had a conference this year. Um, and so people can check that out. Uh, breaking convention, um, dot co uk. We also just put up all the films from this year’s free on YouTube, so if people wanna see the, the best and brightest and the latest interesting stuff in psychedelia, um, check that out.

Joe Moore: Yeah. That’s so awesome. Um, well thank you so much for doing this. I, I hope everybody goes and follows you. Um, and yeah, Alexander’s has been a pleasure and I hope we get to do some more.

Alexander Beiner: Yeah, likewise Joe. Thanks for having me on. It’s been fun.

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Joe Moore in Tricycle Day

Joe Moore feature in Tricycle Day

Oct 26, 2025 – Joe Moore has been beating the drum for a broader (and less sterile) discussion of psychedelics since 2016, when he and his friend Kyle launched a little podcast called Psychedelics Today. What began as a humble effort to preserve their breathwork teacher’s legacy has since grown into one of the field’s most respected and uncompromising voices.

We asked Joe how the psychedelic conversation has expanded beyond mental health, what limitations the drug war still imposes on research and safety, and what the movement needs more than anything right now.

Link to Tricycle Day featuring Joe Moore.

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Dreamshadow – Life and Breath

Dreamshadow Transpersonal Breathwork team - Mustapha Kahn - Life and Breath

In this episode, Kyle and Joe sit down with filmmaker Mustapha Khan and Dreamshadow’s Elizabeth & Lenny Gibson to explore Life and Breath—a new documentary immersing viewers in the experience and community of Holotropic Breathwork. We talk about why Mustapha was drawn to Dreamshadow, the film’s cinéma vérité approach that places you “in the room,” and how years of facilitation informed what became both an archival record and a living portrait of transformation. Elizabeth and Lenny reflect on 35+ years of holding space, the role of curiosity over agenda, and why genuine community is central to lasting growth. Kyle and Joe share personal reactions from a Breckenridge screening, the emotions it stirred, and how this work has shaped Psychedelics Today. We close on hope, relationship, and the power of gathering to remember who we are. Keep an eye out for upcoming screenings and Q&As with the team behind Life and Breath.

Dreamshadow Transpersonal Breathwork

Life and Breath will screen at the Awareness Film Festival on October 26, 2025 in Santa Monica.

Life and Breath won first place at the Psychedelic Film and Music Festival!

Transcript

Kyle Buller: [00:00:00] Hello everybody. Welcome back to Psychedelics today. Really excited to have Lynn Elizabeth Gibson here. Mustafa Khan. Welcome to the show. Thank you.

Yeah, thanks.

So today we’re gonna dig in to talk about this new breathwork documentary called Life and Breath, uh, that was directed and produced by Mustapha Khan.

And for those that wanna go back and maybe listen to Mustafa’s Backstory, uh, we did two podcasts with you, so you can go back into the, the archive and, and check that out. But, um, yeah, well, we’ll just do some quick little intros. So Mustafa, I’ll, I’ll put it over to you to introduce yourself and then we’ll get into things.

Lenny Gibson: Sure. Uh, I’m Mustafa Khan. I’m a filmmaker based in New York. I make, uh, documentaries, narrative films, TV shows, all sorts of stuff. Um, but, um, we’re here today because I made this new film called Life and Breath, uh, featuring, uh, Kyle and Elizabeth and Lenny among other folks. So, uh, I’m delighted to be here.

Kyle Buller: [00:01:00] Awesome. And then Elizabeth, we’ll pass it over to you.

Elizabeth Gibson: Hi everybody. I’m Elizabeth Gibson of Dream Shadow Group. We are a nonprofit organization that promotes personal development work and community building centered around the technique and method that Lenny and I have both been loving and practicing for 35 years now called Holotropic Breath Work.

And I’m very happy that we’ve made this amazing film about it and excited to share it with everybody.

Kyle Buller: Thank you. And Lenny, we’ll pass it over to you.

I’m Lenny Gibson,

a philosopher based in Paulette, Vermont,

and. Entangle the dream shadow.[00:02:00]

Joe Moore: Well, this is gonna be fun for us, Kyle and I really, um, particularly loved the film. I’m happy it’s still gonna get to stream. Um, so, or sorry, screen. So Mustafa, can you tell us a little bit about what’s going on in la?

Mustapha Khan: Uh, sure. Thank you. Um, yes. On October 26th, uh, Sunday, we are screening as part of the Awareness Film Festival in Santa Monica, California.

So please come out. It will be, um, at five 30 on Sunday, I believe at the, um, illusion Magic Theater in, uh, Santa Monica. That’s brilliant. Yeah, it should be, should be lots of fun. And Lenny and Elizabeth, Kyle and I will all be there, um, to do a q and a afterwards as well, and answer any questions you might have.

Joe Moore: Great, thank you. And so we [00:03:00] decided just a little bit ago that we’re gonna do this, um, stream a little bit different from what we’ve done in the past because we’ve had you on before Ms. Tapa to talk about the film. Um, but I, uh, think we can interview the subjects a little bit, um, and see here’s some new perspectives.

So, um, first before we do that, can you kind of tell us like, um, what was it about Dream Shadow that made you wanna do some film there and, and do a project?

Mustapha Khan: Well, it was just a very, very compelling story. Um, all these people coming together from all different walks of life to work on their issues or to know themselves better that they all journey to, uh, this little town of Vermont where Lenny and Elizabeth live and they convene this very special, um, session where people discover themselves and.

I just thought that was a fascinating, uh, story to tell. So, um, happy to, happy to tell it in the film we tell, [00:04:00] um, the story of going through the session, what it’s actually like, and then a sort of a post session analysis as well. So, um, yeah, hope you, hope you enjoy it. Hope you watch.

Joe Moore: Yeah, it was, it was really great.

We had, um, the pleasure, thank you for helping us do this, of, um, hosting a bunch of our, uh, people in our vital program in Breckenridge, Colorado, and we were able to watch it and it was just really great to, that was my first time watching it. I cried at least a few times, which is amazing. Wow.

Mustapha Khan: Tell me, tell me how they reacted and how, how you reacted.

I’d be

Joe Moore: very connect. Oh gosh. It was, um, like I was, I was experiencing, um. I was experiencing some really similar emotions to what I have when I’m there. And, and it was coming back and it was reminding me of things and like there was some emotional resonance I was having with a lot of the stories and the scenery and, you know, it’s, it’s been such an important, um, practice in my life and [00:05:00] place in my life that I, you know, I was feeling a lot and having a lot of emotions.

And I think, I think it was fun, well, not fun, maybe insightful for the others to kind of see Kyle and I having our own kind of like, you know, wiggling responses to it, you know? And, um, it was cool to be able to share that and then have those conversations with people. ’cause we’re really transparent that we’re, we’re modeling a lot of what we do and what we learned in, in dream shadow and palette.

Kyle Buller: Yeah. Sorry, Paulette,

Lenny Gibson: but, but, but thank you for telling me about that, uh, because, um, you know, one of our intentions was stylistically to make it as if. You’re actually going through a session, um, itself. So if you notice at a certain point in the film, you know, we sort of set it up as people are setting up, but then once the session begins, we stay in the session, sort of cinema verite as they say.

Um, so you’re just literally observing it and, you know, it’s, it’s wordless at that [00:06:00] point. Um, so for a big stretch of the film, um, it’s just that experience. So I’m, I’m so happy that you didn’t get bored, but that, but you went with it.

Joe Moore: Yeah, no, it’d be hard for me to get bored. I, I was just impressed that I was able to wait so long to watch it.

Um, it didn’t get too antsy. Um, yeah, so, so glad. Thank you. Let’s start asking this subject stuff. So mu stuff like this is something you’ve done before, right? So you’ve, you’ve done these kinds of projects and, and I’m sure you’ve been curious what people are. Kind of think retroactively about the project, the, the product, and what kind of stuff is really curious, um, or like top on your mind for these subjects here.

Lenny Gibson: Well, I, I kind of think to myself it’s like, uh, Lenny Elizabeth, I’m not sure that, you know, do you know what you’re getting into when you’re decide to make a film? Uh, it’s, uh, it’s, I’m, I’m sure it’s been quite a ride, so I would love to just Elizabeth, for example, I mean, I’d love [00:07:00] to hear your thoughts on sort of the ride from what you originally thought we were gonna do and then till you know, what we’re doing in California and and beyond.

Elizabeth Gibson: Well, originally I thought you and Allie, your partner, were just coming to our house for a visit on your way to, I think you were going to maybe to Canada to see other friends.

Lenny Gibson: Yeah.

Elizabeth Gibson: And we were on our deck having tea or something. I noticed that you and Lenny were having kind of a conversation off to the side and about an hour later this idea had been hatched of making a film.

And I was, I was very excited, kind of surprised, um, and had no really no idea what I was getting into. But I loved, I’m sorry about about that. I shoulda explained it. [00:08:00] I loved it. It’s been an incredible adventure working with you and so wonderful for everybody in our community who’s been able to participate, not just being in this, the film, but going to the screenings and talking about it.

And now we have this amazing record, or it started out as kind of the original idea I think was as an archive of our teaching. That we could have to pass on to the next generation of breath work facilitators. But I feel like it’s grown into so much more than that. So it’s been quite a ride. And now, now we’re going to, to California.

I, you know, I, I never know what we’re gonna be doing next, but it’s all fun and, um, I’m loving it.

Kyle Buller: And how about for you, Lenny? What, what has this [00:09:00] process been like for you?

Interesting.

I, I didn’t

have any, any particular ideas, but someplace in the conversation musta and I were having, I pretty sure it was musta. I suggested, well, maybe you could make a film and.

That immediately engaged me because this breath work we do is hard to explain as a verbally. I mean, one can,

the verbal explanation doesn’t do justice to the process. And so I [00:10:00] was immediately happy that Mustafa was willing to give a shot.

Kyle Buller: Hmm.

And then going through the process, I, I’d never been on, on the inside of a film being made and I realized what an endeavor it was. And especially a film about something real.

Um, ’cause I stopped going to films about 45 years ago because most of them weren’t real.

So I thought it would be a great, it’d be a great idea to give this shot and watching it [00:11:00] develop. And um, I was very impressed with you Mustafa, as your ability to ask people questions and

thank

Kyle Buller: you.

That was the thing that I take away most from the experience was that you are an expert at asking people questions that help them. Reveal themselves.

Kyle Buller: Mm-hmm.

Uh, and, and that’s basically what breath work is all about, is helping people see themselves

in a way that they don’t usually see themselves. We usually see ourselves in a reflection of someone else. We usually think of ourselves as being seen through someone else’s eyes. [00:12:00] And

so your capacity to make people comfortable with showing who they are was a, was a gift.

Lenny Gibson: Thank you.

And.

The, the process of putting it together, um, watching it from the original, from the original takes, and then watching you pull together a coherent story that, that, uh,

I mean, the closest I’ve come was building a house and trying to get the carpenters to understand my crew drawings.[00:13:00]

So it was a delight to watch this film being created. Um, it, it was, it, it made me very happy to watch it and to see how it, how it grew, how it came to be. Um.

And, and then as it came to be, I saw it as a wonderful resource for our facilitators. Um,

something they will be able to use in the future to, to, to stimulate people’s interest because all the people I’ve talked to have seen the film so far have, I think, [00:14:00] come to understand it, come to understand what, what the dream shadow technique is. And of course, it derives from what Stan Graff introduced to us, but I’ve never seen.

A film. There have been a few films made of, of Stan and Christina’s work, but none of them, most of ’em I’ve seen are more like, you know, family movies

and it’s hard to get into a family movie unless you’re one of the family. But the, this film you developed just invites people in. And so I, I think it’s extremely valuable that way because, ’cause [00:15:00] I think Stan has given rise to a technique that is the future of psychology, not as psychology per se. As the kind of activity that psychology would like to engage, but can’t because it

is all about experts telling people what to do, and modern psychology is a mess and, and very inadequate to accomplishing a task it sets out to do.

So here I shift over to my academic hat[00:16:00]

and 2,500 years ago, Aristotle, first political scientist, surveyed a whole bunch of the ancient Greek cities that were pretty unique. Human creations, politically speaking. I mean, apol polls was the word Greeks used for their cities. And after he surveyed these cities and what they did, he decided that wellbeing, it was a great, great term as aia.

Well, diamond, well charactered that, that to be well Charactered required both insight into one’s own character and it required being in a city Apollos, [00:17:00] that was also well, that also understood itself. And the problem with modern psychology. I think the central problem is that community is missing and,

and in fact,

you don’t need psychology if you have a community that’s in, in which people can understand themselves. Um, so I don’t think of this as psychology per se, but I think of this more as what human beings did in [00:18:00] tribes, um, how, why human beings were so successful. At populating establishing the foundation out of which the civilization of the planet grew

and human beings were successful. Or I should start from the other end.

Joe Moore: Well, maybe before we go all the way back in history, we check in with Kyle, um, and Kyle, I’m kind of curious, as you saw this film kind of process into reality, can you kind of like share like what it was like for you to, to be part of this and see this come to life?

Kyle Buller: Yeah, it felt like a, a real honor to be part of it, which was really nice.

Um, yeah, I remember, I think I just got back from maybe the Netherlands and then drove up [00:19:00] to Vermont. I had like a day in between and then did some filming. And yeah, to echo Lenny’s comment, uh, Mustafa did a really great job asking questions and, and pulling the narrative out. Um, and. Yeah, I’ve seen all kind of like the, the different, um, iterations through the editing process.

And I, and I really appreciate Mustafa, like what you’ve created there. It does feel like you go on a journey, um, through the film and almost like gives you a bit of an experience versus like, you know, here’s a technique, here’s like all the theoretical stuff, but it gives a person experience of like, you know, what it’s like to be in that room.

Um, and I think to, you know, Joe, your point, I think I was even getting emotional when we were, uh, screening it up here at Breckenridge too. Just like, again, I think that being in those spaces just brings up a lot of memories and all the work that, you know, we’ve done throughout the years, um, in, in that space.

Um, the growth and just even thinking about like. Where we’re at now. Like I think about, yeah, Lenny Elizabeth, I met you guys back in [00:20:00] 2010, 15 years ago coming up. My first breathwork session was on Halloween in 2010. Um, and just also thinking about like yeah, where we’re at now. Um, so it’s, it’s been, um, really beautiful, um, to witness.

And, um, Lenny, you mentioned something about like an archive, right? And, you know, that’s kind of why psychedelics today started too. Joe and I got together and, you know, we wanted to kind of create a bit of an archive, um, of some of your work as well. Um, you know, I think it’s evolved, um, a lot from that idea, but I think, you know, we all talk about all your work all the time, right?

And, and impact that it’s had. So, uh, it’s nice to have, I guess, a, a film that kind of depicts that and, and shows folks like yeah, what it’s like, uh, to be part of that process. Um, so yeah, it’s been been really beautiful.

Joe Moore: And Elizabeth, I’m kind of curious from your perspective, what was, what was really surprising about seeing your story?

Um, being told on a big screen like that,[00:21:00]

Elizabeth Gibson: it was very exciting to see and I, I almost felt watching it, like I was actually in a breathwork session, which I hadn’t expected that somehow Mustafa and his colleague Jethro, who was also filming, managed to capture the feeling of being in the space, which is the magic that happens. And so I tell friends now when they watch the film, I say It’s best if you can watch it on a big screen with a really good sound system because it’s quite an immersive experience and.

Initially, I, I was, I couldn’t really imagine what it was gonna be like to have a session being filmed, if that would change kind of the atmosphere in the room and if [00:22:00] people would be able to let go. But because of the special way that Mustafa has of just becoming part of what he’s trying to capture, I felt almost in a way that, that your presence there and what you’re doing, Mustafa kind of in intensified the experience for everybody in an unusual way.

So I was quite surprised and I think I learned a lot about, um, how important it is for us as human beings to really. Try to convey to others the work that we love in the world and why it’s important, which is what we’re trying to do with the movie. And I also felt that working [00:23:00] with Mustafa was, I mean, that’s also what you were doing.

So we were kind of doing this thing together that we were all doing the same thing. We were all engaging in a creative act, and the movie really came out. I just think it’s, I love watching it. I must have seen it, you know, I don’t know, almost 10 times now, but every time I watch it, I enjoy it even more.

Lenny Gibson: So. Glad to hear that. Thank you. Hmm. And, and what we do is very similar in a lot of ways, and that’s one of the things I really discovered in the process is that, you know, ideally I’m a facilitator. I facilitate somebody’s soul being on stage, you know, people opening up and sharing that with them, sharing that with the world or sharing that with other people.

And, um, and that’s exactly what you and Lenny do in your space. And, um, and really you beautifully facilitate and then let, let people go and just give them that safe [00:24:00] container. So it’s a, it’s a very similar analogy in, in a lot of ways. Um, I often, I, I, I teach as well, so I often tell my students not to.

When you’re interviewing, you’re not really there to ask questions. You’re really there just to give them prompts, to tell their own story, to let what’s inside them shine. And, um, that’s what it’s all about. And you just let that, let that happen and, uh, beautiful stuff can happen.

Joe Moore: Yeah, that’s, it’s amazing.

So, Lenny, was there anything like through the process of filming, um, or. Watching this be released that kind of, uh, shaped or changed the way you understood your work or, um, dream shadow? Generally

Lenny Gibson: it was mostly reinforcement. It, it assured me that what [00:25:00] we’d been developing over the years was very Kay. Um, and this is what I wish life would be like. That one could drop into these groups in, in various situations and have the experience of open conversation in which one explores who one is and how one understands other people.

Um, and

Kyle Buller: it, it,

it’s my ideal of what philosophy aspired to. I, I think it’s what philosophy aspired to from its beginnings and gradually [00:26:00] got lost as, as academic and theological things developed and things became more rigid and, and and structured. But I think when I, when I, this is what Plato was after in his dialogues.

This, this is what Plato was after, and I, at the time. The people that had the leisure to do this sort of thing were only the upper classes on the Greek city. The, the people who, who descended from the aristocrats. Because

for most people, life, for most of recorded history has been a hand to mouth existence. But [00:27:00] some places where they became prosperous enough so that at least some of the people could have leisure to gather around and try and figure out why they were there, what they were doing, why, what life was all about.

Um, so if only, I mean, I, I, Plato was. Basically a playwright. And so my experience of your putting good, you are a playwright in most, in the classic Greek sense.

Um, and I got a little bit of that. I had some in college especially, I had some very good, a couple very good teachers who [00:28:00] made their classes a bit like this, it, since you’re in college and you’re getting graded and that stuff, you know, that’s, uh, it kind of interferes. But there were numerous times in some, some small classes where we just got down to talking about stuff.

And so in some ways, dream shadow is my attempt to recreate that experience. Without the framework, the rigid framework of the academic situation. Um, so I think

what, what what you’re doing compares with especially the early dialogues of Plato, where it’s conversations. [00:29:00] Um, and that’s what I feel most i i in the process of being with you as this film has come together and as it’s caused me to reflect upon what I’m doing. I, I think more and more that Plato would, Plato would understand this perfectly.

He, he would, it would just be, sure, of course this is what you do. This is what you do. If you wanna pursue, you wanna live life to its fullest,

Lenny Gibson: you know? And, and Lenny in that method is really people asking questions of one another. And so much of what our media propagates is, is [00:30:00] everyone having the answers already.

Yeah. You know, and so the sense of wondering and being thoughtful is, uh, is, is lost in our society a little, or at least it’s not modeled in any kind of way. Um, to say, I don’t know, which is a pretty honest reaction to most things, I think. Um, ’cause we don’t know is, is a rare thing. So, um, you know, I see what you all do at Dream Shadow is.

Being able to give us a platform, gi give us a space to be able to say, I don’t know. And I just am exploring right now and there’s something very beautiful about that.

Yeah. Well, and to me it’s human life at its most beautiful and its most beautiful occasion. Um, and[00:31:00]

I hope you know that this is where humanity is aimed ultimately to when I was in graduate school, which was boring as hell, but I did meet a, a, a priest from Vietnam. And in a conversation he said, well, we’ll have a party. We write poetry.

And that’s the best kind of party, which is a party where creativity is the, is the, is the nourishment, is the food, is the, is the, um, is what goes on. And so I appreciate that this vehicle, [00:32:00] this film is a vehicle, gives a sense. And I really as I,

as as we do this work now, especially in our training sessions, where there are people that have engaged this process repeatedly. Um, that when we finish with sharing, I think it’s pretty identical to what happened in Plato’s Academy. Um, we don’t speak Greek, of course, but, but the kinds of questions that people raise and there’s a little bit more orientation towards the personal, um, than there might have been in classical Greece, but it’s, it’s an exploration of what it means to be human.

And

Joe Moore: would Greek be helpful?

Lenny Gibson: [00:33:00] Well, Greek is a beautiful,

English has its beautiful moments, but.

It, it, it, it doesn’t have the subtlety. You can, the, the conjugation of a Greek verb goes on for pages and pages, and you can practically tell what time of day it is from looking at the form of a Greek verb.

Joe Moore: All right. Maybe I don’t have time to learn it.

Lenny Gibson: It, it, I haven’t been able to learn it anywhere near it to the extent I would like to, but it, it, I mean, just things like in, in English we have singular and plural.

In, in, in nouns and pronouns. In Greek, they had singular, plural, and dual. [00:34:00] That when you talked about a pair of oxen, that was a different set of endings. And if you talked about a herd of. Cows or an and, and in, in, in verbs you can express things like what it would be like to have had an experience and look back upon it later and enjoy it even though it was a difficult experience.

It’s the, the future Perfect heist.

Elizabeth Gibson: So before we get too deep into ancient Greek, I’m, I’m famous at our workshops for interrupting Lenny all the time, and I I, but one thing you were touching on Lenny that I think is really important about what we do, um, in both in breath work and then this whole process of making the movie is that [00:35:00] we’re building relationships.

And so because we’re doing such deep work in a group setting. The bonds that people form with each other in the group are really, um, likewise deep, and people remain friends. Relationships form, I mean, just, I’m looking at the four or the five of us on this call. You know, Kyle, you said 15 years and Joe, it must be about that long that we’ve known longer,

Kyle Buller: longer, longer.

And

Elizabeth Gibson: then you guys went on to form psychedelics today and then all of a sudden Mustafa landed at one of our workshops and, and, and here we are making this film. And Mustafa has shared his community with us. And, and likewise. So [00:36:00] there’s this web of relationships, deep relationships that to me. It’s such an incredibly sweet experience and it also points to what’s missing in our culture today and why I feel that this work is so important, not just for the, the personal development that happens for all of us as we engage this work, but for the deep friendships that we form.

And I’m very grateful for that. And Kyle, when I heard you say earlier on this call that your first breath work was on Halloween. I didn’t remember that, but do you know what, uh, my first breath work was on Halloween too,

Kyle Buller: so. Oh, no way. That’s fun.

Elizabeth Gibson: And we’re going out, we’re gonna be in Santa Monica pretty close to Halloween, so I don’t know what’s up with that, but an

Kyle Buller: anniversary of some sort, [00:37:00] sounds like,

yeah, Stan would, Stan would label this as a kind of coex.

Kyle Buller: Yeah.

A kind of theme that repeats that, that draws people together by bringing out their connection. Uh, that’s not a good, by bringing out by, by, by, by bringing out of the human past the themes that bind people together that they’re not aware of necessarily. Um, and, and, and allow the development of real understanding, real cooperation amongst people, which, you know, sports try to have teams that get along together, but, um, that comp or something together.

But this is a, I remember an [00:38:00] early workshop we did with some. Facilitator, friends. And at the end of the sharing, the woman said, you mean we can’t all go home together? But it also, I mean, what got me into this was the, um, emergence of psychedelics in modern European, and especially modern American culture.

Um, and that’s where Stan started from and, and wanting, there was a, there was a, in the sixties, there was a sense of commonality that developed out of the civil rights movement and then out of the, um, the counterculture movement, but it was very small. [00:39:00] And, and, and, and, and stood in contrast to the general face of things.

Um,

and

I saw how Stan’s work developed from the inspiration he got from the, from Albert Hoffman’s discovery and, and, and, and, and, and employing Albert Hoffman’s discovery. But

I mean, the criminalization of psychedelics, the treating of them as drugs, it, it doesn’t do them justice at all. And I the future. [00:40:00] I think, I mean the, these, the, the, the, the discovery of, of the psychedelic effect of certain, of, of, of these substances is comparable, I think to the, uh, increase in human understanding that came from the invention of the telescope and the microscope.

It magnified experience. And I, I think these substances can perform a similar, but the telescope of the microscope alone are not enough. And so I think, uh, the, I hope the most fruitful, fruitful future will be in the. [00:41:00] Development of the use of these substances combined with the breath work technique, because the substances tend to be a bit isolating.

They’re, they’re, they’re, they, they, they, they emphasize individuality. And the

Joe Moore: Lenny, a quick question. You said treating them like, like drugs. Um, did you mean in terms of, um, like clinical drug development, FDA approved drugs in a similar category to that, or did you mean it in a different way? Um,

Lenny Gibson: Albert Hoffman was not trying to develop, he was trying to develop a. A blood pressure drug.

He wasn’t trying to develop a, a psychotropic drug. They, [00:42:00] the, the few psychotropic drugs could have drugs that have been developed were awful. Um, Al Thorazine, these are just, these are awful, awful. I mean, they calm people down, but at the loss of, they’re awful. They’re just awful for their, because their side effects are overwhelming.

Joe Moore: So in short, you’re saying it’s like just a very different category of substance.

These are not, the psychedelics are not drugs. They only became drugs in mid 20th century America. They, they, they’ve been around for millennia. But what happened in the 20th century, the mid 20th century, was that. They appear, they, the closest category that was available for people to [00:43:00] deal with them was that they were drugs.

I mean, because, and they’re not, A drug is designed to address the symptoms of an illness and what’s the illness.

Joe Moore: I’ll point people towards Sasha Shoguns, the nature of drugs, which is an amazing volume. That’s a lecture notes from Berkeley. It’s extraordinary. Yeah. It’s, uh, Joshua

was an extraordinary person.

Joe Moore: Yeah. Well, let’s get back to the film. Yeah. I wanted

Elizabeth Gibson: Joe getting back to the film. Mm-hmm. Can I jump in again please?

Because I think this will be the event that we’re going to in Santa Monica in about 10 days, I guess. It’s gonna be our third or fourth screaming, screaming, screening, not screaming. Um, screening and the screenings themselves have been [00:44:00] equally amazing, I think, because the fact that we go and talk about our experience making the film and we’re there to interact with the audience after they’ve seen the film, that’s a lot of fun.

And that was a part of this process, EF of it I had never even thought about. I’m sure this is something you’ve done so many times in your career and I’d love it if you would talk a little bit about, you know, what your experience at the screenings is. Because for me it’s just so much fun to be able to feel the audience’s excitement and answer their questions and.

Kind of almost see the experience through their eyes of watching it by the interaction with them.

Lenny Gibson: Absolutely. I mean, I mean, it is fun and that’s the whole reason why we do it. [00:45:00] Um, I always try to promote doing screenings. I mean, in part because they are communal events. Um, it, there’s nothing like being in a, you know, being in a dark room with a hundred people that don’t know you.

But you know, if, if it’s a comedy and they’re all laughing at the same time, or a horror film and they’re all jumping at the same time or crying at the same time in a drama or, um, or just experiencing something like, uh, holotropic breath work vicariously through the screen, it’s, um, that’s why you do it.

And there’s something very interesting that, that, um, it’s very, it’s a very different experience watching this film alone. Then watching in a, in a group of people, it’s really meant like a lot of films meant to really be enjoyed by groups of people. So, um, yeah, that’s one of the main reasons why I do it, is to, is to get this kind of payoff of groups, of people experiencing what you’ve created, uh, with all these other [00:46:00] folks and to all just celebrate it and enjoy it together is, uh, is really nice.

And it’s a communal, it’s a communal event.

I thought it was very interesting when we showed the trailer at Exeter, and there were many people, filmmakers in the audience, that they started asking, well, how do you do this Mustafa? How can you do this? How can you be with people without objectifying? Because so much of ordinary films are about objectifying.

They’re not about being with people, they’re about looking at people and

Lenny Gibson: Well, you invited us in, you invited, uh, my partner, Jethro, uh, waters and I in to be part of the weekend, be part of the sessions and not separate from it. And I [00:47:00] really, um, thank you for that. And Elizabeth, you said, no, you have to be part of it.

I originally said Well be flies on the wall, but, um, but the right way to do it is to be part of that. And, um, and yeah, that’s the, that’s the whole point. And to have both, both the jetro and I go through the breathwork session ourselves and to film that is, uh, is, you know, just worked out perfectly for this because we were willing to just be like everyone else in your feelings, in whatever your stuff is that you.

Have inside your head and just letting it all out and um, and just being in a situation where everybody is sharing, you know, whatever they want to share or everyone’s experiencing this very, very personal moment, um, but within community, which is really quite special.

And I think that makes, to me, that makes this film unusual.[00:48:00]

Lenny Gibson: Well, what you and Elizabeth do is quite special, quite unique. Um, you know, not many people do this in the world and actually only you two do it like this. Um, well, but you do it too Mustafa and yes, I’m happy to do it. Um, but having, having

done it with you, I think I like to feel like we were part of the creation.

Lenny Gibson: Absolutely. You are. Absolutely.

Um, and that is the. That that’s the ultimately been the ultimate rewarding aspect of this for me, is to participate with you and be part of, and avail your expertise without feeling that we were creating something out there, but that we’re all together.

Absolutely.

And that togetherness is, is what I [00:49:00] crave.

I mean, it’s the big thing that’s missing from the world, especially contemporarily that you get. That’s what main reasons

why I make films is to Yeah. Community interview with all these other people. And, um, and you know, what’s funny is that by whether it be a narrative or, or a documentary, people get real very quickly.

If you give people that space to do that, and to some degree they’re, they’re ready for that. Uh, the interview format does that. Um, you know, and it’s, uh, and that’s really fun because you get to know all these people without the small talk just to get right to, you know, how are you doing, how are you really doing?

How’s your soul doing? You know, and that’s what it’s all about. Um, so I, I enjoy that in filmmaking in general. And, um, it allows me to feel less existentially alone in the world too.

Yeah. Which is a, it it’s [00:50:00] hard to get to that place. And it would be nice if the promise of AI is such that we all have a lot more leisure and we can get really into Macon Phillips and, and, and, and, and playing in, in musical groups and.

You know? Yeah. Because that’s, it was like being part, it’s been like a little bit like being part of a band.

Absolutely. That’s the vibe.

Elizabeth Gibson: And I was trying to say earlier, but I was muted. Sorry about that. Um, but it was also for me, an empowering experience in that, um, some of us were nervous about being filmed and I had never really had an experience of being, well, I never had had an experience of [00:51:00] being filmed like this, but it was such a golden opportunity.

And Mustafa, you have the gift of making us feel comfortable and at ease and engaging us in conversation. And I felt like you helped me become more articulate. About what it is that I love about this work and why we do it. And as a result of having walked through this process with you, I feel like I’ve developed even more clarity about why this has been my life work really, and Lenny’s life work and our work in the world together.

Kyle Buller: Can you say more about that? Like Yeah. Why is it your life work?

Elizabeth Gibson: Well, it’s our, it’s my life work. I knew on that first breath work Halloween experience that [00:52:00] for me personally, it was such a valuable session and I have learned something very special about myself in that I had a capacity within myself for.

A deep sense of who I am as a person that I could have, I could have totally missed this capacity and never even known that I had it had I not had that breath work session. And it wasn’t unique to me. I realized it’s something that’s just part of our birthright as human beings, and I think as Lenny was mentioning earlier, that cultures of, you know, centuries past knew this and practiced this in different ways.

So personally, it became very important for me, [00:53:00] which was why Lenny and I started doing groups. I think because we wanted to help other people discover this capacity. That’s part of our birthright as human beings for knowing who we are at a very deep. Level. And then doing workshops led to people wanting to learn how to do their own workshops.

So it’s like spreading the knowledge about a very fundamental aspect of ourselves as people and beings. A gift that I think we’ve fallen out of touch with in Western culture. And I’m very grateful to Stan and Christina and all our breath work teachers for helping us remember this. Not that breath work is the only way, but it’s the way that we [00:54:00] found.

And to me, this film is a great kind of capstone on our life work because it’s helped us evolve with the work even further.

Lenny Gibson: Yeah, I wish you could have been around and

done this work when Stan was part of it, because most of the film that’s been, I mean, he’s such an impressive figure that people who’ve made film have held him up

and, and, and so the focus tends to be on him rather than the community. I, I don’t think that’s it. He’s never, he’s always said he doesn’t wanna be treated that way. [00:55:00] Um, but nobody that I’ve, nothing that I’ve seen

showed him. As he really wanted to be, as he really was and wanted to be seen, um, as he, he, he community is deeply important to him.

Mustapha Khan: And he watched the film too, right?

I think

Elizabeth Gibson: he, yeah, he did watch this film him and said that he loved the, uh, the beautiful images of the natural world that you worked into the, to try to convey some of the magic of the breathwork sessions, because connecting with the natural world is a common theme.

And most people who do breath work for any extended period of time develop [00:56:00] a deep awareness of how interconnected we are with everything. On the planet, especially the natural world. So I think it’s a great, um, way for helping to solve the ecological crisis if we can get enough people to, to do this kinda work.

Lenny Gibson: Evolution is moving in this direction. Um, it’s lured, it’s not driven, but it’s lured towards a, wait, I say towards something beautiful. It’s lured towards beauty. Um, but the addition of hot and cold running water to the human experience has made the human experience much more pleasant

and, um. [00:57:00]

Kyle Buller: So question something that I feel like is a big theme here that everybody’s bringing up is community. And I think about the container Lenny Elizabeth in which you’ve created really kind of fosters that a bunch. Um, I think I might have mentioned on the podcast here and there, it’s like, you know, I think coming to the workshops started to become less about breath work, but more just about the community that you really started to, to create and, and foster there.

And a lot of folks kind of talk about breath work more from this kind of like mental health trauma perspective. Like, we really need to like release these traumas. All this. But from what I’m hearing in like this, this conversation, you guys are really emphasizing community. And Lenny, you’re also bringing in like this philosophical component about getting to just know your experience.

And does that always need to include. Reliving traumatic things or is it, you know, something different. And so it sounds like you guys are [00:58:00] approaching this in a much different way than maybe how other people have approached breath work. Um, in, in a, in a, in a way that now you kind of see now in culture.

Like you see some of this stuff where it’s like really big catharsis and it’s really focused on like the trauma. And from what I’m hearing throughout this, this talk, it’s like the community, the curiosity, the understanding of oneself coming together.

Elizabeth Gibson: I think, I think curiosity is also a really important word, Kyle, because we, we, we try to, um, encourage people to be open and not come with any particular agenda to the breath work experience.

The community part kind of takes care of itself. But if you come to a breath work session with an idea that you need to work. On any specific thing or some difficult relationship or something that happened to you in your past. I mean, all of that can come [00:59:00] up, but the idea is to recognize your expectations and try as much as you can to just set them aside, because otherwise you might miss what’s trying to emerge spontaneously from a deeper place in yourself, which is where I think the magic of the breathwork session really happens.

So not to see it, not to see the experience through any particular lens, but always to try to be as open as possible even after the session in terms of how you look back on it, to continue to unpack it over time and be open to additional insights that you get as you look back on it. Um, from the perspective you gain as you get older, like you guys must have figured that out by now.

Joe and Kyle, you’ve been doing breath work [01:00:00] for enough years, and I know Kyle, you wrote so much about your near death experience in the early years, and I just think of all of the insights you’ve had about that over time and how many people have been listening to your story and so interested in it and how it’s evolved over time.

Lenny Gibson: Werner Heisenberg, the guy who invented in quantum mechanics and one of the greatest scientists ever in the history of the world, talked about his, I’ll send it. Purpose was to have a personal relationship with the world,

to have the relationship with the world at large as you have the most intimate relationship with another human being, [01:01:00] and then you’re, you’re completely at home. You realize you are at home no matter where you are. It’s all we, we all live here and we all have this incredible family that we really need to get to know.

The more we can get to know it, the happier we are.

Elizabeth Gibson: I think the film starts with some comments about home, right? Yeah.

Mustapha Khan: Which makes sense.

Lenny Gibson: Mm-hmm. Being home. Being home and home.

Uh,

and if everybody could be, the more people it can be at [01:02:00] home, the the better off the whole world will be.

Um, then we’re working towards it, but it’s gonna take a while.

And I think it’s possible. I think it’s possible.

Um.

Glad to hear you’re optimistic, Lenny. ’cause uh, a lot of people feel like the world is a pretty dark place right now. Yeah, well,

there’s no, there’s no future in that. There’s no future in despair. Optimism is the only place that has, is the only thing that has a future.

Kyle Buller: I will say when I was in like my nihilistic kind of [01:03:00] perspectives after my, uh, near death experience, the despair was really heavy, really dark, and things didn’t change until I started to get more optimistic and see hope and light. Um, but yeah, hanging out in that darkness, it starts to weigh pretty heavy and, you know, so I try to be as optimistic as possible nowadays, even though sometimes it feels like utter chaos right now.

Lenny Gibson: Well, evolution, the evolution of our species depends on that optimism. Yes. Depends on the population that wants to keep moving us forward and not despairing. Um, so it’s, uh, it’s evolutionarily advantageous to be optimistic in that way.

Joe Moore: A favorite title of a book of mine is Timothy Leary’s, confessions of a Hope Fiend.

And I think like there’s just something about optimism that helps flip the script. And if we don’t have an optimistic headspace, what are we doing? You know, optimists are, you know, pessimists don’t really start [01:04:00] businesses. They don’t really start big projects, right. But if we can’t flip into, oh, maybe this will be even, even for a moment, like, oh, maybe it would be really nice for me to do this for somebody else.

Make a soup for somebody, or something like that.

Elizabeth Gibson: And I do think that’s one of the, um. Maybe not, it’s not spoken of so much, but the toll of what’s happening right now just on sort of the collective feelings of people being very discouraged and feeling quite bleak, that’s taking a huge toll on all of us.

And it’s a very real thing. I mean, it’s easy to talk about hope, but how do you really get there? You know? And so I think we have to recognize that that despair is, it is part of the process. And figuring out how to, um, share our true [01:05:00] feelings with other people is what helps us, I think, feel better. And it’s not something we can figure out by ourselves.

We need other, we need to do this with other people.

A flower opens in the hope that a bee will come along.

And Tim was a little fiendish. He had a few things he hadn’t worked out.

Joe Moore: It’s right in the title Hope fiend. Yeah.

Yeah,

Joe Moore: absolutely.

Elizabeth Gibson: Well, we all have things we haven’t worked out. That’s that’s, that’s the fun of, but we,

we can, we can.

Elizabeth Gibson: Yeah. No,

it’s a problem. We can

that. So

we [01:06:00] must become Angels of Hope. Flowers of hope, blossoms of hope.

Elizabeth Gibson: Hmm.

Well, it’s really special being with all of you here because of. All the times we’ve spent together over the years and to be talking about this project now. And I’m really, really grateful to you, Mustafa, for, I don’t know, you just showed up at the right time and, and we’re still doing it five years later.

We’re still like, do, doing these screenings and making new friends and going to new places. I never thought I’d be going to Santa Monica in October of 2025 to screen a film like this

Lenny Gibson: that you’re a star in.

Elizabeth Gibson: Uh, yeah. I never thought about that. That was not on my bucket list. Oh my

Lenny Gibson: God. But, but people, people [01:07:00] see you on screen and go, wow, she’s a rock star.

Oh, come on. I’m serious. I mean, the way you explain breath work, I. So Crystal clear. It, it’s, it’s, uh, it’s really,

Elizabeth Gibson: it’s easy to talk about things you love. Right? It is easy to talk about things you really love deeply. Yeah.

But five years ago we couldn’t have predicted this. No. But in five years ago,

Kyle Buller: we never thought we were gonna be able to do breath work ever again.

In retrospect, you can look back and see how it all fits together,

and that was one of Stan’s early ideas. The, as we’ve gotten more engaged in this project, I begin to see how that initial intuition he had

can, has, can be developed and make a, and and, and [01:08:00] help us be open towards the future. We don’t need to know what the future will be, but if we’re open. It will happen.

Elizabeth Gibson: Well, I’m so excited. I’m gonna have trouble getting to sleep tonight. I can tell.

Kyle Buller: And I know that’s, we’re, we’re getting at time here, so maybe we’ll start to, to wrap up, um, Mafa, do you wanna, uh, close out again and just let us know where this screen is filming and where people, if they can’t, um, you know, attend live?

Like Yeah. If people are interested in the future, what you got cooking?

Lenny Gibson: Absolutely. I’m just looking at one thing. The, um, uh, absolutely. So life and Breath is, uh, playing at the Awareness Film Festival in Santa Monica, California. And, uh, that’s at five 30 on Sunday, October 26th. And, uh, yeah, please, please come [01:09:00] out and, um, yeah, it should be.

I, I, the only other thing I’d really like to say is that. As much as I like to think the film is about holotropic breath work, you know, it’s, it’s really about the very, very special and completely unique thing that Lenny and Elizabeth do and what you’ve created in creating dream shadow in creating this community.

And, you know, your life’s work really matters to, to so many people. And to have that effect on, on, on so many people is, is just something very, um, special to be able to just sort of try to capture in a film and to show your uniqueness to people who may not be able to get to Vermont. Um, but I, I, I thank you for what you’ve created and for all that you’ve done to pull us together and that you’ve, you know, [01:10:00] influenced my life over the past several years.

And that’s a really lovely thing. It’s great to be on this ride with you.

Kyle Buller: Beautiful. Lenny, you wanna jump in there and have some closing remarks? Well,

it’s bigger than any of us.

It’s, and, but that’s what happens when you, when you do this stuff, you, you,

you remove, you, you get removed from yourself and get, I get, I feel part of something larger. Um,

Lenny Gibson: it’s,

it’s, uh, it can go on and on and on, but it’s just, it’s a beautiful [01:11:00] thing. It’s, it’s, it’s feeling the harmony. Of the cosmos

feeling that we’re doing something as Bucky Fuller once suggested, we’re making adjustments to the perfect machine because even the most perfect machine needs adjustments in the as it is on, so we are helping the universe grow. That sounds pretty, uh, I don’t wanna get swallowed up by Megalomania, but,

and hopefully others pick [01:12:00] this up. Um, but if they don’t, someone will. And this is the future.

Kyle Buller: Thank you.

Lenny Gibson: We have,

we have, we have parties and learn poll tricks instead of politics.

Kyle Buller: And Elizabeth,

Elizabeth Gibson: I am, I feel very fortunate. I’m grateful to, um, Stan Groff and our, all of our teachers, all the people who have come and shared their experiences with us and our next generation of people we’re training. We have [01:13:00] some amazing. Um, facilitators and up and coming facilitators in our community and to you guys here.

I mean, Kyle and Joe, you know how near and dear to our hearts you are and Mustafa, I just can’t say how much I’ve learned working with you and how much we value our friendship with you. So I, um, I feel very blessed.

Kyle Buller: I feel very blessed as well. So thank you all. Um, yeah, we definitely wouldn’t be here without all of your work and the impact that you’ve had on our lives. Um, think about that daily. What if I never went to that weird little school, Burlington College and met you? Um, yeah. My life would probably just look [01:14:00] radically different.

Um, probably be a, yeah. I don’t know where I would be, but yeah. So much love to all of you. It’s been a real blessing.

Elizabeth Gibson: Yeah, it’s been fun tonight. And let’s, let’s just keep doing this stuff. Yeah.

Joe Moore: Joe, you wanna close out with just thank you all. It’s been lovely. What a great film. What a, what a great experience over the past decades and, um, just really can’t wait to keep, um, keep it going.

So much love to do.

Lenny Gibson: Well, thank you for doing your work too.

Kyle Buller: Yeah. Thank you guys. And Kyle. Yeah. Yes. It’s really

Lenny Gibson: lovely.

Kyle Buller: Yeah.

Lenny Gibson: Yeah. You’re welcome. We’re,

Joe Moore: uh, we’re gonna keep it going for a long time. I think so, yeah. Thank you.

Lenny Gibson: And you’re facilitators as well?

Elizabeth Gibson: Mm-hmm.

Joe Moore: Absolutely. Yeah, we just had two breath book workshops up here in, um, Breckenridge, and it was lovely.

Yeah, I, um, forget how much I love doing it, so it, it’s really great. I can’t wait to do more. Thank you. All right, [01:15:00] everybody. Well, thank you all. If you’re in the LA area, check out this screening in Santa Monica. We’ll have links all up in the show notes. Um, this will come out I think, on Friday. So yeah, thank you all for tuning in and, um, yeah, appreciate you all watching.

Have a good night. Thank.

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Book Club! Built To Burn: Tales of the Desert Carnies of Burning Man

Book Cover - Built To Burn: Tales of the Desert Carnies of Burning Man

Join us for the first Navigators book club. We’ll be reading Built to Burn. This book club is for The Navigators! This book is available in print, digital and audio editions.

Built to Burn: Tales of the Desert Carnies of Burning Man By Tony “Coyote” Perez

BUILT TO BURN tells the story of how Tony, a San Francisco blues musician, became Coyote, builder of Burning Man’s legendary city in the desert, and how he came to lead a ragtag band of circus runaways, freaks and geeks that would become its Department of Public Works. In 1996, Tony was making a decent living as a musician, but his creative juices had run one night onstage, he realized he’d just played an entire sax solo while thinking about his laundry. So when a wild-at-heart friend invites him to something called “Burning Man,” he grabs his backpack and hops in the car, unaware that the experience ahead will not only turn him inside out, but alter the course of his life. An essential Burning Man origin story, BUILT TO BURN chronicles the wild uncertainty and creative chaos of the early days in the desert, when the event’s future was under constant threat and the organizers were making everything up as they went along. It’s a tale of struggle and survival, of friends made and friends lost, as Coyote and his misfit crew battle raging storms, crazed livestock, angry townsfolk and each other, locking horns with the real-life cowboys, Indians, outlaws and outcasts of Nevada’s high desert frontier.
Told with wry humor and a bit of cowboy philosophy, BUILT TO BURN invites the reader to experience Burning Man as it was before it got civilized, when it was as wild and untamed as anything out of the Old West.

You can find the book here.

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Mary Carreón — Censorship, Psychedelic Media & Policy Crosscurrents

Joe and Mary dive into how platform censorship and shifting algorithms have reshaped psychedelic media, why DoubleBlind moved to a “newsletter-first” model, and what that’s revealed about true audience engagement. They reflect on the post-2024 MDMA decision headwinds, state-level policy moves (wins and losses), and how funding, politics, and culture continue to reconfigure the field. They also explore alternatives to alcohol, chronic pain research, reciprocity around iboga/ibogaine, and lessons from PS25 (MAPS’ Psychedelic Science 2025).

Highlights & themes

  • From platforms to inboxes: Social and search suppression (IG/FB/Google) throttled harm-reduction journalism; DoubleBlind’s pivot to email dramatically improved reach and engagement.
  • Post-MDMA decision reality: Investment cooled; Mary frames it as painful but necessary growth—an ecosystem “airing out” rather than a catastrophic pop.
  • Policy pulse: Mixed year—some state measures stalled (e.g., MA), others advanced (e.g., NM; ongoing Colorado process). Rescheduling cannabis may add complexity more than clarity.
  • Censorship paradox: Suppressing education makes use less safe; independent outlets need community support to keep harm-reduction info visible.
  • Chronic pain & long COVID: Emerging overlaps and training efforts (e.g., Psychedelics & Pain communities) point beyond a psychiatry-only frame.
  • Alcohol alternatives: Low-dose or occasional psychedelic use can shift habits for some; Mary stresses individual context and support beyond any single substance.
  • Reciprocity & iboga: Rising interest (including from right-leaning funders) must include Indigenous consultation and fair benefit-sharing; pace of capitalism vs. community care is an active tension.
  • PS25 field notes: Smaller, more manageable vibe than 2023; fewer “gold-rush” expectations; in-person dialogue beats online flame wars.

Notable mentions

  • DoubleBlind: Newsletter-first publishing; nurturing new writers and reported stories.
  • Psychedelics & Pain Association / Clusterbusters: Community-driven models informing care and research (cluster headache protocols history).
  • Books & media: Body Autonomy (Synergetic Press anthology); Joanna Kempner’s work on cluster headaches – Psychedelic Outlaws; Lucy Walker’s forthcoming iboga film.
  • Compounds to watch: LSD (under-studied relative to MDMA), 2C-B, 5-MeO-DMT (synthetic focus), and broader Shulgin-inspired families.
Transcript

This transcript was automatically generated and may contain minor errors or inaccuracies.

Mary Carreon: [00:00:00] Okay, I’m gonna send it to my dad because he wants to know. Here

Joe Moore: we go. Yeah, send it over. So, hi everybody. We’re live Joe here with Mary Anne, how you doing today?

Mary Carreon: I’m great Joe. How are you?

Joe Moore: Lovely. I actually never asked you how to pronounce your last name does say it right?

Mary Carreon: Yes, you did. You said it perfectly

Joe Moore: lovely.

Joe Moore: Um, great. So it’s been a bit, um, we are streaming on LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitch X and Kick, I guess. Yeah. Kick meta. Meta doesn’t let me play anymore. Um,

Mary Carreon: you’re in forever. Timeout. I got it. I got it. Yeah.

Joe Moore: Yeah. I think they found a post the other day from 2017. They didn’t like, I’m like, oh cool. Like neat, you

Mary Carreon: know, you know.

Mary Carreon: Yeah. That happened to me recently, actually. Uh, I had a post taken down from 2018 about, uh, mushroom gummies and yeah, it was taken down and I have strikes on my account now. So

Joe Moore: Do you get the thing where they ask you if you’re okay?

Mary Carreon: Yes, with, but like with my searches though, [00:01:00] like if I search something or, or someone’s account that has, uh, like mushroom or psychedelic or LSD or something in it, they’ll be like, mm-hmm are you okay?

Mary Carreon: And then it recommends getting help. So

Joe Moore: it’s like, to be fair, I don’t know if I’m okay, but Yeah, you’re like, probably not. I don’t really want your help. Meta. Yeah.

Mary Carreon: You’re like, I actually do need help, but not from you. Thanks. Yeah,

Joe Moore: yeah, yeah.

Mary Carreon: So not from the techno fascists.

Joe Moore: Oh, good lord. Yeah. Uh, we’ll go there.

Joe Moore: I’m sure.

Mary Carreon: I know. I just like really dove right there. Sorry. Yeah. All right, so let’s,

Joe Moore: um, before we go, let’s give people like a bit of, you know, high kicks on, on who is Mary, where you working these days and what are you doing?

Mary Carreon: Yeah, thank you. My name is Mary Carryon and I am forever and first and foremost a journalist.

Mary Carreon: I have been covering, I say the plant legalization spaces for the past decade. It’s, it’s been nine and a half years. Uh, on January 3rd it will be [00:02:00] 10 years. And I got my start covering cannabis, uh, at OC Weekly. And from there went to High Times, and from there went to Mary Jane, worked for Snoop Dogg. And then, uh, I am now.

Mary Carreon: Double blind. And I have become recently, as of this year, the editor in chief of Double Blind, and that’s where I have been currently sinking my teeth into everything. So currently, you know, at this moment I’m an editor and I am basically also a curator. So, and, and somebody who is a, uh, I guess an observer of this space more than anything these days.

Mary Carreon: Um, I’m not really reporting in the same way that I was. Um, but still I am helping many journalists tell stories and, uh, I feel kind of like a story midwife in many ways. Just like helping people produce stories and get the, get the quotes, get the angles that need to be discussed, get the sentences structures right, and, um, uh, helping [00:03:00] sometimes in a visionary kind of, uh, mindset.

Mary Carreon: So yeah, that’s what I’m doing these days.

Joe Moore: Oh, there it is. Oh, there you are. Love that. And um, you know, it’s important to have, um, editors who kind of really get it from a lot of different angles. I love that we have a lot of alignment on this kind of, and the drug war thing and kind of let’s, uh, hopefully start developing systems that are for people.

Joe Moore: Yeah, absolutely. If you wanna just say that. Yeah, absolutely.

Mary Carreon: Yeah, absolutely.

Joe Moore: So, um, yeah, I almost 10 years in January. That’s great. We um, it’s so crazy that it’s been that long. I think we just turned nine and a half, so we’re maybe just a few, a few months shorter than your I love it. Plant medicine reporting career.

Joe Moore: That’s great. I love it. Um, yeah, so I think. I think one of the first times we chatted, [00:04:00] um, I think you were doing a piece about two cb Do you, do you have any recollection of doing a piece on two cb?

Mary Carreon: I do, yes. Yes. Wait, I also remember hitting you up during an Instagram live and I was like, are you guys taking any writers?

Mary Carreon: And you guys were like writers, I mean, maybe depending on the writer.

Joe Moore: And I was like, I was like, I dunno how that works.

Mary Carreon: Like me. Yeah.

Joe Moore: Yeah. It was fun. It was fun to work with people like yourself and like get pieces out there. And eventually we had an awesome editor for a bit and that was, that was really cool to be able to like support young startup writers who have a lot of opinions and a lot of things to point out.

Joe Moore: There’s so much happening. Um, there was so much fraud in like wave one. Of kind of the psychedelic investment hype. There’s still some, but it’s lesser. Um, and it’s really a fascinating space still. Like changing lives, changing not just lives, right? Like our [00:05:00] perspective towards nearly everything, right?

Joe Moore: Yeah.

Mary Carreon: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, it’s interesting because the space has matured. It’s evolved. It’s different than it was even, what a, I mean, definitely nine years ago, but even five years ago, even four years ago, even last year, things are different. The landscape is different than it was a year ago.

Mary Carreon: And I, it’s, it’s interesting to see the politics of things. It’s interesting to see who has money these days given like how hard it is just to kind of survive in this space. And it’s interesting just to. Bear witness to all of this going down because it really is a once in a lifetime thing. Nothing is gonna look the same as it does now, as it, uh, then it will like in a, in a year from now or anything.

Mary Carreon: So it’s really, yeah. It’s interesting to take account of all of this

Joe Moore: That’s so real. Uh, maybe a little [00:06:00] too real, like it’s serious because like with everything that’s going on from, um, you know, governance, governments, ai Yes. Drug policy shifts. Drug tech shifts, yes. There’s so much interesting movement. Um, yes.

Joe Moore: You, you know, you, you kind of called it out and I think it’s really actually worth discussing here since we’re both here on the air together, like this idea that the psychedelic market, not idea, the lived experience of the psychedelic market having shifted substantially. And I, I, I think there’s a lot of causes.

Joe Moore: But I’ve never had the opportunity to really chat with you about this kind of like interesting downturn in money flowing into the space. Mm-hmm. Have you thought about it? Like what might the causes be? I’m sure you have.

Mary Carreon: Yeah. Yeah, I have. Yeah. I’ve thought about it. I mean, it’s hard. Well, I don’t know. I am really not trying to point fingers and that’s not what I’m [00:07:00] trying to do here.

Mary Carreon: But I mean, I think a lot of people were really hopeful that the FDA decision last June, not last June, the previous June, a year ago, 2024, June was going to open the floodgates in terms of funding, in terms of, um. In terms of mostly funding, but also just greater opportunities for the space and, uh, greater legitimacy granted to the psychedelic medicine space.

Mary Carreon: Mm. And for those who might not know what I’m talking about, I’m talking about the, uh, FDA decision to reject, uh, MDMA assisted therapy and, um, that whole, that whole thing that happened, I’m sure if it, you didn’t even have to really understand what was going on in order to get wind of that wild situation.

Mary Carreon: Um, so, so maybe, yeah. You probably know what I’m talking about, but I, I do think that that had a great impact on this space. Do I think it was detrimental to this space? [00:08:00] I don’t think so. We are in a growth spurt, you know, like we are growing and growing pains happen when you are evolving and changing and learning and figuring out the way forward.

Mary Carreon: So I think it was kind of a natural process for all of this and. If things had gone forward like while, yeah, there probably would be more money, there would be greater opportunity in this space for people wanting to get in and get jobs and make a living and have a life for themselves in this, in this world.

Mary Carreon: I don’t know if it was, I don’t know if it would necessarily be for the betterment of the space in general for the long term. I think that we do have to go through challenges in order for the best case scenarios to play out in the future, even though that’s difficult to say now because so many of us are struggling.

Mary Carreon: So, but I, but I have hope and, and that statement is coming from a place of hope for the future of this space and this culture.

Joe Moore: Yeah. It’s, um, I’m with [00:09:00] you. Like we have to see boom bust cycles. We have to see growth and contraction just like natural ecosystems do.

Mary Carreon: Absolutely, absolutely. It has to be that way.

Mary Carreon: And if it’s not that way, then ifs, if. It’s, it like what forms in place of that is a big bubble or like a, a hot air balloon that’s inevitably going to pop, which, like, we are kind of experiencing that. But I think that the, I think that the, um, the, the air letting out of the balloon right now is a much softer experience than it would be if everything was just like a green light all the way forward, if that makes sense.

Mary Carreon: So,

Joe Moore: right. And there’s, there’s so many factors. Like I’m, I’m thinking about, uh, metas censorship like we were talking about before. Yes. Other big tech censorship, right? Mm-hmm. SEO shifts.

Mary Carreon: Oh. Um, yes, absolutely. Also, uh, there were some pretty major initiatives on the state level that did not pass also this past year that really would’ve also kind of [00:10:00] helped the landscape a little bit.

Mary Carreon: Um. In terms of creating jobs, in terms of creating opportunities for funding, in terms of having more, uh, like the perception of safer money flow into the space and that, you know, those, those things didn’t happen. For instance, the measure for in Massachusetts that didn’t go through and just, you know, other things that didn’t happen.

Mary Carreon: However, there have been really good things too, in terms of, uh, legalization or various forms of legalization, and that’s in New Mexico, so we can’t, you know, forget that there, and we also can’t forget just the movement happening in Colorado. So there are really great things happening and the, the movement is still moving forward.

Mary Carreon: Everything is still going. It’s just a little more difficult than maybe it could have been

Joe Moore: right. Yeah. Amen. Amen. Yes. But also, we

Mary Carreon: can’t forget this censorship thing. The censorship thing is a horse shit. Sorry. I’m not sure if I’m allowed to cuss, but it is, [00:11:00] but it is

Joe Moore: calling it out and it’s important to say this stuff.

Joe Moore: And you know, folks, if you want to support independent media, please consider supporting Doubleblind and psychedelics today. From a media perspective, absolutely. We wanna wanna put as much out as we can. Yes. The more supporters we have, the more we can help all of you understand what’s happening and yes.

Joe Moore: Getting you to stay safer.

Mary Carreon: Yeah, absolutely. And that’s the whole difficulty with the censorship is that psychedelics today, and Doubleblind for instance, but also Lucid News, also other, uh, other influencers, other creators in the space, they like. What all of us are doing is putting out information that is ultimately creating a safer user experience.

Mary Carreon: And so with the censorship, we are not able to do so anymore, which creates actually a lot of danger. So. Yeah, it’s, it’s difficult. The censorship is difficult, and if you are somebody who posts about psychedelics, I know that you know this and I am preaching to the choir.

Joe Moore: Yeah. So can you talk a [00:12:00] little bit about you all at Double Blind made a major shift in the last number of months towards, uh, kind of not necessarily putting everything out there and, and kind of like, um, actually I don’t even know the language you use.

Joe Moore: What’s the, what’s the language you use for the kind of model shift you took on?

Mary Carreon: Yeah, I mean, it’s great. It’s been a wild shift. It’s been a wild shift. Um, what we are currently doing is we went to a newsletter first model, which instead of just posting onto a website for everyone to see, and then, um, you know, hopefully getting SEO hits and also posting on their, then posting those stories onto Instagram and Facebook and Twitter, and hoping to get traffic through social media.

Mary Carreon: Uh, we decided that that was no longer working for us because it wasn’t, um, because the censorship is so bad on, on social media, like on Instagram, for instance, and Facebook and Twitter, well, less on Twitter, [00:13:00] but still, nonetheless on social media, the censorship is so bad. And also the censorship exists on Google.

Mary Carreon: When you Google search how to take mushrooms, double blinds is not even on. You know, our guide is not on the first page. It’s like, you know, way the heck, way the heck down there. Maybe page 2, 3, 4, 5. I don’t know. But, um, the issue, the issue with that, or, or the reason why rather that it’s that way is because Google is prioritizing, um, like rehabilitation centers for this information.

Mary Carreon: And also they are prioritizing, uh, medical information. So, like WebMD for instance. And all of these organizations that Google is now prioritizing are u are, are, are, are organizations that see psychedelic use through the lens of addiction or through drug drug abuse. So [00:14:00] again, you know, I don’t know, take it for how you want to, I’m not gonna say, I’m not gonna tell anybody like what is the right way to use their substances or whatever.

Mary Carreon: However, it’s really important to have the proper harm reduction resources and tools available. Uh, just readily available, not five pages down on a Google search. So anyways, all of that said double blind was our traffic was way down. And it was looking very bleak for a while. Just we were getting kicked off of Instagram.

Mary Carreon: We weren’t getting any traffic from social media onto our website, onto our stories. It was a, it was a vicious kind of cycle downward, and it wasn’t really working. And there was a moment there where Doubleblind almost shut down as a result of these numbers because there’s a, like you, a media company cannot sustain itself on really low page views as a result.

Mary Carreon: So what we [00:15:00] decided to do was go to a newsletter first model, which relies on our email list. And basically we are sending out newsletters three days a week of new original content, mostly, uh, sometimes on Wednesdays we repost an SEO story or something like that. Um, to just to engage our audience and to work with our audience that way, and to like to actually engage our audience.

Mary Carreon: I cannot emphasize that enough because on Instagram and on Facebook, we were only reaching like, I don’t know, not that many people, like not that many people at all. And all of that really became obvious as soon as we started sending out to our email list. And as soon as we did that, it was wild. How many, how many views to the website and also how many just open like our open rate and our click through rate were showing how our audience was reacting to our content.

Mary Carreon: In other words. [00:16:00] Social media was not a good, in, like, was not a good indicator of how our content was being received at all because people kind of weren’t even receiving it. So going to the newsletter first model proved to be very beneficial for us and our numbers. And also just reaching our freaking audience, which we were barely doing, I guess, on social media, which is, which is wild, you know, for, for a, an account that has a lot of followers, I forget at this exact moment, but we have a ton, double blind, has a ton of followers on, on Instagram.

Mary Carreon: We were, we, we get like 500 likes or, you know, maybe like. I don’t know. If you’re not looking at likes and you’re looking at views, like sometimes we get like 16 K views, which, you know, seems good, but also compared to the amount of followers who follow us, it’s like not really that great. And we’re never reaching new, like a new audience.

Mary Carreon: We’re always reaching the same audience too, [00:17:00] which is interesting because even with our news, with our, with our email list, we are still reaching new people, which is, which says just how much more fluid that space is. Mm-hmm. And it’s because it’s, because censorship does not at least yet exist in our inboxes.

Mary Carreon: And so therefore email is kind of like the underground, if you will, for this kind of content and this type of material journalism, et cetera. So, so yeah. So it, it, it has been a massive shift. It is required a lot of changes over at double blind. Everything has been very intense and crazy, but it has been absolutely worth it, and it’s really exciting that we’re still here.

Mary Carreon: I’m so grateful that Double-Blind is still around, that we are still able to tell stories and that we are still able to work with writers and nurture writers and nurture the storytelling in this space because it needs to evolve just the same way that the industry and the [00:18:00] culture and everything else is evolving.

Joe Moore: Yeah, I think, I think you’re spot on like the, when I watch our Instagram account, like, um, I haven’t seen the number change from 107 K for two years.

Mary Carreon: Absolutely. Same. And, um, same.

Joe Moore: Yeah. And you know, I think, I think there’s certain kinds of content that could do fine. I think, uh, psychedelic attorney, Robert Rush put up a comment, um, in response to Jack Coline’s account getting taken down, um, that had some good analysis, um.

Joe Moore: Of the situation. Go ahead. You had No,

Mary Carreon: no, I’m just like, you know, I can’t, when, when journalists are getting kicked off of these, of these platforms for their stories, for their reported stories, that’s like, that is a massive red flag. And that’s all I have to say. I mean, we could go into more, more details on that, but that is a [00:19:00] huge red flag.

Joe Moore: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Um, for sure. The, I, yeah. And like I’m sure he’ll get it back. I’m sure that’s not for good, but I think he did. Okay, great.

Mary Carreon: I think he did. Yeah. Yeah, I think he did.

Joe Moore: Yeah. So thank you. Shout out to Jack. Yeah, thanks Jack. Um, and I think, you know, there’s, there’s no one with that kind of energy out there.

Joe Moore: Um, and I’m excited to see what happens over time with him. Yeah. How he’ll unfold. Absolutely unfold. Oh yeah. It’s like, um. Crushing the beat.

Mary Carreon: Oh yeah, absolutely. Especially the political, the political beat. Like, there’s no, there’s few people who are really tackling that specific sector, which is like mm-hmm.

Mary Carreon: So exciting for a journalist.

Joe Moore: Yeah. Um, so model shifting, like we all have to like, adapt in new ways. Kyle and I are still trying to figure out what we’re gonna do. Like maybe it is newsletter first. Like I, I realized that I hadn’t been writing for [00:20:00] years, which is problematic, um, in that like, I have a lot of things to say.

Mary Carreon: Totally.

Joe Moore: And nobody got to hear it. Um, so I started a substack, which I had complicated feelings about honestly. ’cause it’s just another. Rich person’s platform that I’m, you know, helping them get Andreessen money or whatever. And, you know, so I’m gonna play lightly there, but I will post here and there. Um, I’m just trying to figure it all out, you know, like I’ve put up a couple articles like this GLP one and Mushrooms article.

Mary Carreon: I saw that. I saw that. Really? And honestly, that’s a really, like, it’s so weird, but I don’t, like, it’s such a weird little thing that’s happening in the space. I wonder, yeah, I wonder, I wonder how that is going to evolve. It’s um, you know, a lot of people, I, I briefly kind of wrote about, um, psychedelics and the GLP, is that what it is?

Mary Carreon: GLP one.

Joe Moore: GLP one. Say Ozempic. Yeah, just, yeah, Ozempic. Yeah, exactly.

Mary Carreon: Yeah, exactly. I wrote about [00:21:00] that briefly last year and there were a bunch of people like obviously horrified, which it is kind of horrifying, but also there’s a bunch of people who believe that it is extremely cutting edge, which it also is.

Mary Carreon: So it’s really interesting, really fascinating.

Joe Moore: Yeah. Um, I remember Bernie Sanders saying like, if this drug gets as much traction as it needs to, it will bankrupt Medicaid. I guess that’s not really a problem anymore. Um, but, but, uh, but so like naming it real quick, like it changed the way we had to digest things, therefore, like mushrooms get digested differently and, um, some people don’t respond in the expected ways.

Joe Moore: And then there was some follow up, oh, we, in the regulated model, we just do lemon tech. And then I was like, is that legal in the regulated model? And I, I don’t know the answer still. Mm-hmm. Like there was a couple things, you know, if users know to do it, you know, I don’t, I don’t totally understand the regulated model’s so strange in Oregon, Colorado, that like, we really need a couple lawyers opinions.

Joe Moore: Right. I think

Mary Carreon: yes, of course

Joe Moore: the lawyers just gave it a [00:22:00] thumbs up. They didn’t even comment on the post, which is,

laughs: thanks guys. Um,

Joe Moore: but you know,

laughs: yeah. You’re like, thank you.

Joe Moore: Thanks and diversity of opinions. So yeah, there’s that. And like GLP ones are so interesting in that they’re, one friend reached out and said she’s using it in a microdose format for chronic neuroinflammation, which I had never heard of before.

Joe Moore: Whoa. And um, I think, you know, articles like that, my intent was to just say, Hey, researchers yet another thing to look at. Like, there’s no end to what we need to be looking at. Abso

Mary Carreon: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. You know, reporting on this space actually taught me that there’s so much just in general that isn’t being researched, whether that’s in this space, but also beyond and how, um, yeah, just how behind, actually, maybe not, maybe behind isn’t the right word, but it kind of feels from my novice and from my novice place in the, in the world and [00:23:00] understanding research, it’s.

Mary Carreon: Hard for me to see it as anything, but being behind in the research that we all really need, that’s really going to benefit humanity. But also, you know, I get that it’s because of funding and politics and whatever, whatever, you know, we can go on for days on all of that.

Joe Moore: What’s the real reason? What’s the real reason?

Joe Moore: Well, drug war.

Mary Carreon: Yeah. Well, yeah, definitely the drug war. Nixon. Yeah. Yes, yes, definitely the drug war. Yeah. I mean, and just the fact that even all of the drug research that happens is, again, through the lens of addiction and drug abuse, so

Joe Moore: mm-hmm. Hard to right. Yeah. Um, like ni a is obviously really ridiculous and, and the way they approach this stuff, and Carl Hart illustrates that well, and,

Mary Carreon: oh man, yes, he does.

Joe Moore: Like, I think Fadiman’s lab in Palo Alto got shut down, like 67, 66 or 67, and like that’s, you know, that was one of the later ones,

Mary Carreon: right? And,

Joe Moore: and like,

Mary Carreon: and here we are.

Joe Moore: The amount of suffering that could have been alleviated if we [00:24:00] had not done this is. Incalculable. Um, yes. Yes. Yeah.

Mary Carreon: I mean the, yeah, it’s hard to say exactly how specifically it would be different, but it’s difficult to also not think that the fentanyl crisis and the opioid addiction rate and situation that is currently like plaguing the, the world, but particularly the United States, it’s hard to think that it wouldn’t be, like, it wouldn’t be a different scenario altogether.

Joe Moore: Right, right. Absolutely. Um, and it’s, um, it’s interesting to speculate about, right? Like Yeah. Yes. Where would we be? And

Mary Carreon: I know, I know, I know, I know it is speculation. Absolutely. But it’s like hard, as I said, it’s hard not to think that things would be different.

Joe Moore: Right. Right. Um, I like, there’s two kind of quotes, like, um, not, this one’s not really a quote.

Joe Moore: Like, we haven’t really had a [00:25:00] blockbuster psychiatric med since Prozac, and I think that was in the eighties or early nineties, which is terrifying. And then, um, I think this guy’s name is James Hillman. He is kinda like a Jungian, um, educator and I think the title of one of his books is, we’re a hundred Years Into Psychotherapy and the World is Still a Mess.

Joe Moore: And I think like those two things are like, okay, so two different very white people approaches didn’t go very far. Yes. Um, yes and

laughs: mm-hmm.

Joe Moore: Thankfully, I think a lot of people are seeing that. Mm-hmm. Um, finally and kind of putting energy into different ways. Um,

Mary Carreon: yeah. Absolutely. I think, yeah, I mean, we need to be exploring the other options at this point because what is currently happening isn’t working on many fronts, but including in terms of mental health especially.

Mary Carreon: So mm-hmm. We gotta get going. Right? We [00:26:00] gotta get moving. Geez.

Joe Moore: Have you all, have you all seen much of the information around chronic pain treatments? Like I’m, I’m a founding board member with the Psychedelics and Pain Association, which has a really fun project. Oh, that’s interesting.

Mary Carreon: Um, I’ve seen some of the studies around that and it’s endlessly fascinating for obvious, for obvious reasons.

Mary Carreon: I, um, we have a writer who’s been working for a long time on a story, uh, about the chronic pain that has since. Become an issue for this, for her, for the writer. Mm-hmm. Um, since she had COVID. Mm-hmm. Since, since she is just like, COVID was the onset basically of this chronic pain. And, um, there she attended a psychedelics in pain, chronic pain conference and, uh, that has pretty much like, changed her world.

Mary Carreon: Um, well, in terms of just the information that’s out there, not necessarily that she’s painless, but it’s just, you know, offering a, a brand new, a brand new road, a brand new path that is giving her, [00:27:00] um, relief on days when the pain is, uh, substantial.

laughs: Yeah.

Mary Carreon: So that’s interesting. And a lot of people are experiencing that as well.

Joe Moore: Mm-hmm. So there’s, there’s a really cool set of overlap between the COVID researchers, long COVID researchers and the chronic pain people. ’cause there is Yes. This new science of pain that’s yes. Our group, PPA put out like a really robust kind of training, um, for clinicians and researchers and even patients to get more educated.

Joe Moore: And we’re, we’re getting, um, kind of boostered by cluster busters and we’re kind of leveraging a lot of what they’ve done.

Mary Carreon: Wait, what is a cluster buster?

Joe Moore: Oh gosh. Um, so they’re a 5 0 1 C3. Okay. Started with Bob Wald. Okay. Bob Wald is a cluster headache survivor. Oh, oh, oh,

Mary Carreon: okay. Got it. Got it. Yes. So they’re

Joe Moore: the charity that, um, has been really championing, um, cluster headache research because they found a protocol [00:28:00] with mushrooms.

Joe Moore: Yes, yes, yes. To eliminate. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Um, this really great, I

Mary Carreon: love that.

Joe Moore: This really great book was written by a Rutgers, um, I think medical sociologist or anthropologist psychedelic. Love

laughs: that.

Joe Moore: Joanna Kempner. Cool. Um, and it kind of talks about the whole, um, cluster busters saga, and it was, it was pretty cool.

Joe Moore: Nice. So they’ve been at it for about as long as maps. Um, oh wow. Maybe a little earlier. Maybe a little later.

Mary Carreon: I love that. Cool. I mean, yeah, that’s really great. That’s really great.

Joe Moore: So we’re copying their playbook in a lot of ways and Cool. We about to be our own 5 0 1 C3 and, um, nice. And that should be really fun.

Joe Moore: And, uh, the next conference is coming up at the end of next month if people wanna check that out. Psychedelic. Nice.

Mary Carreon: Nice, nice, nice. Cool.

Joe Moore: Yeah, so that, like, how I leaned into that was not only did I get a lot of help from chronic pain with psychedelics and going to Phish shows and whatever, um, you know, I, and overuse for sure helped me somehow.

Joe Moore: [00:29:00] Um, God bless. Yeah. But I, I like it because it breaks us out of the psychiatry only frame for psychedelics. Mm. And starts to make space for other categories. Mm-hmm. Is one of the bigger reasons I like it.

Mary Carreon: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yes. Yes. Which, like, we need to be, we need to, we, no one else is gonna do it for us. We like the people in the space who are finding new uses for these substances need to be creating those, those pathways and those new niches for people to then begin studying, et cetera, and exploring and yeah.

Mary Carreon: Making, making a proper avenue for,

Joe Moore: right, right. And, you know, um, I don’t know that this is a Maha thing, so No, I’m going there, I guess, but like, how do we kind of face squarely America and the world’s drinking problems? Not [00:30:00] knowing what we know now about alcohol, you know what I mean? And then like, what are the alternatives?

Joe Moore: You know, some, some writers out there on substack are very firm that everybody needs to not do any substance. And like all psychedelics are super bad and drugs are evil, you know, famous sub stackers that I won’t name. But you know, like what is the alternative? Like, I, like we have to have something beyond alcohol.

Joe Moore: And I think you’ve found some cannabis helpful for that.

Mary Carreon: Yeah, I, you know, it’s, it’s interesting because it’s, there are, there’s definitely an argument to be made for the power of these substances in helping, I don’t wanna, I don’t wanna say curb, but definitely reduce the symptoms of, uh, wanting to use or to drink or to consume a specific substance.

Mary Carreon: There’s obviously there is an argument to be made. There are, there is ano another camp of people who are kind [00:31:00] of in the, in the, in the, in the realm of using a drug to get off of a drug isn’t how you do it. However, and, and I do, it depends on the individual. It depends on the individual and the, and how that person is engaging with their own addiction.

Mary Carreon: I think for whether or not the substances work, like whether psychedelics work to help somebody kind of get off of alcohol or get off of cocaine or stop using opioids or, you know, et cetera. Mm-hmm. However, I think like, when the situation is so dire, we need to be trying everything. And if that means, like, if, like, you know, if you look at the studies for like smoking cessation or alcohol use, mushrooms do help, psilocybin does help with that.

Mary Carreon: Mm-hmm. But, you know, there’s, there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of things that also need to happen. There’s a lot of things that also need to happen in order for those, uh, that relief to maintain and to stick and to, uh, really guide [00:32:00] somebody off of those substances. Mm-hmm. It’s not just the substance itself.

Joe Moore: Right. So I’m, I’m explicitly talking like recreational alternatives, right. Like how do I Yeah. On per minute, like, am Anitas becoming helpful? Yeah, yeah. Are helpful and Yeah. Yeah. I think like even, um, normal. What we might call like normal American alcohol use. Like Yeah. That’s still like, quite carcinogenic and like, um, absolutely.

Joe Moore: We’re kind of trying to spend less as a country on cancer treatments, which I hope is true. Then how do we, how do we develop things that are, you know, not just abstinence only programs, which we know for sure aren’t great.

Mary Carreon: Yeah. They don’t work. Yeah. I don’t, it’s, it’s difficult. Mm-hmm. It’s difficult to say.

Mary Carreon: I mean mm-hmm. I don’t know. Obviously I, I, well, maybe it’s not obvious at all for people who don’t know me, but, you know, I exist in a, I exist in, in a world where recreational use is like, it’s like hard to define what recreational use is because if we are using this, if we are using mushrooms or LSD even, or MDMA, [00:33:00] you know, there are so many, there’s a lot of the therapy that can happen through the use of these substances, even if we’re not doing it, you know, with a blindfold on or whatever and yeah, I think like.

Mary Carreon: There is a decent swap that can happen if you, if you are somebody who doesn’t wanna be, you know, having like three beers a night, or if you are somebody who’s like, you know, maybe not trying to have like a bottle of wine at a night or something like that, you know, because like Americans drink a lot and a lot of the way that we drink is, um, you know, like we don’t see it as alcoholism.

Mary Carreon: Even though it could be, it could be that’s like a difficult

Joe Moore: potentially subclinical, but right there.

Mary Carreon: Um, yeah. Yeah. It’s like, you know, it’s, um, we don’t see it as that because everybody, a lot of people, not everybody, but a lot of people drink like that, if that makes sense. If you know mm-hmm. If you, if you get what I’m, if you get what I’m saying.

Mary Carreon: So, you know, I do think that there’s a lot of benefit that, I don’t [00:34:00] know, having, like a, having a mushroom, having a mushroom experience can really help. Or sometimes even like low dose, low doses of mushrooms can also really help with, like, with the. Desire to reach for a drink. Yeah, totally. And, and AMS as well.

Mary Carreon: I know that that’s also helping people a lot too. And again, outside of the clinical framework.

Joe Moore: Yeah. I’m, a lot of people project on me that I’m just like constantly doing everything all the time and I’m, I’m the most sober I’ve been since high school. You know, like it’s bonkers that like Yeah. Um, and you know, probably the healthiest event since high school too.

Joe Moore: Yeah. But it’s fa it’s fascinating that like, you know, psychedelics kind of helped get here and even if it was like For sure something that didn’t look like therapy. Yeah,

Mary Carreon: yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. I, I think, I think most of us here in this space are getting projected on as to like, you know, being like what Normies would consider druggies or something, or that we are just like, you know, high all the time.

Mary Carreon: Um, [00:35:00] I know that that is definitely something that I face regularly, like out in the world. Um, but, you know, I would also, I would also argue that. Uh, like mushrooms have completely altered my approach to health, my approach to mental health, and not even having to consume that, you know, that substance in order or that, you know, that fun fungi, in order for me to like tap into taking care of my mental health or approaching better, uh, food options, et cetera.

Mary Carreon: It’s kind of like what these, it’s like how the mushrooms continue to help you even after you have taken them. Like the messages still keep coming through if you work with them in that capacity. Right. And yeah, and also same with, same with LSD too. LSD has also kind my experiences with that have also guided me towards a healthier path as well.

Mary Carreon: I, I understand that maybe for some people it’s not that way, but, um, for me that substance is a medicine as well, [00:36:00] or it can be.

Joe Moore: Yeah. Um, so. What are, what are some things popping up these days about like US drug policy that’s like getting exciting for you? Like, are you feeling feeling like a looming optimism about a, a major shift?

Joe Moore: Are you kind of like cautiously optimistic with some of the weird kind of mandatory minimum stuff that’s coming up or?

Mary Carreon: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I know that there was a huge, a, a pretty huge shift over at the DEA and I wish I remembered, I wish I remembered his name. The new guy who’s now, I believe the head of the DEA, I don’t know enough information about it to really feel a way.

Mary Carreon: However, I don’t think that he’s necessarily going to be serving us as a community here, uh, in the psychedelic space. I, you know, I just don’t think that that’s something that we can ever depend on with the DEA. Uh, I also don’t think that [00:37:00] the DEA is necessarily going to be. All that helpful to cannabis, like the cannabis space either.

Mary Carreon: Um, I know that, that Trump keeps kind of discussing or, or dangling a carrot around the rescheduling of cannabis. Um, for, he’s been, he’s been, but he’s doing it a lot more now. He’s been talking about it more recently. Uh, he says like, in the next like couple weeks that he’s going to have some kind of decision around that, allegedly.

Mary Carreon: But we will see also, I’m not sure that it’s going to necessarily help anybody if we reschedule two. Uh, what from schedule one to schedule th two, three, schedule three.

Joe Moore: Either way it’s like not that useful. Right. Exactly.

Mary Carreon: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It’s, um, just going to probably cause a lot more red tape and a lot of confusion for the state rec markets.

Mary Carreon: So it’s like something that we, it’s like only ridden with unintentional, unintentional consequences. Unintended consequences. Mm-hmm. Because no one knows how it’s really going to [00:38:00] impact anything, um, if, if at all. But I don’t know. It’s hard, it’s hard to imagine that there won’t be any, uh, like more complex regulatory issues for business owners and also probably consumers as well.

Joe Moore: Hmm. Yeah. This guy’s name’s Terry Cole.

Mary Carreon: Oh, the new DEA guy.

Joe Moore: Yeah. Um, I don’t know much about him. Terry. Yeah. Terry, I would love to chat.

Mary Carreon: Yeah. Terry, let’s talk. I’m sure your people

Joe Moore: are watching. Yeah. So like, just let him know. We wanna chat. Yeah. We’ll come to DC and chat it out. Um, yeah. It’s, um, but yeah, I, Carl Hart’s solution to me makes like almost most of the sense in the world to just end the scheduling system Absolutely.

Joe Moore: And start building some sort of infrastructure to keep people safe. That’s clearly not what we have today.

Mary Carreon: No. But building an infrastructure around the health and wellness and uh, safety of [00:39:00] people is the exact opposite system that we have currently right now. Because also the scheduling system has a lot to do with the incarceration in the United States and the criminal just, or the criminal system.

Mary Carreon: So, so yeah, like we can’t disentangle the two really.

Joe Moore: It just started, um, I feel negligent on this. Uh, synergetic press put out a book like a year or two ago called Body Autonomy. Mm-hmm. Um, did that one come across your desk at all? Mm-hmm. No. I wish basically contributed. Oh, nice. A number of people. So it’s both like, um.

Joe Moore: Drug policy commentary and then like sex work commentary. Oh, nice. And it was like high level, like love that really, really incredible love that detailed science based conversations, which is not what we have around this. Like, that doesn’t make me feel good. So you should go to jail kind of stuff. Or like, I’m gonna humiliate you for real though.

Joe Moore: Ticket. Yeah,

Mary Carreon: yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh God. Uh, when you think about it like that, it just really also shows [00:40:00] just the uh, um, the level at which religion has also kind of fundamentally infused itself into the scheduling system, but also our laws, you know, like what you just said, this like, shame-based, I’m going to embarrass you and make you into a criminal when you know actually you are a law for the most part, a law abiding citizen, with the exception of this one thing that you’re doing for.

Mary Carreon: A, your survival and or your, like, your feeling good, wanting to feel good addressing pain. Um, there’s a large, uh, like noise coming out of the front yard of my house right now. Hold on. Just a, it doesn’t sound too bad. It doesn’t sound too bad. Okay. Okay, good. Not at all. Not at all. Okay. Yeah, I had

Joe Moore: people working on my roof all day and somehow it worked out.

Joe Moore: Oh, good. Um, yeah. Um, yeah, it’s, it’s fascinating and I, I’ve been coming around like, I, I identify as politically confused, [00:41:00] um, and I feel like it’s the most honest way I can be. Um,

Mary Carreon: I am also politically confused these days, impossible to align with any, uh, party or group currently in existence at this exact juncture in American history.

Joe Moore: I can’t find any that I want to throw my dice in with. Nah. This idea of like fucking way being. Like what is the most humane way to do government as a way it’s been put to me recently. And that’s interesting. So it comes down to like coercion, are we caring for people, things like that. And um, I don’t think we’re doing it in a super humane way right now.

Mary Carreon: Um, we, yeah, I am pretty sure that even if there was, I mean, I think that even if we looked at the data, the data would support that we are not doing it in a humane way.

Joe Moore: So

Mary Carreon: unfortunately, and

Joe Moore: you know, this whole tech thing, like the tech oligarch thing, you kind of dropped at the beginning and I think it’s worth bringing that back because we’re, we’re on all [00:42:00] these tech platforms.

Joe Moore: Like that’s kind of like how we’re transmitting it to people who are participating in these other platforms and like, you know, it’s not all meta. I did turn on my personal Facebook, so everybody’s watching it there. I hope. Um, see if that count gets,

Mary Carreon: um,

Joe Moore: but you know, this idea that a certain number of private corporations kind of control.

Joe Moore: A huge portion of rhetoric. Um, and you know, I think we probably got Whiffs of this when Bezos bought Washington Post and then Yes. You know, Musk with X and like yes. You know, is this kind of a bunch of people who don’t necessarily care about this topic and the way we do, and they’re like in larger topics too about humane government and like, you know, moving things in good directions.

Joe Moore: Um, I don’t know, thoughts on that rift there as it relates to anything you, wherever you wanna go. Yeah.

Mary Carreon: Yeah. I mean, I don’t think that they are looking at, I don’t think that they are looking [00:43:00] at it the way that we are. I don’t think that they can see it from their vantage point. Um, I think that like, in the, in a similar way that so many CEOs who run businesses have no fucking clue about what’s actually happening in their businesses and the actual workers and, and employees of their businesses can tell them in more detail.

Mary Carreon: Far more detail about what’s actually happening on the, on the floor of their own business. Uh, I think that it is something like that. However, that’s not to say that, you know, these, these CEOs who employ people who build the A algorithm are obviously guided to create the limitations on us as people who speak about drugs, et cetera, and are creating a algorithm that ultimately is looking at things in a very blanket way in terms of, uh, like we’re probably seen on the same level as like drug dealers, if that makes sense.

Mary Carreon: Which is obviously a much, you know, there’s, [00:44:00] it’s a very different thing. Um, so, you know, there’s like these CEOs are giving directions to their employees to ultimately create systems that harm. Information flow and inform and, and like the information health of, of platforms and of just people in general.

Mary Carreon: So it’s hard to say because there’s nuance there, obviously, but I would bet you that someone like Elon Musk doesn’t really have a full grasp as to the, the nuances and details of what’s even happening within, on the ground floor of his businesses. Because that’s like, not how CEOs in America run, run, and operate.

Mary Carreon: They’re stupid companies. So, so yeah. And I feel like that, like, that’s across the board, like that’s across the board. That’s how I, that’s probably how Zuck is operating with Meta and Facebook, et cetera. And yeah, just likewise and across, across the whole, [00:45:00] across the whole spectrum.

Joe Moore: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And I think, um, a thing.

Joe Moore: Then as the people like, we need to keep looking at how can we keep each other informed. And that’s kind of circling back to drug journalism like we do and like, um, other, other sorts of journalism that doesn’t really get the press it deserves. Right. And I’ve been getting far more content that I find more valuable off of tragically back on Zucks platform like IG is getting me so much interesting content from around the world that no major outlet’s covering.

Mary Carreon: That’s so interesting. Like what? Like what would you say?

Joe Moore: Oh, um, uh, certain, um, violent situations overseas. Oh, oh, got it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, um, you know, that America’s paying for, so like, you know, I just don’t love that I don’t have a good, you know, journalistic source I can [00:46:00] point to, to say, hey, like right.

Joe Moore: These writers with names, with addresses, like, and offices here. Yes. You know, they did the work and they’re held, you know, they’re ethical journalists, so yes. You can trust them. Right. You know what I mean? Yes,

Mary Carreon: yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, all of this makes everything so much harder for determining, like, the censorship specifically makes it so much harder for the people to determine like, what’s real, what’s not.

Mary Carreon: Because, because of exactly what you just said. Mm-hmm. Like, you know, we are, we are basically what that means, like what is required of the people and people who are consuming information is becoming a smart consumer and being able to determine what’s real, what’s not. How can we trust this individual?

Mary Carreon: How can we not, which isn’t analysis process that all of us need to be sharpening every single day, especially with the advent of AI and, uh, how quickly this, this type of content is coming at all of us. Like, especially if you’re on TikTok, which many of us are, you know, like information comes flying at you 3000 miles an hour, and it’s sometimes [00:47:00] really difficult to determine what’s real, what’s not, because AI is.

Mary Carreon: AI is not where it’s going to be, and it still is in its nascent phase. However, it’s still pretty fucking good and it’s still very confusing on there. So, so again, like the media literacy of the people needs to be sharpened every single day. We cannot be on there, we cannot be on the internet existing.

Mary Carreon: That everything that we are seeing is real. Whether that’s about, you know, these, um, the violence overseas, uh, happening at the hands of the United States, whether that is, uh, even drug information like, you know, et cetera, all of all of it. Or just like news about something happening at Yellowstone National Park or something that is happening in the, uh, at like.

Mary Carreon: Um, like potential riots also happening at protests in downtown la, et cetera. Like all, all of it, we need to be so careful. And I think what that also, like, one way that [00:48:00] we can adjust and begin to develop our media literacy skills is talking to people maybe who are there, reaching out to people who are saying that they were there and asking them questions, and also sussing that out.

Mary Carreon: You know, obviously we can’t do that for all situations, but definitely some of them.

Joe Moore: Yeah, absolutely. Like,

Joe Moore: um, a quick pivot. Mm-hmm. Were you at PS 25?

Mary Carreon: Yes, I was. What did I think? Uh, you know, I, I was running around like crazy at this one. I felt like I didn’t even have a second to breathe and I feel like I didn’t even have a second to really see anybody. I was like, worry. I was jumping from one stage to the next.

Mary Carreon: However, I would say, uh, one of, one of the things that I have said and how I felt about it was that I felt that this, this event was smaller than it was two years ago. And I preferred that I preferred the reduction in size just because it was, uh, less over, less overwhelming [00:49:00] in an, in an already very overwhelming event.

Mary Carreon: Um, but I thought that from the panels that I did see that everyone did a really great job. I thought that maps, you know, it’s impressive that maps can put on an event like that. Um, I also was very cognizant that the suits were there in full effect and, uh, you know, but that’s not unusual. That’s how it was last time as well.

Mary Carreon: And, um, I felt that there was

Mary Carreon: a, uh, like the, the, the level of excitement and the level of like opportunity and pro, like the prosperous. The like, prospect of prosperity coming down the pipeline like tomorrow, you know, kind of vibe was different than last time. Mm-hmm. Which that was very present at the one, two years ago, uh, which was the last PS psychedelic science.

Mary Carreon: Yeah. Um, anyways. Yeah. But it was, you know, it was really nice to see everybody. [00:50:00] I feel like in-person events is a great way for everybody in the psychedelic space to be interacting with each other instead of like keyboard warrioring against each other, you know, uh, over the computer and over the internet.

Mary Carreon: I think that, um, yeah, uh, being in person is better than being fighting each other over the internet, so, yeah.

Joe Moore: Mm-hmm. People seem to be a little bit more civil in person.

Mary Carreon: Exactly. Exactly. Mm-hmm. And I think that that is something that we all need to be considering more often, and also inviting people from across the aisle to your events and creating peace, because in person it’s a little different than it is.

Mary Carreon: When you have the opportunity to, uh, yeah, like keyboard attack someone over the internet, it’s like, yeah. It’s just so silly. So silly. We look like fools. Like we look like absolute idiots doing that. And you know what? I cannot sit here and say that I haven’t looked like an idiot. So, you know, it’s like I’m not, I’m not talking from like a high horse over here, but, but you know, it’s like, it’s [00:51:00] better when it’s in person.

Mary Carreon: I feel like there’s like more civil engagements that we can all have.

Joe Moore: It’s practice, you know? Yeah. We’re learning. Yeah. We are. We should be learning, including us, and yes, of course. Um, I, I play a subtler game these days and, uh, you know, I, I, I, it’s better when we all look a lot better in my opinion, because yes, we can inform policy decisions, we can be the ones helping inform really important things about how these things should get implemented and absolutely right.

Joe Moore: Like,

Mary Carreon: absolutely. Yeah, it does. It does. Nobody, any service, especially these medicines, especially these sacraments, especially these plants, these molecules, et cetera, if we are all sitting here fighting each other and like calling each other names and trying to dunk on one another, when like in reality, we are also all kind of pushing for the same thing more or less.

Joe Moore: Mm-hmm. So a thing that [00:52:00] I, it’s a, it’s kind of a, I, I had a great time at PS 25. I have no, no real complaints. I just wish I had more time. Yeah, same. Um, same. Yeah. Our booth was so busy. It was so fun. Just good. And it was like, good. I, I know. It was really good. I’m trying to say it out loud. I get to talk at the conference before Rick did.

laughs: Oh, oh,

Joe Moore: the morning show they put us on at like seven 30 in the morning or something crazy. Oh my god. It was early. I dunno if it was seven 30.

Mary Carreon: That’s so early. That’s so early.

Joe Moore: Yeah, right. Like that’s crazy. I got zero nightlife in That’s okay. Um, I was not, I was there for work. Yeah,

Mary Carreon: yeah. I was

Joe Moore: jealous. I didn’t party, but you know, whatever.

Joe Moore: Yeah, yeah.

Mary Carreon: I did not party this time really in the same way that I did at PS 20. Was it 2023?

Joe Moore: 23, yeah. 23. I only stay up till 11 one night in 23. Nice.

Mary Carreon: Okay. Um, okay.

Joe Moore: So I behaved, I have a pattern of behaving. ’cause I like That’s good. I’m so bent outta shape inside going into these things. I’m like, I know, I know.

Joe Moore: And, and I’m like, oh, all [00:53:00] my friends are gonna be there. It’s gonna be great. And then it’s like, yeah. It’s mostly friends and only a little bit of stress. Yeah. Um, yeah. Yeah,

Mary Carreon: yeah. I had a, I had a great time. It was really good seeing everybody again. Like you, I wish that I had more time with people. Like there are people that I like didn’t even see who are my friends,

Joe Moore: so, which Yeah.

Joe Moore: Which is sad. That’s like a subtext in, in like the notes coming away from 25. Is that the, um, American Right, if we wanna call it that, is very interested in this stuff. Oh yeah. Like the Texas establishment. Oh yeah. Um, the Texas contingent, right? They’re deep. They’re real deep. Mm-hmm. I have, um,

Mary Carreon: let’s talk about that more.

Mary Carreon: Yeah. So

Joe Moore: it’s optimistic in, in some sense that psychedelic science is getting funded more. By states. ’cause the feds aren’t stepping up. Right. I love that. Right. Yeah. Like, Hey feds, look what we can do. And you can’t somehow, and [00:54:00] then, um, we’ll see if state rights stays around for a while longer, maybe, maybe not.

Joe Moore: And then the other part is like, is there a slippery slope given the rhetoric around addiction and the rise in interest in iboga for compulsory addiction treatment with psychedelics or, or compulsory mental health treatments with psychedelics because of the recent, it’s illegal to be a person without housing.

Joe Moore: Um, and you’re gonna get put in treatment. Mm. Like, that’s now a thing. So like, I don’t know, I don’t think forced treatment’s good at all. I, and I don’t think like, um, like the data is something like 15% effective, maybe less. Right. Right. It’s not a good use of money. I don’t know. We’re, let’s, I. You can go there if you want, and riff on that, or if you wanna talk about like, Texas, um, Arizona more generally.

Mary Carreon: Yeah. I mean, I will just say this, I also don’t really believe that forced treatment is like good, you [00:55:00] know, data

Joe Moore: says it’s bad.

Mary Carreon: Yeah. Yeah. I also, yeah, I mean, it’s like, I don’t know. Yeah, that’s, it’s complex. It’s a complex issue. I also don’t think it’s good, but I also do think that we need a much better framework and foundation for like, if people do want the help, helping them get it.

Mary Carreon: Much more easily and in a way that’s going to be beneficial for them. Um, and I don’t think that that system or that pathway currently exists as we saw in, uh, with, with, um, measure 1 0 9 and the failure of measure 1 0 9 or, or was it Measure 1 0 10, 1 10, measure one 10 in Oregon.

Joe Moore: But did you see the response yesterday or two days ago?

Joe Moore: No, I didn’t. No, I didn’t. I’ll I’ll send it to you later. Okay. So the university did the research, um, Portland State University did the research Yes. And said, Hey, look, there was actually 20 other things that were higher priority. Like that actually influenced this increase in overdoses, not our law.

Mary Carreon: Right.

Mary Carreon: Yes. It was really COVID for Okay. [00:56:00] Like for, yeah. Right. Absolutely. Also, there was not a. Like there was not a framework in place that allowed people to get off the street should they want to, or you know, like, like you just can’t really have a, all drugs are legal, or small amounts of drugs are legal without also offering or creating a structure for people to get help.

Mary Carreon: That, that’s, you can’t do one without the other. Unfortunately. That’s just like a, that’s faulty from the start. So that’s all I’ll really say about that. And I don’t think that that had fully been implemented yet, even though it was something that wasn’t ideal for the, um, for the, for the measure. And I believe it was measure one 10, not measure 1 0 9, to be clear.

Mary Carreon: Measure one 10. Um, yes, but confirmed one 10 confirmed one 10, yes. Mm-hmm. Um, but yeah, uh, that’s, you know, that’s kind of what I’ll say. That’s what I’ll, that’s where I’ll leave that portion. Mm-hmm. You know? Uh, but yeah, forced treatment. I don’t know. [00:57:00] We can’t be forcing, forcing people to do stuff like that.

Mary Carreon: I don’t know. It’s not gonna, it’s, yeah, it doesn’t seem

Joe Moore: very humane.

Mary Carreon: Yeah. No. And it also probably isn’t gonna work, so,

Joe Moore: right. Like, if we’re being conservative with money, like, I like tote, like to put on Republican boots once in a while and say like, what does this feel like? And then say like, okay, if we’re trying to spend money smartly, like where do we actually get where we want to be?

Joe Moore: And then sometimes I put on my cross and I’m like, okay, if I’m trying to be Christian, like where is the most, like, what is the most Christian behavior here in terms of like, what would the, you know, buddy Jesus want to do? And I’m just like, okay, cool. Like, that doesn’t seem right. Like those things don’t seem to align.

Joe Moore: And when we can find like compassionate and efficient things, like isn’t that the path? Um,

Mary Carreon: compassionate and t. Yeah, even, I don’t know, I don’t know if it looks lefty these days, but Yeah, I know what you mean. Yeah, I know what you mean. I know what you mean. Yeah. [00:58:00] Yeah. Um, yeah, it’s complicated. It’s complicated, you know, but going back, kind of, kind of pivoting and going back to what you were talking about in regards to the subtext, some of the subtext of like, you know, where psychedelic medicine is currently getting its most funding.

Mary Carreon: You know, I do believe that that was an undercurrent at psychedelic science. It was the, the iboga conversation. And there’s, there’s a lot, there’s a lot happening with the Iboga conversation and the Iboga conversation and, um, I am really trying to be open to listening to everyone’s messages that are currently involved in.

Mary Carreon: That rise of that medicine right now? Um, obviously, yeah, we will see, we’ll see how it goes. There’s obviously a lot of people who believe that this is not the right move, uh, just because there’s been no discussions with, uh, the Wii people of West Africa and, you know, because of [00:59:00] that, like we are not talking to the indigenous people about how we are using their medicine, um, or medicine that does like that comes from, that comes from Africa.

Mary Carreon: Um, also with that, I know that there is a massive just devastating opioid crisis here that we need to do something about and drug crisis that we need to be helping with. And this medicine is something that can really, really, really help. Um, I find it absolutely fascinating that the right is the most interested party in moving all of this forward, like psychedelic medicine forward.

Mary Carreon: And I, I currently have my popcorn and I am watching and I am eating it, and I am going to witness whatever goes down. Um, but I’m, I, I hope that, uh, things are moving in a way that is going to be beneficial for the people and also not completely leave behind the indigenous communities where this medicine comes from.

Joe Moore: [01:00:00] Mm-hmm.

Mary Carreon: We’ll see how it goes. Yeah. We’ll see how it goes. We’ll see how it goes. It

Joe Moore: would be lovely if we can figure it out. Um, I know, and I think, uh, Lucy Walker has a film coming out on Iboga. Mm. I got to see it at Aspen, um, symposium last summer, and it was really good. Mm. So I’m sure it’ll be cut different, but it’s so good and it tells that story.

Joe Moore: Okay. Um, in a helpful way. I’m gonna, I, yeah. I always say I’m gonna do this. I’m like, if I have space, maybe I’ll be able to email her and see if we can screen it in Colorado. But it’s like a brilliant film. Yeah. Cool. This whole reciprocity conversation is interesting and challenging. And so challenging being one of the few countries that did not sign onto the Nagoya protocol.

Joe Moore: Absolutely. We’re not legally bound, you know, some countries are

Mary Carreon: I know. Yes, yes, yes. So

Joe Moore: we’re, you know, how do we do that? How do we do that skillfully? We still haven’t done it with, um, first Nations folks around their [01:01:00] substances. Um, I think mushrooms are a little flexible and account of them being global, um, from Africa to Ireland and beyond.

Joe Moore: And, but you know, that’s, we still want to give a nod to the people in Mexico for sure. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Um, yeah. Yeah, it’s, I had some fun commentary there that I would love to flesh out someday. Uh, but yeah, it’s not for today.

Mary Carreon: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, there’s, yeah, there’s obviously, there’s obviously a lot with the conversation of reciprocity here and, um, I know, I, I don’t know.

Mary Carreon: I, I, what I do know is that we need to be listening to the indigenous people, not just listening to them second, like secondhand or listening to them, uh, once we have moved something forward, like actually consulting with them as the process goes. And that, you know, the way that both parties move, indigenous folks and, uh, western folks move, uh, are at inherently different paces.

Mary Carreon: And, [01:02:00] um, I just hope, and I wish, and I, I hope, I just hope that, uh, Western what, like the Western party, the western folks who are diving into these medicines. Slow the fuck down and listen and just are able to at least make one right move. Just one, just like you. Like it’s, doesn’t have to be this, it doesn’t have to be that hard.

Mary Carreon: Although the pace of capitalism usually propels, uh, the western folks at, at a much quicker rate than, um, yeah. Then it’s like at, at a dangerous rate, I believe through the eyes of indigenous folks. So we’ll see how it goes. Michael

Joe Moore: Douglas from Wall Street, like, it was like actually the devil, and like, I think there’s like this, this like capitalism will, somebody will do it if I don’t, and so, like, you’re right.

Joe Moore: Yeah. Speed. So if I choose to try to slow down Yeah. Immediate loss for me. Yeah. As an individual. Yeah. That’s how it’s perceived. Yes. Let’s not go deep down there. Where do you go? Where do, do sit with l [01:03:00] SD and md MA?

Mary Carreon: Where do I sit? Where do you mean? Like,

Joe Moore: should we, should we slow down with LSD and MD MAI

Mary Carreon: don’t think so.

Mary Carreon: I don’t think so. I don’t, I don’t think so. I mean, you know. It’s different with the molecules. It’s different with the molecules, I believe. Um, I think that we actually should be looking more towards, I think that we should be looking more at LSD in terms of the benefits that we could be reaping from that molecule, uh, in a similar way that we have been looking at MDMA.

Mary Carreon: We’ve been looking at MDMA for a very long time, and I think that we should give LSD the proper, uh, like the proper, uh, scientific analysis. And I don’t think that we are because of its, you know, like the way that it’s been, uh, projected through history. So, so yeah. Um, that’s how I, that’s how I feel about that.

Mary Carreon: And I think that, uh, there’s a safe way to do these substances and yeah. What about you, Joe?

Joe Moore: I’m gonna vote for two cb, I’m gonna vote for, um, five M-E-O-D-M-T ’cause there’s no indigenous use, [01:04:00] um, with the toad. There was YoPo and some other things, but like there wasn’t, wasn’t like we’re doing it today. Um, and then, okay, there’s so many other Shogun molecules we could look at and, I don’t know, three mmc, four MC.

Joe Moore: We got some, you know, Dr. Z molecules. That guy’s extraordinary. Dr.

Mary Carreon: Z.

Joe Moore: Mm-hmm.

Mary Carreon: Yeah.

Joe Moore: Uh, yeah, he was gonna headline our conference in LA when we were still gonna do that.

Mary Carreon: Oh, oh yeah. Oh yeah. Way back. I, yeah. Oh wow. I remember, I remember when you guys were doing that.

Joe Moore: It was gonna be fun. Yeah. Anyway, um, anything you want to give a shout out to as we kind of wrap up here?

Mary Carreon: I would just like to shout out you, Joe. Thank you for having me on. Thank you for still standing and existing and leading. Psychedelics today into the future. I think that’s really commendable and noble of you given how difficult it is to be running a media company, particularly in [01:05:00] psychedelics, but in general in media at large.

Mary Carreon: And, uh, I would like to also say, if you don’t follow me on Instagram, you can find me at Mary Prankster. That’s Mary, MARY, YY prankster. Uh, you can find me across social media there and also sign up for Double Blinds Newsletter. We send out, we send out, uh, stories. Uh, we have great journalists writing stories for us.

Mary Carreon: Uh, we send out Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and yeah, that’s pretty much it.

Joe Moore: Mary, carry on. Thank you so much for joining us and I hope we get to do more of this.

Mary Carreon: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Joe.

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The Psychedelics & Pain Symposium 2025

Psychedelics and Pain Symposium 2025

The Psychedelics & Pain Symposium 2025 is the only conference highlighting past, current, and ongoing investigations into how psychedelics can treat chronic pain and related physical conditions, such as neurodegenerative, autoimmune, and infection-acquired chronic illness.

Founded in 2022, each year the Symposium highlights top research from around the world, this year including findings and patient stories about phantom-limb pain, fibromyalgia, Complex Regional Pain Syndrome, Long-COVID, cluster headache, spinal cord injury, neuropathic pain, cancer-induced bone pain, and other physical conditions. Psychedelics have shown unique promise and enduring relief for many conditions where standard-of-care medications are often ineffective. Researchers frequently share early study results, giving our audience advanced insight into the efficacy and mechanisms of action involved in providing patients with profound relief.

As evidence builds, patient communities are sharing their real-world results & protocols for self-treating debilitating conditions, while building best practices for ensuring safe and effective delivery. The Symposium includes multiple in-person case studies describing their personal experiences in using psychedelic medicines, their previous history of other interventions, and how psychedelics have made striking improvements in their quality of life.

A full recording of the event will be available to all paid attendees and to those who couldn’t attend during the event time.

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Karina Bashir on Psychedelics, Islam, and Human Rights

In this engaging episode of the Psychedelics Today podcast, host Joe Moore sits down with Karina Bashir, an attorney working at the intersection of law, business ethics, and psychedelics.

Karina, of counsel with Antithesis Law and an active member of the psychedelic community, shares her unique journey from human rights advocacy into the evolving field of psychedelic law. The conversation explores her presentation at Harvard on psychedelics and monotheistic religions, and her efforts to bridge the gap between Islamic communities and psychedelic-assisted healing.

She discusses the legal frameworks she navigates to support clients in the psychedelic ecosystem, the spiritual depth of Sufism, and the expansive tradition of Islamic philosophy and mysticism.

If you’re intrigued by the intersections of religion, law, and psychedelic healing, this episode offers deep insights and hopeful perspectives.

📌 Episode Highlights

00:00 – Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:19 – Meeting at the Psychedelic Safety Institute
01:04 – Karina’s Legal Work and Background
04:03 – Human Rights and Migration Work
07:30 – Psychedelics as a Human Rights Issue
18:01 – Legal Challenges in the Psychedelic Space
23:03 – Islam and Psychedelics
28:15 – The Fatwa Process and Islamic Scholars
28:57 – Building Momentum in the Muslim Community
29:08 – Islamic Law and Psychedelics
29:30 – Engaging Muslim Scholars and Community
33:45 – Sufism and Islamic Mysticism
35:09 – Access to Psychedelic Medicine for Muslims
36:49 – Positive Responses and Growing Interest
39:17 – Sufism’s Rich Traditions and Practices
40:51 – Intersection of Sufism and Psychedelics
44:14 – Islamic Cosmology and Psychedelic Experiences
51:26 – Concluding Thoughts and Future Directions

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Transformative Insights from Psychedelics Today Joe Moore & Kyle Buller | Ep 049 – Entrepreneurs In Recovery Podcast

Entrepreneurs in Recovery - Psychedelics Today

In this episode of Entrepreneurs in Recovery, host Jesse Harless sits down with Joe Moore and Kyle Buller, the founders of Psychedelics Today, a leading platform in psychedelic education and advocacy. Joe and Kyle share their transformative journeys, from personal struggles to become voices of change in the psychedelic and recovery spaces. The conversation delves into the evolving landscape of psychedelics, their therapeutic potential, and how they’re reshaping recovery, mental health, and personal growth. Jesse, Joe, and Kyle also explore the cultural shifts, challenges, and opportunities in this emerging field, offering invaluable insights for anyone curious about psychedelics or passionate about healing and transformation. This episode is a must-listen for those interested in breaking stigmas, navigating personal growth, and leveraging psychedelic experiences for profound, lasting change.

Spotify

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The Mystical Roots of Psychedelics: Exploring Dreams and the Liminal State

What can we learn from the mystical roots of psychedelics? And what can we learn from dreams?

In this episode, Joe interviews Shauheen Etminan, Ph.D.: co-founder of VCENNA, a drug discovery and development company, and Magi Ancestral Supplements, which sells nootropics inspired by ancient Eastern traditions.

He discusses his journey into the world of plant extraction, how he first discovered compounds like Haoma and Harmaline, and why he decided to bring Iranian tradition to the psychedelic renaissance. He explores the similarities between psychedelics and experiences found in mystical traditions, and how that historical context can inform modern psychedelic practice. He sees this exemplified most with dream recollection, attending to the emotions found within dreams, and the concept of wakeful dreaming, where one can access unconscious insights consciously, through the liminal (or hypnagogic) state between dreaming and wakefulness. 

He discusses:

  • Zoroastrianism and how the teachings of Zarathustra on understanding morality have inspired him
  • Syrian Rue in Iranian culture, and how it compares to the Banisteriopsis Caapi vine: Is it actually stronger than ayahuasca?
  • Henry Corbin’s practice of embodied imagination and Jung’s concept of active imagination
  • Other less-discussed compounds he’s interested in, like Ephedra and Saffron

and more!

Links

Vcenna.com

Ancestralmagi.com

Ancestral Magi linktree

PT465 – Beta-carbolines, Haoma, and Syrian Rue: Rediscovering Ancestral Knowledge, featuring: Shauheen Etminan, Ph.D. & Jonathan Lu

Haoma and Harmaline: The Botanical Identity of the Indo-iranian Sacred Hallucinogen Somo and Its Legacy in Religion, Language, and Middle Eastern Folklore, by David Stophlet Flattery & Martin Schwartz

Wikipedia.org: Zoroaster

Wikipedia.org: Ephedra

Wikipedia.org: Hypnagogia

Gettherapybirmingham.com: Henry Corbin: Visionary of the Imaginal Realm

Let Your Body Interpret Your Dreams, by Eugene T. Gendlin, Ph.D.

Jungiancenter.org: Jung on Active Imagination: Features, Methods and Warnings

Thealchemistskitchen.com

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Transpersonal Connections, the Body’s Memory, and the Collaborative Nature of Consciousness

In this episode, Joe interviews Paul Grof: research psychiatrist, clinician, author, brother of Stanislav, professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto, and director of the Ottawa Mood Disorders Center.

He talks about his extensive career in psychiatry, and how trying to understand the cause of mood disorders led him to focusing on the very nature of consciousness. He believes that consciousness is a collaborative creation between the brain, body, and external fields, and that the key to connecting with the mechanistic side of academia is through talking about the unexplainable – near death experiences, pre-cognition, remote viewing – and of course, them having positive non-ordinary experiences through psychedelics or other means. He talks about how much we’re connected, how much our bodies remember, and how much society could change for the better if enough people experience the transpersonal.

He also discusses:

  • His thoughts on legal frameworks, education, integration, and whether or not psychedelics will get stuck in psychiatry
  • The importance of new study designs in research, as double blinding doesn’t make sense for psychedelics
  • Concerns over spiritual emergence and emergencies: How much is the responsibility of the therapist or facilitator?
  • The global rise in depression and addiction, especially in the younger generation, and the need for techniques for people to help themselves
  • The work he’s doing with remote healing circles, using strong intention, positive emotions, and visualized healing

and more!

Links

Researchgate.net: Sources of Human Psychological Differences: The Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart

Sciencealert.com: Eerie Personality Changes Sometimes Happen After Organ Transplants

The Holographic Universe: The Revolutionary Theory of Reality, by Michael Talbot

Zimbardo.com: Life and Legacy of Psychologist Karl Lashley

Nasa.gov: What Is the Spooky Science of Quantum Entanglement?

Thelaszloinstitute.com: The Akashic Field with Ervin Laszlo – Higher Self Expo

*Amazon links are affiliate links, meaning that Psychedelics Today will receive a percentage of the sale

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The Potential of Buprenorphine, the Risks of Ketamine, and How Psychedelics Could Prevent Nuclear War

In this episode, Joe interviews Howard Kornfeld, MD: renowned pain medicine expert, addiction specialist, early pioneer in psychedelic medicine, and currently the director of recovery medicine at Recovery Without Walls.

As a leader in the utilization of buprenorphine, he talks about how it came about as a treatment for addiction and chronic pain, its similarities to MDMA, and how its fast-tracked FDA approval could give us clues on how to get MDMA approved. He also dives into the history of ketamine, its unique effects compared to other substances, its potential for abuse, and what can happen with overuse. And he talks a lot about the connection he sees between psychedelics and the prevention of nuclear war, inspired by Sasha Shulgin’s opinion that nothing changes minds faster than psychedelics. He points out that when there is darkness, there is light: Albert Hofmann’s famed bicycle trip on acid happened 3 months after the nuclear chain reaction was invented. Can the growing use of psychedelics inspire the kind of change we need to save the world?

He also discusses:

  • The need for new study designs as we come to terms with the fact that double-blind studies don’t really work with psychedelics
  • Criticisms of the FDA’s denial of MDMA: Was the process unfair?
  • His predictions that advocates will begin pushing to decriminalize MDMA at the state level
  • The books, Tripping on Utopia and Drugged
  • How he played a part in prisons ending the practice of killing prisoners with cyanide gas

and more! 

Links

Recoverywithoutwalls.com

Ippnw.org: International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War

What do Alien Abduction and Psychedelic Experiences have in Common? Let Dr. John E. Mack’s Work Explain

Atlasobscura.com: How a Famed New Age Retreat Center Helped End the Cold War

Trackii.com

Thebulletin.org: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Wikipedia.org: Buprenorphine

Omnimagazine.com: John Lilly on Dolphin Consciousness

National Library of Medicine: Ketamine bladder syndrome: an important differential diagnosis when assessing a patient with persistent lower urinary tract symptoms

Cghjournal.org: Liver Injury Is Common Among Chronic Abusers of Ketamine

United Nations’ Treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, by Michael Pollan

The Nature of Drugs Vol. 1: History, Pharmacology, and Social Impact, by Alexander Shulgin

Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science, by Benjamin Breen

Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind, by Mike Jay

Drugged: The Science and Culture Behind Psychotropic Drugs, Richard J. Miller

Nytimes.com: At the Brink: A Series About the Threat of Nuclear Weapons in an Unstable World

Scientificamerican.com: Inside the $1.5-Trillion Nuclear Weapons Program You’ve Never Heard Of

*Amazon links are affiliate links, meaning that Psychedelics Today will receive a percentage of the sale

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The Hidden Roots of Australia’s Psychedelic Underground

Australia’s relationship with psychedelics has taken a dramatic turn in recent years – but beneath the surface, an enduring underground movement has quietly shaped the country’s evolving psychedelic landscape.

In 2023, the country’s Therapeutic Goods Administration made a groundbreaking decision to reclassify psilocybin and MDMA under Schedule 8 (Controlled Drug) for specific therapeutic uses. This decision reflects a global shift towards recognizing the potential benefits of psychedelic-assisted therapy, particularly in treating mental health conditions like treatment-resistant depression and PTSD. 

While this movement is largely focused on clinical settings, there is another, less visible layer to Australia’s psychedelic landscape: the underground.

The story of psychedelics in Australia isn’t just about modern medical breakthroughs; it’s about a rich, covert history where underground practitioners, researchers, and communities have kept the flame burning throughout decades of prohibition.

In this article, we explore the Western influence of psychedelic interest, information dissemination, and the key underground movements that have shaped Australia’s unique relationship with these substances, from the early days of prohibition to the present psychedelic resurgence.

The Underground Origins of Psychedelic Science in Australia

The Underground Origins of Psychedelic Science in Australia

The global story of psychedelic prohibition is well-known, beginning in the late 1960s when substances like LSD and psilocybin were criminalized. Though geographically distant from the epicenter of the War on Drugs, Australia was significantly impacted by this shift. Formal psychedelic research ended in Australia, as the U.S. declared psychedelics a societal scourge.

From then, the culture of psychedelic science in Australia went underground. During the ’70s, ’80s, and then into the psychedelic renaissance of the ’90s, research around entheogens continued in an active and vibrant counterculture.

Australia’s underground science has been multidisciplinary, with chemistry, botany, mycology, anthropology, and archaeology all contributing to our understanding of these compounds. While these substances were typically used recreationally, there was an appreciation for how they could be used therapeutically; it is this therapeutic aspect that is currently driving contemporary interest.

Looking at the entire history of psychedelics that is known: the past 50 years of prohibition have been the exception rather than the rule. Only a handful of cultures exist that do not use psychoactive substances in some way, and much of our knowledge about these plants comes from traditional societies.

As we move forward into a period of time where psychedelic therapy carries a sense of legitimacy and hope, it is important not to dismiss the wealth of knowledge maintained by generations of psychedelic scientists, harm reduction educators, and underground facilitators who have passionately continued their work with these substances regardless of the legal implications.

There exist many communities of people who actively help support each other to understand themselves and how to “do the work,” not just underground practitioners but also groups of young men and women who are growing plants and mushrooms, sharing them with their friends in a community of shared knowledge, and supporting each other’s work through traumatic experiences.

Psychedelic Science Becomes Citizen Science

Psychedelic Science Becomes Citizen Science

The psychedelic surge of the ’60s catalyzed a generation whose interest in psychoactive compounds could not be quashed by prohibition. Events and publications on psychedelic plants and fungi were essential to spreading awareness and cultivating a movement of citizen science in Australia and around the globe.

Anyone who had a copy of the famous article from Life Magazine written by Gordon Wasson had access to the beautiful and taxonomically accurate illustrations by French Mycologist Roger Heim. It was from these illustrations that many first learned how to identify the Psilocybe mushroom species in the wild.

The landmark 1967 San Francisco conference, Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs, was the first conference dedicated to conversations about psychoactive plants and fungi. The conference also published a book with numerous articles discussing many entheogens. This conference and book were seen as significant at the time and were revisited 50 years later, with another conference and second volume of the book.

The late ’60s saw the beginnings of a ‘literature underground’ that communicated a lot of the information people wanted about psychedelics. In 1969, Robert E. Brown and associates published The Psychedelic Guide to the Preparation of the Eucharist in a Few of Its Many Guises, a publication that set the bar for a sophisticated level of knowledge that circulated in underground texts for decades. The book described the cultivation of a number of entheogenic plants and the extraction and synthesis of the associated alkaloids.

Though formal research ground to a halt around the world following prohibition, the non-clinical use of psychedelics kept going. And while underground chemists such as Bear Stanley and Nick Sand were producing large quantities of LSD, those in the movement were also investigating alternatives, particularly psilocybin-containing mushrooms.

In the following decades of underground research, two fields of study in particular significantly contributed to psychedelic science: ethnobotany and mycology.

Ethnobotany in Australia: The Planting of Many Seeds

Ethnobotany in Australia: The Planting of Many Seeds

The landmark Life Magazine story, Seeking the Magic Mushroom, sparked an interest in the traditional use of many fungi and plants. When LSD was criminalized, many began looking for alternatives.

There had been a fascination for psychoactive plants within the scientific community for hundreds of years, with the publication of many Materia Medica discussing the use of poisons and narcotics for medicinal applications.

Many of these books referred to older herbal books or medieval manuscripts. Considerable psychedelic-referencing literature was written during the early 1900s, with books and papers discussing peyote, morning glory, ergot, and, of course, fungi.

The publication of Carlos Castenada’s The Teachings of Don Juan in 1970 sparked a wider cultural fascination with psychoactive plants in Australia. A growing curiosity led many people to source some of the plants discussed, often not ethically.

Peyote especially suffered from overharvesting, making it harder for Indigenous groups to access the plants necessary for their traditional pilgrimages. Some plants, such as Datura and Brugmansia, became problematic, with people not appreciating the dangers inherent in such powerful entheogens.

Jonathan Ott’s Hallucinogenic Plants of North America and Richard Evans Schultes’ Hallucinogenic Plants (A Golden Guide) became key texts. The later book laid the groundwork for the publication of the 1979 book Plants of the Gods. The 1992 reprint rekindled the fascination in ethnobotany into the 1990s.

Finding Fungi: Mycological Exploration in Australia 

Mycology has long been a key aspect of citizen psychedelic science in Australia. Mushrooms had the benefit of being free but also came with the thrill of foraging. Foragers will happily tell you how rewarding finding a large haul of mushrooms can be. While many plants take time and patience, magic mushrooms could be readily foraged or cultivated in a matter of months, but also discreetly.

The culture around the cultivation of Psilocybe cubensis “Gold Tops” or “Golden Teachers” and Psilocybe tampenensis “magic truffles” or “philosophers stones,” has been one of the significant undercurrents in psychedelic science in Australia.

Books sought by burgeoning mycologists in Australia included Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide, How to Identify and Grow Psilocybin Mushrooms, Teonanácatl: Hallucinogenic Mushrooms of North America, and Paul Stamets’ The Mushroom Cultivator.

Readers who purchased High Times in the late ’80s and early ’90s may recall numerous advertisements selling mushroom grow kits or spore prints. The most notable of these was the PF Tek, a simple, but ingenious kit that made the cultivation of P. cubensis incredibly accessible.

In 1991, Alexander and Ann Shulgin published the legendary book PiHKaL, followed by TiHKaL in 1997. These two books were published based on the citizen science principles of keeping the science open, to use by those who are interested in diving in.

In 1997, the website, The Shroomery, launched and quickly became a significant resource for all things psilocybe and mushroom cultivation in general. Other sites that helped communicate information about psychedelics included Lyceum, EROWID, and the forums Bluelight, Mycotopia, and DMT-Nexus.

In Australia, The Corroboree (the world’s longest-running ethnobotanical online forum) and Ethnobotany-Australia were crucial sites for locals exploring psychedelics. 

The Psychedelic Underground in Australia Flourishes

While the United States and Europe were the epicenters of this cultural change, Australia was not immune to their influence. Music, clothing, fashion, and lifestyle choices were a little behind their contemporaries, but a fascination with psychedelics was a big part of this dynamic.

In his 1934 book Toadstools And Mushrooms And Other: Larger Fungi of South Australia, mycologist John Burton Cleland wrote:

“Some species of toadstool give rise to a kind of intoxication. A former colleague of mine told me how ‘my parents ate once a dish of mushrooms, and as the meal progressed, they gradually became more and more hilarious, the most simple remark giving rise to peals of laughter.’”

It is thought the mushrooms were Psilocybe cubensis, picked while foraging for field mushrooms.

In 1958, mycologists Aberdeen and Jones published a paper entitled A Hallucinogenic Toadstool in the Australian Journal of Science. They were investigating Panaeolus ovatus, thought to be responsible for several accidental intoxications in Australia, but the pair concluded it was more likely P. cubensis. Aberdeen is remembered for being particularly interested in this hallucinogenic species.

“For some time, young drug users had been aware of the existence of a ‘legendary mushroom,’ but information regarding habitat, identification, and effects was lacking. It seems that the necessary information was supplied by a visiting surfer from New Zealand or the U.S.A.,” wrote J.P. McCarthy in 1971.

Locals in the small town of Nimbin in Northern New South Wales would disagree, saying: “We knew about them long before that.”

Australia is home to some particularly beautiful cactus collections, with many Trichocereus species imported during the ’50s and ’60s and allowed to grow to impressive stands. Members of cactus communities often met and swapped seeds and cuttings of various species, including peyote.

In time, many of the larger cactus collections were opened to the public. With the resurgence of interest in hallucinogenic cacti, a new generation began growing and setting up small nurseries. One of these, Urban Tribes, regarded as one of the better cacti collections in Australia, was created by Mark Camo in 1994, who was also possibly responsible for the first cutting of Banisteriopsis caapi in Australia.

Connecting the Psychedelic Dots Across the Continent

Australia is a large, mostly empty country. Psychedelics, being a fairly niche, and legally tricky interest, meant a lot of people interested in underground psychedelic science were often isolated from each other.

The Australian psychedelic underground has required a certain level of self-sufficiency, and networking, but with the introduction of electronic communication in the early ’90s, things rapidly changed.

The publication in 1994 of Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace introduced many to this rapidly evolving network of technically minded psychonauts. The emergence of various websites and forums within the digital landscape of the late ’90s allowed a much broader and more immediate form of interaction, education, and harm reduction around the fungi, plants, and compounds being used in Australia.

It was not unusual during the ’90s and early ’00s for small crowds of individuals to gather in the forest for ‘bush doofs’ (or raves). These gatherings became psychedelic meeting points, allowing people of like minds to connect and share knowledge. As the ’90s progressed, there was a revival of countercultural ideas, with a fascination for the Beat movement of the ’50s, alternative lifestyles, and particularly, psychedelics. 

A growing interest in ethnobotany led many university students to access scientific literature and distribute knowledge on the internet. Information about the presence of DMT in Australia’s native Acacia, Acacia maidenii, was discovered in scientific literature by a student at the University of Sydney, who went on to publish extraction techniques and subsequent experiments.

Terence McKenna visited Australia in 1997 for a speaking engagement at Beyond the Brain Club in Byron Bay. Rumor has it McKenna left a B.caapi vine cutting behind. DMT and ayahuasca were rapidly gaining popularity at the time, and McKenna’s visit led to an increased curiosity and, in time, the popularity of ayahuasca circles in Australia.

The first of many Ethnobotanica conferences was held at Wandjina Gardens in Northern New South Wales in 2001. These small gatherings inspired the formation of Entheogenesis Australis (EGA), which held its first conference in Belgrave, Victoria, in 2004.

These events allowed a multidisciplinary community of both underground and aboveground researchers, scientists, writers and more, to come together, share knowledge, educate, and support others entering the space, in ways that had never happened before in Australia.

In 2010, MAPS founder Rick Doblin was invited to speak at that year’s EGA Symposium. A workshop held after the event led to the formation of Psychedelic Research in Science & Medicine (PRISM), which is now Australia’s leading psychedelic research charity. The EGA conferences are now recognized as one of the longest-running psychedelic conferences.

Honoring the History of the Australian Psychedelic Underground 

The option to use psychedelics within a therapeutic context in Australia is promising, though many professionals entering this space may be unaware of the importance of the underground work, which laid the foundation to understanding effects, how to use psychedelics safely, the problems around consent, and also how to integrate the psychedelic experience.

As the space around psychedelics change, there is a need for reflection on how far our understanding of these substances have come by virtue of underground researchers. While building on the work of traditional practices, and prior research, there is, perhaps, also a need to consider a contemporary approach, reflecting on underground practices in an attempt to create a modern approach to psychedelics without appropriating traditional practices.

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Tripped: The Connection Between LSD, Nazi Germany, and MKUltra

Researching the true history of substances deemed illegal can lead to surprising results. In the case of LSD, does its history include a connection between Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the roots of MKUltra?

In this episode, Joe interviews award-winning novelist and screenwriter, Norman Ohler.

Following in the footsteps of Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich, his newest book, Tripped: Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age, tells the story of how the Nazi’s passion for methamphetamine turned into a curiosity about LSD, and how their experiments with trying to harness LSD as a truth drug eventually led to the CIA continuing their research under their MKUltra program. The book came about from trying to understand why LSD never became medicine – a question posed by his father, when discussing how LSD could help with his wife’s progressing Alzheimer’s symptoms.

He discusses:

  • His path to becoming a “gonzo historian” and how his early psychedelic research was inspired by a friend’s discovery of methamphetamine tablets from the 40s
  • Henry Beecher’s LSD experiments with students at Harvard, and how researchers often didn’t know they were contributing to MKUltra
  • His recent appearances on The Joe Rogan Experience and Jesse Watters Primetime
  • His mother’s experience with microdosing LSD and why police showed up at his father’s door with a warrant
  • Why he believes psychedelics will be legalized in the U.S. in the next 10 years

and more! 

Links

Normanohler.de

Normanohler.de: Tripped: Nazi Germany, the CIA, and Dawn of the Psychedelic Age (LSD for Mom)

Wikipedia.org: Henry K. Beecher

Wikipedia.org: Alsos Mission

Jesse Waters Primetime: Author takes a close look at America’s complicated history with LSD

The Joe Rogan Experience #2183: Norman Ohler

YouTube: Lex Fridman Podcast #442 | Donald Trump Interview

Benzinga.com: American Medical Association Officially Endorses Drug Decriminalization: We Need ‘Something That Actually Works’

Bbc.com: Alcohol ‘more harmful than heroin’ says Prof David Nutt

reMIND Psychedelic Business Forum: Dec. 3, 2024, Las Vegas Convention Center

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Ancestral Knowledge: Why Understanding the Ancient is Crucial for Western Psychedelic Explorers

In the communities of the Shipibo people in the Peruvian Amazon, there are healers known as onayas and witches known as yubés. During ayahuasca ceremonies, onayas will attempt to alleviate the suffering of participants who have been cursed by yubés, through cleansing rituals and songs. In doing so, the onayas risk their lives, according to Alonso del Rio, the founder of retreat center Ayahuasca Ayllu.

An energetic battle between the onaya and the yubé soon ensues, he says. The onaya may not sleep for an entire week, under constant attack from the yubé in another plane of consciousness.

“There have been many high-level healers who have died from confrontations with these so-called witches,” del Rio claims, saying that such skirmishes take place in the metaphysical realms between most Amazonian communities. This possibility was previously noted in the 1998 book, The Cosmic Serpent, among other texts.

Del Rio – who was born in the Peruvian capital Lima and studied for 13 years in the Shipibo tradition to become a psychedelic facilitator – accepts that this is a controversial topic, which is unlikely to be taken seriously by many educated people. But he says that a serious, lengthy illness and the destruction of his house some years ago is evidence of this sinister reality. Only when del Rio began to understand the nature of a curse placed upon him in 2005 by a disgruntled sorcerer, was he able to learn how to cure himself and prevent his likely demise.

The Risk and Responsibility of Preserving Ancestral Psychedelic Knowledge

The Risk and Responsibility of Preserving Ancestral Psychedelic Knowledge

As part of this ongoing quest, del Rio – a self-described “consciousness activist” who holds ayahuasca ceremonies in Peru and across the world, where it is permitted – has collaborated with Psychedelics Today to develop a course titled “Ancestral Teachings for the Psychedelic Renaissance” to help psychonauts and practitioners deepen their understanding of the nebulous nature of shamanism. He refers to ayahuasca, peyote, huachuma and other plant-based psychedelics as “power plants.”

“Because power is something neutral,” del Rio says. “It depends on who uses it and what for.” The consumption of plants like ayahuasca, or lab-based psychedelics like LSD, he adds, does not automatically improve people. Contrary to the belief held by many who work in the field, he believes they should not be called “medicine,” because psychedelics are not inherently medicinal.

The course illustrates how complex and testing a life dedicated to sharing psychedelic plants ceremonially is.

“I believe that the deeper one goes into this path, the more you realize how infinite it is, and the care and responsibility you have to take to preserve your life and the lives of the people attending a ceremony,” he says. 

Beyond Science: How Ancestral Psychedelic Knowledge Offers a Deeper Understanding of Healing

Beyond Science: How Ancestral Psychedelic Knowledge Offers a Deeper Understanding of Healing

Del Rio – who studied under a Shipibo onaya named Benito Arevalo who encouraged him to share the teachings more widely – feels the best path to responsible administration of power plants is achieved by undergoing a comprehensive apprenticeship with an elder. 

“I believe that there are many people who put many people at risk because of their poor training,” he says. “This is not something you really learn, not even in ten years, [but] it is a lifelong path in which we are being formed and each time we understand more how to serve better.”

Stripping psychedelic medicine of its 10,000-year-old Indigenous history and framework of use in order to make it fit within a Western allopathic healthcare system is short-sighted, he contends. It seems that being dispensed psilocybin in a medical setting in the U.S. could be safer than risking being cursed by a yubé in Peru during an ayahuasca ceremony, but del Rio says that the psychedelics cannot only be understood within a scientific paradigm.

“The same amount of substance will work differently for different people,” he maintains. “The substances are not actually what heals, within our tradition, the energy of the healer contributes as much as the substance itself.”

Integration of Ancestral Psychedelic Knowledge into Modern Psychedelic Practices

Integration of Ancestral Psychedelic Knowledge into Modern Psychedelic Practices

Little by little, there is an increasing appreciation that Western medicine can learn from the ancient history of psychedelics. In September, an article published by the BBC reported on how it is essential for Western society to develop an understanding of how Indigenous communities have “very different belief systems for interacting with and interpreting the world around them.”

The bulk of clinical psychedelic research thus far has been focused on the individual, as opposed to the group. Any possible interaction with the natural or spirit worlds is completely overlooked. Del Rio urges modern-day researchers to integrate traditional knowledge, “so we don’t repeat mistake after mistake, which, above all, would put many people at risk.”

Adverse events, which could broadly be described as challenging experiences, or even bad trips, could be more likely to occur under the influence of psychedelic substances because participants may not be given a framework to understand the mystical, spiritual phenomena which could ensue.

The Role of Nature and Community in Preserving the Ancestral

The Role of Nature and Community in Preserving the Ancestral

Indigenous peoples in the Americas “have maps, guides, a deep familiarity with altered states of consciousness,” Jules Evans, a psychedelics researcher at Queen Mary University of London, who directs the non-profit Challenging Psychedelic Experiences, told the BBC. “Secular people, on the whole, do not. As a result, people can be bewildered by the experience and confused as to how to integrate it into a materialistic worldview. This existential confusion can last months or years, and the person who comes out on the other side may be very different to the person before.”

Central to the process of integration of ancestral psychedelic knowledge is a sense of community, but participants in psychedelic retreats can be left wanting when they return to the urban silos and experience isolation even after transcendent, healing experiences. Even more important is a connection with nature, according to Francisco Rivarola, who worked with del Rio to produce the course. 

“The daughter of a Shipibo chief told me that she believes … that what is really sickening society is the disconnection that they have from nature and the source of the divine,” he says. 

“The psychedelic [experience] is a portal through which maybe, if you’re lucky and you do this the right way, you can touch upon that connection.” 

A failure to make secure that enduring connection – in tandem with the sense of community experienced within ceremony – explains why many people persist in regularly taking high doses of psychedelics in group rituals without reporting long-term improvements in their health, Rivarola adds.

“Working with sacred plants within a ceremonial space allows you to understand something that the West does not understand,” says del Rio, “which is the intelligence of plants and how they can act selectively.”

The folly of Western science – and the psychedelics researchers who do not investigate plants and drugs outside of a “reductionist scientific paradigm that only sees matter without its interaction with other energy levels” – will soon become clear, he claims. “In ten or twenty years we will laugh at this model.”

Are you eager to increase your ancestral knowledge? In Ancestral Teachings for the Psychedelic Renaissance, you’ll experience an introduction to the depth of training that a traditional Peruvian curandero goes through and a roadmap for the life-long practices that anyone relating to psychedelic medicine and practices can benefit from. Over 20 hours of recorded classes, three live group calls, and two complimentary e-books are included. Secure your space today – seats are limited!
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Psychedelic Outlaws: Cluster Headaches, Citizen Science, and the Story of ClusterBusters

Cluster headaches are considered to be the most severe pain a person can experience. With scarce research and no funding, citizen-led science has taken over, and sufferers may have discovered the answer: psychedelics.

In this episode, Joe interviews Joanna Kempner, Ph.D.: associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Rutgers University and author of the recently released, Psychedelic Outlaws: The Movement Revolutionizing Modern Medicine.

The book profiles the history and groundbreaking work of ClusterBusters, a nonprofit researching and spreading awareness about what someone named Flash discovered decades ago: that for some people, psilocybin and LSD could stop cluster headaches from coming on. Through early internet message board posts and email exchanges between Bob Wold, Rick Doblin, and others, Kempner pieced together their story. And through attending ClusterBusters meetings, she discovered that a lot of the true healing lies in the bonds formed and the hope people find when seeing something new work for a pain for which science has no answer.

She discusses:

  • The lack of political will behind something so debilitating: Why is there no funding for this?
  • The importance of patient advocacy and the role of the internet in sharing novel information
  • The difficulty in studying a disease so unpredictable: How do you run a randomized trial when you don’t know when a cluster is going to happen?
  • Why the headache community clashes with psychology
  • Concerns over how to ethically combine underground and Indigenous knowledge with above-ground University research

and more! 

Links

Joannakempner.com

Psychedelic Outlaws: The Movement Revolutionizing Modern Medicine, by Joanna Kempner, PhD

Clusterbusters.org

Psychedelicsandpain.org

Not Tonight: Migraine and the Politics of Gender and Health, by Johanna Kempner

Nih.gov: Response of cluster headache to psilocybin and LSD

Allianceforheadacheadvocacy.org: Headache on the Hill

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, by Michael Pollan

Portasophia.org

PT336 – Sisi Li, Ph.D. – Porta Sophia: Psychedelic Prior Art

ClusterBusters Inc. YouTube: Psychedelic Outlaws Book Club – Week 1

Philadelic.org

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Psychedelics and Creativity, Endo-Tripping, and the Origins of Life on Earth

The path of the psychedelic renaissance has largely touched on the aspects of therapy, personal growth, and initiation rites, but now, the relationship between psychedelics and creativity is being studied more and more. Can psychedelics really increase intellect, novelty, and problem solving?

In this episode, Joe interviews Dr. Bruce Damer: astrobiologist with a long history of work at NASA, and now the president and co-founder of the Center for MINDS, a new nonprofit researching the best ways to improve creativity and problem solving.

He talks about how we’re losing our best creative minds to hyper-specialization, and while there is lots of research pointing to psychedelics as creativity-enhancers, we need to develop frameworks and protocols to be able to measure exactly how that works, and the best ways to encourage better results. The Center for MINDS is sponsoring research while running its own three year project studying creativity in a naturalistic setting, and aims to answer: How do we unlock more genius? What’s the main driver for novel thinking?

He discusses:

  • His path to psychedelics, including his time with ‘endo-tripping’: training his mind to trip without any external substances
  • The importance of adding ‘set up’ to set and setting, representing one’s intentions and preparatory work up until that point
  • The tale of his extraordinary ayahuasca experience where he journeyed together with Mama Ayahuasca all the way to the beginning of life on earth
  • His theory on the real origin of life, and why the ‘survival of the fittest’ framework shouldn’t be our North Star
  • The absolute necessity of mentorship from elders

and more!

The steps the Center for MINDS will take in studying psychedelics and creativity will largely be steered by people’s personal stories, so please share yours with them by filling out their survey. What has worked for you? What is your personal protocol?

Links

Centerforminds.org

Biota.org

Lucid.news: Downloads from the Modern Dawn of Psychedelics

Psychedelicsalon.com: Bruce Damer

Psychedelic Prophets: The Letters of Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond, edited by Cynthia Carson Bisbee, Paul Bisbee, Erika Dyck, etc.

The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, by Aldous Huxley

PT444 – A Glimpse Into the Psychedelic Neuroscience Landscape, featuring: Melanie Pincus, Ph.D. & Manesh Girn, Ph.D.

Healthline.com: What Is Hypnagogia, the State Between Wakefulness and Sleep?

Sagepub.com: Psychedelic Agents in Creative Problem-Solving: A Pilot Study

Lucid.news: A Psychedelic Journey to the Origin of Life

Scientificamerican.com: Life on Earth Came from a Hot Volcanic Pool, Not the Sea, New Evidence Suggests

YouTube: ESPD ’55 Dr. Bruce Damer presents It’s High Time For Science (5/25/2022)

Nature.com: Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time

PT256 – Matthew D. Segall, Ph.D. – Consciousness, Capitalism, and Philosophy

Footnotes2plato.com: The Cosmological Context of the Origin of Life: Process Philosophy and the Hot Spring Hypothesis

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Women and Psychedelics: History’s Untold Stories

In this episode of Vital Psychedelic Conversations, Johanna interviews Erika Dyck: author, professor, historian, Vital instructor, and research chair in the History of Health & Social Justice at the University of Saskatchewan.

Dyck talks about the book she co-edited: Women and Psychedelics: Uncovering Invisible Voices, which was released in March as a Chacruna anthology, and collects pieces from several different authors highlighting the untold or lesser known stories from women throughout psychedelic history. Albert Hofmann was the first person to intentionally ingest LSD, but who was the first woman to do so? Who were the women assisting in research or sitting with experiencers in the early days who never got the credit for their contributions? Who were the women supporting some of the biggest psychedelic names in history?

She talks about:

  • The contrast in societal attitudes towards psychedelic exploration based on traditional gender roles
  • Some of her favorite stories from the book, including a woman diagnosed with manic depression becoming one of the first guides in LSD trials
  • The use of psychedelics in pregnancy and birthing practices across other cultures
  • Traditional gender attributes: Are women more wired to care for others? Is there something about the psychedelic experience that’s inherently feminine?
  • The importance of moving past the gender binary and implementing more diversity in research – with the challenge of needing to universalize medicine at the same time

and more!

Links

Chacruna.net: Women

Women and Psychedelics: Uncovering Invisible Voices (Chacruna Anthologies), Edited by Erika Dyck, Beatriz C. Labate, and more

PT457 – Rites of Passage, Psychedelic History, and Rediscovering Our Hearts, featuring: Erika Dyck & Jono Remington-Hobbs

PT217 – Erika Dyck – Canadian Psychedelic History

Chacruna.net: Susi’s Tram Ride: Recognizing the First Woman to Take LSD

Globalearthrepairfoundation.org: Dr. Nancy Turner

PT498 – Traversing the Psychedelic Landscape: From Esalen and Millbrook to the Future of Shulgin Farm, featuring: Maria Mangini, Ph.D., FNP

Womensvisionarycongress.org

Chacruna.net: How Music Therapists Helped Build Psychedelic Therapy

Concordia.ca: Nora E. Jaffary, PhD

PT499 – Mesoamerican Psychedelics, Decolonization, and the Concept of an Ontological Turn, featuring: Osiris González Romero

Chacruna.net: Dream and Ecstasy in Mesoamerican Worldview: An Interview with Mercedes de la Garza

Orthomolecular.org: Abram Hoffer’s 60 Years of Research and Discovery of the Orthomolecular Approach to Psychiatry

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From the Eleusinian Mysteries to Modern Mysticism: The Role of Religion in the Psychedelic Experience

In this episode, Joe interviews Charles Stang: Professor of Early Christian Thought and the Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School.

The Center was created to gain a better understanding of world religions by bringing scholars from their respective countries to study and live alongside Divinity School students. As students and Stang started to become interested in psychedelics, a zoom series, “Psychedelics and the Future of Religion,” began, and the school just hosted their second conference, “Psychedelic Intersections: Cross Cultural Manifestations of the Sacred.” Next year’s Psychedelics and Spirituality conference will take place February 15, 2025.

He discusses:

  • Harvard’s psychedelic history, and why it’s important to not erase the past out of the interest of presumed legitimacy
  • How people are consistently having extraordinary experiences with psychedelics, but not always with religion: Are people becoming less (or more) religious?
  • The Immortality Key, the Eleusinian mysteries, and psychedelic enthusiasts’ need to connect Christianity with psychedelics
  • Psychedelics and other mystery religions, like Hermeticism and Mithraism
  • Why religion is important to so many people, and how it helps us understand the “more-than-human”

and much more!

Links

Harvard Divinity School: Center for the Study of World Religions

Psychedelics and the Future of Religion Zoom series

Spirituality and Psychedelics conference: 2025

Wikipedia.org: Theosophy

Celestial India: Madame Blavatsky and the Birth of Indian Nationalism, by Isaac Lubelsky

Secret Drugs of Buddhism: Psychedelic Sacraments and the Origins of the Vajrayana, by Mike Crowley

The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name, by Brian C. Muraresku

Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear, by Dr. Carl L. Hart

PT236 – Drugs: Honesty, Responsibility, and Logic, featuring: Dr. Carl Hart

The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America, by Don Lattin

Spotify: Harvard Psychedelic Walking Tour

Outside Looking In: A Novel, by T.C. Boyle

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, by Michael Pollan

A Theological Reckoning with ‘Bad Trips’ by Rachael Petersen

The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries, by R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, & Carl A. P. Ruck

Hermetic Spirituality and the Historical Imagination: Altered States of Knowledge in Late Antiquity, by Wouter J. Hanegraaff

Ancientegyptonline.co.uk: Kyphi

Worldhistory.org: Mithraism

Harvard: The Study of Psychedelics in Society and Culture

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The Hidden History of Psychedelics in Australia

Psychedelics have been a part of Australia’s cultural landscape for decades, gaining renewed interest for their potential for healing and self-exploration. If you’re considering or pursuing a career in psychedelics in Australia or want to understand how we got to where we are, you need to know where we’ve been.

The deep past and early history of psychedelics in Australia.

The Deep Past and Early History of Psychedelics in Australia

It’s worth noting this article was written from a non-Indigenous perspective. So, even with the best intentions, any discussion of pre-European psychedelic history given here is inherently incomplete. 

Australia has a long and rich history of customs, traditions, and knowledge that pre-dates European colonization by many tens of thousands of years. So, it’s natural to ask about the Indigenous use of species such as Psilocybe subaeruginosa.

Anthropological and historical records don’t support that Indigenous Australians used plants or fungi as classic psychedelics. But we don’t know what natural medicinal knowledge was lost through the widespread displacement, genocide, and destruction of culture that First Nations in Australia have experienced since colonization began in 1788. So, we can’t know for sure.

Some people believe there is secret Indigenous knowledge of psychedelics. If there is, maybe once we collectively acknowledge that modern Australia is built on stolen land, we’d finally be deserving of it. A great deal more reconciliation work needs to be done to improve understanding of Indigenous culture and connection to plant medicine generally.

Regarding psychedelics, Australia was quiet for the next hundred and fifty years after colonization. But during that time, we developed a voracious appetite for mind-altering substances, particularly alcohol, opium, and cocaine. Sadly, we were also relatively early adopters of racially and politically motivated laws prohibiting drugs (other than alcohol, of course). So, when psychedelics finally came onto the scene, we were primed to adopt them enthusiastically and make the same legal and social mistakes as basically every other country attempting to manage drugs in their respective societies.

The Counterculture Psychedelic Explosion

Two factors primarily drove the emergence of psychedelics into popular culture in Australia. One was the Vietnam War. American service personnel based here or visiting on leave bought many novel ideas – one of them was LSD (along with heroin and cannabis). 

The other was the rise of surfing culture over the ’60s. This attracted surfers, including many from California, who knew about Psilocybe cubensis. In 1969, the Sydney Sunday Telegraph and the Canberra Times claimed that people in southern Queensland and northern New South Wales were eating Psilocybe cubensis for its psychedelic effects. Mycologists, J. Picker and R.W. Rickards reported psilocybin in the native P. subaeruginosa in 1970, and awareness of the potency of this native mushroom spread quickly.

Like the rest of the world, the counterculture era in Australia was also a time when psychedelics were used in questionable circumstances. One of the most high-profile examples centers on a cult known as The Family (also known as Santiniketan Park Association or the Great White Brotherhood). This group operated in the Dandenong area outside of Melbourne and had a small but active membership of medical professionals who practiced an eclectic mix of Christian and yogic traditions. 

One of the members, Marion Villimek, owned and operated the Newhaven psychiatric hospital in nearby Kew. Many of the staff at the facility, including psychiatrists and nurses, were also involved with the cult. Officially, the hospital supplied a range of interventions, including LSD psychotherapy. Many “patients” had no official diagnoses, but their treatments were part of the group’s recruitment process.

And while Australian participation in MK-Ultra was mainly around hypnosis research, our defense department reportedly researched how to synthesize mescaline from eucalyptus sawdust (entirely innocent purposes, I’m sure).

The reaction of mainstream society and politicians to psychedelics in Australia largely mirrored the responses elsewhere. Popular culture firmly linked LSD and psilocybin mushrooms to hippie counterculture and the anti-war movement. Local media effectively used these associations to incite wide-scale moral panic. Just as we followed the U.S. into Vietnam, our politicians enthusiastically signed us up for Nixon’s War on Drugs. The party, in every possible sense, was over. 

The Underground Revival of Psychedelics in Australia

In the ’80s and ’90s, most above-ground psychedelic activity languished, though isolated pockets of research continued, including Dr. Balvant R. Sitaram’s extensive investigations into the psychotomimetic nature of DMT.

But during this same time, the underground in Australia was quite different. Against a backdrop of burgeoning outdoor raves (locally known as “doofs”) and recreational MDMA, a subtle change was afoot. Entheogenic knowledge was rapidly expanding via dedicated communities of citizen scientists and enthusiastic psychonauts, many of whom were members of the world’s longest-running ethnobotanical online forum, The Corroboree.

In 1992, an enterprising University of Sydney chemistry student found scientific records that there were native acacia species that contained DMT. Their story of finding the plants, extracting, and then trying the DMT would be published in a student newspaper, then find its way onto the Lyceum and Erowid. Australian DMT had been set loose upon the world!

What is possibly the first cutting of ayahuasca vine and a handful of Andean cactus seeds were planted in Australia by Mark Camo in 1994. These plants would eventually form the core of Urban Tribes, one of the best cacti collections in the Southern Hemisphere. 

In one of his last journeys abroad, Terence McKenna spoke about DMT at the Beyond the Brain club in Byron Bay in 1997. He also left another B.caapi vine cutting in Australia, setting off a chain of events leading to the rise of local ayahuasca circles.

In 2004, Australia saw the first Entheogenesis Australis (EGA) conference held in Belgrave, Victoria, introducing a wider Australian audience to the study of ethnobotanical plants. The centrality of EGA to psychedelics in Australia can’t be overstated.

For example, in 2010, MAPS founder Rick Doblin attended the EGA Symposium. Discussions with him after a workshop led to the formation of Psychedelic Research in Science & Medicine (PRISM), Australia’s leading psychedelic research charity.

Around the same time as EGA was kicking off, changa appeared. Changa has a range of formulations, but it’s essentially acacia DMT recrystallized on dried B. caapi leaf or bark shavings, along with ingredients such as mullein or blue lotus. Smoking changa is gentler and longer lasting than vaporizing DMT due to the MAOI effect of the ayahuasca leaf.

By the end of 2010, the rise of MAPS and Doblin’s visit gave tapped-in Australians a sense that something bigger was happening with psychedelics. As someone who watched these events unfold from the late ’90s onward, I can tell you – we had no idea what was coming.

Recent Psychedelic Developments

The last decade has been one of unexpected growth and change for psychedelics in Australia. In terms of above-ground activities and broader community awareness, more has happened since 2000 than in the previous century. New organizations like the Australian Psychedelic Society and Mind Medicine Australia have appeared, each with their own visions for the future of psychedelics, which influenced their focus on issues like clinical access or decriminalization.

But no event was more momentous or surprising than the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) decision to add psilocybin and MDMA to Schedule 8 in February 2023, permitting their use as controlled drugs by specialist psychiatrists (albeit only under specific circumstances and with a great deal of paperwork). This change, driven in no small part by Mind Medicine Australia’s allegedly relentless lobbying, caught many of us off-guard, and has driven a massive and sustained increase in community and commercial interest in psychedelics. The first legal offerings in this area have gone live in recent months, with reported prices for a full course of treatment of up to $25,000 AUD ($16,625 USD).

The underground continues to grow in Australia as more people become aware of the potential of psychedelics to relieve suffering, to change how they relate to the world and themselves. Psilocybin use has doubled since 2019, meaning that nearly 500,000 Australians used them between 2022 and 2023. If nothing else, this should serve as a reminder that, in terms of raw numbers at least, the mainstream of psychedelics here is very much out in the wild.

Organizations such as AMAPP aspire to be the peak body for legal psychedelic-assisted therapy in Australia. Clinical professionals are navigating new processes with regulators, for treatments they may never have administered before. Legal reform advocates continue their efforts to end the War on Drugs.

How any of this will play out is uncertain. But there’s definitely something meaningful happening with psychedelics in Australia worth paying attention to.

Are you interested in being part of the future of psychedelic therapy in Australia? Check out our comprehensive course, Navigating Psychedelics: Australia. Developed with the best of international expertise and local knowledge, it could be the first step in finding your place as a psychedelic professional.
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Early Research, Psychedelics in Palliative Care, and the Intersection of Science and the Sacred

In this episode, Joe and Kyle interview William Richards, STM, Ph.D.: senior advisor at Sunstone Therapies, psychologist at the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, contributor to Vital, and author of Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics & Religious Experiences.

He talks about the first time he experienced psilocybin in a research study in 1963, his early studies on the psychology of religion, working with Abraham Maslow, how he became one of the early psychedelic therapists, and what it was like for all of that to disappear when Nixon came into office and shut everything down. He discusses his move into psychedelics and end-of-life care after seeing patients’ fear of death completely disappear, and contemplates whether psychedelics could help people prepare for death – how would we live if we no longer feared death?

He also discusses:

  • How the integration of psychedelics into palliative care should be a huge step in cultural acceptance
  • How psychedelics could be used for education and boosting creativity, problem solving, and even new perspectives on history and classic works
  • The study of comparative religion and the potential for psychedelics to find the connections and commonality between seemingly disparate religions
  • The impact of psychedelic experiences on the perception of the sacred
  • How fascinating it is that the same substance, dose, and set and setting can create such incredibly different experiences

and more!

Links

Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experiences, by William A. Richards

The Psychology of Science: A Reconnaissance, by Abraham H. Maslow

The Divine Comedy: The Inferno, The Purgatorio, and The Paradiso, by Dante Alighieri, translated by John Ciardi

Clinicaltrials.gov: Psilocybin

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Decolonization, Difficult Conversations, and the Challenge of Merging Spirituality and Science

In this episode, Joe interviews Philip Wolf: writer, member of Rolling Stone’s Culture Council, founder of Cultivating Spirits (the first company in the U.S. to offer legal culinary cannabis experiences), and founder of CashoM, an education company offering a certificate in cannabis stewardship.

He discusses his recent Rolling Stone article about the need to divorce ourselves from the colonial mindset that pervades the psychedelic movement, and he talks about the difficult conversation that came about when he asked a very critical group of psychedelic leaders how they felt about the article, and how it taught him just how powerful having these difficult conversations can be. 

He also discusses:

  • The importance of asking questions and not making assumptions
  • Why we may need to abandon the “no justice, no peace” attitude if we ever want to move forward
  • The idea that instead of endlessly battling the establishment, maybe it makes more sense to change our consumer mindset and allow capitalism to do its thing
  • The importance of reaching out to local Indigenous tribes and allocating resources to go to them, not make them come to you
  • The challenge of merging spirituality and science, especially for a regulatory model focused on profit

and more!

Links

Cultivatingspirits.com

Cashom.substack.com

Praying With Plants podcast

PT325 – Philip Wolf – Cannabis: The Early Days of Legality, Elevated Dining, and the Need for Education

Rollingstone.com: Awakening From Self-Centric Paradigms in Cannabis and Psychedelics

Cashom.substack.com: A Beautiful Engagement

From Beirut to Jerusalem, by Thomas L. Friedman

Psychedelics Today: Harming While Healing?: The Oppressive Nature of Psychedelic-Centric Drug Policy

Jameslovelock.org

How Soon is Now?: A Handbook for Global Change, by Daniel Pinchbeck

Psychedelics Today: Is Cannabis a Psychedelic?

Bicycle Day Navigating Psychedelics giveaway

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Bicycle Day Reflections, Quantum Mechanics, and the Value in Studying Philosophy to Understand Psychedelic Experiences

In this episode, Joe and Kyle interview Lenny Gibson, Ph.D.: philosopher, Grof-certified Holotropic Breathwork® facilitator, 20-year professor of transpersonal psychology at Burlington College, and the reason Joe and Kyle met many years ago.

He talks about his early LSD experiences and how his interest in the philosophy of Plato and Alfred North Whitehead provided a framework and language for understanding a new mystical world where time and space were abstractions. He believes that while culture sees the benefits of psychedelics in economic terms, the biggest takeaway from non-ordinary states is learning that value is the essence of everything. And as this is being released on Bicycle Day, he discusses Albert Hofmann’s discovery and whether or not it’s fair to say that Hofmann intentionally had the experience he did on that fateful day.

He also discusses:

  • The end of Cartesian thinking and the need for a new understanding of reality that incorporates the insights of quantum mechanics
  • How philosophy has been taught as an intellectual endeavor, and how we need to embrace the practical and conceptual side of life
  • John Dewey and quantitative thinking, William James and pragmatism, and was Aristotle a Platonist?
  • The novelty of the creation of LSD, and how it gave us a path to a mystical experience that wasn’t culturally bound

and more!

Links

Dreamshadow.com

Breathwork.com

PT316 – Lenny Gibson, Ph.D. – Vital Psychedelic Conversations

Channelmcgilchrist.com

Science and the Modern World, by Alfred North Whitehead

PT499 – Mesoamerican Psychedelics, Decolonization, and the Concept of an Ontological Turn, featuring: Osiris González Romero

LSD: My Problem Child – Reflections on Sacred Drugs, Mysticism and Science, by Albert Hofmann Ph.D.

The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, by Aldous Huxley

The Metaphysics, by Aristotle

Wikipedia.org: Stephen Pepper

Shadow Culture: Psychology and Spirituality in America, by Eugene Taylor

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Rethinking Drug Education: From D.A.R.E. Scare Tactics to an Evidence-Based Approach

In this episode, Joe interviews Joey Lichter, Ph.D.: professor in the Chemistry & Biochemistry department at Miami’s Florida International University, and one of the few professors in the U.S. teaching a course about psychedelics at the collegiate level.

He talks about his path towards the course, the challenge of creating a curriculum that covers everything in a few months, and the importance of teaching young minds about psychedelics the right away; shifting drug education from the “Just say no!” D.A.R.E. model to a more balanced, honest, and evidence-based approach. He aims for his students to think critically, ignore the hype, and see all possible angles with a fairly simple approach: Present the full story.

He discusses:

  • The importance of teaching history, from Stan Grof to MKUltra
  • The work of David Nichols, David Nutt’s drug harm scale, and the greatest lesson William Leonard Pickard took from LSD
  • The representation of Spravato as a new drug, and his concerns with the over-medicalization of psychedelics
  • Teaching about the complexities of Timothy Leary: Was he a positive or negative force?
  • Decriminalization, legalization, and how he gets students to think about drug policy

and more!

Links

PT304 – Jerry B. Brown, Ph.D. – Vital Psychedelic Conversations

Mindapps: Multistate Theory and Tools for Mind Design, by Thomas B. Roberts Ph.D.

Imdb.com: Dirty Pictures

American Trip: Set, Setting, and the Psychedelic Experience in the Twentieth Century, by Ido Hartogsohn

David Nutt’s drug harm chart

PT334 – Prof. David Nutt – The Human Brain, Addiction, and Telling the Truth About Drugs

The Rose Of Paracelsus: On Secrets & Sacraments, by William Leonard Pickard

PT311 – William Leonard Pickard – LSD, Fentanyl, Prison, and the Greatest Gift of All: The Natural Mind

Psychedelics Today: Dr. David Nichols – A Rich and Historical Overview of Psychedelic Chemistry

Mindmed.co: MindMed Collaborators Announce Positive Topline Data from Phase 2 Trial Evaluating LSD in Anxiety Disorders

Nejm.org: Trial of Psilocybin versus Escitalopram for Depression

PT471 – The Evolution of LSD Psychotherapy, the Power of Breathwork, and Why We Should be Taking Archetypal Astrology More Seriously, featuring: Stanislav & Brigitte Grof

Psychedelicreview.com: Walter Pahnke

Npr.org: The CIA’s Secret Quest For Mind Control: Torture, LSD And A ‘Poisoner In Chief’

YouTube: Spravato Commercial (2023)

Open-foundation.org

Book links are affiliate links, meaning that Psychedelics Today will receive a percentage of the sale.

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Preserving Psychedelic Legacies: Shulgin Farm and the Shulgin Archive Project

In this episode, Joe interviews Keeper Trout: archivist, author, photographer, co-founder of the Cactus Conservation Institute, and creator of Trout’s Notes, a website compiling personal research and collected data to help ethnobotanical researchers.

From an interest in cactus taxonomy, Sasha Shulgin urged Trout to go through his files, resulting in a friendship, and eventually, an 8-year project of digitizing all of these files into the ever-evolving Shulgin Archive.

Trout discusses:

  • His relationship with Sasha and The Shulgin Farm project, which aims to make the farm a community resource for therapy, research, events, and more
  • The messiness of cactus taxonomy, and how he believes we’re nearing the end of being able to properly identify cacti
  • The perception of LSD as unnatural and why the natural vs. synthetic argument is largely political
  • Why repealing the Controlled Substances Act is the path we should take over decriminalization or legalization

and more!

Links

Cactusconservation.org

Troutsnotes.com

Shulginfarm.org

Shulginfoundation.org

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Mesoamerican Psychedelics, Decolonization, and the Concept of an Ontological Turn

In this episode, David interviews Osiris González Romero: philosopher and Postdoctoral researcher on cognitive freedom and psychedelic humanities at the University of Saskatchewan.

Romero believes that our weakest point of research is our knowledge of Indigenous languages, and is focused on highlighting different cultural uses of psychedelics to better inform future drug policy. He’s currently studying more than 100 documents (including one over 400 years old) to establish an honest understanding of why peyote was ever banned.

He discusses:

  • Mesoamerican psychedelics and their relevance to cognitive liberty and decolonization
  • How the War on Drugs is our main colonial legacy
  • The concepts of an ontological turn and ontological pluralism
  • The neocolonial, biomedical, and spiritual paradoxes found inside the ‘psychedelic renaissance’
  • How imagination is often viewed through a lens of illusion rather than problem solving or creativity

and more!

Links

University of Saskatchewan: Osiris Sinuhé González Romero

Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic Powers, by Richard Evans Schultes, Albert Hofmann, & Christian Rätsch*

PT217 – Erika Dyck – Canadian Psychedelic History

Wikipedia.org: Xōchipilli

Wikipedia.org: Tláloc

Wiley.com: Indigenous Philosophies and the “Psychedelic Renaissance”

Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, by Miranda Fricker*

Chacruna.net: Colonial Shadows in the Psychedelic Renaissance

Journals.sagepub.com: Decolonization is a Metaphor towards a Different Ethic. The Case from Psychedelic Studies

Academia.edu: Decolonizing the Philosophy of Psychedelics

Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic, by Mike Jay*

Lucid.news: Downloads from the Modern Dawn of Psychedelics

Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear, by Dr. Carl L. Hart*

Philosophy of Psychopharmacology, by Dan J. Stein*

Businessinsider.com: Top Nixon adviser reveals the racist reason he started the ‘war on drugs’ decades ago

Frontiersin.org: Cognitive liberty and the psychedelic humanities

Tandfonline.com: Decolonization is a metaphor towards a different ethic. The case from psychedelic studies

Women and Psychedelics: Uncovering Invisible Voices

Chacruna.net: Mazatec Shamanic Knowledge and Psilocybin Mushrooms

*Book links are affiliate links, meaning that Psychedelics Today will receive a percentage of the sale

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Traversing the Psychedelic Landscape: From Esalen and Millbrook to the Future of Shulgin Farm

In this episode, Joe interviews Maria Mangini, Ph.D., FNP: researcher, educator, and midwife who has worked closely with many psychedelic innovators and was part of the original social network at Shulgin Farm – where this episode was recorded. She traces her journey from the influence of pioneers like the Wassons, Shulgins, and Grofs, and historic places like Esalen and Millbrook.

She discusses:

  • Her early experiences with the Grofs at Esalen and how she met the Shulgins
  • Gregory Bateson guiding her to become a midwife
  • The similarities between midwifery and psychedelic facilitation
  • The unsung work of Denis Berry in saving the Timothy Leary archives
  • How the working relationship of the Shulgins is a perfect example of the coequality society should strive for

and more!

Notable Quotes

“There is a specific skill set that midwives, for the most part, actually have to possess because it’s the matter of what they do, that is identical or very, very similar to the skills that are needed for somebody who wants to be the ground control for somebody in an unusual state of consciousness [or] for somebody who wants to sit at the bedside of someone who’s actively dying. Those skills are the most difficult part of what we try to teach in those programs. You can’t really transmit that stuff very well in the classroom, but the midwives bring it. They already come with it.”

“Medicine really, at least the way it’s practiced in this country, is mostly about curing, whereas nursing is about caring. And there’s a bigger deficit for caring than there is for curing. We need nurses.”

“I think that the personal elements of the quality of the relationship that people who work side by side in that kind of co-equality can attain is inspiring for people, and it holds out a kind of hope for the ability to move in that direction. I think it’s very important and useful for us to think of the Shulgins as a couple.”

Links

Visionarycongress.org

Shulginfarm.org

Shulginfoundation.org

Joanhalifax.org

Batesoninstitute.org: Gregory Bateson

Ravenlang.com

Birth Book, by Raven Lang*

OPENurses.org

PT380 – Microdosing, Talking to Physicians About Psychedelics, and Nurses as the Scalability Solution, featuring: C.J. Spotswood, PMHNP-BC

Herb.co: Inside The Magical Drug Palace Where The Psychedelic 60s Was Born

Lucid.news: Leo Zeff and the Non-Directive Style of Being a Psychedelic Guide

Nypl.org: The New York Public Library Acquires The Archive Of Influential Psychologist And Writer Dr. Timothy Leary

Nytimes.com: Joanna Harcourt-Smith, 74, Dies; Lived a ‘Psychedelic Love Story’

Mushrooms, Russia, and history, by Valentina Pavlovna Wasson*

*Book links are affiliate links, meaning that Psychedelics Today will receive a percentage of the sale

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Reflections from Shulgin Farm: Psychedelics, Legacy, and the Spirit of Discovery

In this episode, released on Ann Shulgin’s birthday, Joe interviews Wendy Tucker: daughter of Ann and stepdaughter to Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin.

Recorded in Sasha’s old office, she recounts her formative years, giving an insider’s look into her Mother’s openness about psychedelics, working with Sasha in the lab, how the Shulgins made a perfect team, and watching a close-knit circle of self-experimenters start to form at Shulgin Farm – and keep coming back over the years.

She talks about the energy infused into the property from the decades of research and gatherings, and how she is trying to preserve it – not just to capture its history and the pioneering research that happened there, but as a beacon for future generations. She imagines weddings, conferences, other communal gatherings, and more. Imagine taking a chemistry course in Sasha Shulgin’s lab?

To learn more about the project and to donate, head to Shulginfarm.org.

Notable Quotes

“When I met Sasha, at first, he seemed a little– I didn’t get his sense of humor. He had such a dry sense of humor, I was like, ‘Who is this guy?’ And I felt a little protective of my Mom, honestly, at first. But soon, I really started to see who he was shining through. He was so good for her.”

“He’d say, ‘You never learn anything by things going right. You only learn when things go wrong.’ And so, that really stuck with me. What a great way to live life.” 

“He always left room for the mysterious, the unknown. It’s an interesting blend to be a scientist and yet have this deep knowledge that there’s something else going on. And we can’t really name it, but we feel it. We know it’s there. And that was Mom’s territory. It was really the spiritual, the psychological. That’s why they made such a great team.”

Links

Shulginfarm.org

Shulginfoundation.org

Transformpress.com

The Nature of Drugs Vol. 1: History, Pharmacology, and Social Impact, by Alexander Shulgin

Zendoproject.org

Synergeticpress.com

Quoteinvestigator.com: Puritanism quote

PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story, by Alexander Shulgin & Ann Shulgin

Erowid.org

Hoverpictures.com

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PT471 – The Evolution of LSD Psychotherapy, the Power of Breathwork, and Why We Should be Taking Archetypal Astrology More Seriously

In this episode, Joe and Kyle are honored to welcome back Stanislav and Brigitte Grof: Stan being the person who kickstarted their interest in non-ordinary states of consciousness, breathwork, and this podcast; and Brigitte: his other half, co-creator of Grof® Legacy Training, and support system (and often, voice) since his stroke a few years back.

They discuss the recently released Stanislav Grof, LSD Pioneer: From Pharmacology to Archetypes, which Brigitte assembled in honor of Stan’s 90th birthday. It celebrates his life’s work in pioneering research into non-ordinary states of consciousness and transpersonal psychology, and features an extended interview with Stan; testimonials from a number of legends in the psychedelic and psychological fields like Jack Kornfield, Rupert Sheldrake, Richard Tarnas, and Fritjof Capra; and a large photo album of rarely seen pictures, including Stan doing his first experiments with LSD.

And they talk about so much more: The evolution of LSD psychotherapy as Stan realized people’s experiences were coming from the psyche rather than any pharmacology; why he started practicing and teaching breathwork; Stan’s love of treasure hunts; how the perinatal matrices were born and how each corresponds to astrology and religious archetypes; why experience in breathwork can be so beneficial to better psychedelic experiences and facilitation; why integration is equally as important as the experience; and an argument to take archetypal astrology more seriously – that there is often a synchronicity that can’t be denied between these archetypes, events, and experiences.

Notable Quotes

“I was surprised that people were having very, very different experiences. And then when [they] had these substances repeatedly; then again, it was completely different. …So I realized that this had nothing to do with chemistry, this had nothing to do with pharmacology, and that it’s basically about the psyche.” -Stan

“I have to say I’m extremely grateful for the map that he found and he gave to all of us, especially in The Way of the Psychonaut, his life’s work, encyclopedia. All the knowledge is there. And when I go to these places myself and I get into the pits, I can, in the back of my head, remember, ‘Oh, this is what Stan was writing about, so it should be okay. I’m going to get out of this.’ So I think everybody who is doing these journeys should know about Stan’s findings. It’s just so mega helpful.” -Brigitte

“When you hear what people say later or you see the creativity and the power of energy that gets released, then the liberation, it’s so amazing, and so healing and very exciting. And the people sometimes say, ‘How do you live with all that screaming?’ And I said, ‘Well, it’s music in my ears,  because so much of the suffering is silent. So when these things come out and they get expressed, they’re leaving the system and people get liberated. So once you understand that, then you’re good.’” -Brigitte

“When we do breathwork, then you add to it breathing, and actually, the intelligence; it brings its own thought. And then of course, bringing in LSD, psychedelics: it’s even further. But the idea is to always work with the psyche. You don’t need any specific tricks.” -Stan

Links

Stangrof.com

Brigittegrof.com

Grof-legacy-training.com

Thewayofthepsychonaut.com

The Way of the Psychonaut: Encyclopedia for Inner Journeys (Volume One), by Stanislav Grof, M.D., Ph.D.  (Volume Two)

Stanislav Grof, LSD Pioneer: From Pharmacology to Archetypes, by Brigitte Grof

Psychedelics Today: PT293 – Stanislav & Brigitte Grof – The Evolution of Breathwork and The Psychology of the Future

Psychedelics Today: Renn Butler – Holotropic Breathwork and Archetypal Astrology

Psychedelics Today: PT291 – Rick Tarnas & Sean Kelly, Ph.D. – The Impact of Stanislav Grof, Ego Death, and The Psyche Unbound

The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Stan Grof (#347)

Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, by Richard Tarnas

Changingofthegods.com

Stangrof.com: Holotropic Research and Archetypal Astrology

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PT466 – The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead: Understanding Reality and the Psychedelic Experience

In this episode, Kyle interviews John H. Buchanan, Ph.D.: certified Holotropic Breathwork practitioner; contributing co-editor for Rethinking Consciousness: Extraordinary Challenges for Contemporary Science; and author of the new book, Processing Reality: Finding Meaning in Death, Psychedelics, and Sobriety.

Recorded shortly after a week-long philosophy and breathwork conference which they both attended, they mostly dig into the challenging philosophical concepts of Alfred North Whitehead: how everything is made up of a feeling; how everything is relational and we all feel each other’s experiences; how Whitehead defined occasions and how moments of experience are accessing the totality of the past; and how neurology and the mind-brain interaction impacts human experience. This analysis leads to a lot of questions: Is the past constantly present, in that it is an active influencer on all our actions? When we relive a past event, where does that live in our minds vs. bodies? Are we tapping into a universal storehouse of past events, or are we tapping into past lives (or into others past lives)? When we sense that someone is looking at us, what is that?

He also discusses his realization that the experiential element of non-ordinary states of consciousness was the most important; his entry point into breathwork; why breathwork creates a perfect atmosphere for conversation; reincarnation and the idea of being reincarnated into other dimensions; the concept of objective immortality and how ripple effects from a single moment continue onward; and the fallacy of misplaced concreteness and psychoid experiences: Are they real beyond our psyche?

Notable Quotes

“One of the key moments for my studies was [when] I was tripping, walking through this room. Suddenly, I had this vision of three overlapping circles of psychology, philosophy, and religion, and in the middle was an experiential center that was all of them, where the experience of these questions and mysticism and psychological insight were sort of all flooding in there. And I thought: Wow, this is the insight people are talking about. I’ve got to find out what this is about.”

“Whitehead has a book called Religion in the Making and he says religious experience, a mystical experience is interesting and part of the picture, but you can’t build an entire religion or philosophy based on extraordinary experience of a few great men. But I think with psychedelics, opening up these realms to millions of people; it creates a much better foundation for doing something like that.”

“Everything’s alive, and I think we need to feel that again and to feel the depth dimensions that psychedelics reveal. …I think when we don’t feel the aliveness around us, we don’t feel alive.”

Links

Processingreality.com

Psychedelics Today: PT316 – Lenny Gibson, Ph.D. – Vital Psychedelic Conversations

Psychedelics Today: John B. Cobb – Whitehead and Psychedelics

Psychedelics Today: PT293 – Stanislav & Brigitte Grof – The Evolution of Breathwork and The Psychology of the Future

Whitehead Word Book: A Glossary with Alphabetical Index to Technical Terms in Process and Reality, by John B. Cobb Jr.

Parapsychology, Philosophy, and Spirituality: A Postmodern Exploration, by David Ray Griffin

Intensity: An Essay in Whiteheadian Ontology, by Judith a. Jones

Religion in the Making, by Alfred North Whitehead

Holotropic Breathwork, Second Edition: A New Approach to Self-Exploration and Therapy, by Stanislav Grof & Christina Grof

Psychedelics Today: Psychedelics, Philosophy, Transhumanism and Peter Sjöstedt-H

Psychedelics Today: PT256 – Matthew D. Segall, Ph.D. – Consciousness, Capitalism, and Philosophy

Adventures of Ideas, by Alfred North Whitehead

Rethinking Consciousness: Extraordinary Challenges for Contemporary Science, edited by John H. Buchanan & Christopher M. Aanstoos

Quantum Mechanics and the Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, by Michael Epperson

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PT465 – Beta-carbolines, Haoma, and Syrian Rue: Rediscovering Ancestral Knowledge

In this episode, David interviews Shauheen Etminan, Ph.D. and Jonathan Lu: Co-Founders of Magi Ancestral Supplements.

Through studying ancient Zoroastrian writings and 2,000 year-old Chinese texts in search of compounds and formulations forgotten by history, Etminan and Lu co-founded drug discovery company VCENNA in 2019 to use extraction technology to isolate these compounds. This led to an understanding of the health properties behind beta-carbolines, which led to their nootropic company, Magi Ancestral Supplements. They talk about the early days and experimenting on themselves, how beta-carbolines create dream-like states, and how their research sent each of them further into their own heritage, and asking themselves: How do we remember what our ancestors knew? 

They discuss espand, haoma, Syrian rue, and how common Syrian rue is in both Iranian culture and psychedelic history; what is a drug vs. what is a supplement; common threads they’ve seen across different cultures and how we may be repeating some of their mistakes; Etminan’s recent ayahuasca experience with the Santo Daime church; and of course, some of Magi Ancestral Supplements’ products and their expected effects – from deep meditation to lucid dreaming to even mild hallucinations. You can get 10% off any product using code PT10 here.

Notable Quotes

“The journey started with basically experimenting with different alkaloid’s extracts. So we were able to extract these compounds from different plants. Specifically, the journey started with just doing some experimentation with psilocybin, looking into what are those alkaloids inside the psilocybin mushroom. And then basically, this story took us into our own heritage and trying to see what other plants are psychoactives but they’re less studied in the West.” -Shauheen

“This terminology you put between what is a supplement, what is a drug, what is food; even going back to what Andrew Weil talks about here, like, is caffeine a drug? Is nicotine a drug? …These words that we apply to what is a drug vs. what is a supplement are fairly arbitrary. We give the label of something as being a drug just because it’s gone through the medical establishment of a thousand people have tested it and based upon the evaluation of a guy wearing a white lab coat with a diploma on the wall, he said that more than 65% of them (or vs. those who were given a placebo) had a positive response, and therefore I can call it a drug now instead of a supplement and you can make a medical claim. But you know, the plants, the compounds: They don’t really care what we call them.” -Jon

“I am not very fascinated about psychedelics in general; I’m fascinated about the effect of psychedelics on human consciousness, because we are really behind our capacity, and I would love to see that we come together with good intention in a way that we can pave that way for fostering something that is serving everybody rather than just a group of people.” -Shauheen

Links

Ancestralmagi.com (Use code PT10 for 10% off)

Linktree: Ancestral Magi

Vcenna.com

YouTube: Chemically-Induced Otherworldly Experiences of Zoroastrians in Iran – Shauheen Etminan

Thethirdwave.co: Magi Review: Rediscovering a 4000 Year Old Spiritual Elixir

Researchsquare.com: Ritual revealed: psychotropic substances in a Ptolemaic Egyptian vase

YouTube: Ethnopharmacology of Psychedelic Substances in Chinese Culture – Jonathan Lu

Ancestralmagi.com: Haoma Revelation Aid

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PT464 – Bodywork, Somatic Literacy, and Understanding Trauma: The Mind and Body Connection

In this episode, Kyle interviews Bessel van der Kolk, MD: pioneer clinician, researcher, and educator on traumatic stress; Founder of the Trauma Research Foundation; Professor of Psychiatry at Boston University Medical School; Principal Investigator of the Boston site of MAPS’ MDMA-assisted psychotherapy study; and author of the #1 New York Times Science best seller, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Treatment of Trauma.

As of this recording, van der Kolk was publishing his last paper and closing down his laboratory, so he looks back on his past: being part of the group who put together the first PTSD diagnosis in the 80s; the early days of psychedelic research and how he discouraged Rick Doblin and Michael Mithoefer from pursuing MDMA research; how the DSM has no scientific validity and was never meant for the diagnosing it’s being used for; how science wasn’t seeing the whole picture and pushing us mindlessly from medication to medication; and how trauma research has evolved over the years as society learned more about how the mind actually works. 

He discusses the struggle to validate “softer” sciences; the impracticality and price of the MAPS protocol and the need for more group and sitter/experiencer frameworks; the efficacy of psychodrama and how that plays out in group sessions; his interest in using the Rorschach test more; how rolfing helped him; the problem with diagnosis and people becoming their illnesses; bodywork, somatic literacy, and how disconnected most people are from their bodies; and how, in all the healing frameworks he’s explored, he has never seen anything work as profoundly as psychedelic-assisted therapy.

Notable Quotes

“I have quite a few friends who are sort of major scientists. And I asked my friends, ‘So, did you take acid also in college?’ All my friends said, ‘Yes, I did.’ And I say, ‘So, how do you think it affected you?’ And my friends generally say, ‘Well, I think it really accounts from my having become a good scientist, because I got to appreciate that the reality that I hold inside of myself is just a small fragment of the overall reality that is.’”

“It was really very gratifying for me to be part of a psychedelic team the past 10 years or so, where we got to see the astounding transformations that people go through on psychedelics – more than anything else that I’ve seen in my career, and I’ve studied many different methods. I’ve studied other things that also turned out to be quite helpful like EMDR and Internal Family Systems therapy and theater and yoga, but the transformations on psychedelics were really astonishing and made me really hopeful that we may enter a much more complex era of thinking about mental functioning.”

“It’s delicate, but we keep running away from it. But the reality is that if you really feel upset, getting a hug from somebody who loves you makes all the difference in the world, of course. That’s still our primary way in which we feel calm. And touch by other people may also scare the shit out of you and send you into a tailspin. So doing that right is very delicate and fraught with danger, but that doesn’t mean we can just keep running away from it.”

Links

Besselvanderkolk.com

Traumaresearchfoundation.org

Neurosciencenews.com: Why Our Brains Prefer Symbols to Words

Wikipedia.org: Rolfing

Mangu.tv: From Shock To Awe: A journey of hope and transformation

Apollo Neuro: Click here to get $50 off an Apollo wearable!

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PT457 – Rites of Passage, Psychedelic History, and Rediscovering Our Hearts

In this episode of Vital Psychedelic Conversations, David interviews Erika Dyck: Vital instructor, historian, professor, author, and editor of the new book, Expanding Mindscapes: A Global History of Psychedelics; and Jono Remington-Hobbs: graduate of the first cohort of Vital, coach, facilitator, and now, Co-Founder of Kaizn, an experiential wellness company with a strong focus on community, creating a feeling of safety, and modern rites of passage. 

They talk a lot about rites of passage and how they create liminal spaces to reflect on the deeper questions we need to ponder but our culture doesn’t allow time for. They talk about how categorization took us away from tradition; how so much of what we get out of these experiences isn’t related to psychedelics at all; why we struggle with connection in the digital age; the power of community as medicine and recognizing a kinship in others; and why we need to integrate our heads and hearts and live more heart-led lives.

They also dive into why cultures have always sought out non-ordinary states of consciousness; how our current state of needing to make sense of a chaotic world is similar to the mindstate of the 60s; psychedelics’ success in palliative care; coaching and why it should be attached to therapy; the creation of the word “psychedelic”; flow states and discovering the intrinsic calling we all have; and the Vital question that starts the podcast out: Are psychedelics the future, or will psychedelics just bring about a different way to think about the future?

Reminder that we’re accepting applications for Vital 2024 now until December 21! 

Notable Quotes

“I keep sort of wrestling with this question about whether the future of psychedelics is really about psychedelics or whether psychedelics are a tool for unlocking a different kind of future. …And to me, that’s really an exciting possibility for what this psychedelic renaissance holds: that it’s an opportunity to really take stock of what we want to revive about the past, whether it is psychedelic or not. It might be something more sacred, it might be a kind of humanity or a kind of way of thinking, that focusing on psychedelics allows us to think differently about how we want to organize those thoughts, those actions. And I think it’s a really exciting opportunity to invest in this kind of renaissance moment, to really blend these historical impulses with an opportunity to think about a different future.” -Erika

“The role of community with psychedelics: I think that we can occasionally get a little bit lost that it’s the psychedelics, the medicine. And the more I’m seeing is that the medicine is community and psychedelics are the implementation tool of that medicine.” -Jono

“Tolerance is a word that comes to mind as you were talking. I think that one of my hopes is that (and it doesn’t have to be everybody taking psychedelics) it can be just tolerance towards difference. I think psychedelics can help us to come into a place where we can appreciate that diversity is a strength, that difference is a strength, that sameness isn’t necessarily the strength or the goal that we should be striving towards.” -Erika 

“[Psychedelics] are an offsetting of an eternal balance between these two hemispheres. And we’ve gone so far one way with this worldview where we are also gamified by what we do. The amount of information that I know because an algorithm wants me to know; it terrifies me when I actually think about it, but on the other side, the amount of wisdom …that’s available from us, from these experiences that we’re having that help guide us back to this other way of being gives me radical hope – radical, radical hope that things haven’t gone too far. It’s just the pendulum has swung very far one way, and I think psychedelics are some of the momentum to take us back the other way and back to ourselves, each other, and Mother Nature.” -Jono

Links

Expanding Mindscapes: A Global History of Psychedelics, edited by Erika Dyck and Chris Elcock

Psychedelics: A Visual Odyssey, by Erika Dyck

Audible lecture series: The History of Psychedelics, by: Erika Dyck

Kaizn.co

YouTube: Introducing Kaizn

YouTube: Kaizn – Deep Nature Reset

Springer.com: Psilocybin in Palliative Care: An Update

Wikipedia.org: Teleology

Psychedelic Experience: Revealing the Mind, by Aidan Lyon

Apollo Neuro: Click here to get $50 off an Apollo wearable!

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PT456 – Moloch, Kairos, Extended-State DMT, and the Spider Queen

In this episode, David interviews Alexander Beiner: an Executive Director of Breaking Convention; writer of The Bigger Picture substack; and author of The Bigger Picture: How Psychedelics Can Help Us Make Sense of the World.

He tells his personal story and how his first psychedelic experience felt like a homecoming; discusses his Rebel Wisdom media platform, where, through interviews, he tried to make sense of social upheavals and conflicts through a more flexible, psychedelic way of thinking; and digs deep into the Greek concepts of Moloch and Kairos: how Moloch represents the winner-take-all, race to the bottom, sacrifice-your-values-to-appease-the-system game playing we all get stuck in, and Kairos represents the openness that comes from psychedelics – the transitional, seize-the-moment opportunities we need to take advantage of. And he discusses much more: the power of dialectic inquiry; the corporatization of psychedelics and how we’re really in a psychedelic enlightenment; how the medicalization of psychedelics is like a Trojan horse; and the concept of technology (and specifically the internet) mirroring the switching between realms that we think is so rare in psychedelics – aren’t we doing that every time we look at our phones? 

Beiner was recently part of Imperial College London’s initial trials on intravenous, extended-state DMT, testing correct dosages and speeds for the pump. He describes the details of the study, how he thought they were messing with him at first, and what he saw in his experiences: an outer space-like world of gigantic planet-like entities, and how a massive Spider Queen entity taught him about intimacy and how our metaphysical and personal worlds aren’t separate at all.

Notable Quotes

“There’s a particularly psychedelic way of thinking in my view. …I would define it as a flexibility in how we think and a looseness and a creativity and a playfulness with how we approach the world that psychedelics can open up in us. And I think that’s so deeply needed right now. So my hope is to kind of combine that ethos together with a lot of very practically important, interesting, sociological, psychological, scientific, and metaphysical insights, and use all of that to write a book that hopefully gives people new lenses in which to make sense of the world and psychedelics.” 

“The process of speaking to the truth of your lived experience in the moment is deeply transformative. And it’s also, in my experience and I think the experience of many people, it’s what psychedelics encourage us to do: They encourage us to be with the truth of our experience and go into what we’ve been hiding from and avoiding, and feel it – feel the truth of what’s actually going on. And that is so, so powerful culturally because so many of our cultural shadows and our polarization and our ‘at each other’s throats’ and our ideological fixations come from these unsaid things. So there’s so many practices, psychedelics included, that can open us up into the truth of what’s going on. And I think that is just the most transformative practice or approach that there is that I’m aware of.”

Links

Alexanderbeiner.com

The Bigger Picture: How Psychedelics Can Help Us Make Sense of the World, by Alexander Beiner

Beiner.substack.com

Breakingconvention.co.uk

Poetryfoundation.org: Howl, by Allen Ginsberg

Slatestarcodex.com: Meditations on Moloch, by Allen Ginsberg

YouTube: The Rise of Psychedelic Capitalism

No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model, by Richard Schwartz, Ph.D.

Alieninsect.substack.com: DMTx: The First Results…

DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor’s Revolutionary Research Into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences, by Rick Strassman. M.D.

Nonordinary.com

Awakenthemedicinewithin.com: Upcoming retreats

Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge a Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution, by Terence McKenna

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PT445 – The Drug War, Harm Reduction, and the Middle Ground Between Liberty and Regulation

In this episode, Joe interviews Ethan Nadelmann: author, speaker, Founder and former Executive Director of Drug Policy Alliance, host of the PSYCHOACTIVE podcast, and one of the leading voices in drug policy reform and harm reduction. 

Nadelmann shares his journey from Princeton University to founding Drug Policy Alliance, to working with George Soros, encouraging Gary Johnson to push cannabis legalization, and interacting with prominent figures like Milton Friedman and Grover Norquist. He explores the motivations behind the drug war, the massive growth of incarcerations it led to, why the US spread its war on drugs abroad even when it went against our best interests, and, thankfully, the progress made in fighting the drug war – particularly with cannabis and psychedelics.

And he discusses much more: the banning of drug testing kits; the damages of our slow learning curve against the idea of a safe supply; the risks of under-prescribing opioids for people who actually need them; how libertarians, the right, and left are all starting to become against the drug war for the same reasons; why cigarette smokers should all switch to vaping; the concept of needing to pass a test at the pharmacy to prove you understand (and won’t abuse) medication; and some strong arguments for decriminalization as an incremental step. And he asks some pretty important questions that we can all simmer on for a bit: how do we find a balance between helping people and not opening the rest of society up to harm? How do we challenge abuse in a way that doesn’t hurt future harm reduction efforts? And how do we incentivize people into acting in their own best interests? 

Notable Quotes

“The drug war resulted in the unnecessary arrests of tens of millions of Americans, the unnecessary incarceration of millions of Americans (oftentimes for very long periods of time), hundreds of thousands of people dying in this country with HIV/AIDS unnecessarily, tens of thousands dying of overdose unnecessarily. That was the drug war.”

“If I could snap my fingers and all of the 30, 35 million American cigarette smokers in the country today, or all of the 1.1 billion smokers around the world were to suddenly stop smoking cigarettes, and all of them were to take up vaping (the e cigarettes); …it would represent one of the greatest advances in public health in U.S. and global history, because the risks of smoking are so dramatically, dramatically greater than the risks of consuming nicotine in non-combustible forms.”

“You look at people pursuing that type of legal course of action where they claim it’s about helping bring attention, but in fact it’s having exactly the opposite results. Yes, it’s important to fix these things, but the methods and ways you go about it are incredibly important. It’s just like the same thing when you had that case involving the therapist in the MAPS training program who did stuff that was sexually inappropriate, etc. And on the one hand, you definitely need people to bring attention to that, and more credit to them for bringing attention to those abuses. On the other hand, one has to have the basic realization that that happens in all areas of psychotherapy. You can’t eliminate this stuff. It’s human nature, it’s humankind. You can minimize the incidence of it, you can bring attentions to the abuses, but make sure that what you’re advocating as the fix is not leading to doing more harm.”

Links

Drugpolicy.org

PSYCHOACTIVE podcast

Ted.com: Ethan Nadelmann: Why we need to end the War on Drugs

Researchgate.net: U.S. Drug Policy: A Bad Export, by Ethan A. Nadelmann

Studentsforliberty.org

Nationalpain.org

iceers.org

Nudge: The Final Edition (Revised), by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein

Visit remindmedia.com and use code REMPSYCTODAY for 10% off your registration.
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Psychedelics and Self-Discovery: A Journey Through the Queer Perspective

When you realize that you’re not who you thought you were, the spiritual leader Ram Dass used to say, the path to enlightenment begins. This is also the beginning of the journey for LGBTQIA+ people.

In either case, self-realization can be prompted by psychedelics. But that transition is a scary one: whether it’s your ego or the gender and sexual orientation you were assigned at birth, it requires the death of the person you’ve known. Ultimately, you break through into a place of beauty, truth, and love. But there’s usually a period of kicking and screaming first, trying to hold on as the known slips through your fingers.

For queer and gender-diverse people, it often isn’t safe to express or connect with who we are, so we learn to suppress this knowledge even from ourselves. Denying one’s authenticity causes trauma that can manifest as depression, anxiety, and PTSD. But LGBTQIA+ researchers, therapists, users, and underground practitioners are finding that psychedelic therapy has immense potential to help their communities heal from internalized queer- and transphobia.

Lxo, a London-based artist and research curator experimented with various medicines in art school when their queer, trans*, and non-binary identities began to surface, deposited by a repressive, religious upbringing and persisting through more than five years of talk therapy.

“Then I did one [dose] of s-ketamine, and something burst forward from the past, like a memory bubble” they say. “I was able to forgive and heal… the version of me that was really crying out for help.”

There Is No “Post-Trauma”

For queer and gender-diverse people, there is no “post-trauma,” says Dr. Jae Sevelius, a clinical psychologist and Professor of Medical Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center. Rather, it’s ongoing, and “It’s not just about experiencing violence, it’s about experiencing violence because of who you are.” 

This has manifested in anti-trans legislation across the U.S., Colorado’s Club Q shooting, and Uganda’s horrific bill making homosexuality punishable by death; woven into the fabric of society in the form of hetero-, cis-, and mononormativity. In most places, even meeting the primal need of relieving yourself involves an act of self-denial.

Discovering who you really are should be a joyful revelation, but is still often met with violent opposition. Most suicide attempts occur within the first five years of realizing one’s sexual identity, irrespective of age; for many, this is during youth. More than half of U.S. trans and non-binary people age 13 – 24 considered killing themselves in 2020, while queer teens attempt suicide at a rate more than twice that of their straight peers.

Most mainstream therapies, however, treat trauma as an isolated incident. “[In the West,] we don’t have great approaches to offer people,” Sevelius says. “We have medicines that can treat the symptoms… but talk therapies for trauma… can be really challenging, [with] very high dropout and [low] success rates.”

What’s more, these frameworks aren’t built to support the queer experience. On the contrary, they’re often the very sources of the trauma they aim to treat. Homosexuality was still classified as a mental illness in the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) until 1973; being transgender, until 2012. These links persist today, with gender-diverse people being required to undergo psychiatric evaluation before receiving supportive healthcare—assuming this is even an option.

I’ve experienced this firsthand: celebrating diagnoses that pathologize your identity because it means you can actually get the care you need, reinforcing cognitive dissonance and negative self-beliefs. It breeds mistrust among queer and especially gender-diverse people, especially those with intersecting underrepresented identities, such as BIPOC and sex workers, who face additional systemic barriers and are most impacted by the drug war.

Patients often have to educate their therapists and doctors in culturally relevant care,  emotional labor that can be life-threatening. Even worse, queer and gender-diverse communities have been subjected to so-called conversion therapy, inhumane “treatments” that try to turn people cisgendered and straight, still legal in many places. Methods of administration have included electroconvulsive therapy — and psychedelics.

In 1950s and ’60s France, gay teens who had been institutionalized for the double “offense” of being gay and out were forced to take megadoses of LSD — up to 1200MG, three times the recommended maximum — then left alone in a room to be observed. Even Ram Dass — before his awakening, when he was still called Richard Alpert, a clinical psychologist, professor, and founding member of the Harvard Psilocybin Project — joined the likes of Timothy Leary and Stanislav Grof in similar experiments.

Playboy Interview: Timothy Leary – a candid conversation with the controversial ex-Harvard professor, prime partisan and prophet of LSD (September 1966 Issue)

In 1968, a Playboy interviewer questioned Leary about reports of LSD bringing forth “latent homosexual impulses,” to which Leary called the drug a “cure” for such “sexual perversions.” This approach scared some people into living straight lives, but most reported “relapse.” Ram Dass himself came out in the 1990s, but rarely spoke publicly about this fundamental aspect of self, struggling his whole life with internalized shame.

Rethinking Clinical Frameworks

The fact that substances known as truth agents could be used as tools of oppression speaks to the influence of set and setting – and, perhaps even more, of institutions like medicine, psychotherapy, and the university system, where outcomes must align with conclusions that satisfy funding sources.

Today, the barriers to both gender-affirming treatment and psychedelic healing remain immense. Part of the problem is that LGBTQIA+ people are underrepresented on both sides of psychedelic therapy and research, as well as the sciences more broadly, and largely feel unwelcome in all these arenas.

“We need to recognize that there are specific needs between different people within the community, and those needs arise from systemic failures,” says Alfredo Carpineti, a queer astrophysicist and founder of UK charity Pride in STEM.

Research both reflects and creates the world, as psychologist and Yale researcher Terence Ching and others have observed. Psychedelic clinical trials and research studies don’t even gather data on sexual orientation and gender identity, so there is no way to know how psychedelic therapy impacts LGBTQIA+ communities, yet the message this sends to them is clear.

Existing studies and trials are not designed to capture or accommodate queer experiences, typically using cis-het, male-female therapist dyads that are meant to mimic hetero-normative parenting frameworks. Additionally, therapists are not trained to handle complex gender and sexuality issues that may come up during sessions.

Misgendering or failing to affirm someone’s identity can be particularly wounding, Sevelius warns. Those designing studies need to ask who is training and recruiting the therapists, and where they’re recruiting participants. A study on MDMA therapy for gender-diverse populations that they contributed to found current protocols lacking, calling for explicitly gender-affirming treatment and safer, more inclusive settings.

“I get requests all the time from trans and gender-diverse people asking me how they can be included in clinical trials. And I have to say, I don’t feel comfortable referring people,” Sevelius says. “Psychedelics create a very vulnerable psychological state. When you don’t know whether the therapists are really competent to be working with our communities, it’s very likely someone will get re-traumatized.”

Psychedelic research also needs to more rigorously capture demographic data about sexual and gender identity, but most organizations don’t have the resources, Ching says. Still, it’s crucial to recruit and train more LGBTQIA+ researchers and therapists to support straight ones in building queer-inclusive clinical spaces.

“There are many ways to improve access,” Ching says. “Rethink your eligibility criteria [and] do more than put up fliers. Go to queer organizations, talk to people, … do a town hall. Tell them what PTSD is and actually get savvy with the fact that sexism, racism, homophobia, and transphobia can lead to it.”

You’re Not Who You Thought You Were

Saoirse* spent five years in the military police, presenting masculine as a means of survival. Struggling with “decades of suppression and depression as well as PTSD from growing up in cis-het society and from the military,” she had already done a decade’s worth of talk therapy through the VA, cognitive processing therapy (CPT; a cognitive behavioral therapy for PTSD), and couples counseling. Then she participated in an ayahuasca ceremony.

“Having a safe space to explore my beingness… within a [sacred container and] Peruvian Amazonian lineage… was the key for me in discovering my true essence,” she says. “The masculine persona… dropped away. The other women gathered around me in a group hug, and I felt my true self seen, held, and celebrated for the first time.”

Talk-based approaches like cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) are standard treatment for afflictions like addiction and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but these focus on managing present symptoms rather than targeting the trauma at its roots.

During his own MDMA therapy session, Ching was visited by otherworldly animal entities that helped him reconcile his queer and Asian-American identities, which he describes as “a profound experience of unshackling myself from the confines of internalized homophobia.”

Dee Adams, a research program manager at Johns Hopkins University who studies the impact of psychedelic therapy on gender-diverse people, says, “Psychedelics unlock[ed] those pieces of me that I… didn’t have the courage in mundane reality to approach or be aware of. I don’t know of any [other] medicines that can… be directly attributed to that initial ‘aha’ moment.”

Psilocybin and LSD have huge potential in triggering these insights, Sevelius says, as they’re known to break stuck patterns. MDMA is effective for identity-based trauma because it increases self-compassion and empathy, they add, and can improve gender resiliency when combined with affirming care. Along with a New York-based clinical partner, they’re also developing the first ketamine-assisted group therapy study created by and for trans and gender-diverse people.

Yet the relief goes beyond clinical symptoms. In her ayahuasca journeys, Saoirse connected with not only her own femininity but the feminine archetype, transmitted through the spirit of her mother, who was dying of a brain tumor.

“Spirit gifted me with an experience of the female pain body… and all the feminine has held for the masculine throughout the ages,” she says, including “the damage the masculine has done to itself… in committing violence. I was shown the breadth of our journey as souls through lifetimes and the beautiful and terrible dance of the human story.”

She also experienced reconciling with her mother’s spirit from her painful first coming-out, something antidepressants and talk therapy could never provide. “Healing does not occur in the mind,” Saoirse says. “Especially [when] healing core wounds with identity and gender identity, [it] takes place in the heart, … in belonging, and sacred witnessing of our stories, held in the eyes of love.”

Three Key Words: I See You

We all need to be seen and loved exactly as we are; it’s a fundamental human need, second only to physical survival and safety. Constantly being disaffirmed by others can cause what Sevelius terms “identity threat,” manifesting in mental health issues, isolation, and substance overuse.

The cure is increasing affirmation while reducing reliance on external validation; psychedelic therapy, they explain, can do both. Affirmation comes from therapists and the sense of connection to larger, mystical forces; the medicines help people validate their own being.

But deconstructing and reconstructing your self-concept is a monumental task; often an entire life’s work. With any psychedelic journey, but especially for LGBTQIA+ users, support before, during, and after the session is essential. Shortcomings of the current clinical framework — not to mention the dubious legal status of most medicines — means many may be better-served by shamanic, Indigenous, and underground providers, something queer researchers confirm.

“Even as a scientist, I don’t necessarily always advocate that the clinical trial is better,” Ching says. “There are some ways of knowing, like gray literature [research published outside formal academic channels] or having your own personal experience, that might be more beneficial than reading it in a scientific journal.”

For Adams, the approaches go hand in hand. Psychotherapy and prescription medication might be additional tools people use for ongoing support after psychedelics bring them the initial realization.

Peer-support networks can be incredibly helpful, providing that essential component for healing: affirmation. Groups such as the Queer Psychedelic Society and Transadelic connect LGBTQIA+ people who use psychedelics through messaging platforms and integration circles. Many trans and gender-diverse people, in particular, find connecting with like-minded others crucial.

“There was a time when our culture was celebrating queerness, but [you had to be] a specific type of queer. I think people are still having and perpetuating that trauma,” says Transadelic member Casey*. “I don’t seek out queer spaces. But I’m really grateful for this one.”

For Saoirse, “hav[ing] my transition journey of self-discovery held… within a conscious spiritual community… has made all the difference for my self-acceptance, self-love, self-confidence, and my quality of life.”

A Queer Medicine

The links between psychedelics, queer culture, and esotericism trace back to spiritual traditions and early LGBTQIA+ rights movements. In the 1960s and ’70s, groups such as the Cockettes and Radical Faeries challenged social norms and blurred counter-cultural boundaries, sprinkled with consciousness-expanding practices.

In fact, the Pride flag was conceived of during an acid trip in the era when the 60’s hippie culture began yielding to ’70s club culture, and queer people found community and catharsis on the dance floor using MDMA and LSD.  The myriad colors reflecting off the mirrored disco ball inspired the flag’s late creator, Gilbert Baker, as a symbol that could replace the former logo, the upside-down pink triangle reclaimed from the Nazis.

Psychedelics have inherent queerness: interwoven into Indigenous societies with fluid conceptions of gender and sexuality; inverting expectations and challenging norms; releasing rigid patterns and making new connections, from found family to community care and long-neglected parts of yourself. One species of fungi has more than 23,000 distinct sexual identities; as mycologist Merlin Sheldrake observes, it helps scientists think beyond the binary, mirroring queer theory and reflecting the world in its crystalline multiplicity. 

In the psychedelic state, “the dissolution of ego boundaries becomes the dissolution of binary categories,” Lxo observes, and integration “begins to connect and unify them, bringing all the various different energies, even seemingly binary ones like masculine and feminine, into a kind of relation.”

It’s crucial for the clinical establishment to understand that queer and transness isn’t something that needs to be cured — and tying treatment to disorders and diagnoses echoes of the pathologized past. Sevelius says the focus should be healing past wounds while building coping strategies for facing continual trauma. Meanwhile, Ching wants to see psychedelic therapy “targeted to identity-affirmation processes… fostering the wellbeing and actualization of queer folks.

“Psychedelics have the power to shift the way we see and experience the world, including ourselves, remembering who we were before a traumatized culture had its way with us. As Ching says, “I know I was born this way, but it took MDMA to show it to me, to accept the emotional truth, … and live my life according[ly].”

Editor’s note: Some names have been changed to protect the identity of the source.*

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Tripping Rabbis: The Psychedelic Influence on Jewish Renewal

There are a great many tales to be told about the countercultural years of the 1960s, but the story of tripping Rabbis whose psychedelic exploration contributed to a great Jewish Renewal isn’t found in many history books.

While the world was shaken by the Vietnam War and the ongoing Cold War, the counterculture represented a rise of a new consciousness expressed in forms of music, art, drugs, and civil disobedience. In a collective rise against the ‘American dream’ utopia built by their parents, the young generation sought to find alternatives to materialist and conservative values. For them, the counterculture was a strike of anti-establishment, in an egalitarian spirit emphasizing the value of human relationships and the individual’s quest for meaning in life.

Drugs like LSD, cannabis, and mescaline became increasingly common with renowned academics, authors and poets of the era. But they weren’t the only cultural leaders exploring the power of mind-altering substances; while the world watched Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert (later known as Ram Dass), Aldous Huxley, and Allen Ginsberg encourage the new generation to turn on, tune in, and drop out, a few radical rabbis were quietly exploring the use of psychedelics to get closer to God, and revive age-old mystical traditions.

Cover of the 1968 publication Response, A Contemporary Jewish Review.

I was inspired to investigate the connection between liberal Jewish movements and psychedelics after encountering the article ‘Psychedelics and Kabbalah,’published in the Jewish youth magazine Response (1968) by Itzik Lodzer. Lodzer was revealed to be a pseudonym for Arthur Green, the now well-established Jewish scholar, rabbi, and influential figure in the establishment of liberal Jewish practices (for the remainder of this article, Lodzer will be referred to as Arthur Green). One of Green’s contributions was Havurat Shalom, an experimental community embracing Jewish libertarianism and alternative religious values. Through Havurat Shalom, Green met another unconventional rabbi: Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, now also commonly referred to as ‘Reb Zalman,’ founder of the Jewish Renewal movement. Schachter-Shalomi became the leading figure for the Jewish liberation theology, and his influence for the entire Jewish community is monumental.

Both Green and Schachter-Shalomi referred to psychedelics as tools to shed light onto forgotten mystical traditions. The Jewish Renewal movement was an epiphany of that realization, and strove to reinvigorate stagnant traditions by reinventing modern Judaism through Kabbalistic, Hasidic, and musical practices. The lives of these two rabbis, their encounters with psychedelic drugs, and the paths these experiences led them on, are remarkable examples of how psychedelic drugs were an integral part of reinventing Jewish theology.

From their stories we can conjecture that psychedelics were a factor in influencing certain powerful, liberal Jewish ideologies, as well as helping their users to experience Jewish mystical theology in a new light.

The Psychedelic Experience and the Kabbalah 

Kabbalah is Hebrew for ‘receiving’. It encompasses a set of teachings generally distinguished from the ‘traditional’ Jewish doctrine. The term came into use in 13th century Spain, where a group of Jewish esoterics and mystics began to separate themselves from the regular Jewish practitioners. To this day, hundreds of modern Kabbalah centers have opened up all around the United States and Europe and many well-known celebrities with (and without) Jewish heritage have picked up the practice of this mystical tradition.

In the 1968 Jewish Review Response, Green draws a parallel between his psychedelic experience and the teachings of the Kabbalah. For him, the foundation of the Kabbalist teachings became vividly real during his encounter with LSD. This is also the likely reason why he chose to write about a topic which, even during the period when LSD was legal, was considered contentious for the traditional Jewish community. Green analyzed parts of the psychedelic experience corresponding to Kabbalist teachings. Many of the elements recognized today as  classic psychedelic trip experiences, represented vivid manifestations of Green’s own belief system.

Re-Evaluating Perspective on Psychedelics

The first aspect Green considered a mystical experience is the notion of perspective.

“That which I thought was all terribly real just a few seconds ago now seems to be a part of a great dramatic role-playing situation, a cosmic comedy which this ‘me’ has to play out for the benefit of the audience,” he said.

In Kabbalah the only ‘true’ unchanging reality is the Ein Sof, ‘the Upper Reality,’ our ways of perceiving that reality are under constant change. For Green, psychedelics opened the illusionary nature of unchanging reality and of his own self. He wrote: “Seen from beyond, however, world and ego are but aspects of the same illusion. From God’s point of view, only God can be real.”

The Paradox of Change

The second aspect Green brought forth is the paradox of the fundamental change of everything about God, the simultaneous fundamental constancy of God, and the circular coexistence of impermanence and permanence: “All is becoming moving. I blink my eyes and seem to reopen them to an entirely new universe. One terribly different from that which existed a moment ago […] If there is a ‘God’ we have discovered through psychedelics, He is the One within the many; the changeless constant in a world of change.”

God’s Gender – Maybe Not Male After All?

Having strongly experienced a feminine presence during his trip, Green questioned the prevailing Judeo-Christian assumptions of God as male, underlying that ‘the father of the heavens’ only makes sense in a context where there is also ‘the mother.’ He argued that Judaism today has become trapped by the stationary image of God as a father figure. Subsequently, the Jewish Renewal movement has been especially focused on the revival of the female Goddess. For Green, the two sides of God were as attainable for ‘contemporary trippers,’ as they had been for the mystics of the past. 

Discovering God’s Fluid Essence

Typically, descriptions of divinity in Kabbalistic writings are inconsistent and fully metaphorical. Green observed the parallel of the flow of beautiful images during his trip and the fluid Kabbalist descriptions of the nature of divinity, but warned against any static statements defining God. He argued that only symbolic and metaphorical descriptions could come close to the truth. Although the process in which the voyager creates a metaphor to describe the flow of images and information can be enjoyable, he warned against taking one’s own imagery too seriously: 

“Indeed, this is one of the great ‘pastime’ of people under the influence of psychedelics: the construction of elaborate and often beautiful systems of imagery which momentarily seem to contain all the meaning of life or the secrets of all the universe, only to push beyond them moments later, leaving their remains as desolate as the ruins of a child’s castle in the sand. No metaphor is permanent, one can always ascend another rung and look down on the silliness of what appeared to be a revelation just minutes before.”

Exploring God’s Authentic Nature

What Green referred to as the “deepest, simplest and most radical insight of the psychedelic consciousness” concerns the authentic nature of God. He wrote: “This insight has been so terribly frightening to the Jewish consciousness, so bizarre in terms of the biblical background of all Jewish faith, that even the mystics who knew it well, generally fled from fully spelling it out.” All reality is at one with the Divine, and therefore every human, Jewish or not, is a part of God’s divine nature, he posited. According to Green, the very sanity of the Western civilization lies in the ability to distinguish fantasy from reality, to separate between God and humans. Now that this fantasy had been shattered for the young Green, the rest of his life was bound to change. “If God and man are truly one … what has all the game been for?” he questioned. 

Green’s testimony of his first psychedelic voyage is a remarkable historical account of how psychedelics can operate on the consciousness of a deeply religious individual. Green’s understanding of Kabbalah provided a strong framework through which the experience could fluidly mature, and although he voiced his concerns of autonomous explorations of God through psychopharmacology, he also believed both the psychedelic and mystical consciousness can be compatible.

In his 2016 biography, Hasidism for Tomorrow, he still states that taking LSD was an important step for his understanding of Hasidic and Kabbalistic philosophies. Such states would be achievable without the substances, he says, but acknowledges taking drugs and spontaneous mystical experiences as parallel processes.

 Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi ecstatic prayer at his daughter’s naming ceremony in Philadelphia, 1977. (Zalman M. Schachter-Shalomi, Shalomi Collection, University of Colorado)

The question arises: will the revolutionary qualities of the Jewish Renewal movement prove lasting, or will Judaism shake off Liberal influences and continue its static path? Just as the Jewish Renewal movement is often seen as a minor influence on a small current, the counterculture movement is often viewed as a failed attempt of revolution, as utopia slowly sinking into disappointment. Both Green and Schachter-Shalomi held their experiences with psychedelics as major influential points in their lives. As the research on psychedelic drugs and neurotheology continues to advance, perhaps the liberation theologies of a number of religions can be understood in a completely novel way.

According to Shalom Goldman, a professor of religion and Middle Eastern studies, the impact of the Jewish Renewal movement has left a permanent mark on contemporary Jewish life.

“Schachter-Shalomi’s Jewish Renewal still remains small in comparison to the larger Jewish denominations, but its influence is wide,” he said. “And many of those influenced would be quite surprised to read that in a way, it started with LSD.”

Editor’s note: this article is an adapted version of the essay, Tripping Rabbis: The Impact of Psychedelic Consciousness in the Revival of Jewish Mystical Tradition during the 1960s Counterculture Movement, by Johanna Hilla-Maria Sopanen, originally published in Psychedelic Press Volume XXI (2017).

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PT413 – Queering Psychedelics, The Dark History of Conversion Therapy, and The EMBARK Approach

In this episode, David interviews Alex Belser, Ph.D.: clinical scientist; author; licensed psychologist; Co-Investigator for a psilocybin and OCD study at Yale University; and co-creator of the EMBARK approach, a new model of psychedelic-assisted therapy that focuses on six clinical domains that typically arise during psychedelic experiences.

He is also one of the editors of Queering Psychedelics: From Oppression to Liberation in Psychedelic Medicine, the new anthology from Chacruna featuring 38 essays from queer authors and allies looking at the heteronormative aspects of psychedelic culture and psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, self-acceptance, psychedelics and pleasure, and ways the queer community can become allies with other groups. As they serendipitously recorded this episode on June 1, it only made sense to celebrate Pride Month by releasing it now, as well as launching a giveaway, where you can win one of five copies of Queering Psychedelics. 

Belser talks about the concurrent emergence of the psychedelic and queer communities; the need to research the effects of transphobia and homophobia in psychedelic work (as well as the internalized phobias often realized during an experience); why it’s more important than ever to talk about the psychedelic space’s dark past with conversion therapy; why the Mystical Experiences Questionnaire needs to be updated; the idea of queer people being boundary walkers; recreating the Good Friday Experiment, the immense importance of long-form interviews and other forms of qualitative research, the power of love and community, and the question: how does anyone not want to change after a powerful psychedelic experience?

Notable Quotes

“When we talk about MK-Ultra and we talk about the abuses of boundary transgressions and sexual transgressions, we also need to be talking about how psychedelics have been used to harm people through conversion therapy and how they have repeatedly been used in this way. If we don’t look to our past and what’s happening currently, then I don’t think we’re ever going to have a truly integral reckoning with how we carry these medicines in ethical ways.”

“I spoke with an Orthodox Priest who said, ‘Before, I used to give sermons to my congregation and I would talk about God’s justice: the justice of the lord.’ And now, after taking psychedelics (he had a really powerful experience), he says, ‘All I want to talk about is God’s love.’”

“[The EMBARK model is] open architecture. It’s multidimensional, but it allows for the therapist to bring in their existing skill sets, and it allows for a patient-centered approach to what might actually emerge or arise, because I don’t think there’s one path for psychedelic healing. What we see are multiple trajectories, and we needed to build a comprehensive theoretical framework for psychotherapy that allows for different expressions of that for different people.”

“I don’t think psychedelics are a panacea or cure-all, but I think that they help us experiment with different ways of being together, and it doesn’t have to be one way. That’s what I’ve learned; it really does not have to be one way, and it does not have to be the old way.”

Links

Winy a Copy of Queering Psychedelics!

Alexbelser.com

Centerforbreakthroughs.com

Embarkapproach.com

Psychedelics Today: Dr. Alexander Belser – How Privilege Affects Gender Inclusivity in Psychotherapy

Plasticbrainblog.com: The shameful history of psychedelic gay conversion therapy

Lgbtmap.org: U.S. Map of Conversion Therapy Laws

Archive.org: Full text of 1960 Playboy interview with Tim Leary

Maps.org: LSD and Sexuality: Review of a case of homosexuality treated therapeutically with LSD and description of a male-female psychedelic session program, by Richard Alpert

The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience: The Classic Guide to the Effects of LSD on the Human Psyche, by Jean Houston, Ph.D. & Robert Masters, Ph.D.

Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, by Andrew Solomon

Queering Psychedelics: From Oppression to Liberation in Psychedelic Medicine, edited by Alex Belser, Clancy Cavnar, and Beatriz C. Labate

Psychedelics Today: PT269 – Adam Strauss – Comedy, OCD, and The Mushroom Cure

Yalemedicine.org: Efficacy of Psilocybin in OCD: a Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled Study.

Psychedelics Today: PT229 – Dr. Matthew Johnson – What is Consciousness?

Wikipedia.org: Marsh Chapel Experiment

Cybin.com

Washington.edu: A Study of Psilocybin-assisted Psychotherapy for Clinicians With Symptoms of Depression and Burnout Related to Frontline Work in the COVID Pandemic

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PT411 – The Humanity of Healthcare Professionals, Ancient Psychedelic Use, and Breaking the Cycle of Colonialism

In this episode, Joe interviews Priyanka Wali, MD: board-certified practicing physician in Internal Medicine, MAPS-trained psychedelic facilitator, comedian, and co-host (with Sean Hayes of “Will & Grace” fame) of the HypochondriActor podcast, where they discuss interesting medical issues in a funny (and hopefully uplifting) way. 

She talks about recognizing and protecting the humanity of healthcare professionals, and how medical school is creating a cycle of hurt people trying to help other hurt people. She believes we need to become more holistic, especially in embracing Indigenous ways of thinking, as their frameworks may be the only way to explain phenomena with which Western science can’t yet come to terms.  

They talk a lot about ancient psychedelic use: the use of a soma described in the Rigveda; Egyptian culture and mushrooms observed in statues; Plato; the work of Brian Muraresku and Graham Hancock; and Vedic chants, Kashmiri Bhajans, and how singing (especially in a group) can be especially healing to the nervous system. And as Wali experienced first-hand the Kashmiri Pandit genocide of 1990, she discusses how much colonialism has changed cultures, and how much our cycles of oppression relate to our collective inability to experience pain and fear.  

They discuss the psychological impact of living through major catastrophes; the special and hard-to-describe feeling of returning to your home (especially in a world changed by colonization and constant conflict); the sad case of Ignaz Semmelweis and hand washing; ghosts of Japan’s 2011 tsunami, the concept of ‘future primitive,’ and more.

Notable Quotes

“We’re only thinking about it from a certain perspective. And this is where you think about principles of colonization come in: looking at things only from one perspective. If you start to bring in Indigenous systems [and] Indigenous ways of looking at data, then suddenly, we do actually have ways to account for these other phenomenon that can’t be objectively tabulated.”

“In traditional Kashmiri culture, it was routine to gather together and sing together. We humans: we’re supposed to gather around the fire and dance and chant. There’s actually something very healing for our bodies. And let’s not forget how our nervous systems regulate with each other, so being physically together as a group, as a collective, singing, using our bodies: it’s actually very healing for the nervous system. We need more of that.”

“I think the next shift in consciousness is recognizing that we experience fear as part of the human experience, but we can choose not to give into it. We can be with it, we can allow it to be there, we can even honor it, but we don’t have to act on it. And we can, instead, choose the path of peace or love, or not even choose those paths, but just choose not to do anything with the fear; choose not to oppress someone, judge someone, lash it out, [or] numb it. …Unless we, in the present day, begin to start being with our fear, we will continue to perpetuate these cycles of oppression.”

Links

Priyankawali.com

Apple podcasts: The HypochondriActor podcast

Wikipedia.org: Kashmiri Pandits

Ripleys.com: The Hallucinatory Voices That Saved a Woman’s Life

When the Impossible Happens: Adventures in Non-Ordinary, by Stanislav Grof Ph.D.

Cosmic Trigger I: Final Secret of the Illuminati, by Robert Anton Wilson

Researchgate.net: Evolution of ephedra as the Soma of Rigveda

Tripsavvy.com: Philae Temple Complex, Egypt: The Complete Guide

Sciencedirect.com: The entheomycological origin of Egyptian crowns and the esoteric underpinnings of Egyptian religion (Stephen R. Berlant)

Libcom.org: What is anarcho-syndicalism?

Psychedelics Today: PTSF 35 (with Brian Muraresku)

Psychedelics Today: Lost Civilizations, DMT Entities, & Altered States of Consciousness and Early Religion, featuring: Graham Hancock

Netflix.com: Ancient Apocalypse

Psychologytoday.com: Kirtan: The Easy Meditation That Can Improve Your Brain

Paannyaar.com: Kashmiri Bhajans – List Of Most Popular Bhajans In Kashmiri

Wikipedia.org: Sankofa

Psychedelicmedicinecoalition.org

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas S. Kuhn

Npr.org: The Doctor Who Championed Hand-Washing And Briefly Saved Lives

My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies, by Resmaa Menakem

Historicalindia.org: Genocide of Kashmiri Pandits

Allthatsinteresting.com: Inside The Disturbing Legend Of The ‘Tsunami Spirits’ That Have Haunted Japan Ever Since Its 2011 Disaster

Confronting Collapse: The Crisis of Energy and Money in a Post Peak Oil World: A 25-Point Program for Action, by Michael C. Ruppert

Apple podcasts: SmartLess

HempLucid‘s function-based mushroom/cannabinoid gummies are a great option for those seeking targeted solutions for sleep, stress, and focus. Save 10% off by using the code PSYCHEDELICS10 at checkout.
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PT406 – Bicycle Day, Unveiling Entheon, and The Mystical Experience Through Art

In this episode, on the eve of Bicycle Day, Victoria and Kyle interview two long-standing icons of visionary psychedelic art: Alex and Allyson Grey.

They talk about the LSD trip that saved Alex’s life, connected him to Allyson, inspired his art, and even made him change his name; his decades-in-the-making “Sacred Mirrors” project of 21 7-foot tall pieces depicting the complex layers of human existence; the interconnectedness of life; the history of psychedelic art; how imagination and non-ordinary states help us connect with the divine; and the value of art in conveying the mystical experience.

Alex and Allyson are the Co-Founders of the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, an interspiritual church/retreat center in upstate New York that, after years of work, is debuting Entheon: an art sanctuary and psychedelic reliquary featuring much of their art and work from favorite artists, a shrine to Tool (who Alex has worked with for most of their career), and a collection of relics from psychedelic legends that includes Albert Hofmann’s glasses, art signed by Stan Grof and the Shulgins, and even Timothy Leary’s ashes. Entheon opens on June 3, on the anniversary of the first acid trip the Greys took together, which gave them a framework for understanding life and an inspiration for art they still follow to this day.

And in honor of Bicycle Day, Alex talks about two pieces dedicated to Albert Hofmann, and continues his Bicycle Day tradition of reading a statement Hofmann made a year before he passed about psychedelics being the “absolute highest importance to consciousness change.” In celebration of Albert Hofmann and the gift he gave us, and with inspiration from the incredibly complex and beautiful art Alex and Allyson create, have a happy, safe, and creative Bicycle Day!

“St. Albert and the LSD Revelation Revolution” by Alex Grey

Notable Quotes

“I hadn’t had any insight that would prove to me any kind of spiritual reality was really there, even though I was making art. And I think from my perspective now: hey, if you’re being creative, you’re evidence. The creative spirit is what birthed the universe, and you’re an expression here and now of it. You’re evolving on that wavefront of reality that is binding time together and our beings together.” -Alex

“We could see the vast vista of fountains and drains of everyone, and every being and thing in the universe was interconnected and made of light, and in that, I think we felt connected rather than disconnected. We felt like we were individual and independent, but also interconnected with all beings and things. [It] makes you feel like there’s some importance to yourself, that you really are necessary in the web of the eternal.” -Allyson

“You’re making love with the divine in the mystical experience, in the divine imagination. That’s where the small self meets the larger self and becomes no self. So I think that the mystical experience is the cornerstone of the sacred traditions, and the artistic sacred traditions as well.” -Alex

“It took me right outside of my miserable psychodrama self and immediately, I got a psychic swirlie to show me the way. So that was a confirmation, and all my prayers basically were answered in that, and I got to meet the love of my life, really, because of it. So we’re very thankful, and it’s one of the reasons why we’ve always loved celebrating Bicycle Day.” -Alex

Links

Alexgrey.com

Allysongrey.com

Cosm.org (the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors)

Entheon

Be Here Now, by Ram Dass

Alexgrey.com: Sacred Mirrors

Alexgrey.com: Life Energy

Learnreligions.com: Indra’s Jewel Net

Mushroomstone.com: Breaking the Mushroom Code

Psychedelicreview.com: Early Inhabitants of Algeria Create Cave Art that Shows Mushrooms

Mythology.net: Sekhmet

Dr. Albert Hofmann’s quote from 2007 that they read every Bicycle Day

Wikipedia.org: Paracelsus

Toolband.com

Alexgrey.com: “Net of Being”

Alexgrey.com: “Theologue”

Allysongrey.com: “Jewel Net of Indra”

Alexgrey.com: “Transfiguration”

Alexgrey.com: “The Great Turn”

“Albert Hofmann and the New Eleusis” by Alex Grey
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PT398 – Lost Civilizations, DMT Entities, & Altered States of Consciousness and Early Religion

In this episode, Joe interviews Graham Hancock: legendary bestselling author and writer and presenter of the new Netflix docuseries, “Ancient Apocalypse,” where he travels the world looking for evidence of lost civilizations likely much more advanced than historians previously believed.

Hancock talks about his early books and how ayahuasca influenced his writing; the similarities in cave art and the common link of altered states of consciousness; how integral these states likely were toward the creation of early religion (especially Christianity); how much the annihilation of religious traditions has hidden history; why his and Rupert Sheldrake’s Tedx talks were originally taken offline; new understandings of Neanderthals’ intelligence and creativity; the Quetzalcóatl; and the concept of the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis: could there have been an advanced civilization 12,800 years ago that we’re just starting to comprehend? Could it have been Atlantis? 

He discusses the conflict with mystery and archaeology’s obsession with scientism and materialist reductionism – that we keep trying to force everything into little boxes of approved science and have lost our imaginations and openness to possibility, especially when you realize how often narratives are built based on interpretations of data rather than facts (since the farther back we go, evidence becomes harder to come by). He believes science needs humility, a willingness to listen to Indigenous history, and a much more open mind when it comes to altered states of consciousness: “I’m convinced we’re missing something important from our past, and if we don’t look for it, we won’t find it.

Hancock has just announced that he will be a speaker at UK’s Breaking Convention, April 20 – 22 at the University of Exeter, and some of the PT team will be there too! To save 10% off tickets, use code PSYCHTODAYBC10 at checkout.

Notable Quotes

“I think there’s a huge amount of genuine mystery in the past, and there’s an attempt by archaeologists to explain away that mystery, …to just drain the past of mystery and to leave nothing there except dry facts (supposed facts) as archaeologists claim, but which, when you dig deep enough, you find are actually interpretations of limited data sets. I don’t know why archaeologists just want the past to be so boring. …Of course there’s a need for rigor and discipline, but there’s also a need for imagination and openness of mind when it comes to interpreting our collective past.”

“Those paintings included the same geometric patterns and the same therianthropic entities construed in slightly different ways, but clearly the same kind of encounter is being documented in the cave art from 30 or 40 thousand years ago and is being documented by shamans in the Amazon rainforest today. And what’s the common factor? The common factor is altered states of consciousness.”

“With extended release DMT, volunteers are going into the DMT state for an hour and they’re making remarkably homogeneous reports about entity encounters and about the space in which they encounter those entities. One reasonable supposition has to be: there are many possibilities for this, but when people from all over the world see the same things [and] have the same encounters in the same sort of space, you have to consider the possibility that that space is real in some way that our science doesn’t recognize.”

“Psychedelics and experiences in altered states of consciousness have actually been foundational and fundamental to human culture, and by pretending that they’re not, as we’ve been doing for the last 50 years, we’re making a huge mistake. We have to change that outlook and welcome and embrace what these gifts of the universe have to give us.”

Links

Grahamhancock.com

Netflix: Ancient Apocalypse

Fingerprints of the Gods – Evidence of Earth’s Lost Civilization

Journey Through Pakistan

Ethiopia: The Challenge of Hunger

AIDS: The Deadly Epidemic

Lords of Poverty

African Ark: Peoples of the Horn

Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind

Visionary: The Mysterious Origins of Human Consciousness (The Definitive Edition of Supernatural)

Underworld: Flooded Kingdoms of the Ice Age

A-Z-animals.com: Denisovan vs Neanderthal: What’s the Difference?

The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art, by David Lewis-Williams

​​The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name, by Brian C. Muraresku

Psychedelics Today: PTSF 35 (with Brian Muraresku)

Interestingengineering.com: Mysterious disappearance of megafauna: why humans may share the blame

Cometresearchgroup.org

YouTube: Graham Hancock – The War on Consciousness BANNED TED TALK

TEDBlog: Open for discussion: Graham Hancock and Rupert Sheldrake from TEDxWhitechapel

Psychedelics Today: PT381 – DMT, Hierarchies of Complexity, and Reality Switch Technologies, featuring: Dr. Andrew R. Gallimore

Reality Switch Technologies: Psychedelics as Tools for the Discovery and Exploration of New Worlds, by Andrew R. Gallimore

Britannica.com: Quetzalcóatl

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas S. Kuhn

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Mind the Gap: The Importance of Gender Equity in Psychedelic Clinical Trials

Psychedelics, once heavily restricted for research, are now being rigorously tested through clinical trials to explore their potential therapeutic benefits. But how are women represented in the search to uncover the efficacy of psychedelic medicines?

While the inclusion of women in psychedelic clinical trials is clearly important – both to understand the effects of these medicines on all genders as well as to develop effective treatments for conditions that primarily affect women – women have historically been underrepresented in clinical trials.

Why has this become the norm? Is it because women aren’t as available as men to participate in studies? Or perhaps women don’t suffer from the illnesses being studied as often as men?

Spoiler: it’s neither.

The Clinical Trial Process – An Overview

The clinical trial process is, largely, a series of research studies that evaluate the safety and effectiveness of new drugs, treatments, or medical devices on human subjects. To fit into a pharmaceutical model, a.k.a. develop a drug or treatment protocol that clinicians can prescribe and health insurance will cover, psychedelic medicines must follow the same clinical trial process that all new drugs and treatments undergo.

If it seems like there’s a new clinical trial announced each week – from psilocybin for depression to MDMA for PTSD to LSD for cluster headaches – it’s because these trials are crucial (and non-negotiable) for biotech companies seeking to bring their compounds and modalities to market. These trials aim to prove the effectiveness of a particular compound or method of use, and ultimately secure the holy grail of U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval. 

Clinical trials are conducted in several phases, each with specific goals:

Phase 1: A small number of healthy volunteers receive the drug or treatment to evaluate its safety and determine the appropriate dosage.

Phase 2: A larger group of volunteers with the condition that the drug or treatment is designed to treat receive the treatment to assess its effectiveness and side effects.

Phase 3: An even larger group of volunteers with the condition receive the treatment in a randomized and controlled study to confirm its effectiveness and monitor side effects.

Phase 4: The drug or treatment is approved and marketed for public use, and ongoing studies continue to monitor its long-term safety and effectiveness.

Throughout the clinical trial process, participants are closely monitored and data is collected to evaluate the drug or treatment’s safety, efficacy, and potential side effects.

Applications are open for the second edition of Vital, our 12-month training certificate program in psychedelic therapy and integration, beginning in April 2023. Head to Vitalpsychedelictraining.com for more info, or attend a Q+A to have your questions answered.

A Brief History of Women in Clinical Trials

As hard as it may be to believe, it wasn’t until 1993 that women and minorities were required to be included in any NIH-funded clinical research. In 1977, the FDA recommended excluding women of childbearing age from Phase 1 and Phase 2 trials, even if they used contraception, were single, or had husbands with vasectomies. 

The objective was to avoid unforeseen birth defects in babies born to women in clinical trials. The result, however, is that most currently prescribed medications were approved by the FDA before 1993 – which means they’re prescribed to women and men at the same dose and were unlikely to have adequate representation of women in their clinical trials.

Francesca Minale, President of Vici Health Sciences and an expert at working with the FDA to bring new medications through clinical trials to approval, says the lack of gender differentiation in dosing persists despite known differences in disease states by gender.

“There is a lack of incorporation of gender data and generic specific dosing and administration on FDA-approved prescription labels,” said Minale. “This gender bias in the research needs to be addressed, especially as it is well documented that many diseases, such as mental health or heart disease, are recognized to have gender differences.”  

Excluding women from early-stage clinical trials led to a vast shortage of data around how today’s drugs affect women – a knowledge gap that scientists are still trying to fill. Even though the NIH now requires women to be included in all clinical research funded by the government agency, there are still many criteria that make it difficult for women to participate in clinical trials. 

Women in Psychedelic Clinical Trials

The results of clinical trials play a critical role in informing regulatory decisions about whether to approve new medicines for widespread use. However, in the past, clinical trials often failed to accurately reflect the populations they intended to serve – especially women. 

This is actually a pretty big problem, because women experience adverse drug reactions nearly twice as often as men. Women consistently manifest elevated blood concentrations and longer elimination times of drugs, unrelated to differences in body weight.

As psychedelic clinical trials seek to determine the safety and efficacy of new psychedelic treatments, it’s imperative we learn from past mistakes. A recent study identified 86 medications approved by the FDA that are more likely to cause complications for women than men.

But yet it’s common practice to prescribe equal doses of medications to men and women – contributing to the overmedication of women and female-biased adverse drug reactions.

In fact, because women were excluded from many pivotal clinical trials, many drugs have been withdrawn from the market or have had their labels changed to include warnings about increased risks for women after they were already approved by the FDA and widely used.

This self-guided class investigates the history, science, and best practices for safe and effective microdosing; hosted by Adam Bramlage, founder of Flow State Micro, Dr. James Fadiman, the “father of modern microdosing,” and a dozen expert guest faculty. Enroll today!

Modern Barriers to Women’s Participation in Clinical Trials

Amy Reichelt, Ph.D., Director of Neuropharmacology at Cybin explained, “In early-stage clinical trials (i.e., Phase 1) where drugs are tested in healthy volunteers, key inclusion/exclusion criteria can bias genders tested.” 

Typical protocol wording includes: “Women of childbearing potential (WOCBP) must be non-lactating and have a negative pregnancy test. Females who are not WOCBP must be either surgically sterile or post-menopausal.” Reichelt said. “This immediately excludes a number of women, particularly when age ranges of trials can have cut-offs of 55-60 years.”

Moreover, it is often written into the trial protocol that a woman of childbearing potential must agree to practice an effective means of birth control/contraception during their participation in the clinical trial, and following the trial for several months. This could impact individuals who are trying to start a family for many months, again discouraging women from participating.

Reichelt pointed out, “Later stage trials (i.e., Phase 2b, Phase 3) can be less restrictive as they are testing in patient populations and initial safety tests are fulfilled in the healthy volunteers in early stage trials, but still there are often requirements for contraceptive use that fall upon the women’s responsibility.”

In addition, body weight restrictions may also prevent women from participating if they are below the protocol threshold i.e., less than 60 kg/132 pounds.

Biological Gender Differences and Why They Matter

The differences between the sexes in circulating levels of sex hormones, such as testosterone and estradiol, can affect pharmacokinetic or pharmacodynamic parameters – which help determine how the drug is absorbed, distributed and metabolized in the body, and how the drug affects the body, Reichelt explained.

Body composition can impact how a drug is processed and eliminated from the body, too. “Women typically have a lower body weight than men, so when the same dose of a drug results in a higher level of drug circulating by body weight. As women generally have a greater body fat content than men, some drugs can be distributed through the body differently,” said Reichelt.

The impact of sex can differ across life stages, too. After menopause, the reduction of estrogen can alter aspects of brain plasticity. Preclinical studies have shown that at the neuronal level, estrogen can increase the density of dendritic spines.

This brain phenomena may subtly affect mood and cognition during a woman’s estrous cycle, and could affect clinical outcomes. More studies are needed to fully understand these impacts, especially when it comes to psychedelic medicines which are closely tied to brain plasticity and dendritic spines. 

For Natalie Gukasyan, M.D., Medical Director of Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, the physiological differences between men and women in the psychedelic experience and outcomes is an area that requires further investigation.

“We don’t yet have a clear understanding of how different biological factors, such as hormonal fluctuations, including menstrual cycle and menopause, may impact the psychedelic experience. However, it does seem that psychedelics may have an impact on menstrual function,” she said.

Gukasyan co-authored a recent study published in the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs on the impact of psychedelics on menstrual function. While the study looked at only three women ranging from 27 to 34 years of age, the results were significant enough to warrant more research.

“Although phenomena related to menstrual and reproductive function have been largely overlooked in the psychedelic literature to date, these effects may have therapeutic utility and warrant further study,” the study concluded.

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    Where To Go From Here

    In the field of psychedelic medicine, where compounds are being extensively studied scientifically for the first time, the underrepresentation of women in clinical trials could have serious consequences for the safety and efficacy of these treatments. Without data on the experiences of women, it is impossible to accurately assess the potential benefits and risks of these new medicines before bringing them to the masses.

    By working to increase the representation of women in clinical trials for psychedelics, we can help to ensure that these treatments are developed in a way that is safe, effective, and equitable for all.

    Thankfully, many psychedelic clinical trials are moving forward with this ethos. For example, two-thirds of the participants in the MAPS’ Phase 2 and 3 clinical trials of MDMA therapy for the treatment of PTSD were women.

    Rick Doblin, the founder of MAPS, said, “When it comes to PTSD, we talk a lot about the veterans, but it’s mostly women who are sexually abused or have childhood traumas that have PTSD. I think that the media attention on veterans sort of distracts people from the understanding that it’s mostly women that we are treating. Two-thirds of the people in the [MAPS] study are women.”

    So far, MAPS has administered MDMA to approximately 1,700 human subjects. Their recent Phase 3 clinical trial of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD also included an assessment of gender identity beyond the binary male and female gender assigned at birth – an important distinction since transgender and gender diverse (TGD) people experience PTSD at higher rates than the general population.

    Other groups conducting clinical trials actively seeking women participants include Psycheceutical Bioscience, which has partnered with clinical research organization (CRO) iNGENū in Australia to conduct its Phase 1 and Phase 2 trials of a topical ketamine cream to treat PTSD.

    “iNGENū takes gender balance in clinical trials very seriously and the diversity of participants is one of the key metrics we strive to achieve. We naturally want our clinical trials to recruit participants who closely match the intended population who will benefit from the drug when it is eventually approved,” said iNGENū CEO Dr. Sud Agarwal. 

    Women-Only Trials

    While the inclusion of women in psychedelic clinical trials is critical to the success of this new paradigm in medicine, there’s also a whole realm of largely untapped research on the benefits of psychedelics for health conditions experienced only by women.  

    Felicity Pharma is a psychedelic biotech company focused on women’s health that’s secured a proprietary psilocybin-based drug for premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD), a very severe form of premenstrual syndrome that affects up to 10 percent of women globally as well as postpartum depression. 

    Olivia Mannix, Felicity Pharma co-founder and CEO, said “We are passionate about transforming women’s healthcare. Women have been traditionally excluded from clinical trials because of hormonal fluctuations and general biological makeup. We are making a stand to develop female-focused therapeutics, where women will be the only patients used in trials.”

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    PT389 – The Art of Ecstasy: The 90’s British Club Scene and MDMA

    In this episode, Joe interviews artist and photographer, Rupert Alexander Scriven.

    Under his brand, Vintage Disco Biscuit, Scriven recently released The Art of Ecstasy: a coffee table book that pairs high definition images of ecstasy tablets he collected over the course of 25 years with interviews and compositions written by himself and a host of other notable names from the 90’s British club scene, documenting the culture and rise of MDMA, while also promoting harm reduction and the work of UK drug charity, The Loop. The book has received some notable high praise, with Dr. Ben Sessa calling it “absolutely fucking awesome.” 

    Scriven discusses why he started collecting ecstasy tablets and how the book came to be, as well as details behind the photography and writings, which he likes to think of as conversations at an afterparty. And he talks about his days in the club scene and how it was like his church; how MDMA changed culture; UK drug policy; talks with his parents about drugs; differences in the club experience when people are on different substances; and whether or not dancing on MDMA can be the therapy people need. And he asks a question many of us wonder regularly: Why are we, as a culture, so far behind with drug testing?

    Notable Quotes

    “It really did change the culture and society as a whole, because at the time, there was ‘Thatcherism’ ([from] Margaret Thatcher, our Prime Minister), and there was a lot of disdain, there was a lot of discomfort. And this was just an outlet for everybody to enjoy themselves, whoever they were. So you could be a street cleaner, you could be an MP, you could be anybody. Everybody came together on a Saturday or Friday night and you just partied.”

    “Each of these pills, even though they’re only eight millimeters across, that stamp; it didn’t signify just quality, it signified somebody’s memory of meeting a friend, a loved one, an experience, a time. You can go on any forum and people will go, ‘Oh, can you remember the dove?’ …You can ask them, and they’ll be able to recap a full story or an experience they had just from that one on element.”

    “A few years ago before the lockdown, [there were] only three festivals that didn’t have The Loop or some form of drug awareness testing charity at them in the UK, and those were the three festivals that there were fatalities. Now that just speaks volumes. It really does.”

    Links

    Vintagediscobiscuit.com

    Wearetheloop.org

    Dmagazine.com: How the Starck Club Changed Dallas

    Wikipedia.org: Vague Club

    David Nutt’s Drug Harm Chart

    Sen1.squarespace.com

    Imdb: “Once Upon a Time in America”

    Britishculturearchive.co.uk: Blitz Club, London, 1980 | Photographs by Andrew Holligan

    Thedea.org: What is Molly? (Leo Zeff is who had the penicillin quote)

    Wikipedia.org: Marshall Jefferson

    Sciencedirect.com: Drug safety testing, disposals and dealing in an English field: Exploring the operational and behavioural outcomes of the UK’s first onsite ‘drug checking’ service

    Awaknlifesciences.com

    Lawenforcementactionpartnership.org (LEAP)

    Carlcox.com

    Kollectiveshop.com

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    PT379 – Intergenerational Trauma, Late-Stage Capitalism, and the Urban Indigenous Collective

    In this episode, David interviews published researcher, social entrepreneur, and internationally recognized Indigenous rights activist: Sutton King, MPH.

    In New York City alone, 180,000 people identify as Indigenous, Native American, or Alaskan Native, and this community is facing a disproportionate prevalence of mental health disparities, poverty, suicide, and PTSD due to intergenerational trauma from attempted genocide, forced relocation, and the erasure of culture and identity via boarding schools. Her purpose has become to bring light to what Indigenous people are facing due to being forced to live under a reductionist, individualistic Western approach that is in direct opposition to their worldview.

    She talks about growing up being instilled with the importance of ancestry and tradition; why she moved to New York; how psychedelics helped her move through the trauma she felt in herself and saw so commonly in her family tree; and capitalism: how we need to move away from our private ownership, profit-maximalist, extractive model into a steward mentality inspired by the Indigenous voices and principles that have been silenced for so long.

    And she lays out all that she’s doing to push these goals forward and help these communities: her work with the Urban Indigenous Collective, Shock Talk, the Indigenous Medicine Conservation Fund, Journey Colab and their reciprocity trust, and even her time last year at the World Economic Forum in Davos. We’re thrilled that she’ll be speaking at our conference, Convergence, this March 30 – April 2.

    Notable Quotes

    “One of the principles that I always was taught is that Indigenous peoples were always taught to be humble and not to be proud and not to be loud. But I have always felt like that was a way to keep us stagnant, to keep us complacent. So I would say I’m definitely a disruptor of this generation.”

    “We are dealing with a burden of poverty, we’re dealing with so much chronic morbidity and mortality, as well and our chronic health. There is a number of different issues that we’re facing as Indigenous peoples. However, I’d also like to highlight how resilient we are as well. To be able to survive genocide, forced relocation, boarding school, and the poor socioeconomic status that many of us face [and] our families face, but continue to be a voice for our communities; continue to be on the front lines, advocating for missing and murdered, advocating for the protection of our land and demanding land back – I see a resurgence.”

    “When you look at that skyline of that concrete jungle in New York City, I love to remind folks that it was the Mohawk ironworkers who risked their lives on that skyline, to be able to create the world we see around us. The paths that we walk today [and] the rivers that flow have always been used by the Indigenous peoples who came before us.”

    “When we think about the economy and this market, it’s not capital that creates economic growth; it’s people. And it’s not this reductionist, individualistic behavior that’s centered at the core of economic good; it’s reciprocity, and being able to make sure that we have a market and an economy that’s inclusive; that’s bringing in all voices, that’s also considering all voices, all of the different parts of the ecosystem – not to silo people, but to bring everyone together, I think, will be the opportunity of a lifetime to really be able to really enact change.”

    Links

    Sutton-king.com

    Urbanindigenouscollective.org

    Imc.fund

    Doubleblindmag.com: Why the “Psychedelic Renaissance” is just Colonialism by Another Name

    Menominee-nsn.gov

    YouTube: The Jingle Dress Dance

    Wikipedia: Carlisle Indian Industrial School

    Wikipedia: Ingrid Washinawatok (Flying Eagle Woman)

    NPR.org: The pope’s apology in Canada was historic, but for some Indigenous people, not enough

    Nysenate.gov: Senate Bill S6924A

    IHS.gov (Indian Health Service)

    Shocktalk.io

    Wikipedia: Potlatch

    Theseventhgeneration.org: Introducing The Seventh Generation Principle – to Promote True Sustainability

    YouTube: TED Talk: The dirty secret of capitalism — and a new way forward (Nick Hanauer)

    Bloomberg.com: Forget Burning Man — Psychedelic Shamans Now Heading to Davos

    Journeycolab.com

    Journeycolab.com: The Journey Colab Reciprocity Trust

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    PT378 – Course Corrections, Preparation, and High-dose Experiences: “Who Are You Now?”

    In this episode, Joe interviews Zach Leary: host of the MAPS podcast, facilitator at Evo Retreats, author, and of course, son of psychedelic legend, Timothy Leary. 

    Leary was last on the podcast four years ago, so this episode serves as a bit of a check-in and reconnection, and truly goes all over the map. He discusses his relationship with Ram Dass and reconnecting to psychedelics (and himself) after a 13-year spiritually-bankrupt career and not quite understanding his identity outside of his father’s shadow; why the psychedelic facilitation role shouldn’t be standardized; Dave Hodge, Kilindi Iyi, and super high-dose experiences; ancestor work; solo ski trips compared to the Vipassana experience; the ease with which people play Monday Morning Quarterback with the story of his father; floatation tanks and the birth of ketamine; why Ram Dass held a grudge against Dr. Andrew Weil; and critiques of Michael Pollan – how much How to Change Your Mind skipped, how little experience Pollan had before essentially jumpstarting a revolution, and how many people now think they’re ready for a psychedelic experience when they’re likely not.

    Leary just recorded with Rick Doblin for the MAPS podcast, he’s finalizing his first book (tentatively titled And Now the Work Begins – Psychedelics in the 21st Century and How to Use Them), and launching an online 8-week course called “Psychedelic Studies Intensive,” which begins February 8. He will also be a guest at our first conference, Convergence (March 30 – April 2).

    Notable Quotes

    “I don’t believe that the psychedelic facilitation role or experience should be standardized. There are just so many ways to do it. There’s no one way to do it. Sure, there are some wrong ways to do it, there’s no doubt about that. But it shouldn’t be standardized. It shouldn’t be generic. It shouldn’t be one-size-fits-all. It really doesn’t matter to me if somebody has gone through the MAPS training program or CIIS; that doesn’t make them any more qualified than some of the amazing underground visionaries who are doing healing work as well. …No one psychedelic experience is the same. Why should the facilitation experience be the same?”

    “It sort of becomes like a catch 22: If you have to ask if you’re ready for psychedelics… I don’t know, maybe you’re not.”

    “If you look at every iteration on the war on drugs; every single one, going back to the late nineteenth century criminalization of opium against Chinese immigrants in the bay area, to African Americans [and] cocaine, to [the] Hispanic population and ‘Reefer Madness’ to white, long-haired, anti-authoritarian hippies dropping LSD, African Americans [and] the crack epidemic – every single time (I mean, this list is endless), it always goes back to a war against people [they] don’t like. And once you do that, you create an inherent system of corruption to fuel that, because it’s a civil war. It’s not a war against the drug. It’s a civil war against behavior [and] against consciousness.”

    “This isn’t a political issue. It’s a human rights issue. Like it or not, every single society on the face of the Earth since recorded history has used mind and mood-altering chemicals. And that is never going to change, ever.”

    Links

    Zachleary.net

    Zach’s Psychedelic Studies Intensive 8-week course

    MAPS Podcast

    Evoretreats.com

    Psychedelics Today: Zach Leary – Trans-humanism, psychedelic use, over-use and taking a break

    Spotify: The Joe Rogan Experience #891 – Zach Leary

    The Wayback Machine: Maps.org

    Zidedoor.com (Dave Hodge’s church)

    Psychedelics Today: Remembering Kilindi Iyi

    Theancestorproject.com

    Goodreads.com: Lon Milo DuQuette’s quote

    Floatworks.com: John C. Lilly: The pioneer of floating

    Marijuanamoment.net: DEA Admits ‘Racial, Ethnic and Class Prejudice’ Led To Drug Criminalization And The Agency’s Own Founding

    Thedailybeast.com: A Drug Kingpin, the CIA, and Prisoners: Freeway Rick Ross and America’s Mass Incarceration Problem

    Newsweek.com: Two-Thirds of American Voters Support Decriminalizing All Drugs: Poll

    Psychedelics Today: PT377 – Integrative Medicine: Health, Wellness, and Psychedelics, featuring Andrew Weil, M.D.

    The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America, by Don Lattin

    From Chocolate to Morphine: Everything You Need to Know about Mind-Altering Drugs, by Andrew Weil, M.D.

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    PT377 – Integrative Medicine: Health, Wellness, and Psychedelics

    In this episode, Joe interviews New York Times best-selling author, pioneer in the field of integrative medicine, and overall legend in the health and wellness space: Andrew Weil, M.D.

    As the author of 15 books on health and wellbeing and a regular in the media, you’re probably familiar with Weil and some of his work, but you may not know of his more psychedelic connections: a long history of experimentation, leading Paul Stamets in the direction of functional mushrooms, co-writing one of the first papers about the Sonoran Desert toad and 5-MeO-DMT with Wade Davis, and being a strong advocate for psychedelics being the spark that could spur a global change in consciousness.

    He talks about the connection between true osteopathy and integrative medicine; why the traditional Chinese medicine approach to mushrooms made so much sense to him; academia’s lost interest in pharmacognosy; how psychedelics may help people with autoimmune diseases; turmeric (he largely popularized it as an anti-inflammatory supplement); matcha; why we should be studying the placebo effect much more than we are; humanity’s innate drive to experience altered states of consciousness; and why a big part of the psychedelic revolution is so many people starting to believe in panpsychism. 

    We’re pumped to finally have him on the podcast, and we’re even more excited that he’s spreading the gospel of psychedelics to a health and wellness crowd who may still be a bit apprehensive about something they were taught to fear.

    Notable Quotes

    “I’m tremendously interested in [psychedelics’] potential at the moment for therapeutic use and ceremonial use, and actually, if I think about it, I would say I’m really interested in the possibility that they can save the world. I don’t see many other things out there that can do that.”

    “I don’t know anything else that is so readily available and that, with at least some attention to how you do them, has such a potential to change how people interpret their perceptions and interpret their experience of the world around them. I’ve seen just such dramatic changes in people and in myself as a result of psychedelic experience. …My first book, The Natural Mind, that was published in 1972, said that only a global change in consciousness could really transform our world, and I think that the psychedelic revolution has the potential to do that.”

    “I think the placebo response is the meat of medicine. That’s what you want to try to make happen. It’s pure healing response from within, mediated by the mind and unmixed up with the direct effects of treatment. …The commonest way I hear that word used is things like, ‘How do you know that’s not just the placebo response?’ or ‘We have to rule out the placebo response.’ I mean, we should be ruling it in. You want to make it happen more of the time.”

    “Human beings have an innate drive to experience altered states of consciousness, not necessarily through the use of drugs (although drugs are a very convenient way to do it). One of the examples I gave was of kids learning to spin until they get dizzy and fall over and the world changed, and that’s universal as far as I can tell, in all cultures. So I got a lot of crap from people for saying that there was an innate drive toward altered states of consciousness, but I absolutely believe that, and I think that a part of the drug problem in our culture has been our failure to acknowledge that and teach people safe and better ways of satisfying it.”

    Links

    Drweil.com

    The Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine

    Dr. Weil’s Matcha (use code: PsyToday for a generous discount!)

    Wikipedia.org: Robert C. Fulford

    Psychedelics Today: Wade Davis – Ayahuasca and a New Hope for Colombia

    Psychedelics Today: Could the Sonoran Desert Toad Cure Narcissism?

    Pubmed: Bufo alvarius: a potent hallucinogen of animal origin

    Psychedelics Today: Dr. Malin Vedøy Uthaug – Ayahuasca and 5-MeO-DMT Research

    Riverstyxfoundation.org

    Wikipedia.org: Pharmacognosy

    Psychedelicpharmacist.org

    Psychedelicreview.com: Psychedelics as Anti-Inflammatory Agents

    Usnews.com: Is the Green Mediterranean Diet Healthier Than Regular Mediterranean?

    Psychedelicmedicinecoalition.org

    Vogue.com: Can Psilocybin Challenge Our Pharmaceutical Dependence?

    ​​From Chocolate to Morphine: Everything You Need to Know about Mind-Altering Drugs, by Andrew Weil

    Psychedelics Today: PT236 – Drugs: Honesty, Responsibility, and Logic, featuring: Dr. Carl Hart

    Psychedelics Today: Psychedelics, Philosophy, Transhumanism, and Peter Sjöstedt-H

    Exploringyourmind.com: Panpsychism: A Fantastic Theory About Consciousness

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    PT375 – Microdosing & Citizen Science: Introducing the World’s First Take-Home EEG Microdosing Study

    In this episode, Victoria hosts a bit of a microdosing roundtable, speaking with three champions of microdosing: “The Father of modern microdosing,” James Fadiman, Ph.D.; Adam Bramlage, Founder/CEO of Flow State Micro (a functional mushroom company and microdosing educational platform); and Conor Murray, Ph.D., a neuroscientist at UCLA who conducted the world’s first EEG microdosing study. 

    Fadiman and Bramlage recently launched a very popular course through our Psychedelic Education Center: “Microdosing Masterclass,” which covers the history and science of microdosing, as well as best practices for microdosing safely and effectively. They discuss the roots of microdosing, decriminalization and concerns over the corporatization of psychedelics, what we’ve seen so far in research, and how we’re finding ourselves in an era where people are going to be allowed to actually help themselves.

    Murray is hoping to make big waves in the promotion of microdosing with the world’s first take-home EEG microdosing study: participants will be mailed a wireless headband that will be able to track brain activity in real world scenarios – the citizen science we’ve so desperately needed in comparison to lab studies that couldn’t be more different from how people actually live day-to-day. There is no criteria to participate, and, in contrast to lab studies, they want all data possible: people who are in therapy or not, people following different microdosing protocols, people microdosing for different reasons, etc. Will microdosing improve brain scores on cognition and emotion? Will participants see measurable improvements? And how will these numbers look when comparing scores months after initial peak neurological windows? 

    If you’d like to participate, head to psynautics.com and sign up. The first 50 people to do so will receive the wireless EEG to track their brain for one month for only $40.

    Notable Quotes

    “Because it’s inherently interesting for people to find that their consciousness can be improved (not necessarily changed) and that their whole physical system can also be improved, microdosing has found a natural niche which is: it might be good for you, and as far as we can tell, it’s very, very, very, very, very rarely bad for you. And that’s a nice risk/reward ratio.” -James

    “It’s hard to fool the brain. You can maybe have a good placebo effect if you’re trying to ask someone: how much do you think your cognition’s improving today or emotion’s improving today? But it’s harder to fool the brain into having a different answer.” -Conor

    “There’s so many people who will not buy into this until it’s proven by modern science, and that’s why Conor and his work is so important, and this new study with the wireless headbands and the idea that every citizen scientist on the planet can write Conor at Conor@psynautics.com and be a part of this study and get a wireless headband – I mean, that is fascinating. That is taking microdosing out of a sterile lab and putting it into the natural environment where it came from, as hunter-gatherers, for hundreds of thousands of years.” -Adam

    “That’s really the metaphor, which is: the more windows, the more you see different views, and there’s nothing good or bad about any particular window except how clean it is. …We’re opening up bigger windows in more directions than has been the case in the past.” -James

    Links

    Adam and James’ Microdosing Masterclass

    The Art of Microdosing Q+A with Dr. James Fadiman & Adam Bramlage (A Psychedelics Today webinar)

    Jamesfadiman.com

    Psychedelics Today: PT353 – Psychedelics and Creativity, featuring: Dr. James Fadiman, Dr. Sam Gandy, Dr. David Luke

    Psychedelics Today: PT275 – Transpersonal Psychology, Microdosing, and Your Symphony of Selves, featuring James Fadiman, Ph.D.

    Psychedelics Today: PT303 – Cannabis, Microdosing, and Our Evolutionary Connection to Psychedelics, featuring Adam Bramlage

    Flowstatemicro.com

    Psychedelicsocietysf.org: Microdosing Movement masterclass

    Psynautics.com (order your headset here)

    UCLA Psychedelic Studies Initiative

    Wikipedia.org: Pituri

    The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide: Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys, by James Fadiman, Ph.D.

    Hightimes.com: North America’s First Take Home Psilocybin Trial Approved in Canada

    Microdose.me

    YouTube: “Drugs: The Children Are Choosing” 1969 Drug Abuse Awareness & Discussion Film

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    PT328 – Courtney Watson, LMFT – Ancestral Veneration and Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy For (and By) QTBIPOC

    In this episode, Joe interviews Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist and certified sex therapist, Courtney Watson.

    In just two years’ time, Watson grew from “Psychedelics are white people drugs” to opening a ketamine clinic to serve the marginalized communities she comes from. She shares the work she is doing through Access To Doorways; her Oakland-based non-profit whose mission is to bring psychedelic-assisted therapy to queer, trans, non-binary, gender non-conforming, Black, Indigenous, people of color, and two spirit communities.

    This discussion is all over the map, from the platform of African traditional religion through the prospect of trauma healing for white supremacists, across BIPOC erasure in psychedelic research studies, and down into the realms of connecting to the spirit of entheogens from our pasts. Watson waxes on Black resilience; Hoodoo; how ALL plants are entheogenic; how conceptualization and talk in the psychedelic space often falls short of real action; ancestral veneration and ways to connect with one’s ancestral past; and the concept of “spirit-devoid” synthesized compounds actually being the evolution of those plants’ spirits.

    She breaks down thoughtful considerations for queer and trans people in the psychedelic space, pointing out that while our society places too much emphasis on gender and sex, the acknowledgement of gender diversity and tearing down of the myths of hetero- and cisnormativity is hugely important. She believes that true access to these medicines can lead to true healing, which leads to love, justice, and actual equality. You can support Access to Doorways by making a donation here.

    Notable Quotes

    “Our people will talk to us. They will guide us. They will direct us. Especially for folks that don’t have ancestral practices in their day to day and haven’t had for generations; ancestors are starving for attention. They’re like, ‘Thank God you see us!’ Give them some light, give them some love, give them some attention, and they will open roads for you in all sorts of ways that you never knew were possible.“

    “I think we also place way too much emphasis on gender and sex in this culture in this way that ends up stigmatizing the fact that there is gender diversity. …Holding all of this knowledge that heteronormativity is a thing and cisnormativity is a thing, and that these are not the default when we’re working with trans folks and folks that do not identify as heterosexual – that is really important.”

    “Healing could actually help shift what’s happening. It can help turn things in the ways that they need to be turned; in the ways towards love, towards justice, towards actual equality. It’s only when we are healed that we can actually do that; 1) because we have enough energy to be able to do that, but also because we have enough vision and foresight to be able to do that. The clarity of what it means to actually love only comes when we are healed.“

    “There’s a lot of conversations, there’s a lot of talk, there’s a lot of conceptualizations, there’s a lot of dreams. But there’s not a lot of action. …So many people get stuck in the conceptualizing piece of it and the philosophizing piece of it that action gets missed. Access to Doorways is action. With $7000, we have given 4 subsidies. I know people that have raised ten times more than us and have not done that much. It is completely about doing what we say that we’re doing. It is completely about action towards healing.”

    Links

    Access2doorways.com

    Access2doorways.com: The Access Key Pledge

    Doorwaytherapeutics.com

    Psychedelics Today: PT278 – Ayize Jama-Everett, Courtney Watson, Leticia Brown, and Kufikiri Imara – A Table of Our Own

    Chacruna.net

    California Institute of Integral Studies: Psychedelic-Assisted Therapies and Research Certificate Program

    Wikipedia.org: Hoodoo (spirituality)

    Wikipedia.org: Anthropocentrism

    Ancestry.com

    Journal of Psychedelic Studies: “Diversity, Equity, and Access in Psychedelic Medicine,” by Monnica Williams & Bia Labate

    Alma Institute

    Fireside Project

    Wikipedia.org: Papa Legba

    About Courtney Watson, LMFT

    Courtney Watson is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and AASECT Certified Sex therapist. She is the owner of Doorway Therapeutic Services, a group therapy practice in Oakland, CA focused on addressing the mental health needs of Black, Indigenous & People of Color, Queer folks, Trans, Gender Non-conforming, Non binary and Two Spirit individuals. Courtney has followed the direction of her ancestors to incorporate psychedelic-assisted therapy into her offerings for folks with multiple marginalized identities and stresses the importance of BIPOC and Queer providers offering these services. Courtney has received training from the Center for Psychedelic Therapies and Research at CIIS, MAPS, and Polaris Insight Center to provide psychedelic-assisted therapy with a variety of medicines. She is deeply interested in the impact of psychedelic medicines on folks with marginalized identities as well as how they can assist with the decolonization process for folks of the global majority. She believes this field is not yet ready to address the unique needs of Communities of Color and is prepared and enthusiastic about bridging the gap. She is currently blazing the trail as one of the only clinics of predominantly QTBIPOC providers offering ketamine -assisted therapy in 2021. She has founded a non-profit, Access to Doorways, to raise funds to subsidize the cost of ketamine/psychedelic-assisted therapy for QTBIPOC clients (now accepting donations!!!). When not in the office seeing clients or in meetings for the businesses she leads, she’s watching Nickelodeon with her kids, kinda working on her dissertation and more than likely taking a nap!

    Socials:
    Instagram: Access to Doorways / Doorway Therapeutics

    Support the show!

    Navigating Psychedelics

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    The Intertwined Prohibitionist Histories of Psychedelics and Kratom

    The history of kratom’s long path to (mostly) legality shows us that if done right, fighting against prohibition can actually lead to wins. But to truly fight these battles, we can’t fall into the trap of psychedelic elitism.

    Ever since Westerners first encountered psychedelics, they have been prohibited, demonized, and considered unfit for civilized folk. Beginning with Columbus’s first encounter with psychedelic-snuff-using natives in Hispaniola, this class of psychoactives has always been relegated to the underground. (Ott, 11) While the recent emergence of psychedelic commercialization and medicalization marks our first flirtation with aboveboard operations in nearly 50 years, psychedelic advocates are all too familiar with prohibition after 500 years of psychedelic distrust and drug war assaults. 

    The road to our blossoming revival of psychedelic culture has been filled with tragedy and struggle. Even with the decriminalization of some psychedelics in select cities, most Americans cannot trip without the fear of losing their freedom. We are criminalized for possessing a portal to an unordinary state of consciousness. Undoubtedly, psychedelic prohibition has brought with it the tragic ruination of thousands of lives. Passionate advocates, then, have a chip on their shoulder – an urge to close the chapter on the long history of the Western demonization of psychedelics. 

    For many, this is a noble and moral goal. Yet in shedding the chains of prohibition, we must ensure that we thoroughly scrub ourselves clean of it. In our desperation to leave our struggle behind, we must not fall into the trap of a prohibitionist mindset. 

    Psychedelics are not becoming legal and mainstream because they are “good drugs” in contrast with the rightfully-prohibited “bad drugs.” There is no such distinction, and it was prohibition which constructed the illogical demarcation between “good” and “bad” drugs in the first place. As the Swiss alchemist Paracelsus mused many centuries ago, the difference between a medicine and a poison is the dose – not whether or not it occasions a psychedelic experience.

    What is Psychedelic Elitism and Why is it Bad for the Anti-Prohibitionist Movement?

    Despite emerging from the same struggle against prohibition that most other “drugs” face, the narrative around psychedelic legalization has often included an attitude which can be termed “psychedelic elitism.” Psychedelic elitism is the belief that psychedelic drugs (psilocybin, LSD, etc.) are harmless and beneficial, and used by responsible, upstanding citizens; whereas other drugs (such as PCP, methamphetamine, or heroin) are bad, inherently dangerous, and only used by the lowest characters in society. As such, psychedelics are seen as wrongfully prohibited, while other drugs are rightfully prohibited. 

    Dr. Carl Hart’s 2019 presentation at the Horizon’s Conference in NYC directly touched upon this issue. He warned that any internalization of the prohibitionist mindset would be counterproductive to our overarching goals of creating a more just and equitable society. All drugs, removed from their social context, have potential for both good and bad reactions. For example, in mainstream narratives, psilocybin is used by affluent professionals and underlies the business model for publicly-traded companies, whereas methamphetamine is only used by impoverished individuals without social status. So psilocybin is associated with success and health, while meth is associated with ruin and sickness. This narrative holds sway despite the fact that methamphetamine is legally prescribed under the name Desoxyn, which has helped countless patients live a better life – very much confusing the moralizing mindset which demonizes some drugs but not others.

    We were honored to have Dr. Carl Hart on the show last year. Check it out here!

    Psychedelic experiences can be freeing, euphoric, problem-solving, pain-reducing, easy going, recreational, creative, therapeutic, medicinal, spiritual, ad infinitum. While these qualities drive our passion for psychedelic advocacy, we should keep in mind that the broader category of psychoactive substances, including non-psychedelic drugs (a category which is largely arbitrary and subjective), can also bear these same positive traits. Therefore, they should be included in our struggle against prohibition.

    Any drug, psychedelic or non-psychedelic, can also be indicted in unpleasant experiences as well. It seems, rather clearly, that psychedelic elitism comes from a positive drug experience with what happened to be a psychedelic. With this experience, part of the propagandist veil which obfuscates our understanding of how drugs affect us individually and on a societal level falls away. We become acutely aware that a drug – in this case a psychedelic – can have a positive effect; a profoundly different narrative than the one peddled by prohibitionists. Yet this newfound knowledge of the contradiction is internalized as simply:  “Psychedelics are good.” There is rarely any further research to see if the prohibitionists were lying about all drugs or just psychedelics.

    Applications are open for the second edition of Vital, our 12-month training certificate program in psychedelic therapy and integration, beginning in April 2023. Head to Vitalpsychedelictraining.com for more info, or attend a Q+A to have your questions answered.

    Anti-prohibitionism

    Psychedelics are worth advocating for, but this should never be done at the expense of other substances and their consumers. Removing the risk of imprisonment for psychedelic users but retaining it for other illicit drug users is hypocrisy at its finest. Allowing individuals and organizations to make exorbitant profits with psychedelics while forcing illicit drug merchants into the unregulated underground perpetuates unnecessary user risk while furthering the divide between the wealthy and the poor. 

    Prohibition didn’t originate to prevent the so-called “menace of drugs on society.” Rather, it was enacted to broaden the range of authority held by law enforcement. From its origin in the Harrison Act of 1914, prohibition has been about power and control – usually with a racial slant. The Harrison Act was passed to regulate and tax opium and coca imports in the US. This effectively made it impossible for Chinese immigrants to procure opium legally, thus making opium users liable for arrest. Cocaine was described in the press as giving superhuman strength to black men while simultaneously making them belligerent and violent. From the get-go, prohibition has never been about protecting people, but rather about protecting the status of the dominant class.

    Selectively opposing psychedelic prohibition may be easier than challenging the entire status quo. Focusing on psychedelics means you don’t have to learn about other drugs and why people choose to take them. And speaking out in favor of psychedelics has become increasingly in vogue. In many places you will be positively received when opening up about your psychedelic drug use. But by including all drugs in the fight against drug prohibition, we can selflessly aid others and reduce overall ignorance of pharmacology while raising awareness of sociocultural inequity.

    We should step back and remember why we oppose the prohibition of psychedelics in the first place. If we are committed to fighting for freedom of choice, the reduction of non-violent prison sentences, and the liberty to alter one’s consciousness as one pleases, then complete anti-prohibitionism is necessary. What I hope to convey is that being a psychedelic advocate should be no different than being an anti-prohibitionist. Both fight for freedom, the right to dictate one’s own consciousness, and the end to unnecessary violence instigated by the war on drugs. 

    An extremely relevant case study in fighting prohibition (and winning) can be found in the story of the Southeast Asian tree leaf, kratom.

    What is Kratom?

    Kratom, or Mitragyna speciosa, is the leaf of an evergreen tree that grows from the base of the Himalayas to the Pacific Islands of Southeast Asia. In Thailand, there is written historical evidence of kratom’s use since the mid-17th century, but many believe it has an undocumented history of use dating back thousands of years.

    A photo by Soren Shade of kratom trees from Top Tree Herbs’ greenhouse

    Kratom also has a therapeutic folklore associated with it. A 350-year-old Buddhist temple in Thailand has a message etched in stone recommending kratom for diarrhea. In the “Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia” episode on kratom, a farmer mentions that he reaches for kratom leaves to help with coughing.

    Thailand has the richest history of kratom use among the Southeast Asian countries where kratom trees grow and traditional use centers around the common laborer. Regardless of what kind of manual work they are performing; the scorching heat, unremitant sun, and long days wear on Thai workers. They chewed kratom long before coffee was introduced to the peninsula, with kratom leaves or tea serving the same purpose of energizing them and pushing them through the physical discomfort of hard work.

    Kratom use originated as simple plucking and chewing of the tree’s leaves. People pick a leaf from the tree, tear the stem from the leaf, roll it into a quid, insert the quid into their mouth and lightly chew on it. They express the juices from the leaf for a little less than a minute, letting the juices come into contact with the mucus membrane, before the leaf is spat out and discarded. This chewing and spitting act can be repeated multiple times throughout the day as desired.

    Another popular way to consume kratom is as a tea. Usually, teas are brewed for social settings or to be sold in the bazaar. Leaves are taken from the tree and added to a pot of water, which is left to simmer over a fire for around three hours. In the marketplace, kratom tea is frequently sold in plastic bags to customers who seek it with the same intent as an American Starbucks patron – for the boost. There are also groups of friends who gather in the evenings to drink a shared cauldron of tea that they make over a fire. At this time of day, the tea isn’t meant to give an energizing kick, but rather to be drunk socially while taking it easy and relaxing. Consuming a larger portion actually provides an effect opposite to the one desired when laboring.

    Kratom has a unique response curve depending upon how much is consumed. One or two tea bags or anything under five or six chewed leaves may have an energizing effect, while  stronger tea (or tea consumed in larger quantities) may have an unwinding and sociable effect while comforting the whole body.

    For more about kratom, check out Joe’s interview with Clinical Professor at the University of Florida, College of Pharmacy: Oliver Grundmann, Ph.D.

    Kratom and Prohibition

    Despite the abundance of native ethnopharmacological options, many Thai citizens were regular opium users in the early 20th century. The opium trade was blessed by the Thai government, and a 20% tax was passed onto the consumer. By 1940, it was estimated that between 8%-20% of all tax revenue in Thailand came from opium.

    In 1942, however, Thailand declared war on Allied forces and entered World War II. With war came economic hardship, and in 1943, the Thai government noticed that their opium tax revenue had plummeted. Usually, opium taxes were a fairly constant source of revenue for the government, as consumers maintained their use continually to avoid withdrawal symptoms. 

    Following an investigation in 1943, the Thai government realized that their former opium taxpayers had switched from state controlled opium to locally-growing kratom after someone had discovered that chewing on kratom or drinking kratom tea allowed them to stop using opium without unpleasant side effects. The word got out and spread like wildfire.

    In a special meeting on January 7th, 1943, Police Major General Pin Amornwisaisoradej, a member of the House of Representatives from Lampang, stated “Taxes for opium are high while kratom is currently not being taxed. With the increase of those taxes, people are starting to use kratom instead and this has had a visible impact on our government’s income.”  Later that year, kratom was made illegal, marking its first encounter with prohibition. In the 1970s, the war on kratom escalated, and the law changed to require that all kratom trees in Thailand be chopped down. Thousands of people were imprisoned and had their lives ruined, while many more were negatively impacted in other ways.

    This self-guided class investigates the history, science, and best practices for safe and effective microdosing; hosted by Adam Bramlage, founder of Flow State Micro, Dr. James Fadiman, the “father of modern microdosing,” and a dozen expert guest faculty. Enroll today!

    Terence McKenna and Kratom

    In 1987, Terence McKenna was approached by a magazine called Trip to write a column called “Our Man in Nirvana.” McKenna was to be sent to remote locations around the world to relax and report back on the local culture. The magazine closed its doors shortly after he started writing for the column, but he had been sent to Thailand on the magazine’s dime, and had produced a brief article from his journey. 

    Ever the curious adventurer, he sought out kratom while in Thailand, which he had read about in Richard Evans Schultes’ book, The Botany and Chemistry of Hallucinogens. Impressed with the leniency of Thai culture and permittance of drug manufacture and use – especially heroin – Terence was intrigued as to why the kratom tree was illegal.

    According to Terence, “We put out the word, and lo and behold, we got samples of this plant – rootstock. And it was very hush-hush. Everyone was either giggling or looking at us with thin, hard expressions as we scored this plant.” He took the rootstock back to Hawaii and made it “available for certified phytochemists and biochemical researchers to determine what this thing is.” Remarkably, this makes McKenna perhaps one of the earliest kratom vendors in the United States.

    Still intrigued by the mystery of kratom prohibition, McKenna continued to look into the issue. Finally he heard a theory that registered with him. “What we learned as we made our way towards it was why it’s illegal. It’s illegal because it inhibits and interferes with heroin addiction.” Referencing how Thailand exported up to “one third of the world’s heroin,” he hypothesized that perhaps the reason it was illegal was due to its threats on their legal opioid industry. “So, who knows, you know, if this is true. But say it were true. So that means, you know, that this is, ethnobotanically, one of the great coups of the decade. And it explains, then, why the Thais are of such an ambivalent state of mind about it, because it’s poised like a dagger at the heart of their economic life if it’s real.”

    Check out our new self-paced (CE-accredited) foundation course, “Psychedelics: Past, Present, and Future,” with Jerry and Julie Brown!

    Kratom Prohibition in the United States

    Americans were first introduced to kratom in the aftermath of the Vietnam war, when GIs returning from Southeast Asia brought leaves back with them. While small circles of interest developed, only hardcore nerds like Terence McKenna were speaking publicly about kratom in the 1980s.  

    Despite McKenna making it available to “phytochemists and biochemical researchers,” public interest in kratom grew slowly. By 2005, kratom was beginning to develop niche appeal on online bodybuilding forums, and by 2016, the ranks of American kratom consumers were swelling. More and more, people were drawn to kratom by the idea that it may give them energy, help them with an opioid use pattern that they wanted to leave behind, or act as a natural painkiller. The DEA, however, challenged these beliefs when it was announced that they would be scheduling kratom as a controlled substance in August of 2016.

    Instantly, passionate kratom consumers jumped into action. Petitions were circulated that drew more than 100,000 signatures. The DEA’s bulletin, the Federal Register, was bombarded with tens of thousands of passionate stories from people recounting how kratom made their lives better. Kratom business leaders joined together to form a lobbying group called the American Kratom Association (AKA). In a short time, dozens of members of Congress, including Bernie Sanders, had written to the DEA expressing their concern that a kratom ban would cause more harm than good.

    In this brand new CE-approved series, Kyle, Veronika Gold, and experts in trauma and ketamine-assisted therapy (KAP) explore the ethical and compassionate uses of KAP in the treatment of trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder. Sign up now!

    Amidst the public outcry, the DEA backtracked on their plan to schedule kratom. This marked the first instance that anything listed by the DEA to be added to the Controlled Substance Act was overturned: a monumental achievement that cannot be overlooked by those studying the history of prohibition.

    The parent agency of the DEA and FDA, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), reviewed the claims put forth by the DEA and concluded that there wasn’t sufficient evidence to make kratom illegal. However, following their receipt of the HHS letter, the FDA maintained for years that their official policy was that kratom was a threat to public health. It took a congressional investigation in 2020 to reveal that the executive branch’s official position on kratom was that it presented no substantiated risks, and that making it illegal would likely cause widespread social harm.

    In the years that the FDA knew they were directed to not pursue kratom, they still solicited a number of local municipalities and state governments to prohibit kratom anyway. They ultimately convinced six states to make kratom illegal – Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Tennessee, Vermont, Wisconsin – driven by an internal, prohibitionist conviction. The AKA responded, and lobbied five states – Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Oklahoma, and Georgia – to pass protections for kratom consumers with a standardized regulatory framework to ensure the quality and safety of the sales. These legal regulations were filling the void that would normally be filled by the FDA, who, instead of focusing on protecting consumers through regulations, chose to pursue total prohibition.

    The anti-prohibition trend has caught wind overseas as well. After over 75 years of prohibiting an ancient, traditional, and naturally occurring tree leaf, Thailand announced they would re-legalize kratom in 2020. Since 2021, 12,000 prisoners have been freed from their sentences related to possession or sale of kratom, and the price of a kratom leaf has dropped by 80-90%. In 2021, kratom was estimated to be a $1.3 billion dollar industry, and with an overwhelming majority of the world’s kratom being exported from Indonesia, the Thai government recognized how much money their prohibition was leaving on the table. After such positive change in global kratom acceptance, Thailand’s legalization news, however, was quickly overshadowed.

    World Court

    In July of 2021, kratom once again narrowly escaped prohibition. After failing to convince enough state governments to ban kratom, the FDA announced that they would be sending an official letter of recommendation to the United Nations, advising them to add kratom to the international list of controlled substances. When it was announced in the Federal Register, the kratom community was once again quick to respond. 

    Initially, the AKA sent out a mass newsletter to inform kratom consumers that the UN and World Health Organization (WHO) were in the process of making kratom illegal on behalf of the FDA. They concluded that the FDA was likely frustrated with the slow progress of attempts to push kratom prohibition through individual states, so they changed their strategy and decided to take their prohibitionist mission to the international level. Having failed at the federal level in 2016 and having lost the blessing of the HHS, it was no longer feasible to make kratom federally illegal. 

    The United States is constitutionally bound to UN declarations that it signs. Since the US signed onto the Convention on Psychotropic Substances of 1971, Congress is required to make any substance illegal that finds its way onto the UN’s list of controlled substances. This would allow the FDA and the DEA to effectively skirt the need to supply the evidence required to ban a substance in the United States, and render the failure to prohibit kratom domestically null and void.

    Kratom advocates submitted over 70,000 comments against the prohibition to the FDA via the Federal Register. The AKA organized dozens of scientists and researchers to present their work on kratom to the WHO. By the time the hearing date came around, kratom advocates were ready for a fight. The strategy at the WHO meeting was to present as much evidence regarding the safety of kratom as possible, and science was on the side of kratom. Point by point, kratom advocates and scientists refuted each false claim made against kratom, proving they were unsubstantiated. On November 18th, 2021, the WHO’s Expert Panel of Drug Dependence concluded that “there is insufficient evidence to recommend a critical review of kratom.”

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    Going Forward

    The kratom community and industry is working towards normalizing kratom and cementing its protection on the state level. Each year, leading kratom businesses spend millions of dollars hiring lobbyists to pressure state legislators to pass the Kratom Consumer Protection Act (KCPA), which would function similarly to state cannabis laws to protect it from federal interference (or at least attempt to). 

    The KCPA has a distinct focus on health and safety regulations. It recognizes that contamination and adulteration are real and dangerous, and any adverse effects resulting from contamination would be spun by the media and prohibitionists to further harm kratom’s reputation. The strategy, then, is to lean into the robust safety profile of kratom to ensure its longevity. The largest kratom businesses have also banded together to enact quality control measures and perform audits on themselves to prove that they are adhering to food grade cGMP (commercial Good Manufacturing Practice) standards. This is not a cheap or easy process, but the effort is undertaken to show in good faith that the industry is mature and responsible.

    Finally, the role of normalizing the use of a substance plays a significant role in the fight against prohibitionists. Generally, getting a majority to oppose prohibition (as 91% of Americans feel towards cannabis) is the goal of all grassroots anti-prohibitionists. As such, there have been a few attempts to personalize kratom, oftentimes through pathos-driven commercials detailing the story of people who can enjoy life again because of kratom. Today, kratom is increasingly being seen as a household object, as products such as kratom tea bags grow in popularity and broaden the consumer demographic.

    Another kratom shot from Top Tree Herbs’ greenhouse

    What to Learn About Prohibition From Kratom

    Kratom has successfully defeated every federal prohibition attempt made against it in the United States. Six states have made it illegal, but even those states are now considering replacing their bans with the regulatory framework laid out in the KCPA. Thailand, the country with the richest history of kratom use, recently re-legalized it, likely due to the undeniable economic benefit kratom exportation would bring to their country. The WHO and UN, normally aligned on drug policy with the US, couldn’t ignore the overwhelming outpour of grassroots support and unanimous scientific consensus on the safety profile of kratom. 

    Still, the most impressive feat performed by the kratom community yet was defeating the DEA in 2016. Normally, the DEA has unilateral decision-making power when it comes to prohibiting substances in the United States. That kratom was able to slip their grip suggests that prohibition at large is defeatable. The methods used to defeat kratom prohibition – hiring lobbyists, mobilizing hundreds of thousands of supporters, and convincing Ph.D.s and MDs to testify – should be taken to heart by anyone who finds themselves standing up against prohibition of any sort.

    At this very moment, the DEA is attempting to schedule more than half a dozen psychedelic compounds, including DOI and DOC. Together, they have been utilized in over 2,000 peer reviewed scientific publications and have been indispensable to psychedelic research. 4-OH-DiPT, 5-MeO-AMT, 5-MeO-MiPT, 5-MeO-DET, and DiPT are also slated to be scheduled soon, which would prevent further study of their effects. (DiPT, for example, causes novel auditory distortions which have the potential to elucidate the mysteries of auditory neural-processing.) Some journalists and advocates have stepped up to the plate to fight the DEA for their continuation of prohibition. However, a united psychedelic front hasn’t emerged, which kratom advocates have argued as being essential to stopping these bans.

    Like psychedelics, kratom has a storied history of use. Both have been devastated by prohibition, but the true test of their merit is shown in their phoenix-like ability to continually inspire consumers to fight for their legality. Use of a substance – any substance – is not justification to imprison someone. Prohibition exponentially raises the possibility of harm that comes with consuming any substance by preventing education, quality control, and normalization. We must expand our scope to include more than psychedelics in our advocacy. Prohibition needs to end, and the clues to victory may just be found in the story of a tropical tea leaf.

    A graphic Top Tree Herbs made when fighting the UN
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    PT317 – Jason Grechanik – Ancient Wisdom, Plant Dietas, and The Universe Within

    In this episode of the podcast, Joe interviews Jason Grechanik; a tabaquero running plant dietas, an ayahuasca ceremony facilitator at The Temple of the Way of Light, and host of “The Universe Within” (@universewithinpodcast) podcast.

    Grechanik tells his story and digs deep into the rich history of shamanism, herbalism, and Indigenous spiritual traditions that span the globe from Siberia and India to Peru. The unifying theme rests on bridging our cultural commonalities; recognizing the fundamental truths consistent across cultures and acknowledging how this seemingly lost knowledge has been kept, guarded, and passed down through epochs of change.

    He unfolds the many layers of ayahuasca medicine work; examining plant intelligence, plant dietas, ways of seeing beyond yourself in the world of spirit, and how deep ayahuasca work can inspire gratitude and humility. And he discusses how group containers exemplify universal oneness; the value in both Western and Indigenous medicine; critiques for the current psychedelic renaissance; the power of breathwork; and the debate between traditional plant medicines and newer lab-derived substances – how everything has a spirit, even a mountain. 

    Notable Quotes

    “I think it’s always really important when we’re talking about these experiences to also realize that they’re extremely personal; that there’s certainly archetypal experiences that these plants can invoke, but they’re very personal as well. And for some people, what they need is the opposite of that. They need to see beauty and love and their own self-worth and to have a very gentle experience. And then other people need to be thrown into the abyss to kind of shake themselves out of something. And I think that’s where that idea of plant intelligence comes in.”

    “It’s not that far-fetched to think that these medicines were ancient, and that they were guarded even through apocalypses and catastrophic events and colonization. They kept these things, but why did they keep them? They kept them because they were seen as not only important, but actually something that was inseparable from humanity.”

    “All of these things; there’s a time and a place for it. There’s benefits to certain things, there’s some drawbacks to certain ways of doing things, but ultimately it’s: what is going to be best for the patient? And that’s also something that’s fundamental to any holistic medicine, is realizing that there’s no panacea for everyone. We’re all different. We all have different body types, we have different stories, we have different physical ailments, [and] different mental stories. So how do we find the medicine that’s going to be best for us in this moment?”

    Links

    Jasongrechanik.com

    Nicotianarustica.org

    The Universe Within podcast

    Templeofthewayoflight.org

    Santodaime.org

    The Bhagavad Gita, by Eknath Easwaran

    Dreamshadow.com

    The Vedas: With Illustrative Extracts, translated by Ralph T.B. Griffith

    About Jason Grechanik

    Jason Grechanik’s journey has led him around the world in search of questions he has had about life. Early in his twenties, he began to develop a keen interest in plants: as food, nutrition, life, and medicine. He began learning holistic systems of medicine such as herbalism, Traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurveda, and nutrition. That curiosity eventually led him to the Amazon where he began to work with plants to learn traditional ways of healing.

    Jason came to work at the ayahuasca healing center Temple of the Way of Light in 2012. After having worked with ayahuasca quite extensively, he began the process of dieting plants in the Shipibo tradition. In 2013, he began working with maestro Ernesto Garcia Torres, delving deep into the world of dieting. Through a prolonged apprenticeship and training, involving prolonged isolation, fasting, and dieting of plants, he was given the blessing to begin working with plants.

    He currently runs plant medicine retreats in Peru and travels abroad running dietas. He also works at the Temple of the Way of Light as a facilitator of ayahuasca ceremonies. In 2020, Jason created a podcast called “The Universe Within.”

    Socials: Instagram / Facebook / YouTube

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    PT316 – Lenny Gibson, Ph.D. – Vital Psychedelic Conversations

    In this episode of Vital Psychedelic Conversations, David interviews philosopher, clinical psychologist, Grof-certified Holotropic Breathwork® facilitator, and long-time mentor to Joe and Kyle: Lenny Gibson, Ph.D. 

    They talk at length about shamanism, Greek mythology, tribal cultures, and the overlapping themes across them. They discuss how religion became but a shadow of the ancient wisdom these cultures held; the commonalities between physics and poetry; how Holotropic Breathwork is a shamanic technique appropriate to 20th century western culture; and the battle between attainable knowledge and the vice of ignorance.

    Gibson discusses the “dying before dying” that took place at Eleusis; how practices like meditation and breathwork can help us in recovering what in Zen is called “original mind;” achieving mystical enlightenment by studying mathematics; and the philosophical parallels between Plato, Kurt Vonnegut, Alfred North Whitehead, and the ancient Greeks.

    He also shares how LSD has reshaped shamanism along with a fun story from the first time he met Albert Hofmann. When considering the most vital conversations people should be having, Gibson encourages us to return to the origins; to study the lineages that embodied the mystical wisdom discovered through non-ordinary states – something he believes our modern culture is missing. In the words of Leon Russell, “May the sweet baby Jesus shut your mouth and open your mind!”

    Notable Quotes

    “Lao Tzu says, ‘The secret awaits the vision of eyes unclouded by longing.’ The secret is in plain sight. All one has to do is step back and pay attention.”

    “Conformity and deep understanding don’t go together.”

    “I try to discourage the focus on substances because one of the most important means in Greek culture was poetry. Homer may or may not have been a person identifiable, but his poetry survived as a body. …The Greeks gathered in large festivals and they would recite the poems of Homer, The Iliad, and The Odyssey, and get thousands of people together chanting the same poems – a huge rave!”

    “The absolutely most impressive thing about Stan Grof’s discovery …that if you empower people in accessing their deepest Self, you will get more than you could get by having a psychoanalyst talk to them about themselves.”

    Links

    Dreamshadow.com

    Psychedelics Today: Lenny Gibson – A Brief History of Psychedelics in the Western World

    Psychedelics Today: Lenny Gibson – Whitehead and Holotropic Breathwork

    Whitehead Word Book: A Glossary with Alphabetical Index to Technical Terms in Process and Reality, by John B. Cobb Jr.

    Process and Reality, by Alfred North Whitehead

    Alan Watts: “The World as Just So (Part 2)“

    Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research, by Stanislav Grof

    The Republic, by Plato

    “The Beach Boys,” Disney Girls

    About Lenny Gibson, Ph.D.

    Leonard (Lenny) Gibson, Ph.D., graduated from Williams College and earned doctorates from Claremont Graduate School in philosophy and The University of Texas at Austin in counseling psychology. He has taught at The University of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Lesley College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He served a clinical psychology internship at The Veterans Administration Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, and trained in Holotropic Breathwork with Stanislav Grof. Most recently, he has taught Transpersonal Psychology at Burlington College. Together with his wife Elizabeth, he conducts frequent experiential workshops. He is a founding Board member of the Community Health Centers of the Rutland Region. As a survivor of throat cancer, he has facilitated the Head and Neck Cancer Support Group at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. Lenny is President of Dreamshadow Group. He raises vegetables, fruit, and beef cattle on a homestead in Pawlet, Vermont, and plays clarinet in local bands.

     

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    PT311 – William Leonard Pickard – LSD, Fentanyl, Prison, and the Greatest Gift of All: The Natural Mind

    In this Bicycle Day edition of the podcast, Joe had the honor to sit down in-person with chemist and researcher, William Leonard Pickard. In 2004, Pickard was famously convicted for the alleged manufacture of 90% of the world’s LSD – the largest case in history – scoring him two life sentences in a maximum security prison. Prior to his conviction, Pickard was a drug policy researcher at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and deputy director of the Drug Policy Research Program at UCLA.

    Pickard discusses his prediction of the current fentanyl crisis (warnings which fell on deaf ears) and watching it all unfold and desecrate lives across the globe from behind bars on the televisions of the Tucson, Arizona Penitentiary he found himself in. With new and dangerously addictive substances like fentanyl being produced carelessly at staggering rates, he believes that it’s incredibly important that we be stronger than any substance, while cautiously asking: will there soon be a drug that is stronger than the will of man? 

    He talks about the unfair and ongoing sentence of Ross Ulbricht; the alchemy in drug manufacturing; the Fireside Project; what made LSD special; substance overuse and what he saw when volunteering in an ER; the inhumanity of prison and the coping mechanisms of prisoners (like making pets out of ants); 2C-B; NBOMe; LF-1; LSD (of course); and perhaps the most sultry devil of them all, caffeine. And he shares his stance on why it’s okay to be drug-free: how the natural and unaltered mind is the greatest gift of all, and how it’s actually a sign of great respect to the sacraments to finally put them down after you’ve received the message you needed to hear. 

    Happy Bicycle Day from Psychedelics Today! If you’re celebrating, please be safe and respectful. 

    Notable Quotes

    “I do think that it’s important to remember that these powerful drug experiences that people have had (psychedelics or otherwise) are not the end-all and be-all – not a religion in themselves but simply a place that points to a greater realization; a greater purity of life and practice. And in the end, you don’t need the drug. That’s one of the beauties of psychedelics, I think, is that they tend to be not only non-lethal (at least the classical hallucinogens: mescaline, LSD, largely psilocybin), but they also are self-extinguishing; that is to say, after a number of long nights of the soul, one may realize that one has learned everything that this particular sacrament can teach and it’s time to put it down. It’s not necessary to go chasing after analog after analog, after different drug experiences with hundreds, soon to be thousands of things available on the net. It’s not necessary to be continually stoned on a different analog every weekend. …It would be respectful for these particular sacraments to put them down and, in honor, say farewell, and simply go about a healthful life of caring, loving one’s friends and families, [and] doing good work in the world. It’s okay to be drug-free. And that’s one of the beautiful things that these particular compounds teach us.”

    “I believe that the nobility of ourselves, the dignity of ourselves, is that we are stronger than any substance. We are stronger than heroin. We are stronger than cocaine. We are stronger than methamphetamine. We are stronger than fentanyl and carfentanil or sufentanil or any of its analogs. We are stronger than alcohol or nicotine. And that must always be true or the world will be enslaved to a substance.“

    “The problem children of the future are not developed by rogue underground chemists. There are few of those and most are not well-trained. The problem children of the future, drug-wise, comes from Big Pharma [and] their relentless tweaking of molecules.“

    “When I first was released, … the first thing that happened when the government van drove away and suddenly, for the first time in twenty years, I’m standing alone with no inmates or officials or anything around – I’m alone for the first time in twenty years – the first thing I did was I saw a flower on a growing tree and went to stare at the flower for about twenty minutes. It was quite beautiful.“

    Links

    Synergia Ranch

    Synergetic Press

    The Future of Fentanyl and other Synthetic Opioids, RAND Corporation, 2019

    Thepsychedelicrenaissance.com: William Leonard Pickard: Imprisonment and Thoughts on the Future of Psychedelics

    Dancesafe.org

    Erowid.org

    Freeross.org: Free Ross Ulbricht

    The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe, by Roger Penrose

    The Rose of Paracelsus: On Secrets & Sacraments, by William Leonard Pickard

    Psychedelics Today: PT247 – Julian Vayne – Magic, Prohibition, and New Models for Legality

    The Brotherhood of Eternal Love

    Journal of Psychopharmacology: Psilocybin produces substantial and sustained decreases in depression and anxiety in patients with life-threatening cancer: A randomized double-blind trial

    Firesideproject.org

    Imdb.com: The Sunshine Makers

    Bicycledaysf.org: Conference/Festival Joe is attending in San Francisco

    About William Leonard Pickard

    Alleged by United States federal agencies to have produced “90% of the world’s LSD,” William Leonard Pickard is a former drug policy fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, a research associate in neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, and deputy director of the Drug Policy Analysis Program at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). As a researcher at Harvard in the 1990s, Pickard warned of the dangers of a fentanyl epidemic, anticipating its deadly proliferation in the illicit drug trade decades before the current opioid crisis. Pickard’s predictions and recommendations for prevention have been acknowledged as prescient by organizations like the RAND Corporation. In 2000, Pickard was convicted of conspiring to manufacture and distribute a massive amount of LSD, and served 20 years of two life sentences, during which time he wrote his debut book, The Rose of Paracelsus: On Secrets and Sacraments, using pencil and paper. Pickard was granted compassionate release in 2020. Presently, he is a senior advisor for the biotechnology investment firm, JLS Fund, and the Fireside Project.

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    PT304 – Jerry B. Brown, Ph.D. – Vital Psychedelic Conversations

    In this episode of Vital Psychedelic Conversations, Kyle interviews professor of anthropology, author, and historian, Jerry B. Brown, Ph.D.

    Together with his wife, Julie M. Brown, MA, he co-authored the book, The Psychedelic Gospels: The Secret History of Hallucinogens in Christianity, where they present compelling anthropological arguments through early Christian frescoes and iconography of the major religion’s long-forgotten entheogenic history.

    Brown discusses the historical and cultural use of entheogens, the major universities currently conducting clinical research, the importance of ethics in this space, the question of ‘will psychedelics survive success (in business)?’, the future of these substances in the fields of medicine and mental health, and rides on the back of giant bengal tigers up volcanoes during LSD journeys. He breaks down why it’s important to understand the role of psychedelics in religion and how they can play a large role in the returning of faiths to their mystical roots, and he highlights two important areas professionals ought to be well-versed in: the establishment of trust between the therapist and client, and the technique of guided imagery – evoking mental images and symbols to facilitate deep healing.

    Brown teaches our CE-approved six-part course entitled “Psychedelics: Past, Present and Future,” and is one of the teachers of Vital, which begins on Bicycle Day, April 19th. Applications for Vital close on March 27th, so if you’re considering joining in, now is the time to act!

    Notable Quotes

    “The magic …is that it is the spiritual experience – the intensity of the mystical experience – that seems to be the kind of magical key that opens the door to healing, to what Grof calls the activation of that inner self-healing intelligence that psychedelics bring to the surface.”

    “To borrow an American Civil Liberties Union phrase, ‘Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty’. And I think that eternal vigilance within the psychedelic community against all kinds of abuse by egomaniacal leaders or ‘phony holies,’ as Julie and I call them (people who want to put themselves out as a spiritual leader and they have no credentials for that); that’s going to happen. And we have to be vigilant for that so it doesn’t derail the good things that are happening.”

    “Guided imagery along with psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy could help heal even cancer, not just alleviate the psychological anxiety and depression.”

    Links

    Psychedeliceducationcenter.com: Psychedelics: Past, Present, and Future

    Psychedelicgospels.com

    Psychedelics Today: PT266 – Jerry B. Brown, Ph.D. – Psychedelics: Past, Present, and Future

    Pewresearch.org: More Americans now say they’re spiritual but not religious

    The Psychedelic Gospels: The Secret History of Hallucinogens in Christianity, by Jerry B. Brown, Ph.D., and Julie M. Brown, MA

    God: A Story of Revelation, by Deepak Chopra

    How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, by Michael Pollan

    Creative Visualization: Use the Power of Your Imagination to Create What You Want in Your Life, by Shakti Gawain

    Healing with the Mind’s Eye: How to Use Guided Imagery and Visions to Heal Body, Mind, and Spirit, by Michael Samuels

    Healing Visualizations: Creating Health Through Imagery, by Gerald Epstein

    Bergin and Garfield’s Handbook of Psychotherapy and Behavior Change, edited by Wolfgang Lutz, Louis G. Castonguay, and Michael Barkham

    About Jerry B. Brown, Ph.D.

    Jerry B. Brown, Ph.D., is an anthropologist, author, and ethnomycologist. He is a Founding Professor of Anthropology at Florida International University (FIU) in Miami, where he teaches an online course on “Psychedelics and Culture.” He also co-created the “Psychedelics: Past, Present, and Future” course for us. Professor Brown teaches and writes on psychedelics and religion as well as on psychedelic therapy. He is coauthor (with Julie Brown, LMHC, an integrative psychotherapist and also his wife) of The Psychedelic Gospels: The Secret History of Hallucinogens in Christianity, 2016.

    Psychedelic Gospels socials: Facebook

     

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    PT303 – Adam Bramlage – Cannabis, Microdosing, and Our Evolutionary Connection to Psychedelics

    In this episode of the podcast, Joe interviews Adam Bramlage: Founder and CEO of Flow State Micro, a functional mushroom company and microdosing educational platform. 

    Bramlage talks about his journey to psychedelics and discovery of microdosing, and how he worries that the troubling issues he saw in the legal cannabis industry are already finding their way into the psychedelic space. He discusses what he experienced when he started microdosing; how he connected with James Fadiman; how he defines microdosing; the concepts of neurogenesis and a gut-brain axis; how more and more professional athletes are using psychedelics to heal brain injuries as well as optimize performance (and how leagues may handle this going forward); concerns over chronic microdosing; and why the goal is always to microdose less over time. 

    While we expected to hear about the benefits of microdosing, their conversation also goes deep into its history and our ancestral connection to psychedelics (particularly psilocybin), touching on Hernán Cortés; R. Gordan Wasson banking for the vatican; Christianity, Jesus, and mushrooms; repeated examples of control through the erasure of history; Tim Leary; Al Hubbard; MKUltra; the Tarahumara Indians’ peyote-influenced ultra-running; cave paintings; Whitey Bulger, and more.

    Bramlage is a speaker on May 27th’s Microdosing Summit (along with Joe), and just released a new “Microdosing Movement Masterclass” in collaboration with the San Francisco Psychedelic Society, which focuses on our ancestral connection to psychedelics and the potential evolutionary use of microdosing. Use code psychedelicstoday at checkout for 10% off!

    Notable Quotes

    “I’m a single dad to two kids, and both of those kids, at periods of time in their life, were raised on a cannabis farm. And what I’ll tell you is this: when you normalize these plants and these tools and it’s just like a flower or a squash that my kid sees farmed like the farmer next to me, my kids want nothing to do with cannabis. It is so uncool. It’s the last thing they want to be around. I don’t have any worries about my son or daughter smoking pot. And why? Because we normalized it. And if you look at Portugal and what they’ve done with drugs and the success they’ve had with decrim legalization, supporting substance abuse issues with therapists and programs; this is the future. This is the answer.”

    “We have an ancestral and evolutionary connection to these plants and it’s only in the last couple hundred years that they’ve been made illegal and bastardized. …We’re putting five or six year old kids on Adderall (which is methamphetamine), but we’re pointing fingers at a parent who gives their kid 10 milligrams of a mushroom.”

    “Psychedelics have an afterglow, or a 48-hour effect, so you don’t need to microdose seven days a week. You can take it on a Monday, take Tuesday off, and you’re still getting benefits. So what I see over time with microdosing is the more people use it, the less they need it. This isn’t a Western medical model of: you’re going to take microdoses five days a week because it regulates your blood pressure and your heart condition. It’s not like that. This is more like: the more people are microdosing over time, the less they need it. …When I’m coaching people or working with clients, the goal is to eventually not microdose.”

    Links

    Flowstatemicro.com

    Psychedelicsocietysf.org: The Microdosing Movement Masterclass

    Microdosing Summit: May 27th (International Microdosing Day)

    Doubleblindmag.com: “How to Microdose” class 

    The Concussion Repair Manual: A Practical Guide to Recovering from Traumatic Brain Injuries, by Dr. Dan Engle

    The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico, by Miguel Leon-Portilla

    The Sacred Mushroom and The Cross, by John M. Allegro

    The Psychedelic Gospels: The Secret History of Hallucinogens in Christianity, by Jerry B. Brown, Ph.D., and Julie M. Brown, MA

    The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name, by Brian C. Muraresku

    Trippingly.net: Al Hubbard: The Original Captain Trips

    Ultrarunninghistory.com: The Tarahumara Ultrarunners

    Secret Drugs of Buddhism: Psychedelic Sacraments and the Origins of the Vajrayana, by Mike Crowley

    Link.springer.com: Effects of psilocybin on hippocampal neurogenesis and extinction of trace fear conditioning

    Gnosticwarrior.com: Whitey Bulger: Crime Boss Said CIA Gave Him LSD in Mind Control Experiment

    About Adam Bramlage

    Adam Bramlage is Founder/CEO of Flow State Micro, a functional mushroom company and microdosing educational platform focusing on harm reduction and best practices. Bramlage works one-on-one with clients to optimize their microdosing experience. He’s helped hundreds of people, from professional athletes to people suffering from addiction and depression, achieve incredible results through microdosing. Bramlage works closely with psychedelic researcher, pioneer and father of modern microdosing, Dr. James Fadiman. In collaboration with Doubleblind Magazine, Bramlage launched his 14 episode online course “How to Microdose,” which was recently featured in Forbes Magazine as one of the masterclasses of psychedelics, and received an award from Gear Report for Top Ten Wellness Products of 2021. In collaboration with the SF Psychedelic Society, he has recently released his online Microdosing Movement Masterclass, looking at our ancestral and potential evolutionary use of microdosing. He is co-founder of the Microdosing Support Network, the first free online monthly microdosing support group. Prior to his work with mushrooms, he spent more than a decade in the Prop 215 and Prop 64 California cannabis space as a farmer, distributor, and manufacturer. He hopes psychedelics does NOT go the same route as legal cannabis.

    Socials: Instagram / Facebook

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    PT293 – Stanislav & Brigitte Grof – The Evolution of Breathwork and The Psychology of the Future

    In this episode of the podcast, Joe and Kyle finally sit down with one of their all-time heroes: Stanislav Grof, MD, Ph.D., who joins them with his wife and collaborator (and co-creator of Grof® Legacy Training), Brigitte Grof, MA. 

    If you’re a fan of Psychedelics Today, you know that one of the major reasons Joe and Kyle met and decided to start this whole thing up was due to a mutual admiration for Grof’s work and a strong desire to spread it through the world of psychedelia. Due to Stan’s stroke a few years ago, we haven’t been able to have him on, but he has recovered enough to grace us with an appearance. 

    Stan and Brigitte talk about his stroke and recovery; developments in his concept of birth perinatal matrices; how they see breathwork evolving; how we get to the psychology of the future; the inner healing intelligence; and the need for more practitioners to have more training in non-ordinary states of consciousness. Stan also tells stories of how he discovered the power of breathwork and bodywork, and a funny story about missing a huge event at Harvard to instead relearn how to say “monkeys eat bananas.”

    While the stroke set Stan back a bit in terms of speech, “the problem is in the cables, not the content,” as Brigitte says, and that is evident – as is Stan’s refreshing and humbling self-awareness and ability to laugh at his struggles. And what’s even more evident is the love between the two of them and how much Brigitte has helped him through this difficult time, and continues to help keep his knowledge in the forefront of this psychedelic renaissance (as we’re trying to do). 

    Notable Quotes

    “This was the only situation where I could see what LSD is actually about, because once you get beyond the matrices, there is no real material substrate for the images. It’s basically just consciousness, and the question is how far the consciousness goes further back.” -Stan

    “I believe that if psychiatry goes in the right direction (not where it is going now) that it ultimately should be done with non-ordinary states of consciousness (not necessarily just psychedelics; it could be breathwork or it could be working with people who have spontaneous experiences, spiritual emergency and so-on), …because some of the deeper sources; they are not reached with verbal talking and just suppressing symptoms. It’s very bad psychiatry. So I believe, if it [goes] in the right direction, that it’s going to be [working] with non-ordinary states of consciousness.” -Stan

    “I find something that is absolutely essential for breathwork …is that the psyche has the intelligence.” -Stan

    “The processes are similar. …Certainly with psychedelics, it’s more visual and it’s longer, but what you could see is anything you can see in breathwork. So if you learn how to deal with this by breathwork training, …it’s an easy step to be a psychedelic sitter or starting to do psychedelics yourself. …When you know how to deal with breathwork and bodywork and everything, then you can deal with psychedelic sessions. It’s a very short, small step to move over to that area.” -Brigitte

    “People can become artists who haven’t been before. It can awaken these abilities, or healing qualities, or people can maybe get some psychic experiences, or just become yourself more, whoever you are or whoever you’re supposed to be. I think that’s what it’s about.” -Brigitte

    Links

    Stangrof.com

    Brigittegrof.com

    Grof-legacy-training.com

    Thewayofthepsychonaut.com

    The Way of the Psychonaut: Encyclopedia for Inner Journeys (Volume One), by Stanislav Grof, M.D., Ph.D.  (Volume Two)

    Theshiftnetwork.com: “The Psyche & Cosmos,” with Transpersonal Psychologist Stanislav Grof, MD and Philosopher Richard Tarnas, Ph.D.: 18-module On-demand Video Training

    Theshiftnetwork.com: “Psychology of the Future,” with Psychiatrist and Transpersonal Psychology Pioneer Stanislav Grof, MD, Ph.D.: A 7-Module Online Course

    Theshiftnetwork.com: “The Way of the Psychonaut,” with Psychiatrist and Transpersonal Psychology Pioneer Stanislav Grof, MD, Ph.D.: A 24-Session Recorded Video Training

    Theshiftnetwork.com: “Psyche & The Cosmos: Using Archetypal Astrology as a Telescope Into Your Depths,” with Transpersonal Psychologist Stanislav Grof, MD, and Philosopher Richard Tarnas, Ph.D.: An 8-Module Online Video Course

    Buy Psyche Unbound: Essays in Honor of Stanislav Grof here!

    Enter the giveaway here!

    The Tim Ferriss Show: Stan Grof (#347) (transcription and audio)

    Psychology of the Future, by Stanislav Grof

    The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, by Erich Fromm

    About Stanislav Grof, MD, Ph.D.

    Stanislav Grof, MD, Ph.D., is a psychiatrist with more than sixty years of experience in research of non-ordinary states of consciousness. In the past, he was Chief of Psychiatric Research at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and Scholar-in-Residence at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, CA. Currently, he is Professor of Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) in San Francisco, CA. In August 2019, his life’s work encyclopedia, The Way of the Psychonaut, was published, and the documentary film about his life and work was published as well: “The Way of the Psychonaut- Stan Grof and the journey of consciousness.”

    About Brigitte Grof, MA

    Brigitte Grof, MA, is a psychologist, licensed psychotherapist, and artist with 35 years of experience in holotropic breathwork. She was certified in the first Grof training groups in USA and Switzerland. She has led breathwork workshops and taught training modules in the US and in Germany. Currently she works in her private practice in Wiesbaden, Germany, and leads workshops and retreats.

    Since April 2016, Stan and Brigitte Grof are happily married, live in Germany and California, and conduct seminars, trainings and holotropic breathwork workshops worldwide. In May 2020, they launched their new training in working with Holotropic States of Consciousness, the international Grof® Legacy Training (www.grof-legacy-training.com).

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    PT291 – Rick Tarnas & Sean Kelly, Ph.D. – The Impact of Stanislav Grof, Ego Death, and The Psyche Unbound

    In this episode of the podcast, Joe interviews two authors and professors at the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco: Rick Tarnas and Sean Kelly, Ph.D. 

    While this is the first PT appearance for Tarnas – a huge name in the archetypal astrology field (and referenced often in our monthly Cosmic Weather Report series) – this episode is not focused on his work, but instead on the new book he and Kelly co-edited: Psyche Unbound: Essays in Honor of Stanislav Grof, which is a collection of 22 essays from the last 50 years about Grof and the impact of his work (a festschrift of sorts). The book features pieces from legends of the past like Joseph Campbell and Huston Smith, and big names in the field today like Michael Mithoefer and Fritjof Capra. It’s quite a beautiful book, and thanks to Synergetic Press, we’re actually giving away five copies signed by Stan Grof himself (click here!).

    Tarnas and Kelly discuss what led to this project happening; why Grof’s work is so important; how Grof connected classic ideas with previously unthinkable concepts and realities; what the over-simplified term, “ego death” really means; and talk about their concern that standardized research is often leaving out the very integral spiritual dimension. They also discuss a different way of viewing the concept of “hanging up the phone,” and Kelly tells the story of a very powerful early psychedelic experience.

    Notable Quotes

    “What [Stan] found was that it was often the challenging experiences – the really difficult ones, the ones where one is encountering not only problematic or traumatic psychological issues, complexes, traumas from early life, etc. – it was bringing these up from the deep unconscious where they’re lodged in our body and in our psyche, and bringing them to consciousness and working them through, releasing them, releasing the emotions and the physical responses that have been bottled up in the psychophysical organism for decades. And that that was the very means by which a psychospiritual transformation could open up, and that one could thereby have both a healing experience and a deeper mystical experience of life.” -Rick 

    “She brought me outside and sat beside me as I lay in the snow for about three hours and was just with me. And that transformed what had been a kind of Hellscape where I was trapped in this world of mirrors (a ‘no exit’ situation) into one of just floating on this sea – a nourishing, milk-white snow ocean. But it wouldn’t have happened unless this compassionate being was willing just to sit with me and hold my hand.” -Sean

    “Stan’s attitude has been one of trusting whatever is coming up, whether it’s a difficult experience or a positive one. The positive ones can often serve as a kind of grounding and awareness that you can keep in the back of your mind, that when a difficult experience starts coming up, this higher unity is still waiting for you in some way. You can trust that the hard experience is not the only game in town.” -Rick

    “If the humanities are colonized entirely by the methodological imperatives and constraints of the natural sciences, we’re essentially blocking out much of what it is to be a human being.” -Rick

    Links

    CosmosandPsyche.com

    CIIS.edu: Sean Kelly

    Buy Psyche Unbound: Essays in Honor of Stanislav Grof here!

    Enter the giveaway here!

    Thewayofthepsychonaut.com

    Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our World View, by Richard Tarnas

    Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, by Richard Tarnas

    YouTube: CITY LIGHTS LIVE! Psyche Unbound- Session One  (Session Two)  (Three)

    The Way of the Psychonaut: Encyclopedia for Inner Journeys (Volume One), by Stanislav Grof, M.D., Ph.D.

    The Way of the Psychonaut: Encyclopedia for Inner Journeys (Volume Two), by Stanislav Grof, M.D., Ph.D.

    Becoming Gaia: On the Threshold of Planetary Initiation, by Sean Kelly

    LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven, by Christopher M. Bache, Ph.D.

    About Rick Tarnas

    Richard Tarnas is a professor of psychology and cultural history at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, where he founded the graduate program in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness. He teaches courses in the history of ideas, archetypal cosmology, depth psychology, and religious evolution. He frequently lectures on archetypal studies and depth psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, and was formerly the director of programs and education at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. He is the author of The Passion of the Western Mind, a history of the Western world view from the ancient Greek to the postmodern that is widely used in universities. His second book, Cosmos and Psyche, received the Book of the Year Prize from the Scientific and Medical Network, and is the basis for the documentary series, “The Changing of the Gods.” He is a past president of the International Transpersonal Association and served on the Board of Governors for the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. 

    About Sean Kelly, Ph.D.

    Sean Kelly, co-editor of Psyche Unbound, is professor of Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS). He is the author of Becoming Gaia: On the Threshold of Planetary Initiation and of Coming Home: The Birth and Transformation of the Planetary Era. He is also co-editor of Ken Wilber in Dialogue: Conversations with Leading Transpersonal Thinkers and co-editor of The Variety of Integral Ecologies: Nature, Culture, and Knowledge in the Planetary Era. Along with his academic work, Sean teaches taiji and is a facilitator of the group process, Work That Reconnects network, developed by Joanna Macy.

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    The Wild World of 19th Century Psychedelics

    Our understanding of the brain in the 1800s was quite different from what we know today – and pretty weird, too.

    You can’t throw a tab of LSD without hitting a story about psychedelics these days. While psychedelics are going through a scientific renaissance, 150 years ago, the field was a circus of misinformation and racism. Occasionally though, through that potpourri of misguided madness, it nailed some concepts that still hold up today. Granted, future scientists will most likely write an article clowning the state of psychedelics in the early 2000s to today, but let me be the first to start that vicious cycle by highlighting some of the more ridiculous concepts people believed in the 19th Century.

    While there may have been many ethnographic studies of psychedelics dating back to the Bronze Age, the concept of modern neuroscience is a fairly new field. In the 1880s, the interest in neuroscience formed from humanity’s attempt to explain mental illness and addiction through scientific terms as opposed to supernatural spirits possessing bodies. Some neuroscientists in the 19th century believed a person’s cognition, along with predisposition of behavioral traits was rooted in neuroanatomy, which some believed was reflected in the physical structure of the skull. The idea that chemistry played a role in brain functionality was a novel concept that didn’t have much support in the scientific community in the early 1880s. In fact, the closest thing science got to neurochemistry was in 1809, when Johann Christian Reil soaked a brain in pure alcohol for a week just to see what would happen (if you’re wondering, it got really hard and took on the texture of shoe leather).

    To first understand the state of neuroscience in the 1800s, we must first comprehend the state of science at the time, and it was bonkers.

    Cell Theory, Darwin, and Phrenology

    The idea that all living organisms consisted of cells and that all cells originated from pre-existing cells (cell theory) proposed by German physiologist Theodor Schwann in 1839 was revolutionary. It shifted the deeply-held religious belief that life originated supernaturally, and instead, emerged from biological means. It sounds trivial now, but society took a collective seat and came to the realization that each person was a community of cells working in unison to create a ‘Bob,’ Connie,’ or ‘Karen’ (and of course, all those Karen cells wanted to see the manager shortly after being created).

    Twenty years after the world recovered from Schwann’s cell theory, Darwin dropped The Origin of a Species, giving birth to the concept of evolution, a radical idea that once again shifted humanity’s focus away from divine creation and more closely towards the modern worldview we hold today.

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    Science in the 1800s was also notoriously racist. Many people used Darwin’s evolutionary theory to justify hateful pseudoscience that revealed the most vile aspects of humanity. While he was able to consciously remove himself from the 19th century racism that prevailed in science at the time, most could not. Franz Joseph Gall constructed the basic ideologies of phrenology in 1808, which was a belief that a person’s mental aptitude could be determined by bumps and ridges in a person’s skull — evidence Gall believed was the pressure of the neuroanatomy of the brain on the skull. More specifically, he believed a person’s behavior was localized in different compartments in the brain — a total of 28 areas to be exact. Things like ‘the firmness of purpose,’ ‘love of poetry,’ and even a place in the brain that’s responsible for a person’s tendency to murder, Gall insisted, could be determined through cranial anatomy. 

    When phrenology emerged in Europe in the 1800s, most scientists discarded the idea since its foundations were based on faulty neuroanatomical information. Gall was tossed out of Austria for proposing such an obviously absurd idea and eventually ended up in France, where even Napoleon Bonaparte ridiculed his concept of phrenology. When the rest of the world seemed to collectively reject phrenology as the pseudoscience it truly was, it found a home in America — because at that conflicted time, obviously it would. 

    With abolitionist movements spreading across the country along with the social underpinnings of what would be known as the Civil War, phrenology was used as a “scientific” reason to justify slavery in America and the overall disgusting treatment of Indigenous people as land continued to be removed from tribal territories. However, phrenology did have its fierce opponents, like John P. Harrison, editor of the Western Lancet, a peer-reviewed medical journal that caught the attention of Southern political leaders when it was introduced to America (and is still in print today). With the assistance of books like Phrenology Vindicated by Charles Caldwell and Crania Americana by Samuel Morton, political leaders had the “scientific” backing to make absurd claims like Africans were neurologically designed to be enslaved and Indigenous Americans were biologically a different species than white people — which made stealing their land a natural process ordained by God.

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    Louis Lewin’s Phantastica

    Amongst the incendiary nature of science during the 19th century, the unlikely emergence of psychedelic neuroscience occurred — and like all things in the 1800s, it was undoubtedly a product of its time. That’s a nice way to say it was sometimes wrong and mostly racist, but interestingly enough, it got some things right. 

    Neuroscience can be defined as the objective study of the brain and the central nervous system. The first neuroscientist to analyze the effects of psychedelics was Germany’s Louis Lewin in his book, Phantastica. Although it was officially released in 1924 when Lewin was 74, it contained his collected psychedelic research that took place in the late 1800s. Among the many drugs he categorized, he decided not to call psychedelics “hallucinogens” since not all substances elicit a hallucinatory response. “Phantastica” was the word he decided on, along with other equally interesting names like “Inebriantia” for drugs like alcohol, and my personal favorite, “Excitantia” for substances like caffeine and nicotine. 

    Lewin was never really a scientific rock star in his time though, mostly because he refused to renounce his Jewish heritage in 19th-century Germany – racism and anti-Semitism in the scientific community at this time went hand-in-hand. However, Lewin did get the props he deserved in psychedelics when Paul Henning of the Berlin Botanical Museum named peyote Anhalonium Lewinii in Lewin’s honor. 

    Around the time Lewin came on the scene, most people were describing psychedelics in a subjective manner, wrapped up in pseudo-science and religious mysticism. People weren’t tripping because of psychedelic-induced neurological activity — evil spirits possessed the taker of the psychedelic, which meant evil behavior was soon to follow. Metaphysics, with its focus on the nature of human consciousness and existence, was rapidly growing in the 1800s. Lewin believed that describing psychedelics in metaphysical terms would ruin what we could potentially learn from them. His research was wholly focused on dispelling the pseudoscience that surrounded psychedelics, yet Lewin fell into the trap of anointing psychedelics with otherworldliness with his idea that an invisible force called ‘vital energy’ surrounded all living things. Lewin believed this vital energy governed all chemical, mechanical, and physical properties of each person and that psychedelics had the ability to interrupt this energy. He also believed a person’s resistance to psychedelics was dependent on the strength of their vital energy. 

    This wasn’t the first time Lewin would take an L in his neuroscientific research of psychedelics. When assessing the capability of certain psychedelics on the brain, he assumed (1924, p. 8) that black people naturally had a higher recovery rate than whites: 

    “We may take it as a fact that Negroes have greater recuperation powers than white people. This is due not to climatic conditions but to certain innate qualities possessed by them.”

    In his writings, he didn’t seek to prove this theory — it was just taken as matter-of-fact; another symptom of the 19th century. Lewin also insisted Indigenous people knew of their own racial inferiority, which is why they self-medicated with psychedelics: 

    “The Indians of South America are said to have an intuitive appreciation of their own defectiveness, and to be ever ready to rid themselves of such melancholy feelings by intense excitement, i.e. through kola and similar drugs” (p. 2).

    Still somehow, Lewin believed psychedelics ‘form bonds in people of all walks of life’ (p. 7). He realized the diversity of people was so great that a one-size-fits-all explanation of human physiology and psychology in regards to psychedelics wouldn’t suffice. Likely influenced by Darwin’s The Origin of Species, Lewin made a strong case for the adaptations of organisms to a variety of external influences like psychedelics. He believed a skilled anthropologist could trace the development of culture directly to the availability of psychedelics, an idea shared 100 years later in Terence McKenna’s Food of the Gods. Lewin was also one of the first scientists to see the health benefits of psychedelics, mostly based on accounts of Indigenous people taking them for mental health. 

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    In the 1800s, a small but prevailing idea amongst scientists was that psychedelics created a “trip” by activating ductless glands in the body to secrete hormones into the endocrine system. Lewin thought the theory was BS and instead theorized that psychedelics excite certain “brain centers” to “transmit agreeable sensations” (p. 3) through the chemistry of the substance. He basically described what we now know as psychedelics acting as serotonergic agonists that bind to mostly 5-HT2A receptors in the brain — an original theory Lewin established nearly 50 years before the discovery of serotonin.

    Lewin’s assumption that psychedelics hit specific cortical regions through something like the serotonin system was remarkable, but only because he made other successful guesses like recognizing that every chemical study on the brain up to that point was conducted ex vivo, or on a dead brain, and that in vivo neuro research conducted on a living brain may have chemicals that were not present or didn’t transform into something else upon death. He also knew about the brain’s need for oxygenated blood and suggested that psychedelics may affect this process. Neuroscience had to wait 100 years for Lewin’s idea to be tested with BOLD (Blood Oxygen Level Dependent) brain imaging through MRI. 

    When it came to theoreticals, Lewin had a few. One of his notable ones was the idea of a toxic equation, which is a loose formula that dictates everyone has a certain resistance to the effects of psychedelics based on their neurophysiology and overall physiology. On the surface, it sounds like a reasonable idea, but digging deeper, it gets a bit irrational. His general belief was that people built up a resistance to psychedelics due to parts of the brain weakening and not being able to process these substances. There’s still no proof of this over a century later though, and in 2021, Dr. Ling-Xiao Shao conducted research that pointed to the opposite. Psilocybin actually strengthens dendritic density in the brain and repairs neurons that have atrophied due to stress and depression. Lewin also believed cells had ‘will-power’ and when a person takes a psychedelic after not taking it for a long time, the memory of the ‘agreeable sensation’ is just too strong to resist and that’s how people become addicted again (p. 18). 

    Learning From the History of Psychedelics

    Unfortunately, psychedelic neuroscience research didn’t really catch on in the 19th century, mostly because civilization almost collapsed due to a global opioid addiction that crippled nearly every economy and led to prohibition in the early 1900s. The bigotry and racism of the 19th century confined Louis Lewin’s research of psychedelics into a box that takes a lot of ethical unpacking to fully absorb.

    The origin of neuroscience is shrouded in poorly constructed science and whacky ideas which were specifically designed to marginalize groups of people from the discussion of who could be considered human. It has a dark past, but with a more defined scientific method and newer ideas, the future of psychedelic neuroscience is whatever we make it. In every natural system, diversity is the key defining factor for the progression of that system. These ideas aren’t mine or even new — Darwin wrote several books on this. This same need for diversity also applies to psychedelic neuroscientific research. History shouldn’t serve as an obstacle for the exponential amount of discovery that can be revealed if we all work together. We will get there.

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    PT275 – James Fadiman, Ph.D. – Transpersonal Psychology, Microdosing, and Your Symphony of Selves

    In this episode, Joe and Kyle finally interview legendary author and microdosing popularizer, James Fadiman, Ph.D. 

    He talks about Tony Sutich, Abe Maslow, and the emergence of transpersonal psychology in an era when psychology was especially uncomfortable with spiritual experience; the early days of the Transpersonal Association and their relationship with Ram Dass; how easy it was to get LSD from Sandoz Pharmaceuticals and the vastly different ways people started experimenting with it; and how society dealt with him, his ideas, and these new substances as they started to become more mainstream.

    He discusses microdosing: how it emerged, dosing amounts, how you’re supposed to feel, and how researchers are finally starting to look at brain waves of microdosers. And they discuss the recent self-blinding microdose study and how he thinks the “not statistically significant” difference was actually notable; the strictness of clinical trials and how researchers often stack the deck to get the results they want, and how real world evidence (which psychedelics has a ton of) is seen as the defining factor of a successful trial. 

    And he talks about his newest book, Your Symphony of Selves: Discover and Understand More of Who We Are, which he sums up quite well with: “Have you ever argued with yourself? Who is the other person arguing?” He believes (and psychology believed, before Freud) that we are made up of several different shifting selves and the key to a happy and healthy life is to embody the right self at the right time. 

    Notable Quotes

    “I’m still not acceptable. I have no University affiliation, no hospital affiliation, no clinic affiliation, and I talk about the correct use of psychedelics in ways that the people who are doing the fundamental research either don’t know or can’t talk about.” 

    “The level of oversight from the federal government – you cannot imagine it, knowing anything about the federal government today. You wrote Sandoz and Sandoz said, ‘I don’t know who you are. Here’s a whole bunch of LSD.’ Literally, the instructions you would get is: ‘Tell us what you’re doing.’ Because Sandoz had this wonderful problem: they had this substance that was the most powerful substance per molecule that they’d ever found and they didn’t know how to make any money out of it.”

    “The secret of microdosing is if you’re noticing it, that’s a little too high a dose. …The perfect definition of a microdose is: You have a really good day, you get things done that you’ve been putting off, you’re nice to someone at work who doesn’t deserve it, after work you do one more set of reps at the gym than you usually do, you really enjoy your kids, and at the end of the day you say, ‘Oh, I forgot I had a microdose.’”

    “The last step is always real world evidence, which is why drugs get recalled. …The funny thing with psychedelics is we have all the real world evidence pretty well stacked up to start. So I’m not waiting for the clinical evidence, because it comes in last.

    “The image of the healthy self is more like a choir, where everyone is singing their correct note, but not the same note. And also they’re singing at the right pitch, at the right tempo, at the right volume, so that it works. And a beautifully organized choir doesn’t need a leader because they’re hearing each other.”

    Links

    Jamesfadiman.com

    Pubmed: Might Microdosing Psychedelics Be Safe and Beneficial? An Initial Exploration

    Microdosingpsychedelics.com

    YouTube: Psychedelics Today: Exploring LAPSS – Los Angeles Psychedelic Science Symposium

    The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide: Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys, by James Fadiman, Ph.D.

    Your Symphony of Selves: Discover and Understand More of Who We Are, by James Fadiman, Ph.D. and Jordan Gruber, J.D.

    Innertraditions.com

    Linkedin.com: The Stephen Hawking of Psychology: Anthony “Tony” Sutich

    Transpersonalcommunity.org: The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology

    The Only Dance There Is: Talks at the Menninger Foundation, 1970, and Spring Grove Hospital, 1972, by Ram Dass

    Wikipedia.org: Human Potential Movement

    Mimosatherapeutics.com

    Maryoliver.com

    About James Fadiman Ph.D.

    James Fadiman, PhD., has been researching psychedelics since 1961 and the effect of microdosing since 2010. His most recent books are The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide: Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys and Your Symphony of Selves: Discover and Understand More of Who We Are (with Jordan Gruber). He is working on a new book about microdosing and wants to hear remarkable microdosing stories: jfadiman@gmail.com. 

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    PT269 – Adam Strauss – Comedy, OCD, and The Mushroom Cure

    In this episode, Joe interviews New York-based writer, comedian, and performer, Adam Strauss. 

    Strauss tells his story of growing up with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder; struggling with decisions, control, and anger, and how a small 2006 study on psychedelics and OCD mixed with meeting someone who had had a life-changing ego death at age 16 led him to try to fix his OCD with psilocybin. The subsequent trips (especially the bad ones) became a template for how to work with his OCD, as they taught him to accept, feel, and breathe through the emotions his OCD was trying to protect him from. He tells the full story through his one-man show, “The Mushroom Cure,” which he’s hoping to turn into a special. 

    He also talks about comedy in the era of Covid and why he doesn’t do much stand-up anymore; the creation of his YouTube show, “The Trip Report” (which originally was co-hosted by last week’s guest, Hamilton Morris); Terence McKenna and the concept of humans coevolving with psychedelics; drug urban legends and the misinformation of the drug war (Oprah and MDMA causing holes in the brain); and why psychedelics may be the best tool towards saving the planet. 

    Notable Quotes

    “OCD is entirely a disease of thinking. If you don’t have thinking, you don’t have OCD. It’s this trying to figure out and get things perfect in your mind, but the roots of OCD, I believe (and I believe this is true of all what we would call mental illness): …it’s always in the body. There’s always an emotion, which is basically a physical sensation that we don’t want to experience. And so with OCD, there is a fear or a loss, and the idea is that if I can figure everything out in my head or if I can arrange things perfectly in the world, then that feeling in my body will change. …And so if you’re able to accept that anxiety, to really feel the fear in the body, that takes the wind out of the OCD’s sails.”

    “I don’t think psychedelics are necessarily going to save humanity, but I think our odds of survival without psychedelics are vanishingly slim.”

    “If you’re talking about OCD, you’re really talking about this absolute inability or unwillingness to trust anything. You don’t trust yourself (that’s why I have to check the stove 47 times), but you also just don’t trust the universe. You don’t trust that things will be okay. And on psychedelics, I’ve had these spiritual, religious, ‘plus four’ experiences where there is a deep sense of a profound intelligence …at work- an intelligence that transcends my own consciousness and probably transcends human consciousness. And I think so much of why we’ve gone off the rails (at least in Western society) is this real loss of religious and spiritual experience.”

    “Having people who should know better believe drug war propaganda is not top of the list, but it is significant. It is significant, and I think it tells you how effective this propaganda has been. We laugh about “Reefer Madness,” but a lot of these same people who laugh about “Reefer Madness” do believe that LSD can give you a flashback because it still stays in your spinal fluid.”

    “I think one thing psychedelics reliably do at high doses is they can be humbling, and I think humility; it doesn’t always lead to compassion and empathy, but I think it often can.”

    Links

    Adamstrauss.com

    Instagram: @atomstrauss

    Facebook

    Twitter: @atomstrauss

    YouTube: The Trip Report

    Themushroomcure.com

    Safety, Tolerability, and Efficacy of Psilocybin in 9 Patients With Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (2006 study)

    Clinicaltrials.gov: Efficacy of Psilocybin in OCD: a Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled Study. (current Harvard study)

    Bouncing Bear Botanicals Out Of Business

    Psychedelics Today: Can Psychedelics Provide Relief for Autistic Individuals?

    Letters to a Young Poet, by Rainer Maria Rilke

    Psychedelics Today: Sam Gandy – Psychedelics and our Connection with Nature

    The Duncan Trussell Family Hour, Episode 447: Adam Strauss

    “The Pharmacratic Inquisition” documentary

    Psychedelictimes.com: Iranian Religious Authority Considers Psychedelic Medicines Halāl

    Theroot.com: Philippine President Attacks Neuroscientist Carl Hart for Speaking Against Drug War: ‘That Black Guy … Son of a Bitch Has Gone Crazy’

    Wikipedia.org Urban legends about drugs (MDMA causing holes in the brain)

    Aubrey Marcus Podcast, #184: Psychedelics and Self Acceptance, with Adam Strauss

    Thewayofthepsychonaut.com

    About Adam Strauss

    Adam Strauss is a writer and performer based in New York. His monologue, “The Mushroom Cure,” is the true story of how he treated his debilitating obsessive-compulsive disorder with psychedelics. The New York Times said it “mines a great deal of laughter from disabling pain,” The Chicago Tribune called it “arrestingly honest and howlingly funny”, and Michael Pollan called it “brilliant, hilarious and moving.” Adam is also the creator of The Trip Report, a psychedelic news show streaming now. Adam also speaks about OCD and psychedelics in articles, on podcasts, and at conferences.

     

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    PT266 – Jerry B. Brown, Ph.D. – Psychedelics: Past, Present, and Future

    In this episode, Kyle interviews anthropologist, author, ethnomycologist, and now co-designer of a new Psychedelics Today course, Jerry B. Brown, Ph.D.

    Like this episode, the course he worked on with Kyle is called “Psychedelics: Past, Present, and Future,” and this podcast serves as a brief overview of what the course goes much further into, from the landmark psychedelic events that brought us here, to the current models of psychedelic-assisted therapy, to the many career avenues that have opened up (and will continue to open up) as a result of this renaissance. 

    Brown discusses Albert Hofmann’s synthesis of LSD, Stan Grof’s first psilocybin experience, the Nixon administration and the beginnings of the drug war, Roland Griffiths and Walter Pahnke (and Rick Doblin’s follow-up research), the early end-of-life cancer and psilocybin study, the creation of the Mystical Experience Questionnaire, and how Gordon Watson’s betrayal of María Sabina mirrors a lot of what’s going on today between Indigenous tradition and the Western money grab.

    He talks about the concerns over Compass Pathways and patent law, how legalization often follows medicalization, how Portugal has handled the drug war, why we need to know our history, and the importance of recognizing the different ways of knowing. And he gives a very detailed description of his life-changing psilocybin journey many years ago that led to the discovery of his soul’s code.

    If you want to learn much more, Psychedelics: Past, Present, and Future begins on October 26th! More info at Psychedeliceducationcenter.com.

    Notable Quotes

    “There’s a difference between standing on the shoulders of giants and crushing the people who have gone before us.”

    “I was completely blown away by this Jungian synchronicity; this meaningful coincidence of a mental, psychedelic experience and something physical that happened in the world. How could they possibly be connected? But they were obviously connected. And this is the way I found what James Hillman (the psychologist) called my soul’s code.” 

    “That magic and that resacralization of life’s experience that people talk about; this is a real deal. I mean, if you think about it, many of the founders of the field had transformative, transformational psychedelic experiences that took them from where they were in one part of their life and brought them into working on psychedelics.” 

    “In both trials, the intensity of the mystical experience described by patients correlated to the degree to which their depression and anxiety decreased. I mean, let’s just think about what this means: We have white-coated shamans in a clinical laboratory administering a synthetic psychedelic to predictably occasion a mystical experience, which turns out to be the key to healing. This is amazing and brings psychedelics back to its shamanic roots.” 

    Links

    Psychedelicgospels.com

    The Psychedelic Gospels Facebook

    Psychedelics Today: Jerry and Julie Brown – Healing Through Mystical Experience

    Psychedelics Today: Psychedelics: Past, Present, and Future course

    Chacruna.net: María Sabina, Mushrooms, and Colonial Extractivism

    Cnn.com: Report: Aide says Nixon’s war on drugs targeted blacks, hippies

    The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, by James Hillman

    Maps.org: Pahnke’s “Good Friday Experiment”: A Long-Term Follow-up and Methodological Critique

    Csp.org (Council on Spiritual Practices)

    Vice.com: Can a Company Patent the Basic Components of Psychedelic Therapy?

    Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work, by Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal

    About Jerry B. Brown, Ph.D.

    Jerry B. Brown, Ph.D., is an anthropologist, author, and ethnomycologist. He is a Founding Professor of Anthropology at Florida International University (FIU) in Miami, where he teaches an online course on “Psychedelics and Culture.” He also co-created the “Psychedelics: Past, Present, and Future” course for us. Professor Brown teaches and writes on psychedelics and religion as well as on psychedelic therapy. He is coauthor (with Julie Brown, LMHC, an integrative psychotherapist and also his wife) of The Psychedelic Gospels: The Secret History of Hallucinogens in Christianity, 2016.

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    Anima Mundi: Psychedelics and The Ensouled Earth

    illustration representing Jung's theory of the conscious and unconscious to represent Psychedelics Today column "Psychedelics in Depth"

    Original Illustration by Martin Clarke

    What is the ‘Anima Mundi’ and how can it help us understand psychedelic experiences?

    This is part of our column ‘Psychedelics in Depth‘ which defines and explains depth psychology topics in the context of psychedelics.

    Once upon a time, people saw nature as vividly alive, full of gods, spirits, and beings that existed beyond the realm of human culture. Nature was ensouled, and the earth was animate. In the tradition of depth psychology, this concept is known as the Anima Mundi: the Soul of the world. In this article we will explore the interplay between psychedelics, the earth, and the spirit of place.

    Can psychedelics put us in touch with a more-than-human intelligence that emanates from the earth itself? Do certain places carry particular energies or “souls” which psychedelics might allow us to perceive? Finally, what role can psychedelics play situated at the crossroads of nature and culture, especially in this time of dire ecological collapse?

    Ask yourself: have you ever felt immersed in some ineffable communication with an aspect of the natural world during a psychedelic experience? Have you ever felt uneasy upon setting foot in certain places, yet unable to say why? Have you ever felt a powerful sensation upon visiting an ancient redwood grove, a stone circle, or one of the earth’s many sacred sites?

    Truth be told, there is an extremely high likelihood that most long-time users of psychedelics would report at least one instance of the natural world having a profound influence on their trip in ways that defy rationality.

    But before we go any further, a story.

    Land Memory and Psychedelics

    I work as a psychedelic therapist with MycoMeditations, a legal psilocybin retreat based in Jamaica. I’m fortunate to get detailed insights into a vast array of psychedelic experiences on an almost weekly basis.

    During one retreat, a woman shared about a repetitive vision she had during her trips. She explained how, on each mushroom journey, she heard a certain kind of “tribal music”—drumming and singing in an incomprehensible language. During her third and highest dose, she found herself near a campfire glimpsing the “people” responsible for this ecstatic sound. She described them in detail, especially their uniquely pointed heads. She had no explanation for this.

    As it happens, the Taino, the Indigenous people of Jamaica and the wider Caribbean, practiced what is known as “cranial shaping,” a method of elongating the skulls of their newborns. This practice, done by many Indigenous peoples of the Americas, was a distinguishing cultural marker of the Taino, who lived in greatest numbers on Jamaica’s south coast—exactly where MycoMeditations happens to be based.

    In fact, the very stretch of coast where our retreats occur, an area now called Treasure Beach, is known as an archaeologically rich zone for Taino pottery, confirming this region as one of, if not the most significant ancient centers for the Jamaican Taino population.

    As a colleague informed me, guests having visions of “pointy-headed people” was not something new to her. She was utterly unfazed by this seemingly inexplicable synchronicity.

    What do we make of this? Despite mounting research, there is still a healthy dose of mystery lingering about these plants and molecules. To discard her experience as meaningless, or simply ‘coincidence,’ either briskly diminishes its significance and robs her of potential avenues for meaning-making—the very antithesis of psychedelic therapy and integration—or reveals something concerning about the practitioner themselves.

    No psychedelic facilitator worth their salt attempts to dictate the meaning behind someone’s experience.

    Depth psychology would have us take seriously these moments of exchange between the human psyche and the living earth, and encourage us to lean into these liminal crossroads of perception. For if myth and medicine tells us anything, it is that the most fertile ground for growth is where our domesticated understanding of life ends and the wild unknown of the forest begins.

    The Anima Mundi and the Ensouled World

    Yet, why is it that the idea of a tree or a river or a gust of wind having something to say to us is so unsettling? Why is the notion of an ‘inanimate object’ having some claim on our senses so confronting to the modern Western psyche?

    Author and professor of history, Theodore Roszak, who coined the term ecopsychology (along with counterculture, interestingly enough,) wrote in his book Voice of the Earth, “If we could assume the viewpoint of nonhuman nature, what passes for sane behavior in our social affairs might seem madness. But as the prevailing reality principle would have it, nothing could be greater madness than to believe that beast and plant, mountain and river have a ‘point of view.”

    To believe that the natural world has a point of view, or is ‘ensouled’, as archetypal psychologist James Hillman explored in his book, Re-Visioning Psychology, is to understand that rocks and waterfalls contain an equally relevant quality of psyche that allows for avenues of communication between our two seemingly disparate beings.

    The idea that the world itself has a Soul, and is therefore an animate, even conscious being, is one of the most radical notions within the depth tradition. Carl Jung deemed this old idea the Anima Mundi: a concept with roots going far back into esoteric religious and mystical traditions such as hermeticism, gnosticism, kabbala, and of course countless Indigenous traditions across the world.

    Tracing European culture’s disconnection from this ancient notion of the ensouled earth, Jung wrote in his Collected Works Volume 11, “The development of Western philosophy during the last two centuries has succeeded in isolating the mind in its own sphere and in severing it from its primordial oneness with the universe. Man himself has ceased to be the microcosm and eidolon [image] of the cosmos, and his ‘anima’ is no longer the consubstantial scintilla, spark of the Anima Mundi, World Soul.”

    The research on psychedelics’ capacity to dissolve the ego and increase one’s connection to nature places these substances in direct conversation with the climate crises, which could be seen as an equally, if not even more valuable benefit of psychedelics.

    Embracing the notion of the Anima Mundi can help us navigate and integrate psychedelic experiences that blur the culturally constructed lines that our society would have us believe separates humanity from the living earth.

    In this regard, the Anima Mundi and depth psychology asks us to question many pillars of European thought, specifically the legacy of Enlightenment thinkers like René Descartes, whose work marked a decisive turning point by cleaving apart any remaining threads of pagan belief, which connected European consciousness to the living earth.

    The Research: Nature-Relatedness and Psychedelics

    If generations of ceremonial plant medicine use by Indigenous people across the globe was not sufficient evidence, current research shows us that psychedelics can foster a greater sense of connectedness to the natural world. A 2019 study by Kettner et al. concluded that a sense of “nature relatedness was significantly increased 2 weeks, 4 weeks, and 2 years after a psychedelic experience”, and that the frequency of lifetime psychedelic use was positively correlated to a baseline sense of nature relatedness in healthy participants.

    Concluding their research, Kettner et al. wrote: “With the loss of self-referential boundaries being a defining characteristic of ego-dissolution experiences under psychedelics, as well as experiences of awe in nature, it may be that the loss of perceived boundaries between the self and the other may in turn facilitate an expanded perception of self/nature continuity or overlap, reflected by increased feelings of nature relatedness.”

    This discussion of “self/nature continuity or overlap,” invokes and calls into question the legacy of Descartes mentioned above. Indeed, it places these types of psychedelic experiences squarely in the other corner from centuries of Western philosophy and worldviews. In the age of global climate collapse, the implications of this research cannot be understated.

    Current research on psychedelic medicine’s potential to treat many intractable mental health issues is invaluable, to be sure. As a mental health professional, I could not be more thrilled. Yet, the research on psychedelics’ capacity to dissolve the ego and increase one’s connection to nature places these substances in direct conversation with the climate crises, which could be seen as an equally, if not even more valuable benefit of psychedelics.

    Defining Anima and Animism

    Many Indigenous traditions embrace what anthropologists called an “animistic” way of perception, and have woven it into their cosmologies, ceremonies, and the very fabric of their cultural belief systems. The personification of plants and places within certain Indigenous traditions, especially terms like “madre ayahuasca”, “grandfather peyote”, or “La Pastora” (one of the many Mazatec names for Salvia divinorum) plainly acknowledges that there is more going on within the earth than an “inanimate” accumulation of minerals and dirt.

    From my own time spent with Indigenous peoples from many different cultures, as well as years of formal academic study in anthropology, religion, and depth psychology, this is one of the clearest messages that I’ve received: the earth does indeed have something to say to us, if only we can remember how to listen.

    Indigenous ways have always been relevant to depth psychology because of this very understanding, that the earth is undeniably ensouled, living, sentient, and worthy of respect. Psychedelics can play a crucial role in helping many people remember this humble fact, and guide us down a path which, at heart, requires a style of listening, reverence, and attention which our culture has quite painfully forgotten.

    Anima Mundi for Facilitators: Relationship to Place, Grief and Soul

    Now would be a reasonable time to ask how any of this applies to actually working with people navigating and integrating psychedelic experiences.

    To start, establishing some form of relationship to the actual land where one’s work takes place is the bare minimum. Learn about the Indigenous people of your particular place, who they are and were, and any Indigenous place names you can manage to dig up; even better if you can learn it in person from their living descendants, and cultivate a relationship with them.

    The story shared at the beginning of this article would have not meant much to me if I were ignorant of the Taino people and their particular practice of shaping their skulls. Uncovering the untold story of the land, its ecological and geological timeline, and especially its history of human migration, colonization, and modernization, must factor into a holistically grounded relationship with a place.

    Sitting with the raw story of a place often leads one down the dark stairwell of grief. This is a good thing. But it is wise to be prepared for it, and to know how to support others who may find themselves immersed in a story whose weight might be much more than they can bear. Grief, however, can be one of the most profound gateways to feeling, and therefore to the Soul. Psychedelic experiences which bring one face to face with land-grief are important because they are emanations from the place itself. One could say that it is one of the earth’s many attempts to speak to human beings​​—a process which we have conditioned ourselves to largely ignore. 

    Finally, cultivating one’s own relationship to the natural world, to the unique curvature and temperament of a place, will inform what occurs when the mists of the otherworld begin to encircle one’s perception. Personally, before any psychedelic journey, I offer some tobacco, and ask permission from whatever ancestors called that place home. You wouldn’t just wander into someone’s house without knocking first. There are many reasons for doing this, the least of all being that it’s simply polite.

    Closing Thoughts on Anima Mundi and Psychedelics

    Psychedelics can provide a key to unlocking our culturally fractured and traumatized relationship to the natural world, and its indwelling Soul, the Anima Mundi. Psychedelics have the capacity to dissolve the ego and open one to experiences of awe in nature, which in turn help a sense of greater nature relatedness take root.

    As individuals, we need awe-inspiring encounters with the Anima Mundi which crack open the ego and reveal the Soul. As a culture, we are in dire need of a renewed sense of reverence and respect for the more than-human-world, which psychedelics may be able to instill in our increasingly adrift society. And as ensouled beings, we need deeply personal, Soul-level encounters with something greater than ourselves, which help us remember how to listen to the language being sung all around us.

    The other road, I’m sorry to say, is bleak.

    The poet-philosopher Goethe knew this when he wrote, “And so long as you haven’t experienced this: to die and so to grow, you are only a troubled guest on the dark earth.”

    About the Illustrator

    Martin Clarke is a British Designer and Illustrator from Nottingham, England. Specializing in branding, marketing and visual communication, Martin excels at creating bespoke brand identities and striking visual content across multiple platforms for web, social media, print and packaging. See more of his work here.

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    No, VR Will Not Give You A Psychedelic Trip

    woman using virtual reality headset with glitch effect to represent psychedelic VR

    Psychedelic VR—or virtual reality claiming to give users a psychedelic trip—is here, but is there any truth to the claims? And theoretically, how would it work?

    A few years ago I took five grams of psilocybin mushrooms and went to the E3 video game expo in Los Angeles only to be lost in a world of virtual reality. It’s not something I would suggest for everyone, unless you want to spend the rest of the day wondering if cosplayers are just regular people from the future.

    There’s an untethered prism of technological potential that has been emerging from VR in the past decade. However, you’re reading this because you want to know if a person can have a psychedelic trip while in VR. The short answer is ‘no,’ and any VR company that makes these claims is not being truthful. The long answer is—definitely not right now, but the more neuroscience and technology advances, the closer we will come to having a psychedelic trip exclusively in virtual reality. I’ll explain one of those ways, but first how did we get this far with virtual reality?

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    A Brief Rundown on the History of VR 

    Let’s get the definitions straight. Virtual Reality (VR) is the complete immersion within an artificial world usually through a headset. Augmented Reality (AR) is the addition of virtual components to reality, like an email notification that appears in your vision, usually through glasses. Mixed Reality (MR) is the combination of VR and AR that brings together the digital and real world. An example would be a real-world object that is QR-coded so a person can see a virtual image emerging from the object when wearing mixed-reality glasses. Microsoft HoloLens is pioneering this technology. Finally, there’s Extended Reality (XR) that’s a blanket term that combines VR, AR, and MR.

    When was Extended Reality invented? The history is debatable—was it the Ancient Greeks that constructed theaters and used the science of acoustics to mimic reality on stage, or should we go back to cave dwellers and their ‘subterranean cyberspaces’ they crafted filled with imagery that replicated the outside world? Let’s skip a few centuries, past Sir Charles Wheatstone’s 19th century stereoscope and Ivan Sutherland’s ‘Sword of Damocles’ machine of the 1960s, and go straight to Thomas Furness’ VCASS (that is, Visually Coupled Airborne Systems Simulator) built in 1982. It was astronomically expensive, and the technology alone filled up several rooms with computers. However, it was the first VR headset to fully immerse the user in an interactive artificially-manufactured world.

    Aside from a few Hollywood films like “Lawnmower Man” and “Johnny Mnemonic” in the early ‘90s, VR didn’t really explode into mainstream culture like it was intended to. By 1999, the VR industry was deceased. Not like it laughed itself to death, but the world laughed the technology out of existence. It would take another decade and a 17-year-old named Palmer Luckey to invent the Oculus Rift, the current standard for virtual reality. Now, every VR headset available on the market is built on Luckey’s binocular LCD innovation.

    Our new 12-month certificate program, Vital, begins April 19th. Registration is closed, but sign up for the waitlist for next year’s edition now at vitalpsychedelictraining.com!

    The Neuroscience of Psychedelic VR

    You’re a virtual reality history buff now, so let’s talk about the capabilities of the technology and why all claims that it can induce a psychedelic trip are misleading and erroneous—if not outright lies.

    Currently, the only way we know a psychedelic trip can happen is through direct interaction with 5-HT2A neural receptors. When a person ingests psychedelics, those substances sit in these receptors. The molecular neuroscience of this process is largely unknown, and psychedelics can also induce other neurological changes like thalamic afferents and shifting cerebral blood flow between cortical regions. We’re still trying to understand why this happens, but the one consistent occurrence is the excitement of the 5-HT2A receptors in the brain.

    That should be the end of the story, but you guys want to dive deeper in the rabbit hole—so let’s do it.

    I spoke with neuropharmacologist and founder of Psychedelic Support, Dr. Alli Feduccia, about the possibility of inducing a psychedelic trip exclusively through VR—without the interaction of 5-HT2A receptors. She said while it’s highly unlikely, it’s theoretically possible through what’s called ‘neural oscillations.’

    Neuroscience discovered some neurons and even entire regions can be activated through neural oscillations, which is the synchronization of activity in certain regions of the brain. For example, when a person speaks you understand them better when you look at their face to receive visual information (happiness, sadness, etc.), which aids the auditory information (what they’re actually saying) that’s being processed in your brain. Those two sensory inputs (auditory speech and visual facial cues) are coupled as a neural oscillation.

    It’s been proposed that oscillations also reflect changes in the excitement of neurons from these sensory inputs. Excitement from these neural oscillations mostly show dendritic synaptic activity in the brain—the place where serotonin receptors reside. The synaptic activity seen through this neural oscillation is a ‘ping-pong’ effect bouncing between pyramidal cells (the brain cells that process serotonin) and inhibitory interneurons (neurons that assist the activity of pyramidal cells). Theoretically if any extended reality device can create a collection of sensory inputs (visual, auditory) and vestibular inputs (balance, direction) to create a ‘transient evoked’ (a response to discrete stimuli) or a ‘steady-state evoked’ (response to periodic rhythmic stimuli) neural oscillation that would be strong and complex enough to excite certain brain regions responsible for psychedelic trips like the medial prefrontal cortex—then we would be able to see technology like VR induce a psychedelic trip.

    All of this sounds like it’s possible only because I explained it to be understood. In reality, neural oscillations from an exogenous stimuli like VR that would activate a cortical region like the prefrontal cortex to excite the 5-HT2A receptors and induce a trip is a scientific and technological process that hasn’t been invented yet. In fact, we aren’t close to having even the fundamental understanding of these systems to begin the research and development of technology that would be capable of doing this. It would be like creating the Deathstar and all the technology inside entirely from cardboard. Oh, that’s happened already? Well I take that back.

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    What Psychedelic VR Is, Isn’t and Could Be

    When I spoke with @Trippy, the largest psychedelic community in the world (1.7 million followers and counting), about the potential of creating a psychedelic trip through technology, the curator said,“It’s impossible to deliver or duplicate an authentic psychedelic experience utilizing only technology. Humanity finds a sense of comfort in believing we can quantify or recreate all things. We have an unending desire to control things outside our understanding.”

    The long and short of it is, there are a lot of VR companies out there that want you to believe they have invented a way to have a psychedelic trip through digital means. This could be the result of overzealous writers dropping extraordinary headlines and less about the CEOs of the VR companies that are represented. Everyone wants a good story, especially when you’re in the market of garnering investor interest for a capital raise.

    A company that was brought to my attention is the Los Angeles-based VR company TRIPP (not to be confused with @trippy). Judging by the name one would easily believe the company is rooted in the psychedelic experience. Even their site suggests that for only $19.99 you can “start TRIPPing”. When I reached out to the company with a few questions (the first being, “Why do you think TRIPP works?”) the PR department sent me this:

    “TRIPP does not elicit a psychedelic experience, nor does it act as/mimic a serotonergic agonist. TRIPP is simply a digital tool to help you manage stress and your emotional well-being. We don’t make claims on therapeutic efficacy.”

    Certainly not the response many were hoping for—considering in June 2021, CEO of TRIPP Nanea Reeves told TechCrunch: “Many people that will never feel comfortable taking a psychedelic, this is a low-friction alternative that can deliver some of that experience in a more benign way.”

    We’re not picking on TRIPP, there are far more dubious claims from individuals that suggest they have the technology to put the brain in altered states. Right around the VR craze in the mid ‘90s, Stanley Koren came out with the ‘God Helmet,’ a device that claims it can give the wearer a feeling of otherness, similar to the subjective effects of DMT and ayahuasca.

    Through oscillations of low magnetic fields, the God Helmet allegedly disrupts the communication between the left and right brain lobes, which gives a person the perception of another ‘godly’ presence. There’s only one problem: No one has fully been able to replicate Stanley Koren’s claims with their own God Helmet study.

    None of this is meant to degrade VR’s therapeutic use, which has been proven in clinical studies. For instance, Hunter G. Hoffman’s 2004 ‘Snowworld VR’ study showed patients can withstand pain longer in a tranquil virtual environment, the first evidence in history that VR changes brain activity during painful procedures.

    VR is not an alternative that can deliver a psychedelic experience. If there’s one thing from this article to take away, it’s that. In the future, however, this statement has the possibility of turning around, and judging by the advancements in neuroscience along with an array of psychedelic research being unraveled, it will most likely be untrue. But for now, we’re still a long way to go before VR will give you a psychedelic trip.

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    What Is the ‘Collective Unconscious’ and How Can It Help Us Understand Psychedelic Experiences?

    illustration representing Jung's theory of the conscious and unconscious to represent Psychedelics Today column "Psychedelics in Depth"

    By Simon Yugler

    Original Illustration by Martin Clarke

    Everything you need to know about Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious and how it can help us process, navigate and guide psychedelic journeys.

    This is part of our column ‘Psychedelics in Depth‘ which defines and explains depth psychology topics in the context of psychedelics.

    A boundless sea rises to engulf the land. A solitary ship floats delicately on its churning surface. On the boat there are two figures, rapidly bailing out water from the deck, while a pair of animals look nervously over the edge. Out of the water bursts forth a massive tree, lifting up the boat in one of its thousand limbs, rescuing the people and the animals from the murky abyss below. The moon blocks out the sun, an eagle soars across the sky, and all falls into darkness…

    Dream, psychedelic vision, or ancient myth? Can you tell the difference? 

    If you answered no, that’s because this outlandish sequence of events cannot possibly be based in objective reality, and therefore must be subject to interpretation. Who’s to say what any of it means—for now it remains a tapestry of evocative images containing infinite avenues where we might create meaning. Perhaps only the dreamer, journeyer, or culture of origin is truly capable of this, since an image’s deeper meaning can only become clear when its context is provided.

    What is clear, however, is that the images which emerge in dreams, psychedelic states, and myths share themes in common, which is a foundational principle of depth psychology.

    While the patterns or images themselves might be considered ‘archetypes,’ the question of where they come from is our main concern in this article.

    Did that story above seem somehow familiar? Did it remind you of other stories you’ve heard before, once upon a time? Jung and other depth psychologists would likely say that they emerged out of the ‘collective unconscious,’ a foundational concept in depth psychology.

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    The Dark Side of the Moon

    The idea of the collective unconscious is perhaps one of the most unique and enduring concepts of Jungian and depth psychology. The very question of its existence caused the never-healed split between Freud and Jung, which marked one of the most significant moments in the history of psychology.

    To embrace the reality of this mysterious, timeless realm is to embrace the notion that there are indeed regions of consciousness that we cannot, and will not, understand by our usual ways of knowing.

    In this regard, the collective unconscious opens the way to the unknown, which psychedelics can, gracefully or otherwise, escort us into closer communion with. It could even be said that modern Western culture’s long standing fear and stigmatization of plant medicine, psychedelics and altered states of consciousness is an intense fear of the unknown projected onto the plant, pill or powder in question.

    Psychedelics can ferry us across the river into the storehouse of repressed human experiences that modern culture has sought to obscure, dilute, or completely ignore. This can look like vivid encounters with death, powerful reminders of humility or sobering wake-up calls that break us out of whatever psychological trance state we all seem to occasionally fall into.

    Despite all of our technology and scientific discoveries, to this day the collective unconscious remains as mysterious as the dark side of the moon.

    What Is the Collective Unconscious?

    According to Jung in his Collected Works, Volume 8, the terrain of the collective unconscious “contains the whole spiritual heritage of mankind’s evolution, born anew in the brain structure of every individual,” and can seem “something like an unceasing stream or perhaps ocean of images and figures which drift into consciousness in our dreams or in abnormal states of mind.”

    In other words, the collective unconscious is a universal aspect of the human experience—something akin to a genetic heritage of the psyche, composed of primordial images and which express themselves symbolically through dreams and myths across time and space.

    In his later writings, Jung used the term ‘objective psyche’ to refer to the collective unconscious because of a refinement in his thinking and a desire to steer his work away from focusing on overtly social phenomena like collective projection or groupthink. While this was a facet of Jung’s work, the true scope of the collective unconscious far surpasses this domain.

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    Additionally, there exists the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious, the difference of which is important to understand and explore.

    The personal unconscious contains all of the unique aspects of your personality and psyche which have been repressed, such as difficult memories, traumas, and behaviors you’re not even aware of. The personal shadow, according to Jung, is composed of all the aspects of your personality which fail to neatly conform to your ego’s idea of who you are, which is called your ‘persona’. Unless these shadow aspects are consciously faced and integrated (often called ‘shadow work’), they inevitably tend to be projected outward. But more on that another time.

    The collective unconscious is a different beast entirely, and refers to regions of the psyche far beyond the personal repressed material described above. Nearly all of Jung’s most evocative concepts, such as complexes, archetypes, anima/animus, and shadow arise from or are connected to the collective unconscious. By its very nature, the collective unconscious is unknowable and imperceivable to us by our usual methods of perception.

    Over the course of his life and work, Jung postulated different ideas as to what this infinite realm might be and what its purpose could be for humanity. His work contained within The Red Book expresses his personal journey of delving into his own uncharted depths through cryptic prose and evocative, semi-religious artwork.

    What is clear is that the collective unconscious remains an elusive concept, and that any discussion of it requires a healthy dose of mystery and wonder. Because it is ineffable and eludes full definition, the collective unconscious remains something beyond our ability to fully control, manipulate, and know—actions which, from a depth perspective, all emerge from the ego. And perhaps it should remain so.

    Psychedelics and The Collective Unconscious

    According to Scott J. Hill in his book Confrontation with the Unconscious, both Jung and Stanislav Grof assert that:

    “Psychedelic substances don’t cause specific psychological effects. Although they increase energy levels that activate psychological processes, which allows one to consciously experience otherwise unconscious content, they don’t give rise to specific experiences or content. The content that arises from the unconscious during a psychedelic session, like the content that arises in a dream during sleep, is what is available in the unconscious at the time. What emerges can naturally vary, then from session to session for each person, and can certainly vary from person to person.”

    Psychedelics cause a “lowering of the threshold of consciousness,” according to Jung, meaning that they bring one into closer contact with the unconscious. Another way of looking at it is that unconscious material bubbles up to the surface during altered states of consciousness, leading to the vast array of reactions that psychedelics are known to evoke. From this perspective, the unconscious material rising to the surface is emerging both from the personal and the collective unconscious.

    The ego has a hard time believing that anything could be beyond its realm of knowledge and control. Experiences of fear, which can often infuse the onset or peak of psychedelic experiences, can be seen as the ego’s response to losing its grip on psychic control. As we plunge ever more deeply into the waters of the unconscious, fear is the ego’s alarm system, signaling that it’s well-maintained boat appears to be going down. Yet this descent, as we know from some of the world’s oldests myths and ceremonial traditions, is where real transformation begins, and as any psychedelic guide worth their salt will tell you, the best course of action at this point is to surrender, breathe, and go within.

    What actually happens within the psyche while immersed in a powerful psychedelic experience can be interpreted from a variety of perspectives, as decades of psychedelic literature and multidisciplinary studies demonstrate. But like most great mysteries, psychedelics create more questions than they can possibly answer.

    From a depth perspective, however, one could say that psychedelics catalyze the emergence of previously repressed psychic material which arises from both the personal and the collective unconscious —a sentiment expressed by many before. Stanislav Grof deemed psychedelics ‘abreactives,’ meaning that they bring to consciousness whatever material which has the most emotional charge.

    Because psychedelics can open one’s psyche to experience aspects of the collective unconscious, various archetypes, images, complexes, and energies can be personally experienced, leading to profound moments of catharsis, healing, insight, and what Jung called, ‘numinosity’: overwhelming feelings that burst forth when one is confronted with the power of transpersonal images, archetypes, and experiences. In other words, a full-blown mystical experience.

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    The implications of understanding the psychedelic experience through a depth psychological lens cannot be overstated, and helps us better understand what Grof meant in his famous axiom: “Psychedelics are to the study of the mind what the telescope is for astronomy and the microscope is for biology.”

    The Collective Unconscious and Psychedelics For Psychedelic Facilitators

    If you are a psychedelic therapist or facilitator seeking to integrate a depth psychological approach into your practice, it is important to never overlook the significance of the unconscious and the critical role that it plays in psychedelic work. This means expecting the unexpected, listening for the deeper, unconscious threads in a client’s process, and always approaching this work from a place of humility and caution. One could say that the essential function of psychedelic therapy, from the beginning of preparation, through the dosing session, to post-trip integration sessions, is essentially one long process of integrating material from the personal and the collective unconscious.

    Depth psychology will inevitably require you to learn to speak two languages at once, as you keep one foot grounded in the world of ego consciousness, persona, and outer objective facts, while maintaining another firmly rooted in the world of symbol, metaphor, myth, and subjectivity. Becoming literate in this dream language takes time, practice, and a dedication to your own inner work as well.

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    Listening to the lectures and reading the books of people like James Hillman, Joseph Campbell, Marie Louis von Fronz, Marion Woodman, Robert Johnson, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Robert Moore, and Robert Bly can help you get a feel for what the language of the unconscious might sound like according to various masters in the field. Working with a Jungian analyst is also a fantastic way to immerse oneself in becoming versed in understanding the language of the psyche, especially through dreams. Here at Psychedelics Today, we also teach two comprehensive courses on depth psychology topics in the context of psychedelics, Imagination as Revelation: The Psychedelic Experience in the Light of Jungian Psychology and Psychedelics and The Shadow: Exploring the Shadow Side of Psychedelia.

    It’s important to remember this challenging stance requires letting go of dogmatic perspectives, beliefs and certainties, as well as cultivating a certain level of humility and openness. Never forget that each time your client is venturing into psychedelic space, they are venturing into the unknown. The role of the guide or psychedelic therapist is to be a light along the way, to clear the path as much as possible, and to point the journeyer in the right direction as they bravely step into their own star-lit darkness.

    The enduring message of depth psychology, however, is that those stars, and that darkness, are not yours alone. The inner world is not an empty void of nothing, but a fertile space utterly saturated with meaning, the comprehension of which can take a lifetime. The collective unconscious belongs to the collective heritage of humanity, is passed down to us in myth over countless millennia, and is remembered in our dreams and visions.

    Perhaps this is what Joseph Campbell meant when he famously said, “And where you had thought to be alone, you shall be with all the world.”  

    About the Author

    photo of Simon Yugler, a white man with blond hair and a goatee.

    Simon Yugler is a depth and psychedelic integration therapist based in Portland, OR with a masters (MA) in depth counseling psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. Weaving Jungian psychology, Internal Family Systems therapy, and mythology, Simon also draws on his diverse experiences learning from indigenous cultures around the world, including the Shipibo ayahuasca tradition. He has a background in experiential education, and has led immersive international journeys for young adults across 10 countries. He is passionate about initiation, men’s work, indigenous rights, decolonization, and helping his clients explore the liminal wilds of the soul. Find out more on his website and on Instagram , Twitter (@depth_medicine) or Facebook.

    About the Illustrator

    Martin Clarke is a British Designer and Illustrator from Nottingham, England. Specializing in branding, marketing and visual communication, Martin excels at creating bespoke brand identities and striking visual content across multiple platforms for web, social media, print and packaging. See more of his work here.

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    How PCP Became A Weapon of Police Propaganda [Part 2]

    By Troy Farah

    Original Illustration by Riayn Grey 

    Phencyclidine or “angel dust” is a misrepresented psychedelic intertwined with a history of racism and police brutality. But efforts to rehabilitate this drug are met with scorn.

    This is the second part of a two-part series on why the psychedelic scene ignores PCP. Check out Part 1 here.

    PCP, a drug that also goes by the names “angel dust” and “dipper” among others, remains one of the most stigmatized and misunderstood psychedelics around. However, there is little scientific evidence to suggest that PCP is any more dangerous than any other drug. Alcohol, ketamine, LSD and acetaminophen (Tylenol) can all be just as hazardous if used recklessly.

    Much of what people think they know about PCP is shaped by outdated media scare stories and urban legends, not actual evidence. (For more on the science, history, discovery and true dangers of PCP, read Part 1 of this series.) Yet the psychedelic community largely ignores PCP while pushing for the legalization of drugs like MDMA and psilocybin.

    One aspect of PCP that cannot be ignored is how this mythology directly plays into the militarization of law enforcement and the proliferation of police brutality. The specific demonization of PCP is not only unwarranted, the stigma can be more deadly than the drug.

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    PCP Panic in the Media

    PCP was discovered in the 1950’s and was used clinically as an anesthetic for about a decade before being replaced by ketamine—a closely-related drug that offers the same pain-killing benefits with less hallucinations. Sometime in the ‘60s, PCP made its way onto the streets of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, then spread across the nation. In its wake, horrific stories of users gouging out their eyes or withstanding storms of bullets followed.

    Strangely, illicit PCP use has largely been restricted to the U.S. “It has failed to gain traction anywhere else on the planet,” according to an analysis by VICE. Its popularity has waned since the ‘80s, and PCP use remains largely constrained to cities like Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. But for much of the ‘70s and into the ‘90s, PCP was the panic drug du jour.

    In 1977, Time Magazine described it as “A Terror of A Drug” while in 1980 the Chicago Tribune warned its allure was the “Sniff of Madness.” In 1982 the Los Angeles Times pegged it as a “Modern-Day Plague,” according to historian Jacob Taylor’s thesis, PCP in the American Media.

    “It’s kind of like a part of police lore, this substance that people take that makes them immune to pain and unreasonable and gives them superhuman strength,” Hamilton Morris, a chemist and documentary filmmaker who has done films about both the positive and negative aspects of PCP, tells Psychedelics Today. “It’s almost designed to terrify law enforcement.”

    The stark reputation of PCP soon became a justification for police violence, as the idea spread “that users of the drug, once on a violent rampage, were almost impossible to stop,” Taylor reports. “Police spoke of being thrown around ‘like ragdolls,’ and of needing six or more officers to physically restrain one intoxicated individual. Most notoriously, several incidents were documented in which arrestees high on PCP broke free of handcuffs by simply tearing apart the steel-link chains.”

    There’s really little actual evidence to back up these claims. A 1988 analysis in the Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology looked at 350 studies of PCP and only found three instances of violence, leading the authors to conclude, “PCP does not live up to its reputation as a violence-inducing drug.”

    Furthermore, these tales of super human strength may sound familiar: The “negro cocaine fiends” of the early 20th century were an invented media legend used as an extension of the Jim Crow South to demonize Black people. Similar stories of bloodthirsty cocaine users with hyper-strength impervious to bullets were instrumental in banning cocaine and heroin under the Harrison Tax Act.

    The specific demonization of PCP is not only unwarranted, the stigma can be more deadly than the drug.

    Phencyclidine and Police Brutality

    There are echoes of that history in how PCP is perceived by law enforcement today. And the reputation of this drug making users into frenzied killers has real world consequences, especially given that PCP is a cheap drug “linked to urban zones of poverty, unemployment and high crime,” as VICE reports. “In other words it’s a drug linked to inequality, and groups of people who are more likely to be excluded from the mainstream economy, with housing and employment problems, such as the Black community.”

    Police officers commonly use fear as an excuse for lethal force—and this defense often works. In the shooting of Philando Castile, officer Jeronimo Yanez of the St. Anthony, Minnesota Police Department, told jurors “I was scared to death. I thought I was going to die,” according to the Pioneer Press. Yanez was not convicted. And the “I-feared-for-my-life narrative” is only multiplied when a strange, infamous drug is introduced.

    “When you really think about what that does to the psychology of law enforcement, it’s a terrifying idea,” Morris says. “If they genuinely believe that someone has superhuman strength, that means they can kill you easily. If you believe that the people who use this substance have superhuman strength, that’s a justification for excessive lethal force.”

    This is exactly what has happened on numerous occasions, even in recent history. On March 23, 2020, Rochester police approached Daniel Prude, who was naked and having a mental health episode. Officers placed a ‘spit hood’ over Prude’s head, a mesh bag designed to prevent spitting and biting. They then pressed his face into the ground for two minutes, suffocating the 41-year-old man.

    A year later, the New York State Attorney General announced the seven officers involved in the case would not face any criminal charges—their lawyers argued that PCP had killed the man, not their actions. A medical examiner’s report listed the death as a homicide, but noted that PCP in Prude’s system contributed to his death.

    Of course, just a few weeks after Prude’s death, George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis by officer Derek Chauvin under similar circumstances: suffocation while being pressed into the ground. In fact, one of the other officers, Thomas Lane, can be heard asking Chauvin if Floyd might be on PCP. Floyd later tested negative for the drug, but methamphetamine and fentanyl were found in his blood. So Chauvin’s defense emphasized that these drugs must have killed Floyd—not the fact that his knee was on Floyd’s neck for 9 and a half minutes. A jury did not agree and convicted Chauvin of two counts of murder and one count of manslaughter.

    The case of Laquan McDonald is another rare case in which a police officer was convicted of murder for killing an unarmed civilian. In October 2014, McDonald was walking away from Officer Jason Van Dyke when he was shot 16 times in the back. Van Dyke wasn’t charged until over a year later when dashcam footage was released via a judge’s order.

    During the trial, a pharmacologist named James Thomas O’Donnell testified that McDonald was “whacked on PCP,” which had been found during an autopsy. But jurors weren’t convinced and found Van Dyke guilty of 16 counts of aggravated battery with a firearm and second-degree murder.

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    Typically, however, when PCP is involved, that isn’t the case. In 2016 Terence Crutcher was shot dead by officer Betty Jo Shelby in Tulsa, Oklahoma. An autopsy showed “acute phencyclidine intoxication” and also the presence of TCP, a similar drug to PCP. A jury found her not guilty.

    “Psychedelic enthusiasts were conspicuously silent when Van Dyke used PCP as justification for his savagery,” Dr. Carl Hart, a neuroscientist and professor of psychology at Columbia University wrote in his most recent book, Drug Use For Grownups. “We also didn’t hear a peep from them when Betty Jo Shelby, a white Oklahoman police officer, evoked the ‘crazy nigger on PCP’ defense to justify her killing of unarmed black Terence Crutcher.”

    But PCP doesn’t actually have to be involved, either. The most famous example is likely from March 1991, when Rodney King was yanked from his vehicle and savagely beaten by four Los Angeles police officers. One of them yelled, “He’s dusted!” but King later tested negative for PCP—only alcohol was in his system.

    However, during the trial, a “drug expert” declared the officers were “justified” in their belief that King was under the influence of PCP, according to the Chicago Tribune. The officers were acquitted, although two were later sentenced to 30 months in prison by a federal court.

    ‘Non-Lethal’ Weapons And PCP

    One particular PCP-related incident fundamentally changed policing in America. In 1977, 35-year-old biochemist Ronald Burkholder was naked in the streets of Los Angeles, high on PCPy (also called rolicyclidine), a PCP analogue in the class of arylcyclohexylamines. Burkholder was allegedly climbing a sign pole, came down and tried to grab LAPD sergeant Kurt G. Barz’s nightstick. After a struggle, Barz shot Burkholder six times. Because he was naked and unarmed, the case drew considerable controversy, including from the ACLU.

    According to Morris, this case and other police murder incidents “produced enough social pressure on law enforcement that they started to carry tasers and pepper spray,” Morris says, adding, “You can actually trace the history of non-lethal incapacitating agents being used by law enforcement to PCP.”

    “Cops wanted some kind of tool that would allow them to subdue folks high on PCP without having to lay hands on them. The Taser did the trick,” journalist Matt Stroud reported for OneZero. According to Taylor, some police departments “experimented with ‘grabbing-sticks,’ nets, water-cannons, sound-wave guns, bean-bag guns, and, in a surreal example from New York City, mace-spraying robots … It created a culture of fear among police which must have had a lasting, negative impact on their work.”

    “As Americans, when we participate in racism, I think we use at our disposal whatever tools are available. And sometimes PCP can be used as one of those tools.”

    —Dr. Carl Hart, author of Drug Use for Grown Ups

    With a new market, many companies soon filled the gap, often openly advertising so-called “less-than-lethal” weaponry using PCP as a selling point. “A lot of companies would market to law enforcement non-lethal equipment, like tasers, stun guns, there were nets, and they would really play up the fact that these are for people that are intoxicated on PCP specifically,” Dr. Jason Wallach, a neuropsychopharmacologist who has studied PCP and related chemicals, tells Psychedelics Today. “Anytime they can sell using fear, companies will.”

    Encouragement came from the federal government as well. For example, a 1994 bulletin from the National Institute of Justice advertised oleoresin capsicum—that is, pepper spray—and flat out quotes a police sergeant saying, “When confronting subjects under the influence of PCP … ‘OC is the best option short of a lethal weapon. If we did not have pepper spray, we would have to use lethal force. Having OC is another tool to use at the lowest possible level versus impact weapons, which won’t work anyway on subjects under the influence of PCP,” implying that people on PCP are impervious to bullets.

    Even today companies market misinformation about PCP to sell something. Lexipol, a Texas consulting company that provides training to police departments, has a blog post on its website from 2016 titled, “5 safety tips for cops when dealing with a subject high on PCP.” It contains multiple urban legends, such as suspects breaking free of handcuffs or that PCP can be absorbed through the skin, an echo of the fentanyl touch myth that persists in the media today. It even suggests drugging people: “allow medical providers, if available and authorized, to use sedative medications to chemically restrain the patient.”

    But describing these tools as “less-than-lethal” is just a euphemism—they can and do kill. A 2017 Reuters investigation documented 1,005 deaths from tasers, in which 9 out of 10 involved unarmed people. The news organization was able to obtain 712 autopsies, reporting: “In 153 of those cases, or more than a fifth, the Taser was cited as a cause or contributing factor in the death.”

    Tasers also don’t reduce police shootings. An eight-year study of the Chicago Police Department by the National Bureau of Economic Research, for example, noted that, “Police injuries fell, but neither injury rates nor the number of injuries to civilians were affected. There is no evidence that Tasers led to a reduction in police use of firearms.”

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    PCP Isn’t The Point

    PCP is uniquely treated among drug users and law enforcement. Even drugs that are somewhat similar to PCP are not given the same level of stigma. But in the end, drugs are often just used as an excuse for racism and over-policing in America—the chemical itself is irrelevant.

    “As Americans, when we participate in racism, I think we use at our disposal whatever tools are available. And sometimes PCP can be used as one of those tools,” Hart tells Psychedelics Today. “I don’t think that PCP is special in that way or anything like that.”

    People who care about ending the drug war or generally reforming drug policy should be aware of the history of racism and police brutality that has played into PCP’s reputation as a dangerous drug. Like any drug, PCP can be abused. But what actually makes drug use dangerous often has more to do with prohibition than any intrinsic nature of a chemical. And police overwhelmingly benefit from the power dynamics of prohibition, meaning they have a deep investment in this mythology.

    “It’s not really about PCP, of course,” Morris says. “The bigger issue is the way that we assign certain values to drugs as pharmacological determinism, and what the medical and political outcomes of that can be in terms of prison sentences, in terms of law enforcement’s behavior.”

    This is why PCP should probably be more centered in the conversation about psychedelic drug reform. The efforts to decriminalize drugs shouldn’t just focus on the substances people think are safe or socially acceptable, but focus on ending the systems that inflict suffering on minorities and low-income communities.

    “The main most important thing is for people to know that pharmacologically, [PCP] is not that dissimilar from ketamine,” Hart says. “And the sort of narratives that we tell ourselves about it has less to do with pharmacology, and more to do with these social sort of issues. I just hope that they’re not fooled by those cop stories any longer.”

    About the Author

    black and white photo of Troy Farah

    Troy Farah is an independent science and drug policy reporter that lives in Southern California with his wife and two dogs. His work has appeared in National Geographic, The Guardian, VICE, WIRED and others. He co-hosts the podcast Narcotica and can be found on Twitter @filth_filler or on his website troyfarah.com .

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    Why Does The Psychedelic Scene Ignore PCP? [Part 1]

    By Troy Farah

    Original illustration by Riayn Grey

    Stigma against PCP or “angel dust” contradicts the science of this misunderstood psychedelic. But, will the psychedelic community ever look at phencyclidine favorably?

    The retro schlock horror of cannabis turning teenagers into murderous sex fiends is nothing but laughable today. The same Reefer Madness applied to psychedelic drugs like LSD or psilocybin “magic” mushrooms is also rightfully judged to be an absurd relic of the Nixon era. Even attitudes on heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine have slightly relaxed—sure, these drugs can be highly addictive, but few believe they turn you into a bloodthirsty monster.

    Yet one narcotic still remains in the public consciousness as nothing but a lethal menace that will drive users into fugues of brutal rage: PCP.

    Ever since its arrival on the black market in the 1960s, PCP, or phencyclidine, has been saddled with a reputation of extreme violence, cannibalism and superhuman strength. Urban legends of “angel dust” consumers breaking squad car doors off their hinges or bursting from handcuffs persist—despite the fact that scientific evidence for PCP causing any such behavior is non-existent, to put it lightly.

    Like many other demonized drugs, such as ketamine or MDMA, PCP has a long history of therapeutic use. And PCP is a psychedelic, too, not just a dissociative anesthetic. But while drug policy reform advocates are pushing the Overton window when it comes to so-called “classic” psychedelics, PCP is notably left out of the conversation. But why?

    “I am deeply disturbed that there is a deafening silence from the psychedelic community while fellow drug users continue to be brutalized as a result of PCP-related misapprehensions,” Dr. Carl Hart, a neuroscientist and professor of psychology at Columbia University wrote in his most recent book, Drug Use For Grownups. But he acknowledges a likely explanation: “Drawing attention to the fact that PCP is also a psychedelic might jeopardize the reputation, and thus the availability, of other psychedelics.”

    Listen to our podcast episode with Dr. Carl Hart, PT236 – Dr. Carl Hart – Drugs, Honesty, Responsibility, and Logic.

    PCP could be seen as another example of “psychedelic exceptionalism,” in which certain drugs are seen as “better” than others because they are used by certain people and not others. For example, the Decriminalize Nature movement has taken the U.S. by storm, loosening laws against “plant medicine” like ayahuasca, ibogaine and mescaline cactus, not to mention psilocybin fungi. But these laws—which have passed in at least seven cities, including Oakland, Ann Arbor and Cambridge—exclude other plant medicines like opium, coca leaf, khat and more.

    The same narrow-mindedness or lack of political scrutiny could be said about PCP, according to Hart and other experts, such as Dr. Jason Wallach, a neuropsychopharmacologist and assistant pharmaceutical sciences professor at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia. Wallach has closely studied PCP, ketamine and related drugs like 3-MeO-PCP, publishing numerous reports on this class of drugs (known technically as arylcyclohexylamines), including a textbook chapter devoted to dissociative anesthetics.

    “I don’t see anything about PCP that makes it inherently more dangerous than other dissociative drugs, like ketamine, for example,” Wallach tells Psychedelics Today. “I think the stigma around PCP is almost exclusively of the media’s creation.”

    Understanding how that myth of PCP was created—and how the power structures it serves persist today—is essential for anyone who truly cares about drug policy reform.

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    A Brief History of Phencyclidine

    Like many drugs, the profound psychoactivity of PCP was an unexpected discovery. On March 26, 1956, a medicinal chemist named Dr. Victor Maddox was developing various compounds for Parke-Davis and Company in Detroit, Michigan. Maddox showed one molecule, which he temporarily named GP 121, to his coworker, Dr. Graham Chen, who said it was the most unique compound that he had ever examined. This was phencyclidine, or PCP.

    Structurally, PCP resembles a stupor-inducing drug that is produced in Corydalis cava flowers called bulbocapnine, which was used by the CIA in the agency’s Project MKUltra mind control experiments. Chen dubbed PCP a “cataleptoid anesthetic” and began giving it to animals. Some of the cats he injected with PCP would remain in a state of rigid, fixed posture for 24 hours, while a wild rhesus monkey became so calm it allowed researchers to jam their fingers in its mouth without biting.

    Following further testing in animals, a Dr. Edward Domino revealed that PCP was much less toxic than opioids and human trials began around a year later. By 1963, PCP was patented and sold as a drug with the brand names Serynl and Sernylan, which come from the word “serenity.” (Not exactly the word most people associate with PCP today.)

    “As patients were anesthetized with PCP, it became obvious that the drug, when properly administered by an anesthesiologist, was indeed very safe, far safer than most anesthetics that were then available,” Domino wrote in the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs in 1980. But there was a problem. Some patients experienced “the sensation of feeling no arms or legs and being in outer space,” Domino wrote.

    The side effects of PCP—hallucinations, delirium, confusion—were too much for many clinicians. Chemists quickly cooked up an alternative and in 1962, chemistry professor Calvin Stevens presented a new drug to the world: ketamine. PCP was voluntarily withdrawn from the market in 1965.

    “PCP and ketamine are chemical cousins,” Hart tells Psychedelics Today. “So if you’re going to classify ketamine as a psychedelic thing, you have to classify PCP as a psychedelic.”

    Yes, ketamine and PCP are very similar in nature. But while ketamine is heralded as the latest “breakthrough drug” for treating mental health—which it very well could be—PCP is still considered by some to be the “most dangerous drug.” But how dangerous is it really?

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    The Light and Dark Side of PCP

    For Brian, who lives in the Washington, D.C. area, PCP was like “the boogie man.” He was familiar with stories of people taking it and stripping naked in the street, so he’s not sure what finally motivated him to try it. But a friend with sickle cell anemia was dipping cigarettes in liquid PCP—what locals call “the dipper”—and said, “If this guy has fucking sickle cell anemia and he’s not scared, I can’t let him go out by himself. So I hit it too.”

    Brian, whose real name is not being used, says the first thing he noticed was ringing in his ears like an alarm going off in the distance, followed by a feeling of being immersed in water. On the phone, he made a warbly sound, like batteries dying in a cassette tape deck.

    “It feels fucking odd and awkward,” Brian says. “But once you come down, it’s like clarity out of the chaos. I just descend it to a single cell organism and feel in tune with every fucking thing.”

    Brian says he’s had multiple, profound psychedelic experiences on PCP. “I’ve literally had moments where I definitely feel that my fucking heightened crown chakra just exploded,” he says. “It actually exploded to a different consciousness, where I was an observer of myself.”

    However, Brian, who has also used DMT and mushrooms, is first to admit that it’s “not all peaches and cream,” as he puts it. Several times, he says he’s woken up in the hospital. “It’s more chaotic, and more traumatizing and more negative than it has been positive,” he says. “But those positive times have been extremely fucking groundbreaking.”

    Filmmaker and chemist Hamilton Morris has tried to show both sides of this drug. In fact, Morris says PCP was behind the entire genesis of his drug documentary series on Viceland, Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia. Morris recalls arguing with an executive producer about the show’s content, who said, essentially, “Well, you have to admit that some drugs are bad.”

    Morris tells Psychedelics Today that he responded, “No, I don’t have to have to admit that at all. And he said, ‘Well, what about PCP? You couldn’t possibly say that PCP is good.’ And I said, certainly I could make the case that it’s not what people think it is. And that was sort of the origin of the show.”

    Episode two, “A Positive PCP Story”, aired in 2016. It features Morris as he journeys across the U.S. to speak with PCP chemists, both clandestine and legitimate, as well as people like Timothy Wyllie, a British author, a founding member of the Process Church of the Final Judgment, and artist who illustrated sacred landscapes while under the influence of phencyclidine.

    In contrast, Morris also interviews people who have struggled with PCP addiction, as well as Christ Bearer, a rapper who attempted suicide on PCP after amputating his penis. Christ Bearer survived his attempt, but now says he’s “proud” of what he did.

    “He felt his penis had a negative impact on his life, and cutting it off allowed him to focus on his art,” Morris told The Guardian. “If he stands by it and thinks his life is better as a result, does that really mean he did something bad?”

    Horrific self-amputation stories aside, it’s clear that PCP tales like these are anomalies. It doesn’t take much Googling to find almost identical stories involving alcohol. But few people are worried about booze driving people to such violence. Yet, when it comes to PCP, stories like this tend to rise to the top.

    “What you shouldn’t do is then try to extrapolate that and say, ‘This is a normal response with PCP,’” Wallach says. (Side note: Wallach and Morris are friends. Wallach appears in the “Positive PCP Story” episode, and in 2014, Morris and Wallach published a scientific review of dissociative drugs, including ketamine and PCP.) “There absolutely have been horrible things that have happened while people were intoxicated. But you could say the same thing about any intoxicant, including ethanol. There’s no good, solid evidence that PCP has a higher propensity to cause this type of response.”

    Morris has himself sampled PCP, both by snorting the hydrochloride salt and smoking the freebase. “My experiences with it were, on one hand, unremarkable,” Morris says. “Given that this is a substance that is almost exclusively associated with psychosis and adverse responses of one kind or another, the major takeaway for me was that whatever supposed problems are associated with this drug are not intrinsic problems of PCP. The problems [are] associated with poverty, lack of control over the dosing, black market distribution patterns, mental illness, and so on.”

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    The Future of PCP

    Will the psychedelic community ever come to terms with PCP like it has other synthetic psychedelics like MDMA, LSD or ketamine? Similar horror stories and misperceptions have plagued these drugs in the past, but today most people recognize the medicinal and (relatively safe) recreational value of psychedelics. PCP seems to remain a hold-out.

    “I think it’s certainly something that has been ignored partially because of its association with impoverished people who have no connection to the counterculture, really,” Morris says. “Maybe the biggest issue of all is that this is a substance that middle upper class people don’t use. So in order to really change people’s minds on a large scale, it’s often the case that people have to have direct experience with the substance.”

    However, the people I spoke to for this article didn’t seem optimistic that the stigmatizing attitudes toward PCP would change any time soon.

    “That sort of myth is too important to opinion makers in our society, including law enforcement, including some people who are trying to distance their favorite drug away from something like PCP,” Hart says. “PCP does not have an advocate. It’s bad enough you don’t have an advocate, you need to have a powerful advocate. And I don’t see PCP having such an advocate.”

    Morris agrees perceptions about PCP have been hard to change, even after the success of his TV show. And even the most adventurous psychedelic startups probably won’t want to investigate the scientific, therapeutic value of PCP, although analogs of the drug gacyclidine (a PCP derivative) are being trialed for tinnitus treatment.

    “I don’t predict anyone will advocate for that in the near future. But you never know,” Morris says. “It’s just another one of many instances of a substance that has a reputation that has been sculpted, not by any intrinsic property of the substance itself, but by the social framework in which it’s used.”

    Check out Part 2 of this series, “How PCP Became a Weapon of Police Propaganda”.

    About the Author

    Troy Farah is an independent science and drug policy reporter that lives in Southern California with his wife and two dogs. His work has appeared in National Geographic, The Guardian, VICE, WIRED and others. He co-hosts the podcast Narcotica and can be found on Twitter @filth_filler or on his website troyfarah.com .

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    PT256 – Matthew D. Segall, Ph.D. – Consciousness, Capitalism, and Philosophy

    In this episode, Joe interviews philosopher, author, and assistant professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco: Matthew D. Segall, Ph.D.

    Segall discusses the relationship between consciousness and neuroscience: how science is helpful, but ultimately amounts to just one of many different tools towards describing consciousness (not truly understanding it), and how science, philosophy, and religion need to focus on their specialties but also work together towards better defining the human experience. And he talks about the importance of philosophy in trying to make sense of non-ordinary states of consciousness. 

    As this is a very back-and-forth, philosophically-based conversation, they talk about a lot more: William James, David Ray Griffin’s concept of “hardcore common sense presuppositions,” Richard Dawkins, scientism, positivism, how we’re slowly thinning the line between technology and humanity, Timothy Leary and whether or not anyone really “dropped out,” German idealism, how capitalism co-opts everything, John Cobb, Alfred North Whitehead, Universal Basic Income, the death denial in capitalist life, and how to use the relationship between the internet and capitalism to improve society. 

    Notable Quotes

    “The thing about capitalism is that it lives inside each of us at the level of our desires and our drives because we’ve been shaped by it. So we can’t pretend like it’s this big, bad monster out there that other people believe in. The problem with capitalism is that it’s not just a worldview you decide to believe in or not; it is the very structure, again, of your desires and your sense of identity. It’s inside of you.”

    “They say cannabis causes problems with motivation. Well yea, once you see through the value structure of our society, you lose motivation to participate because it’s no longer appetizing to you to engage in the rat race.” 

    “Fifty years later, after Leary was saying ‘Turn on, tune in, and drop out’, a lot of people thought that they followed his instructions, but again, capitalism co-opted the whole hippie movement, and by the 90s, they were selling Che Guevera t-shirts at the shopping mall and Apple was using the Beatles to sell computers.” 

    “The way that liberals tend to think about these questions [is that] they get really mad at Facebook for being biased in what ads they allow and not censoring certain things and selling ads to Russians and stuff. …A publicly traded corporation has one purpose: to maximize shareholder profits. And that’s the business model for Facebook, and so they’ll take money from anyone who wants to sell ads. They’re a private company. They’re not a public utility that has anywhere in its corporate charter as part of its mission: ‘improving civil society’ or ‘helping America maintain its democracy.’ Why would we expect a private corporation to do that? There’s no incentive in capitalism for that. And yet we get mad and blame Mark Zuckerberg. Why aren’t we blaming capitalism? That’s where the source code for this problem is.” 

    “Psychedelics aren’t necessarily going to wake us up, but I think that’s why we need philosophy. These substances and these experiences need to be contained within a meaningful story and a meaningful theory of reality so that we can make sense of what we’re experiencing and integrate it, and not only come out of those experiences with a profound sense of what’s wrong with our society, but with at least a good idea for what we’d like instead.”

    Links

    Footnotes2plato.com

    Twitter: @ThouArtThat

    Youtube: Footnotes2Plato

    Patreon: Footnotes2Plato

    Physics of the World-Soul: Alfred North Whitehead’s Adventure in Cosmology, by Matthew David Segall

    Psychedelics Today: ​​Matthew Segall, Ph.D. – Whitehead, Process Philosophy, and Ecology

    Youtube: Alan Watts debate with Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder (1967)

    About Matthew D. Segall, PhD

    Matthew D. Segall, PhD, is assistant professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, where he teaches courses primarily on German Idealism and Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy. He is the author of Physics of the World-Soul: Whitehead’s Adventure in Cosmology (2021) and has published journal articles and book chapters on a wide range of topics including panpsychist metaphysics, media theory, the philosophy of biology, the evolution of religion, and psychedelics. He blogs regularly at footnotes2plato.com. His current research focuses on the panpsychist turn in contemporary philosophy of mind and its implications for the scientific study of the origins of life and consciousness.

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    PT253 – Sean Hinton Ph.D. – Culture, Research Limitations, and Non-Medical Paths Forward

    In this episode, Joe interviews psychologist and adjunct professor at Capella University, Dr. Sean Hinton.

    Hinton talks about his early days at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology (now Sophia University) and his realization of how common numinous experiences are and how seldom people talked about them at the time. And he talks about how so many research studies just reinforce what we already know or want to further prove, existentialism and existential psychologist Rollo May, and Timothy Leary and his cultural, non-medicalized approach to research.

    And he talks about a lot more in this very free-ranging conversation: Portugal and their model for legalization, James Fadiman, James Hillman, addiction, heroin, Norman Rockwell, LSD, John Quincy Adams, microbreweries, William James, gun control, monotheism, and more!

    But his main focus is what we do next if we get these substances rescheduled: How do we view integration outside the medical model? How do we view these tools anthropologically and sociologically and keep them from being solely medicalized? And how do we handle regulation as the “price we pay for civilization” without becoming progress-blocking bureaucrats?

    Notable Quotes

    “Consider the field a table. Now consider your half of the table as your half of the table and then divide that into quarters, and then divide that again, and when you get down to something that’s too small to put your plate on; that’s what you want to do your research on. It’s always a very, very small area of what is already known but hasn’t been illuminated sufficiently.”

    “That’s the question: What kind of world are we going to live in? It’s fun to talk about trip stories and it’s fun to talk about the latest and greatest synthetic drugs and neuroscience, but what’s it really mean to the lives of those people who would like to have a more expansive, happier, content, paradisal life, as opposed to struggling through tyranny?”

    “That’s where the thinking went. It’s typical American privatism at its best. ‘You can’t show me the usefulness of it, [so] why should we pursue it?’ And usefulness means it makes money. American pragmatism is just a branch of capitalism.”

    “When you start confusing the roadmap to what the reality is, they’re two different things. It’s great to think of myself as a bunch of neurons and stuff like that. Well, that’s a great roadmap, but I’m sorry, what I’m experiencing is something that needs understanding, as Hillman would say. So how do we integrate this understanding part of ourselves with a society that’s cohesive enough to allow for those understandings, or open and unafraid? All the good stuff comes from places that are open and unafraid.”

    Links

    The Glass Bead Game: A Novel, by Hermann Hesse

    E=mc2: A Biography of the World’s Most Famous Equation, by David Bodanis

    Huxley.net: Brave New World Revisited

    About Sean Hinton

    Sean Hinton is a psychologist counseling individuals in their personal and spiritual growth, an executive consultant to business leaders, and a lecturer and graduate school instructor in psychology. 

    He often works with professionals in organizations to grow into their leadership roles in ways that both satisfies them in spirit and produces positive results in their organizational and personal life. He works with women and men in transition, stage of life challenges, and existential crisis of loss, life purpose or changing relationships. 

    He earned his PhD at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, and received an MBA in management from Pepperdine Graziadio School of Business and Management, an MA in education, and a MACP in clinical psychology.

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    Q & A with Keeno Ahmed-Jones: Dismantling the Echo Chamber of the Psychedelic Renaissance

    Colored alcohol ink blot to represent Q&A with Keeno Ahmed-Jones on MAPS Canada

    By Sean Lawlor

    Keeno Ahmed-Jones shares her experience trying to instill anti-racism values at a major psychedelics institution, and how difficult it proved to be.

    As progressive and inclusive as the psychedelic renaissance purports itself to be, there are continuing issues around understanding, respecting, and making efforts to expand equity and inclusion in psychedelic spaces. Without an honest recognition of how systemic issues are manifesting in the burgeoning psychedelic industry, the psychedelic renaissance will inevitably fail to help our world heal from painful, ongoing social injustices.

    In October of 2020, MAPS Canada became the subject of these issues when an Open Letter and Call to Action was published. The authors, Keeno Ahmed-Jones and Ava Daeipour, detailed their efforts to help MAPS Canada implement ethical, socially conscious and culturally sensitive policies and move towards equitable access to psychedelics. These efforts were subsequently obstructed by the organization.

    In this interview, we hear from Keeno Ahmed-Jones about her experiences that led to the Open Letter and Call to Action. She shares details of her professional background in education advocacy and policy work, and how it helped inform her endeavors at MAPS Canada.

    *Note to reader: This interview took place in March of 2021. In the weeks that followed, a second Open Letter was written addressing further issues with the MAPS Canada board. In the past three months, three members of MAPS Canada’s board have resigned.

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    Sean Lawlor: Can you describe how you came to work for MAPS Canada?

    Keeno Ahmed-Jones: I moved to Canada in 2018, after being in New York for over 20 years. My professional background is in K-12 and adult education; I’ve worked in public service for a long time, including for major governmental organizations. My first exposure to systemic stratification in the context of educational opportunities was during my tenure at the New York City Department of Education, which, at the time, served 1.2 million school-aged students. I then served for several years advising the Board of Regents and leadership at the New York State Department of Education on programs and policies for adults and out-of-school youth. When I came to Vancouver, my birthplace, I knew of the research that MAPS was doing on MDMA, saw there was a chapter here, and was interested in seeing how I could contribute to their efforts as a volunteer.

    Given my background, I started volunteering on the policy committee, but when I saw that they were well situated, I asked if there was a diversity committee. One thing that was very notable to me upon attending the first general volunteer meeting was the lack of people of color in attendance; out of the 40-plus people there, I was one of three in the room from a racialized background. And so, when I found out that there wasn’t an active diversity committee, I started one, which I co-led with another woman, Ava Daeipour, who ended up helping me write the open letter and call to action sent to MAPS Canada. The letter brought into high relief a lot of the issues that I think are endemic not only for MAPS Canada as an organization, but really… you hear the term “psychedelic renaissance” bandied around, and I think that psychedelic renaissance really needs to raise the bar, based on my experiences at least.

    SL: Specifically in terms of diversity?

    KAJ: Diversity is one element. But beyond that, I think MAPS Canada really had the opportunity to become an exemplar of an organization and, unfortunately, instead of listening to people such as myself trying to inform and educate them on how to become a twenty-first century organization centered on anti-racist values, collective liberation, and the tenets of cultural humility, they really actively resisted that.

    I understand their advocacy for psychedelics, but I think there is an essential question that MAPS Canada and other organizations in this space need to ask, which is beyond diversity. “Is the playing field equal?” Every organization, non-profit or not, loves to talk about “corporate social responsibility,” and publicly place those statements front and center, especially in the wake of Black Lives Matter and the gaping inequalities that came to the fore in 2020. The pandemic illuminated a wide chasm that exists between the haves and the have-nots. And the murder of George Floyd compounded that reality into vivid detail for a lot of people that didn’t understand the traumas that people of color have had to endure—and I want to specifically forefront Black and Indigenous folks who have lived under the yoke of that oppression in North America.

    But, beyond the logistical hurdles around regulatory frameworks and proselytizing about legalizing psychedelics—and I do understand the passion and advocacy for that—when it comes to eventual access to these novel MDMA and other psychedelic treatments, some key questions need to be answered. Who’s going to be first in line to receive these treatments? Who’s going to be administering them? Who’s going to be doing the integration work? I’ll venture to guess that the clinic up the street from my old office in New York City charging $4000 for a course of ketamine sessions is not within reach for the vast majority of people.

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    SL: For folks who are less familiar with the situation, would you be willing to share more about what happened at MAPS Canada, and your experience in the wake of the open letter?

    KAJ: I came to my volunteer role from a background where my work was mediated via a policy lens, with a lot of value placed on collaborative and community-based approaches. Gaining diverse perspectives and working within a framework that ensured equity and inclusion was critical because in my work, decisions had the power to materially impact very marginalized people who were already struggling and in need of fierce advocates. And one of the things I came to value through those experiences was being on the ground with people knee-deep in those efforts, including people living those stories of struggle. I find that kind of work not just a calling, but a privilege.

    At MAPS Canada, I did not see those conversations happening, frankly—internally or externally. There seemed to be no interest nor engagement. So, one of the things that I started to advocate for early on was introducing a JEDI (Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion) framework, and talking about collective liberation—which were both in various stages of implementation at MAPS in the US, so I thought that both would be relatively easy to adopt. But I was basically told: hold the phone; we are not about collective liberation, and MAPS Canada is not a “save the whales” organization. It was incredible to hear someone actually say that to my face.

    After living in New York City, I think I had a bit of a mythologized vision of what life would be like in Canada, to be in a community that I thought had a better, more compassionate understanding of racism and colonialism. And I quickly found that was very much not the case. Rather, it’s been more problematic, because a lot of people are under the delusion that Canada is a post-racial society. Of course, that myth is quickly debunked if you look around, whether that’s at the overrepresentation of Blacks in the prison population, the deplorable treatment of First Nations in the healthcare system, racial inequities in school suspensions, police surveillance, wage inequities, I could go on.

    So, while MAPS Canada released quasi-apologetic statements after the open letter came out about having limited staff, and claims about suffering from the affliction of being white with blind spots, and so on [Psychedelics Today tried to find the links to these statements but could not]… a huge part of what occurred, and what is happening across the psychedelic domain, comes down to worldview. It’s a values decision. And, as far as boardrooms of nonprofits and for profits, white voices, most of them male, are what is valued.

    And so, instead of true coalition building, stepping down from that pedestal to engage in critical dialogue around equity, access, and reciprocity, there’s a Gollum effect taking place, a sort of metastasizing hunger for the psychedelic gold ring, if you will. There are the pandemic Instagram photos of these same folks in Costa Rica scoping out places for retreat centers, or multinational corporations looking for real estate in the downtown eastside of Vancouver to open for-profit clinics.

    Photo provided by Keeno Ahmed-Jones.

    SL: Thank you for sharing all that. Once you put out the open letter, was there any change or acknowledgement? I know there was a lot of exposure around it, but do you feel that it was heard?

    KAJ: Well, materially, has there been any change? Not to my knowledge. I know that a lot of declarations have been made, not only from MAPS Canada, but other organizations in this space that are adjacent to MAPS Canada. I feel like when an organization goes through a bit of a public relations debacle, like MAPS Canada did, the propensity is to do damage control. And when you have an all-white board, for example, attempts are made to diversify that board. But just because you now have a brown or black face on your board, that doesn’t really mean anything. The proof is in the pudding, as they say.

    I think there needs to be a radical reimagining of what this “psychedelic renaissance” looks like. Many of these organizations have constructed these top-down, colonial projects with extractive ideologies, have conflicts of interest and undisclosed public/private partnerships, and lack accountability and transparency. Those are major concerns that need to be addressed first and foremost, prior to thinking about whether your organization is diverse enough.

    SL: So, the open letter was published in October 2020; what has your focus been? Are you still working in this psychedelic renaissance?

    KAJ: I am, and thank you for asking that question. A lot of people have asked me that. I think one of the most brilliant things about the open letter was the support it received from all around the world—including Indigenous activists in Canada, the US, and the Global South. I’ve been in conversation with some of them, including in Canada, who shared their interactions with people in leadership at MAPS before and had less than stellar experiences, and so just did not want to engage.

    I do have a project that’s in motion, which I hope to share soon, interwoven with the themes of psychedelics, social justice, mental health, and drug policy.  And I am working with grassroots activists, practitioners, and other bright lights in the space envisioning sustainable models of self-determination and new ethical frameworks.

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    SL: I look forward to this project when the time comes to announce it. Last thing I want to ask: As you can probably tell, I am a white person working in the psychedelic field, and I want to keep getting more involved. Looking at the reality that there is a disproportionate amount of white people in this work, what would you suggest white folks in this movement do in order to help change these issues?

    KAJ: I love that question and think it’s a good one. Taking the step to educate myself has always been a core tenet of my approach and what I recommend to others. There are so many resources out there on anti-racism. Read books about the colonization and history of the Americas authored by Black and Indigenous authors. Examine issues around white fragility. I think those are solid building blocks.

    Being able to sit in that container of self-examination is really important—apart from the psychedelic journeys—because I think a lot of people go to that as a shortcut. But entheogens are not an antidote for racism. MDMA is not some sort of cosmic equalizer.

    I think we need to think more holistically about understanding privilege, being in community, and doing a lot of listening. “Why is this space not more diverse?” I think that’s a huge question in these spaces. Why are the people attending these community meetings not representative of this city I live in? Is there something unwelcoming about this space?

    I think it has to be a slow, gradual approach. It’s not going to happen overnight. There needs to be trust-building, community-building, and a lot of listening. That really takes time, intention, and effort, and I think it begins with an in-depth examination of privilege. These are deep assumptions and beliefs that people have held onto that have to be challenged.

    Psychedelics Today reached out to MAPS Canada for a comment on how the organization has been moving forward since the Open Letters were published and the work (if any) that it is doing to be a more inclusive institution. Their Board Chair, Eesmyal Santos-Brault, provided us with this statement: 

    MAPS Canada has made significant changes in the past six months to its leadership, board of directors, governance, accountability reporting, and operational structure, and this work is ongoing. As part of this, we are undertaking the work of creating new codes of conduct, ethics, and practice for all current and future board members, staff, and volunteers. Our current diversity committee, which consists of eight volunteer members (all of whom represent a wide spectrum in terms of age, and self-defined gender, sexual orientation, ethnic background, racial identification, indigeneity, spiritual beliefs, ability, and more) are leading MAPS Canada’s work to articulate and embed our commitment to equity, justice, diversity, inclusion, and reconciliation within the structures of our organization and all that we do, beginning with a new Terms of Reference drafted by the committee in November, 2020. This work is ongoing, and we look forward to sharing our progress in these areas with all stakeholders and the public in the coming weeks and months.

    This piece was updated on July 28, 2021. In the original article it said that three members of the MAPS Canada Board had resigned in the past two months, it has been changed to three months.

    Sean Lawlor

    Sean Lawlor is a writer, certified personal trainer, and Masters student in Transpersonal Counseling at Naropa University, in pursuit of a career in psychedelic journalism, research, and therapy. His interest in consciousness and non-ordinary states owes great debt to Aldous Huxley, Ken Kesey, and Hunter S. Thompson, and his passion for film, literature, and dreaming draws endless inspiration from Carl Jung, David Lynch, and J.K. Rowling. For more information or to get in touch, head to seanplawlor.com, or connect on Instagram @seanplawlor.

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    PT251 – Kristina & Jonas of the Psychedelic Literacy Fund – Celebrating Stan Grof

    In this episode, released on Stan Grof’s 90th birthday, Joe interviews Kristina Soriano & Jonas Di Gregorio of the Psychedelic Literacy Fund, a donor-advised fund focused on educating the world about psychedelic therapies by financing the translation of classic books into different languages. Their first big project has been to publish new translations of Grof’s classic, The Way of the Psychonaut. 

    Kristina and Jonas first told us about their project back in December, and they’re back to update us on their fundraising progress: new translations, future projects, a new volunteer, and a generous grant through HalfmyDAF. They talk about experiences with ayahuasca and virtual reality, audiobooks and the joy of reading, how the translation process works, and the birth perinatal matrices. 

    And they talk a lot about Stan Grof, with Joe discussing how much his work has meant to him and the formation of Psychedelics Today, which was created largely to promote Grof’s work and the power of Holotropic Breathwork. If you want to donate to the furthering of Grof’s knowledge in honor of his birthday, please do so at Psychedelicliteracy.org.

    Notable Quotes

    “It’s so fortunate that we chose The Way of the Psychonaut as our first book because Stan is turning 90 years old this year and it’s a wonderful way to celebrate his dedication to this field of psychedelic psychotherapy. He’s devoted 60 years of his life to this, to pioneering this way, and it’s really an homage to his fierce courage and curiosity in bringing this message forward. And the receptivity that we’ve had from our project just really shows how much people have been affected and positively influenced by his work.” -Kristina

    “When we speak about books about psychedelics, especially in countries where there is a different understanding of what they are, etc., [a] publisher can be very much reluctant and hesitant in translating them. And so that’s why, especially now, where clinical trials are showing these incredible results in the United States and a few more countries, it makes sense for philanthropy to think strategically [about] how these books can catalyze clinical trials and research in other countries.” -Jonas

    “Stan is so positive. It’s so beautiful how he accepts this is the 9th decade of his life and [he’s taking] all of the pieces and putting them all in a row, so that way, the passing is smooth. And it’s such a beautiful acceptance of this reality. But also, we want to assure the people of this generation that it’s being passed on to a generation that respects and honors the pioneering efforts that they’ve done, and we’ll make good on that promise so that we will learn from the past and bring it forward in a way that’s holistic and healing for everyone. That’s my hope.” -Kristina

    Links

    Psychedelicliteracy.org

    Psychedelics Today: PTSF 39 (with Jonas and Kristina of the Psychedelic Literacy Fund)

    Halfmydaf.com

    Stangrof.com

    Grof-legacy-training.com

    The Secret Chief Revealed, by Myron J. Stolaroff

    Microdosevr.com

    About Kristina Soriano & Jonas Di Gregorio

    Husband-and-wife team, Jonas Di Gregorio and Kristina Soriano, established the Psychedelic Literacy Fund in May of 2020 as a donor-advised fund managed by RSF Social Finance in San Francisco.  The vision of this fund is to educate the public about psychedelic therapies by financing the translation of books into different languages.

    Kristina Soriano holds a Masters’s Degree in Healthcare Administration from Trinity University.  A classically trained pianist and multi-instrumentalist, she is the Executive Director for the Women’s Visionary Congress.

    Jonas Di Gregorio comes from an Italian family of publishers, Il Libraio Delle Stelle.  He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Philosophy from La Sapienza University of Rome.

    Support the show

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    What Is Transpersonal Psychology and How Does It Relate to Psychedelics?

    By Jasmine Virdi

    Defining transpersonal psychology, exploring its history, and examining how it relates to psychedelic experiences.

    Transpersonal psychology, the branch of psychology that concerns itself with the study of spiritual experience and expanded states of consciousness, has often been excluded from traditional psychology programs. However, as we traverse the reaches of the psychedelic renaissance and interest in the healing potential of non-ordinary states of consciousness continues to grow, understanding transpersonal psychology is of growing importance.

    What Is Transpersonal Psychology?

    Sometimes transpersonal psychology is referred to as “spiritual psychology” or “the psychology of spirituality” in that it is the branch of psychology that concerns itself with the domain of human experience that is not limited to ordinary, waking consciousness, transcending our typically defined ego-boundaries. As a discipline, transpersonal psychology honors the existence and latent wisdom contained within non-ordinary experiences, concerning itself with unravelling the implications of their meaning for the individual, but also for the greater whole. It attempts to combine age-old insights from ancient wisdom traditions with modern Western psychology, trying to encapsulate the full spectrum of the human psyche.

    Prior to the inception of transpersonal psychology, the idea that psychologists should study spirituality was unheard of. Compared with traditional psychological approaches, transpersonal psychology takes a non-pathologizing approach to spiritual experience and non-ordinary states of consciousness.

    Reflecting on the origins of the discipline, psychedelic researcher and author, Dr. James Fadiman, offers, “Transpersonal psychology, in its simplest definition, is concerned with understanding the full scope of consciousness, primarily within the human species, but not limited to that which can be described easily by Western science, religious or mystical traditions, nor by Indigenous categorizations.”

    “Unlike the rest of psychology, it has not attempted to use the trappings of scientific method to make it more acceptable,” Fadiman adds. “As a result, it has often been identified pejoratively as part of the “new age” counterculture, since it freely investigated states of consciousness and approaches to personal growth and development that were not being looked at by the other psychologies.”

    Although Fadiman is generally more well-known for his pioneering work in microdosing, he was one of the prominent figures in shaping the early transpersonal movement. Together with psychologist Robert Frager, Fadiman co-founded the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in 1975, now known as Sofia University.

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    The Birth of a Spiritual Psychology

    Transpersonal psychology was formally launched in 1971 by psychologists Abraham Maslow and Anthony Sutich. It emerged as a “Fourth Force” within psychology, with the other three forces being cognitive behaviorism, psychoanalytic/Freudian psychology, and humanistic psychology.

    In the 1950s, American psychology was dominated by the schools of cognitive behaviorism and Freudian psychology, however, many felt that these approaches to understanding the human psyche were limited and this growing dissatisfaction led to the birth of humanistic psychology. Humanistic psychology was closely linked to the transpersonal movement in that it was also founded by Maslow and many of the same individuals.

    No longer a psychology of psychopathology, humanistic psychology concerned itself with the study of healthy individuals, focusing on human growth and potential. One of Maslow’s main qualms with behaviorism was the limitation of applying animal models to human behavior as this approach would only serve to illuminate the functions that we share with given animals. As such, he felt that behaviorism did not serve to enhance our understanding of the higher functions of our consciousness such as love, freedom, art, and beyond. Additionally, Maslow felt Freudian psychoanalysis was lacking due to its tendency to reduce the psyche to instinctual drives and draw on models of psychopathology.

    Humanistic psychology attempted to take a holistic approach to human existence, concerning itself with self-actualization and the growth of love, fulfillment, and autonomy in individuals. Despite the popularity of the discipline, and the new “Human Potential Movement” that spawned around it, Maslow and others felt that there were some critical aspects lacking in humanistic psychology. Namely, the acknowledgement of the role of spirituality in people’s lives.

    In 1967, a working group including the likes of Abraham Maslow, Anthony Sutich, Stanislav Grof, James Fadiman, Miles Vich, and Sonya Margulies met in Menlo Park, California with the aim of developing a new psychology that encapsulated the full spectrum of human experience, including non-ordinary states of consciousness. In this discussion, Stanislav Grof suggested the new discipline or Fourth Force should be called “transpersonal psychology.” Thereafter, the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology was launched in 1969, and the Association of Transpersonal Psychology was founded in 1972.

    Despite the formal beginnings of transpersonal psychology in the middle of the twentieth century, the movement has its conceptual roots in the early work of William James and Carl Jung, psychologists who were mutually interested in the spiritual reaches of the human psyche. Touching upon the relevance of Jung’s contributions to the field in his book Beyond the Brain, Dr. Stanislav Grof, one of the founding fathers of transpersonal psychology and pioneer in the field of psychedelic research, described Jung as, “The first representative of the transpersonal orientation in psychology.”

    William James, father of American psychology, is also perceived to be one of the founders of modern transpersonal thought, making the first recorded use of the term “trans-personal” in a 1905 lecture. However, James’ use of the term was more narrow than the way it is used today. Not only did James’ philosophy contribute to the development of transpersonal psychology, his early experimentations with psychoactive substances, in particular nitrous oxide, have also added substantially to the psychology of mystical experiences and the scientific study of consciousness.

    Reflecting on his experience in The Varieties of Religious Experience, James wrote, “Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.” It is these very forms of “entirely different” consciousness that transpersonal psychology concerns itself with.

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    Understanding the Nature of Transpersonal Experience

    The term transpersonal literally means beyond (trans) the personal, and as such, transpersonal experiences are those which serve to evaporate and transcend our ordinary, waking consciousness. Although transpersonal experiences are sometimes induced spontaneously, they can also be brought on by contact with nature, engaging in contemplative practices like meditation, sex, music, and even by difficult psychological experiences. They can take place in a variety of forms, whether it be a spontaneously induced mystical state, out-of-body or near-death experience, a unitative state elicited by psychedelics, or even an alien encounter experience.

    Transpersonal experiences are inherently transformative in that they usually serve to broaden our self-conception, often providing us with a broader cosmological perspective. Take for example, the experience of ego death, or ego-dissolution as it is referred to in the scientific literature, a type of transpersonal experience that can be triggered by the use of psychedelics. In the ego death experience, the ordinary sense of self fades into an experience of unity with ultimate reality or “cosmic consciousness.”

    Such experiences are both fearful and enlightening, but are thought to be one of the reasons why the psychedelic experience is so transformative for so many people. Viewed through the transpersonal lens, ego death tends to be understood as a beneficial, healing process in which an individual is able to let go of old ego structures that are no longer of service, making space for new, more integral ways of being.

    Transpersonal experience is not limited to the world as we know it to exist in everyday reality. In a transpersonal experience, one might find themselves projected out of their body, viewing remote events in vivid detail or having encounters with entities from other dimensions. Describing the nature of such states in their book Spiritual Emergency, Stanislav Grof and the late Christina Grof, suggest that they include elements that western culture does not accept as objectively real, such as deities, demons, mythological figures, entities, and spirit guides. As such, they write, “In the transpersonal state, we do not differentiate between the world of “consensus reality”, or the conventional everyday world, and the mythological realm of archetypal forms.”

    Such experiences facilitate a sense of harmony and meaning, connection and unity, and self-transcendence which are associated with positive effects such as heightened feelings of love and compassion. However, that is not to say that transpersonal states always have positive consequences, as they can also be incredibly destabilizing and have the ability to cause psychological distress, often referred to as a “spiritual emergenc(y)” in the transpersonal literature.

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    Why the Need for Transpersonal Psychology?

    Science, as it stands today, is limited in its purview. Mainstream science and psychology is largely dominated by materialist approaches to consciousness and mental health. Within the materialist paradigm, matter is considered primary to consciousness, which is believed to be an accidental by-product of complex arrangements of matter. According to Fadiman, “The problem for mainstream psychology has been the unmeasurable core of transpersonal’s interest, namely, human consciousness.”

    Fadiman suggests that mainstream psychology has become more and more “scientistic.” That is, it has become dogmatic in its belief that science and the materialist reductionist values that underlie it are the only way of objectively understanding reality. “Psychology is more concerned with statistical significance than personal utility, and its subject matter now includes a remarkable amount of research with animals, where their consciousness can be most easily ignored,” he shares.

    Fadiman reflects that transpersonal psychology’s interest in the nature of consciousness and states of consciousness that extend beyond personal identity makes it “at its very best, the ugly stepsister that one leaves at home when going out to join material sciences parties.” Sharing an example of this, Fadiman pointed to the American Psychological Association’s refusal to grant accreditation to a transpersonal graduate school.

    “This was not because of the quality of its dissertations which were rated quite highly or for the span and variety of its courses nor because of the financial status of the institution,” Fadiman continues. Rather, “It was turned down solely on the basis of its fundamental subject matter.” In essence, it boils down to the question of materialism, as many transpersonal psychologists believe in some form or another that consciousness cannot be explained by processes of the brain alone.

    Almost all indigenous cultures who have used psychedelics for hundreds perhaps thousands of years report that as one’s consciousness expands beyond the perimeters of the identity, that there are other beings, other realms of existence which are met, often across cultures with identical descriptions.

    —James Fadiman

    Further, Grof describes the dominant scientific perspective as “ethnocentric” in that “it has been formulated and promoted by Western materialistic scientists, who consider their own perspective to be superior to that of any other human group at any time of history.” However, he suggests that transpersonal psychology, on the other hand, has made significant advances in remedying the ethnocentric biases of mainstream science through its cultural sensitivity towards the spiritual traditions of ancient and native cultures, the acknowledgement of the ontological reality of transpersonal experiences, and their value.

    The Relevance of Transpersonal Psychology in the Psychedelic Renaissance

    The resurgence of interest in the medical, psychological, and transformational benefits of psychedelics has naturally generated increased awareness of transpersonal states and their value for the health of the human psyche. When it comes to the study of spirituality and non-ordinary states of consciousness, transpersonal psychology has long paved the way, validating the veracity and psychological benefits of such states. As such, it offers itself as an important reservoir of knowledge when trying to understand the healing potentials of psychedelics within therapeutic contexts, but also when trying to understand their broader socio-cultural implications.

    In spite of not being widely recognized, transpersonal psychology has long led the scientific endeavor to understand the totality of the human psyche through its embrace of non-ordinary states of consciousness that have hitherto been dismissed as “psychotic” or merely “hallucinations” by mainstream science. Fadiman explains that transpersonal psychology continues to take seriously and without judgment the results reported by individuals working with psychedelics. “For example, almost all indigenous cultures who have used psychedelics for hundreds perhaps thousands of years report that as one’s consciousness expands beyond the perimeters of the identity, that there are other beings, other realms of existence which are met, often across cultures with identical descriptions,” says Fadiman.

    The conceptual frameworks of the dominant model are inadequate when it comes to understanding non-ordinary experiences, including those elicited by psychedelics. As such, Fadiman suggests that, “As we continue to develop more accurate maps of inner space, it is likely that transpersonal psychology, with its emphasis on subjective as well as objective observation will continue to play a prominent role.”

    This article was updated on July 19, 2021 to correct the years the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology and Association of Transpersonal Psychology were founded.

    About the Author

    Jasmine Virdi is a freelance writer in the psychedelic space. Since 2018, she has been working for the fiercely independent publishing company Synergetic Press, where her passions for ecology, ethnobotany, and psychoactive substances converge. Jasmine has written for Psychedelics Today, Chacruna Institute for Plant Medicines, Lucid News, Cosmic Sister, Psychable, and Microdosing Guru. She is currently pursuing an MSc in Spirituality, Consciousness, and Transpersonal Psychology at the Alef Trust with the future aim of working as a psychedelic practitioner. Jasmine’s goal as an advocate for psychoactive substances is to raise awareness of the socio-historical context in which these substances emerged in order to help integrate them into our modern-day lives in a safe, ethically-integral, and meaningful way. 

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    Book Review: Alexander Shulgin’s The Nature of Drugs

    By Lex Pelger

    A review of The Nature of Drugs: History, Pharmacology, and Social Impact (Synergetic Press, 2021), a collection of eight lectures given by the “godfather of ecstasy” Dr. Alexander Shulgin.

    And so begins one of the best classes you’ll ever take…

    “Most of you have already been exposed to drugs, and most of you will personally decide if you wish to become exposed again in the future. The goal of this course is to provide specific information concerning drugs, as to their actions, their risks, and their virtues. And that’s really what my role is, I’m a seeker of truth. I’m trying to find out what’s there. I am not an advocate for nor an advocate against drug use. I have my own personal philosophies that have no business in here. You’ll find that I am quite sympathetic with a lot of drugs that people say are evil and bad. But in truth, I want you to have enough information that you can decide for yourself whether this is something that’s your cup of tea, quite literally caffeine, or whether it is something you wish to stay out of.

    “I’m going to have a theme for this whole course called “warts and all.” Namely, what is known about drugs, what is to be found out about them, what do they smell like, what do they taste like, what are the goods, what are the bads. Why is it so bad to use drugs? Why is it occasionally so good to use drugs?”

    —Alexander Shulgin, The Nature of Drugs: History, Pharmacology, and Social Impact

    The Nature of Drugs: History, Pharmacology, and Social Impact by Alexander Shulgin is out now with Synergetic Press.

    What’s beautiful about this work—a volume of the first eight lectures from Alexander “Shasha” Shulgin’s popular course on drugs at San Francisco State University—is that for those of us who never knew Sasha, or only saw him briefly, it’s a window into a beautiful soul. Like Robert Sapolsky, he’s one of those extraordinary teachers of science who brings so many layers to the experience of how science actually works. Through his anecdotes and asides, he does away with science as a function of perfect observers, removed from their subjects with ideal impartiality and presents a messy system of egos, funding priorities, ‘novelty’ and blind groping towards the Truth.

    Many of us know Dr. Alexander Shulgin through the landmark books he wrote with his wife Ann, PIKHAL and TIKHAL, which are a mix of autobiography, love story, and drug syntheses. Even more of us know him through his beloved compound MDMA, which he popularized and made famous. But this book, The Nature of Drugs: History, Pharmacology, and Social Impact, shows another side: a teacher of phenomenal worth.

    I’ve been studying drugs for twenty years, but Sasha Shulgin’s lectures to his students still gave me new insights on almost every page. He has a way of making the complexities of pharmacodynamics accessible by turning the human body into a bathtub. He talks about how the water gets filtered, how it goes down the drain, and how that makes a difference in the drugs you take. The understanding he imparts of how drugs work is invaluable.

    But what feels so special is the glimpses you get of the alchemical man himself. In these lectures, occurring in the Year of our Reagan 1987, he makes clear his opposition to the War on Drugs. The students taking his course might not have expected a year-by-year rundown of the increasing crackdowns since 1980, but that’s what they learned. And if you sit yourself in their seat as you read this book, imagine being a student in Reagan’s Amerika learning about the Drug War from a white-haired chemist who admits in the first lecture, out of the 250 known psychedelic compounds, to have tried about 150 of them. 

    But he doesn’t look like Hunter S. Thompson. He looks like a tall kindly man with his pretty wife in the front row taking notes. He approaches chemistry as a ‘sacred art’. He rails against ‘holding laws’ that are simply used to hold people that the police don’t like the look of. He drops jokes constantly and calls his scribbled diagrams of molecules ‘dirty pictures’. I like to imagine myself in this classroom and I wonder if I would have been sharp enough to figure out that this was one of the greatest underground chemists of all time.

    There’s a clue near the end, while he’s talking about his own history in industrial research and playing one of his imagination games with his students:

    “Take, for example, how you define new sweetening agents, agents that you put in coffee that make coffee taste sweet. How would you go about finding them? It’s your job. You’re hired and you are working for Monsanto. “Find a new sweetening agent. We want to knock Nutrasweet off the market.” How are you going to find it? You’re right now at the nitty gritty of research; your task is to find a new sweetening agent. Here are our leads. Here are five materials that do cause sweet tastes, but this is too toxic, this has a bitter aftertaste, this one takes fifteen minutes to come on, this one causes cancer, and that one causes teratogenesis. We can’t use them. But we need one because we’re losing the market. Saccharine is not going to be available much longer. How do you find one?

    “Well, my philosophy, that people would cringe at, is to put a damp finger into it and taste it. [Laughter.] That to me is the heart of how you find a sweetening agent. Well, what if it’s going to cause cancer of the jaw? Okay, then you come down with cancer of the jaw, but you’ve found a sweetening agent. [Laughter.] So you have risk and you have reward.”

    This was the same method he used to test MDMA when he first synthesized it a decade before these lectures. Unfortunately, only three months earlier, the feds had banned MDMA by putting it into Schedule 1. They also passed the Federal Analogues Act that would be used as a wide club against any “substantially similar” molecule (a phrase that makes him shake his head. “Is the taillight structure of a 1986 Pontiac “substantially similar” to the taillight structure of a 1984 Chevrolet?”). Despite these crackdowns, his wife in the front row would go on to lead an untold number of therapists into an alliance with MDMA and its chemical cousins like 2C-B. And their books PIHKALand TIHKAL would document a beautiful love story, fertilized by his psychoactives. He knew that the drugs that interested him couldn’t be found by testing them in animals. As an alchemist, he knew you had to stick your finger into it and taste it for yourself. 

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    Shulgin’s First Taste

    In his first lecture, he shares with the students,

    “My first experience with morphine was with a wound I had during WWII and I was going into England. I was about three days out of England on a destroyer and was below decks and we were playing cards and killing the time until we got into England. I was on morphine pretty much all the time because this was one hell of a painful thing. And I was dealing with one hand, I learned to deal with one hand, and the guy in sick bay would come by and say, “Is your thumb still hurting you?” “Yeah, probably a little bit more than it had before. Whose deal?” You know, the next thing you’re dealing cards. The pain is still there. It’s a beautiful, powerful tool to treat pain because the pain is there, but it doesn’t bother you.”

    As he doesn’t reveal in the first lecture, in 1960 Sasha first tried mescaline while a young chemist at Dow Pharmaceuticals. He said of the experience, “I understood that our entire universe is contained in the mind and the spirit. We may choose not to find access to it, we may even deny its existence, but it is indeed there inside us, and there are chemicals that can catalyze its availability.’’ 

    Chemicals can also catalyze profitability. The next year, he created Zectran, the first biodegradable pesticide. Dow could sell it by the ton. And as he said to his class—most likely with a wink and a Groucho Marx smile, “And industries love things they can sell by the ton.”

    With his success, Dow was content to leave him alone in his lab, puttering around and doing just the kind of things he wanted. It was a chemist’s dream. And this dreamer dreamed up novel psychedelics.

    As Hamilton Morris lovingly laid out, Sasha began with a simple modification to the mescaline molecule. He added one carbon to a side-chain and it became the psychedelic amphetamine that he called TMA. He continued experimenting and produced TMA-2 through TMA-6.  The last one eventually went on to become a moderately popular psychedelic in the US and Japan. 

    As an alchemist, he knew you had to stick your finger into it and taste it for yourself. 

    1963 marked the beginning of the end for the cushy Dow years: Sasha synthesized DOM (his PIHKAL entry here). By 1966, with LSD illegal, this psychedelic amphetamine started appearing on the street under the name STP (Serenity, Tranquility, and Peace). It earns its name. Shulgin himself said on 4 mg, “It is a beautiful experience. Of all past joys, LSD, mescaline, cannabis, peyote, this ranks number one.”

    But the effects of DOM can last much much longer than LSD. You might have been enjoying the merry-go-round, but eventually you want to get off and let the world stop spinning. At 5 mg, he wrote, “The experience continued unabated throughout the night with much tension and discomfort. I was unable to get any sleep. I hallucinated quite freely during the night, but could stop them at will. While I never felt threatened, I felt I knew what it was like to look across the brink to insanity.” 

    Unfortunately, just in time for the Summer of Love, some underground chemist dosed a batch at 20 mg of DOM per pill. On top of that high dosage, the full effects can take two hours to kick in and so it’s easy to imagine redosing because you don’t think it’s working. In Golden Gate Park at the huge and historic Human Be-In, thousands got way too high in trips that could last for three days. Within a year, the feds made DOM illegal and when Dow figured out the mind behind the molecule, they kindly showed Dr. Shulgin the door.

    He went to his home laboratory in the hills outside Berkeley, California, and became a gentleman scientist in the vein of Ed Ricketts. But instead of the sea, Shulgin peered into the mind. He kept his Schedule 1 license by being useful to the DEA and funded himself with consultations and teaching. In plain sight of the authorities, he tinkered with hundreds of psychedelics—including the rediscovery of MDMA. 

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    Alexander Shulgin’s Definitions

    From this unique perspective, the students in Sasha’s class got to learn about two of the trickiest problems in pharmacology and sociology:

    1. How do you define ‘drug’?
    2. How do you define ‘drug abuse’?

    He begins, “Philosophy aside, what is a drug? The FDA has given a marvelous, marvelous, long legal definition that goes on for four paragraphs”. He continues to gently mock this FDA definition until he shares a better explanation from Professor Samuel Irwin: “A drug is any chemical that modifies the function of living tissue, resulting in physiological or behavioral change.” But Shulgin takes it farther:

    “I would make the definition looser yet, and considerably more general. Not just a chemical, but also plants, minerals, concepts, energy, just any old stuff. Not just changes in physiology or behavior, but also in attitude, concept, attention, belief, self-image, and even changes in faith and allegiance. “A drug is something that modifies the expected state of a living thing.” In this guise, almost everything outside of food, sleep, and sex can classify as a drug. And I even have some reservations about all three of those examples.”

    Cue the laughter. In these transcripts, you often see [laughter], and you know the transcribers are probably underreporting it. It makes you want to listen to the original tapes. Those lucky kids, getting to learn about ingestion methods from one of the great alchemists of the century. Sasha teaches on how we metabolize these drugs, how they sequester to different tissues, how we form bad habits with them and how we form good habits with them.

    “If you can drink modestly, if you can use tobacco modestly and have a choice, have freedom of choice, and choose to do it and you have a good relationship with it, and it applies to alcohol, it applies to tobacco, it applies to LSD, it applies to heroin—there is nothing intrinsically evil about any of those drugs. Drugs are not intrinsically evil. In fact, we are going to get into the question of what is drug abuse. The problems that are bothersome with the definition of the word “drug” are nothing compared with the ones that are to be faced with the word “abuse.””

    He even had a collection of definitions of ‘drug abuse’. From his huge consumption of articles, essays and public talks, you can imagine the different versions collected in his files, like species of beetles pinned in a collector’s cabinet. He found they fell into “the four operative words: what, who, where and how.”

    What a drug is…

    • a particularly lousy definition because drug abuse is linked directly to the shape of the molecule itself.

    Who’s giving the drug…

    • following Szasz, if drugs from a doctor is drug use and if self-medication is drug abuse, then doctors stand between you and your drugs like priests did between you and God before the Reformation.

    Where is the drug obtained…

    • according to Dr. Jerome Levine at NIMH, drugs from “illicit channels, and/or in medically unsupervised or socially unsanctioned settings.”
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    And finally, how are drugs used?

    “I personally believe, most strongly, that in the improper use of drugs lies their abuse. Dr. Irwin has phrased it thusly: “[Drug abuse is] the taking of drugs under circumstances, and at dosages that significantly increase their hazard potential, whether or not used therapeutically, legally, or as prescribed by a physician.

    …

    “People use drugs, have always used drugs, and will forever use drugs, whether there are physicians or not…

    “Any use of a drug that impairs physical or mental health, that interferes with one’s social functioning or productivity is drug abuse. And the corollary is also true. The use of a drug that does not impair physical or mental health or interfere with social functioning or productivity is not drug abuse. And the question of its illegality is completely beside the matter.”

    And the Freedom Fighter in him isn’t slow to point out how these definitions are used to harm people in the real world via the War on Drugs. Plus, the sly wizard mentions the recent banning of MDMA as a textbook example of the misuse of drug abuse.

    What a prof. He defines terms, rambles on to fascinating asides and uses brilliant metaphors. And of course, he made no secret of his dislike of midterms, finals and grades. He’s the kind of cool teacher who takes a Socratic poll on what kind of final to have and finally decides to make it an essay question where you have to disagree with him.

    Buy The Book: The Nature of Drugs

    All these lectures give the portrait of a courageous, beautiful soul. And with this book, the course is only getting started. There’s another volume still to be published where he will drill down into the various categories of drugs. 

    Anyone interested in psychoactives should get this book and support the further compiling of Dr. Shulgin’s work. If you’ve ever spent $30 on any of his chemical creations, helping out by buying the book seems only fair. And you get to own a lovely portrait of someone whom we are very lucky for having lived and having taught.

    About the Author

    Lex Pelger. With a background in biochemistry, Lex Pelger writes and lectures about the science of psychoactives. He’s written three graphic novels about the endocannabinoid system based on Moby-Dick and hosts the Lex Files podcast about spirituality and psychoactives. Follow him on Twitter @TheLexFilesShow or join his No Nonsense! newsletter.

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    PTSF64 – The First Woman to Take Acid, The Drug Policy Reform Act, and Indigenous Language Extinction

    In this week’s Solidarity Friday episode, Michelle, Kyle, and Joe review the most interesting articles and recent news in the world of psychedelia. 

    They first talk about Chacruna’s article highlighting not only the world’s first trip-sitter, but also the first woman to take LSD, Albert Hofman’s assistant, Susi Ramstein. They then look into the new Pill-iD app coming out in the UK, which will match user-submitted pictures of MDMA with pictures from their database, using machine learning to determine purity and strength. While this is good (especially in a post-quarantine environment of people very eager to chemically celebrate their ability to be together again), how much can we really know without any chemical analysis? And how much should we trust their database?

    They then revisit their discussion on California’s Senate Bill 519 (turns out it does mean legalization after all, but if so, why is “decriminalization” used in the bill’s title?), excitedly discuss the first all-drug decriminalization bill being submitted to Congress (the Drug Policy Reform Act, or DPRA), talk about psilocybin being studied for anti-inflammatory effects and Robin-Carhart Harris’ recent interview with Court Wing, and finally, get into the very real and often not-talked-about importance of ancient and Indigenous language and the danger of losing it: Are we going to lose more knowledge from the loss of language than from the destruction of habitat?

    Notable Quotes

    “The argument here is not only the human cost, [but] the real financial cost of an overdose is extreme, relative to getting ahead of this. So cities and governments can save money by offering this. Less dead bodies to pick up with your EMTs, less situations of overdose to respond to.  …If we can do harm reduction [and] say, ‘Hey, these are people too,’ we also save money, and we save lives, and we get those lives back into society in a hopefully meaningful way.” -Joe

    “The bill is damning of the drug war, of criminalization, [and it] talks about how criminalization and the drug war have added more harm to consumption. And the fact that it passed the California Senate means that these politicians are starting to catch on to how brutal this has been. And in this post-BLM, post-George Floyd and Breonna Taylor era; hey, you guys have got to clean your act up, otherwise, you’re going to have riots on your hands.” -Joe 

    “If this bill does pass, I feel like that’s sending a message to the whole world that we can be rational again. This wasn’t rational, this wasn’t based on science, and a lot of people mistrust us now because of that. …What would we be showing young people if we did this? …Not that we need more respect for authority, but we could respect authority at all if they could show us that they could rule or govern us in a rational, science-based way.” -Michelle 

    “If we ever get to the point in human civilization where things start to collapse and we need to understand the environment [and the plants] a little bit more, we’re going to be very lost. Just going outside and looking around you, what plants do you know? What stories do you know about the plants around you? Do you know what’s edible? Do you know what’s medicinal? All these things that you call weeds are actually edible plants or have really great medicinal value. Do you know the story of the landscape in which you live in?” -Kyle

    Links

    Chacruna.net: Susi’s Tram Ride: Recognizing the First Woman to Take LSD

    Ladbible.com: Pill-iD App Lets Users Scan MDMA Pills To See What They Contain

    Washingtonpost.com: Drug-smuggling tunnel to Mexico found under abandoned KFC in Arizona

    SB-519 Controlled substances: decriminalization of certain hallucinogenic substances (the actual bill)

    Filtermag.org: First All-Drug Decriminalization Bill to Be Introduced in Congress

    Drugpolicy.org: Summary of the Drug Policy Reform Act (DPRA) of 2021

    Psilocybinalpha.com: Silo Pharma Announces Collaboration with University California San Francisco to study Psilocybin as an Anti-Inflammatory agent in Parkinson’s and Bipolar Patients

    Lucid.news: UCSF Launches Translational Psychedelic Research (TrPR) Program

    Psychedelicstoday.com: Psilocybin for Depression: A Q&A between Robin Carhart-Harris & a Psilocybin Study Participant

    PNAS.org: Language extinction triggers the loss of unique medicinal knowledge

    Books:

    Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca, by Richard Louis Miller

    Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, by John Perkins

    Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, by Johann Hari

    The Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic: The Parallel Lives of People as Plants: Keeping the Seeds Alive, by Martín Prechtel

    Drug testing resources:

    Dancesafe.org

    Bunkpolice.com

    Elevationchemicals.com

    Drugsdata.org

    Energycontrol-international.org

    Support the show!

    Navigating Psychedelics

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    What Is Sacred Reciprocity?

    psychedelic compounds

    By Rebecca Martinez

    Defining sacred reciprocity, exploring the historical use of psychedelics, and establishing ways to give back to the communities who have lost the most holding this ancient wisdom.

    Nature exists in a dynamic balance of interconnected relationships and exchanges. When more is taken than returned, the results are depletion, imbalance and system collapse. Many of us in the Global North have the advantage of enjoying psychedelics simply by purchasing them or receiving them as a gift. We are no longer in direct relationship with their roots or required to know where they came from, who grew them, or how they were sourced and produced. We do not bear the historic or contemporary burdens carried by those for whom entheogens are integral to their way of life.

    The psychedelic movement is surging, in part because many of us have had the privilege of direct, life-altering experiences with these substances. These medicines, whether grown or synthesized, give generously, often in the form of healing, wonder, reconnection, play and illumination. But they don’t exist in a vacuum. Thankfully, they also offer the capacity for openness—and this unlocks a door to a more nuanced and responsible conversation about where our medicines come from and the impacts of our participation in what has become, for better or worse, a global market.

    Just as being good stewards on this Earth requires us to know the stories behind our food, clothing, fuel and devices, we also have a calling to ask deeper questions about psychedelics. What don’t we know about the places, cultures, ecologies, peoples, and complex histories associated with the healing modalities we venerate? In asking these questions, we can uncover practical and meaningful ways to contribute to a culture of reciprocity, sustainability and integrity, toward the benefit of all. Then we can begin to see how this reciprocity lays the groundwork for collective healing.

    Sacred reciprocity offers an opportunity to help restore balance to a presently imbalanced system of extraction amidst the global expansion of psychedelics.

    Reciprocity requires an exchange of value, to be sure—but it should be a meaningful contribution to which we bring our whole selves, rather than simply a bill that we pay.

    What Is Sacred Reciprocity? 

    Sacred reciprocity is the heartfelt exchange, gratitude, and acknowledgment for everyone and everything that sustains us. In psychedelics, it is a call for those who consume plant medicines to give back meaningfully to the communities and lineages who have preserved these medicines for generations. Indigenous communities bear the impact of the expansion, along with, in many cases, oppression from local governments.

    The concept of sacred reciprocity comes from the Quechua word, ayni. Quechua is the Indigenous language of the ancestral peoples of the Andes, specifically Peru. Ayni is a principle of receptivity and gratitude, marked by a lifestyle of giving back in an inhale-exhale type relationship with the natural world.

    Even those who consume only lab-based substances can participate in sacred reciprocity through a number of practices detailed here.

    The History of Indigenous Psychedelic Use

    Here’s a quick and dirty history lesson.

    So, where and from whom do our medicines come? What is their traditional use? The following list is by no means exhaustive, and it’s important to remember that many entheogens are found throughout multiple continents and their practices vary between lineages. Additionally, much history has been lost and erased through the process of colonization. We recognize the unnamed groups and honor their heritage from which modern life has been severed.

    Psilocybin

    Psilocybin-containing mushrooms are sacred to many indigenous communities in Mexico, especially in the mountains of Oaxaca.

    Psilocybin mushrooms have confirmed Indigenous roots in Central America, most notably the Mazatec people of Oaxaca, Mexico (recall the oft-told tale of Maria Sabina and R. Gordon Wasson), as well as the Mixtec, Nashua and Zapotec peoples.

    It has been theorized that ancient Greeks used a combination of psychedelic mushrooms and ergot fungus in their ceremonial brews. Evidence of ceremonial mushroom use has also been found in Africa, with Algerian cave paintings dating back 9,000 years and psilocybe mushrooms found in Central Africa and South Sudan.

    Modern Mazatec people have spoken of the “Hippie Invasion” of the ‘60s and the way the commodification of sacred mushrooms reshaped their communities. Learn more about Mazatec Perspectives on the Globalization of Psilocybin in this article from Chacruna Institute.

    Ayahuasca

    Ayahuasca, also called caapi, yajé, or yagé, is a ceremonial drink made from the stem and bark of the Banisteriopsis caapi vine and the leaves of Chacruna (Psychotria viridis) or other botanicals. It was first formulated by Indigenous South Americans of the Amazon basin, particularly modern day Brazil, Peru, Colombia and Ecuador. In 2010, a 1,000- year old bundle of shamanic herbs with ayahuasca was found in a cave in Bolivia. Ceremonial use for the Shipibo-Conibo people does not always include chacruna leaves, which contain DMT.

    While the Shipibo people are the most well-known tribe associated with ayahuasca medicine, close to 100 distinct Indigenous groups use ayahuasca. The global expansion of ayahuasca tourism (and the Western emphasis on visions and DMT) has led to overharvesting, deforestation, violence, non-Indigenous owned retreat centers and competition between shamans.

    In addition, deforestation in the Amazon has reached record highs, which has a global impact on climate instability. Yet, a 2020 study found what many First Nations people have often said and may seem obvious: Collective Indigenous property ownership reduces deforestation and protects human rights, as well as cultural and biodiversity.

    Peyote

    Peyote is sacred to many Native American and Mexican communities. It contains mescaline.

    Peyote is a sacred cactus native to what is now known as the American Southwest, Mexico and Peru. With a human-plant relationship dating back 10,000 years, this ceremonial cactus has been used in rites of passage and annual pilgrimages by Native American and Mexican Indigenous groups for millennia and is inseparable from cultural heritage for many tribes, including the Wixaritari, Raramuri, Yaqui and Cora peoples.

    Peyote contains mescaline, a psychoactive substance also found in Huachuma (San Pedro cactus). For the last century, Indigenous groups have fought convoluted government policies, environmental degradation, private land ownership, poaching, mining, and urbanization.

    The Indigenous Peyote Conservation Initiative is a collaborative effort to preserve peyote and ensure the survival of this sacred practice for generations to come. Learn more here.

    Huachuma

    Known as the grandfather of entheogens, Huachuma (which came to be known as San Pedro after the Spanish Invasion) is a cactus native to Peru and Bolivia. Its use can be traced back 4,000 years. With roots in the Andes, this medicinal plant is associated with the Chavín culture, which laid the foundations for the Inca civilization. Stone temple slabs dating back to 1,300 B.C. show a figure holding a huachuma cactus.

    Huachuma contains mescaline, and while it is legal in the United States to grow the cactus for ornamental purposes, consuming mescaline is illegal. Because it grows so much faster than peyote and is more widely available, conservation and Indigenous rights advocates recommend that those who feel called toward a relationship with mescaline choose huachuma rather than peyote. In this way we can preserve peyote in solidarity with the Native American communities for whom it is a sacrament.

    Rapé

    Tobacco is one of the oldest and most important shamanic medicines in the Americas. It is impossible to separate Indigenous history in the Americas from the ceremonial use of tobacco, known as Mapacho. Rapé (also called Hapé or Rapéh) is a form of sacred Amazonian snuff tobacco. It is made by combining dried tobacco leaves (Nicotiana Rustica) with sacred tree ash and other botanicals and grinding it into a dust-fine powder. Blends are distinct from tribe to tribe and the shamanic process of making rapé can take several weeks. It is known for its grounding and stimulating qualities.

    Tobacco is not prohibited in most of the world the way other entheogens are. However, this open legal market has created other concerns. In recent years, an explosion in global interest in rapé has resulted in many white-owned “shamanic supply” businesses popping up online, selling rapé and other Amazonian medicines on web stores and Instagram. It is wise to dig deeper when companies claim they are in partnership with local tribes or have a “trusted source.” Keep in mind that  “a portion of proceeds returned to the tribes” and “mutually beneficial relationship” are undefined and potentially exploitative claims and fair trade practices aren’t always readily enforced.

    Kambo

    Kambo, also known as toad medicine, is a controversial ritual. Historical use of kambo is very different than the modern practice. Hunters in the Matsés tribe of Peru would coat their blow darts with the frog poison, believing that this purified the animal they shot. They would then bring the animal back to their village to be sacrificed and eaten. Kambo is quite different than other Indigenous medicines; the modern practice, as Westerners know it, seems to be a new invention. The first human use of Kambo (for sharpening the skills of hunters) was documented in 1925 by French missionaries. It was popularized in the 1980’s, by investigative journalist Peter Gorman, and numerous patents were also filed at this time.

    Sourcing kambo involves first extracting the peptide-rich poison from the body of the Giant Leaf Frog (Phyllomedusa bicolor). This is done by catching the animals and then stressing them so that they secrete their poison, either by stretching their limbs or holding them over a fire. A stick is then used to scrape the gluey secretion from their skin and save it for later use. This biological material is shipped around the world to practitioners who promote it as a detoxification and immunity-building medicine.

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    Kambo practitioners burn holes in the skin of their clients and then apply the frog secretions to the wounds. The purging and immune response which follows is believed to cleanse the user of ailments and negative energies.

    The Giant Leaf Frog is currently threatened by climate change and habitat loss (though it is currently listed as “Least Concern”). Furthermore, patenting kambo is yet an example of bioprospecting, which is a common practice in the incredibly diverse rainforests of the world and has major impacts on the Indigenous communities from which these molecules are sourced.

    Ibogaine

    Ibogaine comes from the root bark of the iboga shrub, which is native to Gabon in central West Africa. It has been used for centuries by people of the Bwiti religion as a rite of passage and initiation. The preservation and expansion of the Bwiti tradition and iboga medicine has a complex history involving French occupation, displacement, intertribal violence, religious suppression and political marginalization.

    Medicalization of ibogaine began in the late 1930s, with decades of intermittent but promising research into its potential to treat substance use disorders, particularly opiate addiction. Its legal status remains complicated and restricted in many countries.

    Global enthusiasm about iboga’s healing potential has created problems not unlike those faced by Indigenous Americans with peyote, such as difficulty sourcing medicine for their traditional use and ongoing political struggle to protect their practices.

    Wild iboga is currently endangered in Gabon due to poaching, climate change, illegal export to satisfy international demand, urbanization and habitat degradation. As an alternative, iboga can be grown sustainably in greenhouses and farms, and advocates also point to the option of using semi-synthetic ibogaine from the voacanga tree instead. 

    DMT

    DMT has been called the spirit molecule. This powerful, naturally occurring entheogen is concentrated in modern ayahuasca brew, thanks to the presence of chacruna leaves. It is also produced endogenously by a variety of plants, fungi and animals, including toads, salamanders, rats, shrubs, seeds and amanita mushrooms. Some have theorized that the human body even produces DMT at birth and death, and it has been found in the urine of people experiencing schizophrenia and other psychoses. DMT is structurally similar to LSD. 

    Due to conservation concerns, many in the movement advocate for the use of synthetically derived DMT to avoid contributing to habitat loss and extinction as interest and demand for this medicine grows.

    LSD

    photo of ergot fungus growing on rye
    Ergot fungus growing on rye. LSD is derived from ergot.

    While tiny squares of paper blotted with synthesized LSD and printed with cartoon characters may seem the farthest thing from nature, it was first discovered by Swiss chemist, Albert Hoffman, working with ergot, a fungus that grows on rye.

    Lab-Made Companions

    Synthesized compounds such as LSD, MDMA, ketamine, 2C-B and others need not be excluded from the list of substances deserving of our gratitude. When we partake with intentionality, the journeys give generously back to us. Sacred reciprocity can be viewed as an essential element of psychedelic experience, regardless of the catalyzing substance.

    Qualities of Sacred Reciprocity

    Now that we have some context for the historical and contemporary issues surrounding entheogens and psychedelic medicines, let’s look at some guiding lights for giving back meaningfully.

    Relational Reciprocity

    Sacred reciprocity comes with the humble energy of the ask. To seek consent not only from the medicine itself, but also the elders and medicine keepers, is to set aside one’s own agenda in the interest of the larger good. Are we willing to take no for an answer? This is a nuanced question and cultural considerations are different with every entheogen and context. For example, partaking in ayahuasca may have different steps for accountability than partaking in home grown mushrooms. This is why moving at the speed of trust and cultivating lasting relationships is a responsible approach.

    Proactive Sacred Reciprocity

    Rather than an afterthought, sacred reciprocity can be woven into the entire psychedelic process, from decision making and intention through to integration and daily life. Think ahead and be intentional with how you want to give back. Involve your peers in this shared effort as well, and watch a culture of integrity bloom and flourish before your eyes.

    Practical Reciprocity

    When we talk about reciprocation, it’s important to focus on impact over intention. How does this action directly benefit the people, ecologies, and futures we seek to support? This is why we recommend backing organizations without intermediaries so that good intentions are not lost in translation.

    Grateful Sacred Reciprocity

    Every great medicine journey begins with gratitude. Whether in a deeply healing or rambunctiously festive environment, pausing for a few breaths or words of gratitude can have major impact on the ways we relate to the substances we consume, what we bring to the experience, and what we come away with. Thank the medicine, yes— but also thank the ancestors, wisdom keepers, protectors, ecologies, and chemists!

    Humble Reciprocity

    Readiness to listen and learn is a powerfully healing force. The forces of colonialism, which could have wiped out these medicines completely, are rooted in ideas of superiority and entitlement. Unwinding these attitudes is a process that comes full circle within the very medicine spaces that have been protected for generations.

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    Non-Transactional Reciprocity

    The concept of ayni is one rooted in a living, dynamic relationship. If we fall into a guilt-driven, transactional mindset of repetitively taking and repaying, we begin to lose the heart of ayni. Reciprocity requires an exchange of value, to be sure—but it should be a meaningful contribution to which we bring our whole selves, rather than simply a bill that we pay.

    Informed Sacred Reciprocity

    Recognizing the true history of entheogenic medicine is a tough pill to swallow. We all benefit from the sacrifices of Indigenous groups who have preserved their heritage in the face of colonialism, genocide, religious persecution, criminalization and exploitation. Medicine work calls us to awareness. Awareness calls us to relationship. Relationship inspires action. This is a healthy cycle of responsibility that can have far reaching benefits for global healing, if we’re willing to engage with it.

    Understanding also enables us to spread knowledge and context within our communities and gradually shift the culture at large.

    Multi-faceted Reciprocity

    Reciprocity considers the interconnected social, economic, ecological and spiritual factors at play within the global expansion of psychedelics. Offerings of gratitude seek to edify multiple facets of the movement—for example, financially resourcing native communities hit hard by COVID-19 and spreading awareness of entheogen conservation issues among your social circle are tangible ways to give back.

    Committed to Sacred Reciprocity

    To step into a reciprocal relationship with entheogens means stepping into the right relationship with the Indigenous communities where they originate. It is difficult to imagine an ethical way to consume psychedelics while ignoring the ongoing struggle of the very groups who have shared them with us.

    Commit to supporting indigeous survival, thriving and self-determination. This includes the return of power, agency and resources to the original people of the land. The common psychonautic reprise that “we are all one” and desire to “stay out of politics” becomes difficult to justify while directly enjoying the traditions these people have made sacrifices to defend.

    Complex global issues are at play here, so nuanced and open-ended relationships are the name of the game. We have to let go of short term solutions and quick fixes. This is a process of unlearning as much as learning—but the alternative is an old story in which we in the Global North unconsciously repeat the harms of the past in more subtle, but equally detrimental ways.

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    Ways To Give Back

    • Commit to learning and honoring the lineage and preservation of medicines you consume (studying and sharing this article is a solid start).
    • Financially support Indigenous-led organizations* The Indigenous Reciprocity Initiative, hosted by Chacruna Institute, offers a directory of community-determined projects which you can support directly. Check it out here.
    • Use medicines sparingly. These substances are powerful, limited and rapidly declining. Consider ways to spread out your journey work, and make the most of each experience through self-responsibility, preparation and integration.
    • Grow your own medicines and choose medicines that can be sustainably grown or produced.
    • Dig into your own Indigenous history. Get into relationship with your ancestry through family, food, research, community and focused journey work. Solidarity reaches deeper when it hits close to home.
    • Advocate for drug policy reform and work to understand systems of oppression in your community.

    No money? Use what you have.

    • Volunteer time. Many organizations and projects could use help with web-based marketing, fundraising and awareness efforts.
    • Talk with loved ones about sacred reciprocity.
    • Cultivate practices that are good for the Earth and its ecosystems in your diet, travel, and consumption habits.
    • Do journey work specifically focused in prayer for Indigenous protection and thriving.
    • Commit to the path of interconnectedness. Embrace systems thinking over simplistic solutions.

    *The Chacruna Institute makes an important point here: “It is vital that members of the psychedelic community help support Indigenous groups and the traditional ecological knowledge they practice. Many organizations and individuals have a genuine desire to help, but struggle to find ways of connecting directly with local communities. Sometimes, the only option is donating to massive non-governmental organizations (NGOs) based in Western countries. Many who care about the environment and its interdependency with Indigenous lives are aware that money given to large NGOs often fails to reach the people on the ground due to the large infrastructural costs needed to run these organizations. Yet, small grassroots groups doing the most impactful work often labor to connect with people wanting to offer direct support through donations. For this reason, Chacruna has created the Indigenous Reciprocity Initiative of the Americas.”

    Conclusion

    With so many converging forces in the psychedelic movement, it is refreshing—audacious almost—to envision a community-led path forward that isn’t shaped by “corporadelics” or pharmaceuticals. The culture of sacred reciprocity is a first step toward healing the traumas of the past and present. The potential of the psychedelic resurgence multiplies when we embrace the inherent value of our roots and the lives that sustain this medicine.

    Sacred reciprocity is a worthy cause. It requires humility and dedication. There lies before us a chance to live out a new story—one that our descendants will no longer have to spiritually bypass in order to fully enjoy their trip.

    Resources:

    Indigenous Reciprocity Initiative

    Sacred Reciprocity Toolkit from EntheoNation

    Decolonize First: Downloadable workbooks and mini-courses in decolonizing

    Boom Festival 2019 about Sacred Reciprocity Video presentation from Ismail Ali & Lorna Liana

    About the Author

    Rebecca Martinez is a Xicana writer, parent and community organizer born and raised in Portland, Oregon. She is a co-founder of the Fruiting Bodies Collective, an advocacy group, podcast and multimedia platform addressing the intersections between healing justice and the psychedelics movement. Rebecca served as the Event & Volunteer Coordinator for the successful Measure 109 campaign, an unprecedented state initiative which creates a legal framework for psilocybin therapy in Oregon. She is also the author of Edge Play: Tales From a Quarter Life Crisis, a memoir about psychedelic healing after family trauma, spiritual abuse, and police violence. She serves on the Health Equity Subcommittee for Oregon’s Psilocybin Advisory Board as well as the Board of Advisors for the Plant Medicine Healing Alliance.

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    Psychedelic Capitalism and Other Myths: Is the Joke On Us?

    By Simon Yugler

    Is psychedelic capitalism a myth?

    The week I am writing this, author and psychedelic philanthropist Tim Ferriss poised a very direct question (via Twitter) to the public and various leaders in the psychedelic community, including Michael Pollan, Rick Doblin, and Robin Carhart-Harris.

    Ferriss asked about how best to navigate the apparent “patent land grab” occurring behind the scenes within various private companies, many of which have received millions of dollars in investment capital and stock valuation.

    This was in no doubt a response to the bizarre move by the British psychedelic startup Compass Pathways to patent, according to a recent VICE article, “the basic components of psychedelic therapy,” including the use of “soft furniture and holding hands.”

    The internet being what it is, Christian Angermayer, a venture capitalist representing both Compass Pathways and a biotechnology company called ATAI Life Sciences, chimed in. Downplaying Ferriss’ philanthropy efforts and deeming his concerns as “wrong,” Angermayer defended the business strategies that Ferriss, along with many other leaders in the psychedelic community, called into question.

    Instead of continuing to communicate through tweets, Ferriss wrote this extensive reply.

    We are in the midst of a psychedelic gold rush. This comprehensive article from VICE addresses the nauseating pace at which psychedelic patents are springing up, including everything from psilocybin-infused cannabis to Phillip Morris e-cigarettes containing DMT and patents for psychedelic treatment of food allergies.

    As if our world wasn’t getting strange enough. 

    If the $1 billion initial public offering (IPO) of Compass Pathways tells us anything, it is that we are well into witnessing the birth of an unwieldy and unpredictable psychedelic capitalism–a phrase which would likely compel the Huxleys, Hoffmans, and McKennas of the world to roll over in their infinite cosmic graves.

    With multiple decriminalization measures passing this past year across the US, along with Measure 109 in Oregon that will allow the therapeutic use of psilocybin, the trip train is moving fast.

    This news is worth celebrating. Personally, I am overjoyed, especially due to the fact that psychedelics played a central role in why I became a psychotherapist. Yet at this very moment, the future of psychedelic medicines is being bought and sold through high-level investment pitches delivered in sleek board rooms across San Francisco, London, and beyond.

    Along with it is the potential for equitable and affordable access to psychedelic treatment for millions of people desperately seeking their healing effects–the very same people these companies claim to want to “help.” Forgive me for being skeptical.

    Because here’s the thing we all must keep in mind as we trudge along into this wild new century: 

    Psychedelic Capitalism Doesn’t Exist.

    There are psychedelic substances, experiences, music, art, and literature. There are psychedelic philosophies, ethics, worldviews, and sub-cultural communities. And there is psychedelic healing, treatment, and indigenous traditions. Psychedelics dissolve boundaries and reveal the soul, as the Greek definition of the word indicates (psyche – soul, delos – to reveal).

    And then there is capitalism: an economic system controlled by private corporations based on infinite growth, resource extraction, consumption, and the bottom line of financial profit. Capitalism engulfs, confines, and extracts the soul from what it consumes.

    Like “military intelligence” or the “music business,” the two words create a philosophical conundrum. We are currently witnessing how these paradoxical concepts will mesh in the here and now. The balance will undoubtedly be precarious.

    In the heart-wrenching internet comic, We Will Call it Pala, artist Dave McGaughey tells the story about one woman’s vision to start a psychedelic healing clinic colliding with the hyper-optimized ethos of Silicon Valley and the cold-blooded demands of her venture capital investors.

    As the story progresses along its all-too-likely trajectory, she faces the monstrosity she has unwittingly created. Grieving for her seemingly naive vision, the heroine laments, “There is no medicine strong enough to blow a corporation’s mind.”

    This is because, despite their legal standing in our society, corporations are not conscious beings. By definition, a corporation will never have a mind-altering or heart-opening experience. And though the etymological roots of the word inevitably boils down to “body,” a corporation will never feel a thing.

    Art may be one of the best arenas where we might be able to predict how the weird, alchemical vinegar of psychedelics will merge into the oil-laden waters of capitalism. 

    It is said that art can serve either as a hammer or a mirror for society. Even once a great work has been absorbed by the market–a Banksy or a John Cage or a Van Gogh–the impact of that work can still continue to resonate within the psyche and catalyze an imaginal or inner shift, no matter how many coffee mugs it’s been plastered onto.

    Art is able to, at least partially, escape the trap of capitalism because it exists between two realms.

    Art takes a form in our physical, time-bound reality, but also lives within the imagination, and is formless. Art can embody and transmit ideas, imparting rare messages that transcend the tangible and time-bound. Art changes culture. Art evokes emotion, even if we’ve seen the same image a thousand times. Art can shock, uplift, or crush us. Art is dangerous.

    The Art of the Trick

    Lewis Hyde, in his book Trickster Makes This World, argues that artists have evolved to become the mythological trickster figures within our modern culture, previously relegated to ritual and story.

    Charting the work of figures as diverse as Marcel Duchamp, Bob Dylan and Frederick Douglass, Hyde explores the very nature of the words “art” and “artist,” tracing their etymological origins back to the Latin “artus,” which means joint, or juncture.

    As Hyde playfully elaborates, the “artus-workers” of our modern era now play the role that Hermes, Raven, and Coyote played in their own cultural mythologies, as gods of the threshold, the trick, the lie, and the oft-misunderstood bearer of culture.

    These were celebrated beings who, often unwittingly, upset the established and most likely stale cosmic order, and introduced a bit of divine chaos, thereby creating a new cosmic law, sacred technology, or a new world entirely.

    Despite their humble or comedic natures, tricksters, like psychedelics, are not to be taken lightly.

    Take the Greek myth of Hermes that Hyde uses as an example in his book. Hermes, through stealing and then slaughtering the golden cattle of his brother Apollo, performed the first sacrificial offering to himself and made himself a god. He clearly made a fool of his brother, who had a thing for fancy board rooms in the sky. The other Olympians thought it was hilarious and let Hermes stay.

    Another example, Coyote, comes from Native American tradition, as told in the 1984 book, American Indian Myths and Legends. In thousands of tales told across many languages, Coyote creates the world, teaches hunting and tracking, or travels to the land of the dead, amongst other adventures. Up north, Raven brings fire to humans, invents the fish trap, and perfects the art of theft. He also travels between the earthly and heavenly realms, bringing messages across the divide.

    Eshu and Legba, trickster gods from West Africa and the Carribean, are invoked before all other gods, for it is understood that every act of divine communication and exchange must pass through their hands. According to Hyde’s book, even though Eshu and Legba are not the most powerful beings in the Afro-Carribean pantheon, these lords of the crossroads are feared above all others because of their pivotal cosmic position. And you never know what you are going to get.

    Even the Loki, dark trickster of the Norse pantheon, sets into motion events which would result in the destruction of the very gods themselves–Ragnarok. But what is often forgotten is that Ragnarok is not just about the fiery end of all things. It is also the beginning of the new world, all of which was put into motion because Loki couldn’t help but push a few buttons up in Asgard.

    Come to think of it, trickster myths seem to have a lot in common with the role that psychedelics play within the psyche and the brain. Stay with me here.

    Neurology and New Worlds

    Neuroscientist and psychedelic researcher Robin Carhart-Harris’ landmark 2014 article, The Entropic Brain, highlighted the ways in which psilocybin decreases blood flow to an area of the brain called the default mode network (DMN), enabling novel connections to be made between neural pathways that are normally routed through this cognitive superhighway.

    Psychedelics upset the applecart of our normal cognitive functioning, and by introducing a bit of pharmacologically mediated chaos, make room for new and different neural connections to take shape.

    Of additional interest here is Carhart-Harris’ discussion of psychedelic states being “poised at a ‘critical’ point in a transition zone between order and disorder” in terms of consciousness. The place between two places, often called the liminal, plainly invokes the many trickster gods we have been speaking of, for all dwell on this same precipice, and can be found anywhere that roads, worlds, and perhaps even neural networks, collide.

    Even the many studies showing the promise of psychedelics to treat addictions can be seen in the light of trickster myths (e.g. de L. Osório, et.al, 2015, and Hamill et.al, 2019). Whatever epiphany is granted during the psychedelic experience that might finally help someone kick a long-held, potentially lethal habit, marks a shift from one world to another, mythologically speaking.

    True recovery marks an end and a beginning. Such an epiphany, especially in the language of Alcoholics Anonymous, is seen as a message from a higher power, which the Greeks and the Yoruba knew was always mediated by the trickster.

    Lastly, let’s not forget the reason why psychedelics were made illegal in the first place. As Terance McKenna famously said, “Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.”

    Just like art, psychedelics have the potential to change culture, and can be dangerous to the established order of things. The 1960’s and 70’s proved that with a spectacular flair. It is not difficult to imagine why Nixon deemed Timothy Leary “the most dangerous man in America” at the onset of the drug war.

    The simple fact that a naturally occurring plant or fungus could impart such soul-revealing visions may even be “the best kept secret in history,” according to Brian Muraresku in his revelatory book, The Immortality Key. Who needs priests to talk to god when you can do it yourself with the help of a plant? But that’s a story for another time.

    Even if these awe-inspiring revelations are “occasioned” (to use the words of psychedelic researcher Roland Griffiths) through a psychopharmacological trick of serotonin agonists, if the above mythologies teach us anything, it is that sometimes a trick is exactly what’s needed for real transformation to occur.

    Standing at the Crossroads

    Psychotherapy, it has often been said, is both an art and a science. And now as psychedelics firmly make their way into the field, it may require those facilitating this work to embrace the deeper dimensions of what such a sentiment actually implies.

    Perhaps the evolving art of the psychedelic therapist or facilitator will be to more deeply embrace the fact that these medicines are as unpredictable as the tricksters we’ve just met, and that their true implications for both individuals and culture lay far beyond simply feeling better and having a nicer day at the office.

    To believe that psychedelics can be confined to the clinic, the lab, or the corporate body not only ignores the volatile history of these compounds in the 20th century, it ignores the fact that the very function of these substances is to dissolve boundaries and dismantle familiar, long-held structures on neurological, psychological, and cultural levels.

    To bring this all to a close, and to end where we began in true trickster fashion, it seems that Hermes has one last ace up his sleeve. Not only was he the divine messenger, bringer of dreams, guide of souls, and lord of the crossroads, Hermes was also the god of the marketplace. Any time money is exchanged, Hermes is said to be there. The true “free market” is imbued with the spirit of Hermes, and involves much more than the simple exchange of currency and intellectual property rights sold to the highest bidder.

    Emerging philosophies, religions from far off lands, rumors of wars, and village gossip were all exchanged in the markets of old. They were places of excitement, cross-pollination, unpredictability, and community–things I think we could all use a bit more of these days.

    There’s one last thing. It was said that one could ask for Hermes’ help by leaving an offering at his shrine, located at the heart of the market, covering one’s ears, and walking away. The first thing you heard when you opened your ears was Hermes speaking to you. The fine print is that one had to be firmly outside the hustle and bustle of the market before listening for the winged messenger’s reply. I believe the modern term for uncovering one’s ears too soon is called an “echo chamber,” and we all know how helpful those can be.

    What does this mean for our purposes here? I haven’t the slightest idea. Only that the god of the marketplace requires us to maintain a certain distance from his domain to be clearly heard. Just because Hermes rules the marketplace doesn’t mean he lives there.

    So just like where we find ourselves today, peering over the precipice of this new psychedelic capitalism, there’s no map for where we must go before listening for Hermes’ synchronistic response. Go far enough out and we might encounter the language of owls, moonlight, and whoever else prowls those liminal wilds. Stay too close, and we risk repeating just more of the same.

    And if we get lost, and find ourselves back at the crossroads where we first began, perhaps that is the message we were needing all along. Because ultimately, the joke’s on us.

    About the Author

    With a masters (MA) in depth counseling psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute, Simon Yugler is a depth and psychedelic integration therapist based in Portland, OR. Weaving Jungian psychology, Internal Family Systems therapy, and mythology, Simon also draws on his diverse experiences learning from indigenous cultures around the world, including the Shipibo ayahuasca tradition. He has a background in experiential education, and has led immersive international journeys for young adults across 10 countries. He is passionate about initiation, men’s work, indigenous rights, decolonization, and helping his clients explore the liminal wilds of the soul. Find out more on his website and on Instagram , Twitter (@depth_medicine) or Facebook.

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    PT228 – Deborah Snyder from Synergetic Press

    In this episode, Joe interviews Director of ecological think tank The Institute of Ecotechnics, and publisher and CEO of Synergetic Press, Deborah Snyder.

    Snyder talks about her past- meeting people from the Institute of Ecotechnics at a conference about the solar system, time working with Richard Evans Schultes, participating in a traveling theatre company, and the early days of the Heraclitus (a research ship built for a 2-year expedition through the Amazon, which is now being rebuilt to soon visit and chronicle remote coastal cultures). She also discusses Biosphere 2, ecotechnics (the discipline of relating the technosphere to the biosphere), regenerative agriculture, and the idea of natural capital- assigning economic (or other) value to an ecosystem as a way of both identifying keys to ecological longevity and increasing corporate or governmental interest in the environment. 

    She talks about books she’s published or work she’s been inspired by from a veritable who’s-who of names listeners of this podcast should be familiar with: Dennis McKenna, Wade Davis, William S. Burroughs, Mark Plotkin, Ralph Metzner, John Perry Barlow, and Claudio Naranjo. And she’s very excited about a 2-day symposium Synergetic Press will be putting on in May to commemorate the launch of Volume 1 of Sasha Shulgin’s course curriculum on the nature of drugs. 

    Notable Quotes

    “I’m from Illinois. I’m from the rural midwest. All my family are farmers. There is a gulf of understanding about plant medicines and the potential of these medicines in places where people are really desperate for these kinds of tools to help with youth health and mental well-being- good well-being. So, I’m interested in bridging that gulf with the work that we’re doing next, because I think that part of the divide is this physical divide between suburban city and rural country to some degree, which we’ve seen growing over a 50-year period of time.”

    “Many of our shoulders on which we stand- we’re losing them. So I feel more necessity, you might say, to capture these voices.”

    “In doing anything, it’s very hard to do anything by yourself. You need to find a group of other individuals that have some commonality or ally yourself with other organized groups already to get something of a coalescence of wills to make something happen.” 

    Links

    Synergeticpress.com

    Facebook

    Twitter

    Instagram

    Youtube

    Institute of Ecotechnics

    Changing Our Minds: Psychedelic Sacraments and the New Psychotherapy, by Don Lattin

    Where The Gods Reign: Plants and Peoples of the Colombian Amazon, by Richard Evans Schultes

    Imdb.com: Embrace of the Serpent

    White Gold: the Diary of a Rubber Cutter in the Amazon, by John C. Yungjohann

    Ayahuasca Reader: Encounters with the Amazon’s Sacred Vine, by Luis Eduardo Luna & Steven F. White

    Kissthegroundmovie.com

    Birth of a Psychedelic Culture, by Ram Das and Ralph Metzner

    Wikipedia.org: John Perry Barlow

    Spaceshipearthmovie.com

    The Revolution We Expected: Cultivating a New Politics of Consciousness, by Claudio Naranjo

    Thefarmatsouthmountain.com

    About Deborah Snyder

    Deborah, co-owner and publisher of Synergetic Press, Ltd., has published over 40 books in ethnobotany, psychedelics, biospherics, consciousness and cultures since establishing it in 1984. From 2000-2019, Synergetic Press published Ayahuasca Reader, by Luis Eduardo Luna, Birth of a Psychedelic Culture with Ram Dass and Ralph Metzner, Mystic Chemist on the life of Albert Hofmann, Zig Zag Zen, Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs, and Secret Drugs of Buddhism. Deborah just signed copublishing agreement with Transform Press’s CEO, Wendy Tucker. First title under the joint imprint is Sasha Shulgin’s book on The Nature of Drugs. Synergetic Press is expanding it’s line of books in the ethnobotanical and psychedelic medicine field with forthcoming titles from Kile Ortiga, Beyond the Narrow Life: Psychedelic Integration and Existential Exploration and with Chris Kilim for the Shaman’s Pharmacy.

     

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    What do Alien Abduction and Psychedelic Experiences have in Common? Let Dr. John E. Mack’s Work Explain

    By Michelle Janikian

    The story of John Mack, the Harvard psychiatrist who wanted to believe—and ended up introducing the entire culture to the possibility of transpersonal experiences.

    “At their core Carlos’s encounters have brought about a profound spiritual opening, bringing him in contact with a divine light or energy, what he calls “Home,” which is the source of his personal healing and transformational powers. In our sessions, when he comes close to this light he becomes overwhelmed with emotions of awe and a longing to merge with the energy/light/being. Space and time dissolve, and he experiences himself as pure energy and light or consciousness in an endlessness of eternity, ‘a pure soul experience . . . I go back to the source because I’m not just human. I need to go back to the source in order to continue.’ Carlos, like so many abductees, has developed an acute ecological consciousness. He is deeply concerned with the earth and its fate. The question of whether this is an unintended by-product of a process that he, no more than any of us, can fathom, or is an integral part of the alien phenomenon, cannot, of course, be answered. Carlos clearly believes that the aliens, however awkward, or even brutal, their methods, are trying to arrest our destructive behavior.”

    -Dr. John E. Mack, M.D.

    Abductions: Human Encounters with Aliens (1994)

    Until many lines in, to us in the psychedelic community, the passage above reads exactly like insights from a psychedelic-assisted therapy or integration session. But to my surprise in my recent alien abduction reading, this was work being processed with abductees – or “experiencers” as they preferred to be called – by pioneering psychiatrist, John E. Mack, in the 1990s. Mack wasn’t only the Head of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, but also the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T.E. Lawrence (his 1977 biography of “Lawrence of Arabia” ), and a fearless anti-war activist as well.

    “John had always been so well regarded,” his former research associate and girlfriend Dominique Callimanopulos tells Psychedelics Today. “He was such a wunderkind in circles, such a bright light and leader in his field, and well known for his clinical perceptiveness and precision.”

    So how does a Harvard psychiatrist get into the fringe world of alien abductions? It probably won’t surprise our readers that the story has its roots at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. According to NY Times journalist Ralph Blumenthal’s upcoming biography on Mack, The Believer: Alien Encounters, Hard Science, and the Passion of John Mack (scheduled to come out in March 2021 on University of New Mexico Press), in 1987, Mack attended the “Frontiers of Health” conference at Esalen in which Stanislav Grof spoke about transpersonal psychology and hosted an unplanned Holotropic breathwork session for the group. It was Mack’s first time trying the consciousness-altering form of breathwork and he had a profound experience relating to the death of his mother when he was only nine months old, as well as his first truly transpersonal experience.

    Mack continued his exploration and training with breathwork, and according to Blumenthal’s book, by 1989, he had become a “regular” participant in Grof’s breathwork modules. Elizabeth Gibson, co-founder of Dreamshadow Transpersonal Breathwork and co-author (with Mack and Grof) of the 2003 article, “Reflections on Breathwork and Alien Encounter Experiences,” remembers Mack’s involvement in the Grof breathwork group. On a Zoom call, she recalls that Mack was a facilitator at the first Holotropic breathwork session she had ever participated in, one of the “big weekend workshops” Stan and Christina Grof used to host. “There must have been 130, 140 people there that weekend,” Gibson recalls, “and John Mack was on the team with them [to help facilitate] and he brought with him a lot of the psychiatric residents that were then in training with him at Cambridge hospital.” Similarly, Callimanopulos recalls that Mack was part of a Grof breathwork “pod” that would meet a few times a year in different parts of the world for two weeks at a time. “That was a very strong bonding experience for all the people in his pod,” she says.

    It turns out that Grof not only introduced Mack to breathwork and transpersonal experiences, but to the alien abduction phenomenon as well. In March 1988, at a breathwork training module at Pocket Ranch in California, Grof gave Mack a chapter on alien abductions from his and Christina’s upcoming anthology, Spiritual Emergence: When Personal Transformation Becomes a Crisis (1989). “I have no idea why Stan thought I would be particularly interested in that subject,” Mack wrote in 2003. “I read the chapter with much interest, although I kept asking myself, ‘But is it true?’ Were people really being contacted by humanoid beings or the like?” Later in the same article, Mack wrote, “Through Breathwork I became open to the fact that the universe might be full of entities, which we call spirits, gods, archetypes, angels, mythic beings or whatever. The humanoids encountered by abduction experiencers seem to be one such type of being.”

    Soon after the March ‘88 breathwork module, Mack was introduced to New York artist and famous alien experiencer and researcher, Budd Hopkins, who then introduced him to a whole network of abductees through a support group Hopkins was running. Unlike other mental health care professionals these folks may have seen, Mack had a much more empathetic approach. Instead of disbelieving what these people claimed to have experienced because he couldn’t prove it was true, Mack just held space for these folks to process their abductions, much like one would do for any other type of non-ordinary state of consciousness, like a near-death, psychedelic, or mystical experience.

    “I think that was one of the big gifts he brought to this community of people he was working with. He never questioned whether their stories were true. He just accepted that people were having these experiences and tried to support them and give them a safe place where they could express what they were going through without fear of being judged. And that was huge for people,” says Gibson.

    Mack helped abductees tremendously through this approach to their trauma by helping them “integrate” this reality-shattering experience, and at the same time, he started to find some undeniable common threads among their stories, which he writes about extensively in his two books on the subject, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens (1994) and Passport to the Cosmos (1999). For example, the alien beings typically communicate with people telepathically and transmit profound messages through their big, dark eyes. Aliens also seem to alter people’s consciousness during their abduction experiences and even their “vibrations,” which then permits the aliens to move humans through the air and even through solid objects like the walls of their homes. What was also reliably consistent from experiencer to experiencer was a traumatizing loss of control of their bodies, incredibly invasive medical procedures, and even forced sexual contact and impregnation, which was often communicated to experiencers as an essential part of an alien-human hybrid program, and the future of both of their species.

    Now, I know this all sounds a little X-Files-y (and according to Blumenthal in The Believer, Chris Carter (the TV show’s creator) even called Mack to pick his brain when he was developing the iconic series), but for the actual experiencers, this was deeply traumatizing. Budd Hopkins, for example, found the abductions to be incredibly demoralizing and felt it was a deep violation of trust and power by the alien beings, and that’s how he framed his support group for abductees—as one of victims processing trauma.

    However, when Mack worked with experiencers, he used his recent training as a Holotropic breathwork facilitator to “hold space” for folks to integrate the non-ordinary state and to help it reach some kind of conclusion, which often lead to spiritual transformation. “As our work deepens, especially as the reality of the alien intelligence is acknowledged and the abductees come to accept their lack of control of the process, the frightening and adversarial quality of the relation seems to give way to a more reciprocal one in which useful human-alien communication can take place and mutual benefit is derived,” writes Mack in Abduction. “For example, the abductees [who] felt bitterly resentful about having their sperm and eggs used by the aliens in the hybridization project, may come to feel that they are participating in a process that has value for the creation and evolution of life.”

    What Mack understood is that folks were processing experiences that completely shattered their worldview, similar to having one’s idea of reality flipped on its head after a strong psychedelic experience. How were folks supposed to get back to their regular lives after communicating with aliens telepathically and being shown we’re not the only intelligent life in the universe? “The terror is not just the terror of being paralyzed, having your body taken and having things done to you, the terror is the terror of the expansion of consciousness,” Mack said at a seminar on “Affect” in June 1992. He goes on to explain that is it a type of “ontological shock” that attacks people’s sense of their material reality—as it has attacked his own. And in his opinion, that’s what really needed to be integrated, not only by the abductees themselves, but by society, because that’s what really shocks people—that there’s more out there than we perceive on a daily basis.

    In fact, his theories on the existence of aliens greatly differed from many of his UFO-hunting counterparts. Through his work with abductees and transpersonal realms of consciousness, he came to believe that aliens exist, but not in this physical dimension that we humans know as reality. He started to theorize about other realms of existence, or spiritual dimensions, where entities and intelligence like the alien “Grays” could exist, possibly less embodied but more conscious than us. And perhaps, the alien abduction phenomenon exemplified the most damning occurrence in the “Western dualistic worldview” as he often called it—that there are intelligent beings who are, at will, able to travel between dimensions and enter our material reality from their spirit realm.

    “In short, I was dealing with a phenomenon that I felt could not be explained psychiatrically, yet was simply not possible within the framework of the Western scientific worldview,” Mack writes in Abduction. “My choices then were either to stretch and twist psychology beyond reasonable limits, overlooking aspects of the phenomenon that could not be explained psychologically… Or, I might open to the possibility that our consensus framework of reality is too limited and that a phenomenon such as this cannot be explained within its ontological parameters. In other words, a new scientific paradigm might be necessary in order to understand what was going on.”

    While deep in this research, my next question was: how significant were Mack’s psychedelic experiences to this openness to the possible existence of aliens, in this reality or another? Because for me, as a person who’s not particularly spiritual or religious and also grew up with a Western idea of what’s “real,” it wasn’t until my psychedelic experiences began lifting the veil that I started opening up to the possibility of spirit realms, plant intelligence, and now, the existence of aliens in some dimension. Mack admits in Passport to the Cosmos that his own experiences of “a transcendent reality” influenced his evolution of thought, in addition to his decade of working with experiencers and all the data they supplied him with.

    In The Believer, Blumenthal also reports that Mack was experimenting with some psychedelics with his Grof group and other close friends. He talks of MDMA, LSD, ayahuasca, and ketamine trips, in addition to Holotropic breathwork. Mack also had correspondences with psychedelic philosophers and researchers doing adjacent work, like Terence McKenna and Rick Strassman. There’s a 1992 video of McKenna interviewing Mack at the International Transpersonal Conference in Prague and multiple references to McKenna’s work and the conversations the two of them had in transcripts and correspondences of Mack’s, which the John E. Mack Institute provided for me while I was researching this piece.

    When Mack started theorizing about the purpose of the alien’s visits in his writing—that perhaps they were sent by some greater creative intelligence or “Anima Mundi” to expand human consciousness and help us not only evolve (or co-evolve), but also help us understand we are all intricately connected and need to take better care of our most precious gift, the planet earth—it sounds a lot like the insights from a strong psychedelic experience, or a talk from Terence McKenna at the time. At another Affect Seminar in July 1992, Mack referenced a McKenna quote, “that even God has limits”, in which Mack took to mean, “There is a point when one species seems to have carried the experiment too far in certain directions, then there is a cosmic correction occurring of a sort. And many of the abductees actually experience that powerfully, that this phenomenon involves some kind of balancing that is going on.”

    Mack continues this line of thought in other talks and later writings—that perhaps the Anima mundi thinks we’re getting too destructive and it sent the aliens here to help us correct our ways. While I was in a deep reading of these ideas 20 years later, I couldn’t help but think that perhaps in 2020, that same intelligence thought psilocybin mushrooms may be a more successful plan to help evolve the human mind to realize its vital connection to all things. It’s a very common psychedelic insight (especially on mushrooms or ayahuasca) to feel a deep, spiritual connection to everything and to return with a great sense of urgency to help save our ailing planet. Could these messages all be coming from the same “source”?

    Or, was Mack inserting his own spiritual and environmental bias onto his clients?  “My own impression, gained from what abductees have told me, is that consciousness expansion and personal transformation is a basic aspect of the abduction phenomenon,” Mack wrote in Abduction. “I have come to this conclusion from noting in case after case the extent to which the information communicated by alien beings to experiencers is fundamentally about the need for a change in human consciousness and our relationship to the earth and one another. Even the helplessness and loss or surrender of control which are, at least initially, forced upon the abductees by the aliens—one of the most traumatic aspects of the experiences—seem to be in some way “designed” to bring about a kind of ego death from which spiritual growth and the expansion of consciousness may follow. But my focus upon growth and transformation might reflect a bias of mine.” 

    Are the aliens trying to expand human consciousness so we can live more harmoniously with the rest of the galaxy, save our own home planet, and become more in touch with a spiritual dimension? Or was Mack letting his own consciousness expansion leak into his work and influence it too strongly? “We would fight about it sometimes,” Callimanopulos recalls. She explains that Mack was accused of leading people to believe their experiences were spiritual in nature, and she also believed it had become his bias. Coming from an anthropological background, she “felt he should hold back more and be more neutral. Let people struggle to define their experience more.”

    Yet, Callimanopulos also says that she often felt Mack was being very appropriate, and she describes how powerfully real people’s emotions were when they began to recall and process their abduction experiences. “He started this work because people were hurting,” Callimanopulos says. She also drives home that Mack possessed an incredible intellect and was always drawn to life’s mysteries. “John always tried to address the big questions in life, like what’s life about? How does it all work? What are we doing here? What’s our identity?”

    After Abduction came out, Mack supported his theories—that aliens exist, but perhaps not in this physical dimension, and they’re here to expand and transform human consciousness for a higher intelligence’s purpose—on all the mainstream outlets of the time, including Oprah and Charlie Rose. But after a few damning articles in Time Magazine and the New York Times that questioned Mack’s practices, Harvard began a long and trying inquiry into the standards of his work. For instance, part of how Mack worked with abductees to help them remember and process their experiences was a relaxing form of hypnosis. But could that just be opening the door for false memories or confusing nocturnal dreams with reality? Mack defended his practice and truly felt that a non-ordinary state of consciousness like an alien abduction needed a similarly altered state to help the integration process, but to others, its necessity was less clear. There were other discrepancies that Harvard looked into as well, like how he billed insurance and charged abductees, and whether they were formally clients or research subjects.

    Mack survived the Harvard inquiry tenure intact, but the emotional toll it must have taken on him is only for us to wonder. “He was very used to being well regarded and well-liked. It came as a big shock to him that people—his close colleagues, turned against him,” Callimanopulos says. “I think it was also harsh for John because he was a very collaborative, empathic person who enjoyed relationships more than anything else in life and sought out that harmony— that comfort and adulation from colleagues. So I think it was really tough.”

    However, he continued the work with abductees, releasing his second and more openly spiritual book on the phenomena, Passport to the Cosmos, in 1999. Then, he also began a professional interest in the survival of consciousness after death, until his own tragic passing in 2004. When Mack was in England for a conference, he was hit by a car after looking the wrong way while trying to cross the road in London. It was a shock to the abductee community and all who knew him. He was 74 years old.

    I can’t help but wonder if Mack’s ideas would be more easily accepted today in a world that’s decriminalizing magic mushrooms, pumping out psychedelic doses of ketamine to depressed patients, and scientifically quantifying the significance of mystical experiences in psychedelics’ usefulness for treating mental health conditions. During a time when more people are taking mushrooms and ayahuasca than ever before and coming to very similar insights as Mack’s abductees, would we be more receptive to his ideas of aliens expanding human consciousness in order to enlighten and transform our species, so that we can save ourselves from ourselves?

    In 1999, he wrote in Passports to the Cosmos: “We seem to be experiencing now in the United States, and more or less throughout Western culture, a kind of spiritual renaissance. It reflects a deep hunger for something missing in the lives of many people, a sense, however vague, that there are other realms from which they feel cut off, and a growing realization that many of the catastrophic events of this century now ending have derived from radical secularism and spiritual emptiness.” Perhaps Mack himself was part of the cosmic correction, opening the mainstream’s mind to a whole world of transpersonal possibilities. “He was a big catalyst for the whole conversation being in the mainstream,” says Callimanopulos. “Maybe if he lived longer, he might have gone on to do a little more mapping of those different dimensions.”

    About the Author

    Michelle Janikian is a journalist focused on drug policy, trends, and education. She’s the author of Your Psilocybin Mushroom Companion, and her work has also been featured in Playboy, DoubleBlind Mag, High Times, Rolling Stone and Teen Vogue. One of her core beliefs is that ending the prohibition of drugs can greatly benefit society, as long as we have harm reduction education to accompany it. Find out more on her website: www.michellejanikian.com or on Instagram @michelle.janikian.

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    PT220 – Susan Hess Logeais – The Way of the Psychonaut

    In this episode, Joe interviews writer, director, and producer of the recent documentary, “The Way of the Psychonaut: Stanislav Grof’s Journey of Consciousness,” Susan Hess Logeais. 

    The film, which we streamed and presented a panel for back in October, was co-produced by Stan Grof himself, and tells of his journey from his youth in Nazi-occupied Prague to Esalen to today, with much of Logeais and her theory-affirming life story mixed in. It features interviews with many big names, including Fritjof Capra and Rupert Sheldrake, and full-length interviews can now be found on the film’s website; 2 of which are conversations between Grof and legends we’ve lost recently: Ralph Metzner and Michael Harner. It is Joe’s favorite film on Grof and his work.

    Logeais talks about making the movie and meeting such big names in the field, wonders how differently children might grow up if quantum physics and a respectful agreement with nature were taught in school, discusses cesarian births and the differences they could create in fear or stress response in comparison to kids born traditionally, and talks about the power of breathwork and its enormous influence on psychedelic-assisted therapy.

    Notable Quotes

    “When I met Stan and heard him speak and heard what he spoke about- tantric science, mythology, Eastern spiritual traditions, even quantum physics, Shamanic journeywork- there were so many things that he spoke about that I had explored on my own before I met him. And then in the course of making the movie, I realized that he had introduced many of those concepts during his 14 years at Esalen. And so I was resonating with him on a level– it’s like he was impacting my life before I met him.”

    On using MDMA with psychedelics: “Perhaps as an introduction to a psychedelic experience, especially for people who are older, it might not be a bad idea. I know the anxiety that I had occasionally when something was going really fast and very deep. But I agree with you in that the depth and that anxiety passes, and it’s in the learning to get past that anxiety that we develop capacity for reflection and to move away from reactivity. So I think maybe for the first trip, just to say, ‘Ok, this is what you’re in for, and next time we’re not going to do this.’”

    “I just want to say how valuable I think Stan’s contribution is, and how proud I am, or how, I guess, grateful I am to have worked with him in the creation of this film. And I’m so glad that you enjoyed it because I wanted to take his theories, his discoveries, his contributions, and make them accessible and interesting so that people could watch it and come away with an understanding that would hopefully inspire them to then go and do the deep work. And I hope people come to the website and visit the live stream archive page so that they can gain a deeper understanding of all these amazing concepts that Stan participated in sharing during his time at Esalen and his ITA conferences.” 

    Links

    Susanhesslogeais.com

    Thewayofthepsychonaut.com

    The Way of the Psychonaut facebook

    Blackfoot Physics: A Journey Into the Native American Worldview, by F. David Peat

    Stangrof.com

    Grof-legacy-training.com

    Holotropic.com: Grof Transpersonal Training

    About Susan Hess Logeais

    Susan holds a demonstrated history of working in the entertainment industry. She is skilled in Music Videos, Film, Documentaries, Commercials, and Theatre. She demonstrates strong entrepreneurship professional with a Interdisciplinary Degree focused in Transformational Entertainment and Human Consciousness from Marylhurst University. She is an actress and producer, known for Gone (2012), Not Dead Yet (2009) and The Way of the Psychonaut: Stanislav Grof’s Journey of Consciousness (2020).

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    PTSF 35 (with Brian Muraresku)

    In today’s Solidarity Fridays episode, the typical Solidarity Fridays format is switched up yet again, this time with Joe interviewing author of best-selling book, The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name, and recent Joe Rogan Experience guest, Brian Muraresku. Because where do you go after Joe Rogan? Psychedelics Today, of course. 

    Muraresku discusses how his fascination with Latin and Greek and the 1978 book, The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries (by R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, and Carl A. P. Ruck) and its proposal of a psychedelic sacrament of sorts being imbibed at the Rites of Eleusis led him to spend about 12 years searching for evidence to prove it. From the idea of “graveyard beer,” to Alcibiades and the profanation of mysteries, to wine parties to interact with the dead called refrigeriums, Muraresku dives deep into his findings: that the wine they drank was, at the least, spiked with herbs and spices to create something very different and likely hallucinogenic, that participants were seeking immortality, a euphoric ecstasy, and communion with both God and the dead, that both the Dionysian Gospel and Christianity are heavily related to the Rites of Eleusis, and that these ceremonies don’t appear to have been isolated to Eleusis- that people took what they learned and practiced elsewhere, in what Denise Demetriou refers to as “open-access sanctuaries.”

    Notable Quotes

    “Some of the legacies of this civilization, from democracy and the arts and sciences to literature and philosophy and the very concept of a university- all these inheritances are the things that we associate with the very literate Greeks. And there stands Euelisis at the center of it all. …And they [the Rites] were seen as so important, so central, so integral to life at the time, that even Cicero, a Roman in the first century B.C.- he referred to Euelisis as ‘the most exceptional and divine thing that Athens ever produced.’ So it wasn’t democracy, the arts, sciences, etc. It was Eleusis.”

    “They saw something. The thinking for a long time was that maybe it was a theatrical performance- maybe there was something happening in this temple that has been lost to time. And then that book I mentioned in 1978, The Road to Eleusis, was saying as long as we’re talking about a vision, why can’t it be something that was produced internally? Why couldn’t it be one of these great epiphanic psychedelic visions? And so, as a hypothesis, it makes sense just based on the way people talked about this experience. It was a once in a lifetime experience that essentially erased the fear of death and made these initiates immortals. And weirdly, which is why I picked this up in the first place, it’s very, very similar to the testimony that comes from the volunteers in the Johns Hopkins experiments with psilocybin. It’s again, a once in a lifetime single dose of psilocybin [that] seems to result in these profound, mystical transformations in people; including atheists, who will describe it as among the most meaningful experiences of their lives.”

    “I think that there was a historical Jesus, and I think that we have these relatively conflicting accounts of what he was and what the message was in the canonical gospels that have come down to us. But we have these other gospels and this Gnostic literature that didn’t make it in The Bible, and the gospel of Mary Magdalene. And what comes across to me, time and again, are people trying to find ecstasy, people looking for communion with Jesus. And again, you don’t have to look off into all this esoteric stuff just to focus on the very simple proposition that the Eucharist is an immortality potion, plain and simple.”

    Links

    TheImmortalityKey.com

    The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries, by R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, and Carl A. P. Ruck

    Wikipedia.org: Diagoras of Melos (additional Alcibiades/“profanation the mysteries” info

    R. Gordon Wasson’s 1957 Life magazine article

    The Dionysian Gospel: The Fourth Gospel and Euripides, by Dennis R. MacDonald

    Youtube: Joe Rogan Experience #1543 – Brian Muraresku & Graham Hancock

    Youtube: His recent appearance on CNN

    The Immortality Key on Audible

    About Brian Muraresku

    Brian Muraresku graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Brown University with a degree in Latin, Greek and Sanskrit. As an alumnus of Georgetown Law and a member of the New York Bar, he has been practicing law internationally for fifteen years. He lives outside Washington D.C. with his wife and two daughters.

     

     

     

     

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    PT217 – Erika Dyck – Canadian Psychedelic History

    In this episode, Joe interviews Ph.D., Professor at the University of Saskatchewan, and author specializing in the history of psychedelics and their relation to the medical industry, Erika Dyck.

    Dyck talks about her interest in Canadian history and specifically Saskatchewan, which was the first jurisdiction in North America to elect a socialist government. She talks about how it was clear in the early days of governmental support that they were reaching out to people with bold ideas, leading to Humphry Osmand coming there in 1951 to commence research that he felt was being stifled in London.

    They talk extensively about the work of Osmand and Abram Hoffer, early experiments with giving staff in mental hospitals LSD to encourage empathy toward patients, a hospital architect taking LSD and learning that tiled, checkerboard-esque floors may be a challenge to patients with depth perception issues, a “Hollywood hospital” where wealthy film stars were flown to deal with addiction largely in secret, the concept of having patients write out an autobiography before a medicine session in order to reflect back on their life afterward, Osmond’s participation in a peyote ceremony and his subsequent report, why the Timothy Leary model of dropping out of the scientific/academic world isn’t helpful, why time passed and changed public opinion have led to old research coming to light, and why it’s more important to talk to people who aren’t sold on psychedelics yet instead of those who are already bought in and live in our psychedelic bubble.

    Notable Quotes

    “Even people like Humphry Osmond or Abram Hoffer who were on the frontlines of that psychedelic heyday in the 1950s- they were quite careful (and obviously they were sort of practiced at this), but they were quite careful about how I might characterize their work with psychedelics, and they insisted that what they were doing was not unethical, they did not have money from the C.I.A., they had lots of checks and balances, and they were clearly responding to that very heavy reputation and characterization of psychedelics. And I reflect on that every once in a while, and wonder, ‘what would they would say today?’”

    On Osmond and peyote: “It was the question of whether or not these chemicals and these rituals using chemicals should be allowed more broadly. And I think that the federal government in Canada was thinking that, again, this white-coated British guy would walk in and behave like the colonialist that they expected him to be, and come out and say ‘these are rotten ceremonies,’ but that was absolutely not who Humphry Osmond was. He participated fully. He chewed the buttons, he threw up, he participated in the feast afterwards, he participated in the drumming circle. …So Osmond then made a statement (and he’s published about this in a variety of different places) saying this was an absolutely beautiful ceremony, it was absolutely sacred, it should be protected, it should be promoted, [and] people should be given access to peyote so that they continue this sacred ceremony. And the Canadian government was not impressed with this reaction.”

    “Our governments are addicted to the war on drugs.”

    “I think that part of what the psychedelic world needs to do, in my humble opinion, is to reach out and seek these kinds of bridges and these alliances, because I think that there’s a risk that we can just convince ourselves that psychedelics are good and that it won’t actually break through the psychedelic bubble, if you will, to convince regulators that in fact, there is real merit here. There’s still a sense that– even just saying LSD- I gave a presentation last week to a group of retired physicians and these are people with medical training and who’ve spent their careers doing medical education and medical work, clinical work. And they’re like ‘oh, but LSD, that’s the one that fries your brain, right?’ I mean, these were disproven studies in the 70s, and yet it’s very interesting that that characterization is so strong.”

    Links

    Twitter

    Chacruna.net: Women in psychedelics

    Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic, by Mike Jay

    The Seasteading Institute

    About Erika Dyck

    Erika Dyck is a professor and Canada Research Chair in the Department of History at the University of Saskatchewan. Her work focuses on 20th century medical history, especially the history of psychedelics, psychiatry, eugenics and population control. Her books include Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD from Clinic to Campus (2008); Facing Eugenics: Reproduction, Sterilization, and the Politics of Choice (2013); Managing Madness: Weyburn Mental Hospital and the Transformation of Psychiatric Care in Canada(2017); and she is editor of A Culture’s Catalyst: Historical Encounters with Peyote and the Native American Church in Canada (2016) and co-editor of Psychedelic Prophets: The Letters of Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond (2018). She is a guest editor at the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines. You can email her at Erika.dyck@usask.ca. 

     

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    Reexamining Cultural Beliefs Around Children and Psychedelics

    By Jasmine Virdi

    For decades, the subject of children and psychedelics has been one of great contention. The mere thought of exposing children to mind-altering substances elicits substantial controversy in public opinion, often considered a “no-go zone.” Anything that concerns children and how to best care for them precipitates strong reactions because parents aim to safeguard their well-being and protect them from harm’s way. Nonetheless, after a long period of suppression, we now find ourselves in the midst of a psychedelic renaissance. As access to these substances continues to expand through legalization, decriminalization, and medicalization efforts alike, our conversation redefining the use of these substances should seek to holistically address the groups that interact with them, including children.

    Re-examining Cultural Paradigms

    Viewing the subject through a Western lens, there is often the conception that child and adolescent brains are not fully developed, and that ingesting psychedelics could be damaging to brain development and identity formation. This view is widely held even among psychedelic enthusiasts, such as lay psychotherapist Ann Shulgin, who believes that “when you are under the age of, say, 16, you haven’t really lived that long. You haven’t had time to find out what the core of your self is.” Shulgin estimates that a well-prepared 15-16-year-old could cope with the experience, but recommends waiting a while “until you’ve lived a little bit” (Mind States, 2017).

    Similarly, Armando Lozaiga, certified chemical dependency specialist and president of the Institute of Intercultural Medicine of Nierika A.C., suggests that adolescents from the age of 16 onwards are better psychologically equipped to deal with psychedelic experiences. At that age, “you have more of an emotional intelligence as well as abstract thinking functions,” he says. Lozaiga also contrasts Western and Indigenous perspectives, noting that “through a Western lens, in order to attain benefit, I feel that you have to have undergone certain hardships and have a medicinal need.”

    In general, psychedelics are considered to be physiologically safe substances that do not lead to dependence or addiction. In fact, many classic psychedelics, including LSD, psilocybin, and ayahuasca are being researched for their anti-addictive properties. In theory, even if you were to ingest psychedelic substances on a regular basis, the human body is hardwired to develop a tolerance to them in a short timespan, diminishing both their psychoactive and physiological effects.

    For many, the idea of pairing psychedelics with children (even in a medical venue) sounds absurd due to the cultural stigma attached. However, medicating young children diagnosed with ADHD with amphetamines like Adderall has become normalized within our societal paradigm. Why then, should it be such a leap for us to imagine that certain psychoactive substances could provide healing benefits to children?

    In an interview conducted earlier this year, Mark Haden, the executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) Canada discussed the topic, suggesting that psychedelic experiences are a health service, reframing the question by asking: “How do youths access health services?” Haden acknowledges that youth access in a medical context would also necessitate parental consent as well as being dependent on the individual child in question. He believes that there is no golden rule for an individual being ready for such experiences, firmly asserting that youth access “isn’t about age, it is about maturity.”

    Limited studies have been conducted on psychedelics and children in a medical setting. However, researchers in the 1960s looked at LSD as a treatment for autistic children, concluding that the effects “were very promising and could even be considered excellent for the majority of children.” Despite this, the positive outcomes associated have often been dismissed due to the fact that the study designs employed were not as rigorous or effective when compared to today’s standards. A more recent double-blind study by Yale University is examining the effects of using ketamine as a therapy for treatment-resistant depression in adolescents.

    Beyond this, Phase 3 clinical trials for MDMA as a treatment for PTSD are well underway, with MDMA moving ever closer to becoming an FDA-approved treatment. Once MDMA becomes legal, the FDA has signaled its willingness for MDMA to be used as a treatment for adolescents suffering from PTSD.

    Regardless of whether or not children should have access to psychedelic substances, the fact remains that a large proportion of adolescents choose to experiment with psychoactive drugs before coming of age and graduating high school. According to the 2016 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, approximately 2 million U.S. adolescents aged 12 to 17 were current users of illicit drugs at the time.

    As it stands today, when it comes to drugs, we tend toward a “zero tolerance” policy, strictly writing substances off because they are “bad” and have no perceived value. However, this attitude is itself dangerous as many young people world-over are drawn to experiment with psychedelic substances regardless, resulting in failed or misguided self-initiations that can be damaging and harmful. Our “‘zero tolerance’ style of drug education trivializes the factors underlying actual drug abuse and pathologizes normal adolescent experimentation” (Stuart, 2004).

    As greater access to psychedelics awaits on the horizon, we are in dire need for a reform in drug education. The prevalent strategy of repeatedly reinforcing the message of simply avoiding drugs does not provide our youth with ways to maximize the benefits and minimize the risks associated with these substances.

    Recognizing the need for a safe, non-judgemental space to talk about such delicate subjects, Rebecca Kronman, a licensed therapist specializing in psychedelic integration, founded Plant Parenthood, the only digital and in-person community dedicated to exploring how psychedelics impact modern parenting as well as de-stigmatizing the subject of children and psychedelics. 

    Reflecting on the origins of Plant Parenthood, Kronman shares that the idea for the project emerged through conversations with parent peers about psychedelics. “Many shared stories about their own use and how it changed them as a parent, and some shared about their use while their children were present (sometimes sleeping, sometimes not),” she says. “When these conversations can take place in a loving, open way, it makes space for more dialogue and inquiry, which is enormously helpful to reducing stigma.”

    Psychedelics and The Shadow

    Learning from Indigenous Cultures

    Taking a step beyond our cultural conceptions, there are numerous examples in which children are included in psychedelic medicine rituals, including non-substance participation in ceremony as well as use of psychedelic substances throughout all stages of the life cycle. 

    Kronman recently wrote on the topic, emphasizing the value of using Indigenous traditions to re-evaluate Western paradigms. “When we look towards Indigenous cultures, the paradigms that govern our thinking around children and psychedelics are reflected back to us,” she explains. “It allows us to see that it doesn’t have to be this way.”

    Within the Indigenous Huichol culture of Mexico, children are thought to begin ingesting peyote around the age of six, as they are able to verbally articulate their experience at that age (Stuart, 2004). Comparatively, within the Native American Church (NAC), younger children are less likely to consume peyote in ceremony, and are usually invited into the tipi as a rite of passage around the age of 12, when they hit puberty. Families in the Brazilian ayahuasca churches, Santo Daime and União do Vegetal, likewise allow children to participate in ceremonies and have also been known to give extremely small doses of ayahuasca to newborn babies as a symbolic initiation into their tradition.

    Contrary to Western youth, Kronman (2020) highlighted the fact that “Indigenous children are not using psychedelics for escapism, experimentation, or in ways that are contrary to their society’s norms.” Instead, the ingestion of psychoactive plant sacraments is culturally ingrained into a way of life and the use of substances can be both culturally and spiritually reaffirming, reinforcing the values of the community. “If it is in ceremony, and Huichol children want to eat peyote, it is reinforced, as it is part of them fulfilling their spiritual identity,” says Lozaiga. “It is not a drug, it is a spiritual plant completely free of prejudice, and they know that it is not going to do them harm.”

    Although both peyote and ayahuasca are Schedule I substances, Indigenous groups and ayahuasca communities are entitled access to their medicines through religious freedom laws. In the United States, Indigenous adolescents are free to participate in NAC road meetings (ceremonies) without facing legal hurdles due to their religious exemption, allowing them to use peyote as a ceremonial sacrament. Within the Brazilian ayahuasca churches, the consumption of ayahuasca by pregnant women and children is considered as an “exercise of parental rights” (Labate, 2011).

    Childhood and adolescence are both periods characterized by significant brain development, and naturally, the use of substances that influence our brain functioning and development should be approached with caution. Hence, there is a paucity of research examining how psychedelics affect the developing brain.

    Even so, there is no evidence that the long-term use of peyote causes brain damage and mental health issues. On the contrary, a 2015 study attempted to understand the long-term effects of peyote consumption in Native Americans, finding that there was no evidence of residual neurocognitive problems and that the subjects actually scored significantly higher on overall mental health measures compared to members of the same tribe who were of a different religion and did not use peyote. Similarly, another study analyzed the effects of ayahuasca on adolescents, comparing 40 Brazilian adolescents who consumed ayahuasca to a control group and finding no measurable difference in scores on neuropsychological and psychiatric tests.

    In Indigenous peyote traditions, many women ingest peyote throughout different stages of their life cycle, including eating peyote prenatally, while nursing, and sometimes even during childbirth, as it is thought to help prevent miscarriage, allow for the healthy development of the fetus, increase breast milk production, and ease the experience of labor.

    As it happens, the theme of pregnancy and peyote is intimately intertwined with the Huichol origin myth of the first pilgrimage to the sacred peyote desert, Wirikuta. In the myth, the Earth Goddess (Utüanaka) and the Mother of Peyote (Wiri’uwi) begin to menstruate before they enter the desert and encounter peyote, only to consume it and fall pregnant.

    Stacy Schaefer, Professor Emerita of anthropology at California State University, has devoted much of her research career to the topic of pregnancy and peyote, illuminating how Huichol women use peyote throughout their life cycle as well as providing theories for how it may interact with the female reproductive system. Through her research, Schaefer has explored how consuming peyote throughout pregnancy may affect a baby’s cognitive development in the womb. With limited research on the processes of prenatal cognitive development, she speculates that peyote might stimulate the fetus’ neocortex and help with the connection of neurons in the brain.

    Schaefer’s hypothesis is based on the idea that the more stimulation a baby gets, the better its nervous system will develop, including cognitive and reflex abilities. She compares this to an existing theory which posits that the reason newborn babies require so much sleep is because they do not get the necessary stimulation from the environment in their waking states. “Peyote is a stimulant, and I wonder what is going on as their brains are developing and these neural pathways are being created,” says Schaefer. “However, this is something that can’t be proven unless there is more research.”

    In Schaefer’s field studies, some Huichol women suggest that eating peyote when you are pregnant can predispose young children toward becoming shamans. Schaefer attempts to make sense of this in relation to her theory. “We use very little of our brain capacity and perhaps the neural pathways that are being stimulated can create an even greater consciousness or awareness that wouldn’t normally exist,” she says. “Indigenous societies would not continue to do this if it was maladaptive. They would notice if something was wrong through trial and error,” she emphasizes. “They would see it is causing serious problems to their children and pregnancies, and they simply wouldn’t do it.”

    “All I can say is that I can propose these ideas, but I don’t feel comfortable promoting children- especially young children consuming psychedelics, including peyote, in Western society, unless there is more medical and scientific research done,” says Schaefer.

    Going beyond peyote traditions, it is also increasingly common within the Santo Daime and União do Vegetal ayahuasca churches for women to drink ayahuasca throughout their pregnancies and during the process of childbirth.

    There is conflicting information revolving around the subject of pregnant women ingesting ayahuasca and peyote. Some advocate avoiding consuming ayahuasca and peyote during the first trimester in which the embryo undergoes critical development (Schaefer, 2018), while others suggest that it is perfectly safe to consume ayahuasca throughout the whole pregnancy (Labate, 2011). 

    Glauber Loures de Assis, sociologist and president of Céu da Divina Estrela, a Brazilian Santo Daime church, shared that his wife drank ayahuasca during the process of childbirth, finding it helpful and spiritually important. Beyond that, Loures de Assis shared, “The first thing I did when my son was born was to give him a drop of ayahuasca. In Santo Daime, it is in our tradition to serve ayahuasca to pregnant women and to children alike,” he says. “However, they often drink smaller quantities as a symbolic gesture.”

    Non-Ingestive Ceremonial Participation

    For pro-psychedelic parents looking to help lay the foundations of their children’s spiritual lives and expose them to the ceremonial aspect of psychedelic use (without them actively ingesting substances), Kronman (2020) suggests that introducing children to the ceremonial aspect of psychedelic use by itself can serve as a model for Western parents to teach their children important values about community, spirituality, and nature on an experiential level.

    Lozaiga shared about his own experiences raising his children in this context: “In my experience, we sensitized our children to ceremonies, but we didn’t necessarily want to give substances to the kids until they were adolescents. For us, it was more about exposing them to the ritual; to the sacredness that revolves around the consumption of plants, rather than inducing visionary effects.”

    “For many young adolescents, I think psychedelics can do more harm than good,” he says. “There is a general lack of guidance, and looking ahead, if we were to destigmatize these substances to the point where we could look at them objectively, I would like to see initiatory spaces in which young adults can come and be introduced to the sacred dimension of themselves in a guided way.”

    Lozaiga additionally believes that incorporating youth in ceremonies and educating them about psychedelic medicines could serve as drug abuse prevention. “These plant medicines can help people be more inoculated, as once you have sat in ceremony, you begin to understand that it is no game.”

    Re-examining Rites of Passage

    It is clear that in our modern, industrialized culture, we are missing meaningful rites of passage that help our youth transition into adulthood. It has been thought that modern-day Western society allows for the delay of adult responsibilities, in that youth are educated for extended periods of time to meet the employment demands of today’s complex economy (Stuart, 2004). Many young people seek ways to claim the independence of adulthood, and experimenting with psychedelics is one of those ways.

    Despite contention over what age adolescents should have access to psychedelic substances, many agree that under the right circumstances, with the proper guidance and a controlled set and setting, such experiences could potentially be beneficial in serving an initiatory function for young people. “I think it is treacherous in Western society to promote psychedelics with children from birth until puberty,” says Schaefer. “However, at puberty and adolescence, under the right circumstances, with a proper support system in place, it has the potential to be an incredible rite of passage.”

    In many ways, Western, industrialized society has become bereft of meaningful rites of passage. However, our society is still permeated with rituals like the celebration of birthdays, Bar Mitzvahs, graduations, and so on. Exploring how our rituals have become deprived of meaning and living spirit, beloved guru and countercultural figure, Ram Dass, suggested that the main problem with modern-day rites of passage is that they “no longer provide direct contact with the numinous” (Dass, 2004).

    It is important to tread with care despite the existence of both anecdotal and empirical evidence, in that there are very few peer-reviewed scientific studies observing how psychedelics affect adolescents and how they affect children developmentally when mothers ingest prenatally or during nursing. However, we can learn from Indigenous communities and their age-old cultural integration of plant medicines throughout the life cycle, better preparing our own children to approach these substances with respect. By including children in the psychedelic dialogue, we pave the way to dissolving the taboo and stigma that are often a cause for harm among Western adolescents, as well as cultivating reverence for the sacredness of these substances.

    In re-examining the principles that have dominated our perceptions in the West, and looking beyond the boundaries of our society’s current paradigm while integrating the wisdom of other cultures, we can develop a fuller and more nuanced understanding of these substances and what they can add to our lives.

    References

    Dass, R. (2004) Psychedelic Rites of Passage. Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, 14(2), 4-7. https://maps.org/news-letters/v14n2/v14n2_6-7.pdf

    Kronman, R. L. (2020). Children and psychedelics: Using indigenous wisdom to examine western paradigms. Chacruna. https://chacruna.net/children-and-psychedelics-using-indigenous-wisdom-to-examine-western-paradigms/

    Labate, B. C. (2011). Consumption of ayahuasca by children and pregnant women: medical controversies and religious perspectives. Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, 43(1), 27–35. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/51167576_Consumption_of_Ayahuasca_by_Children_and_Pregnant_Women_Medical_Controversies_and_Religious_Perspectives

    Mind States. (2017). Children & psychedelics: Dosing the kids? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sifMmkwnUec&t=92s

    Schaefer, S. B. (2019). Beautiful Flowers: Women and peyote in Indigenous traditions. Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, 29 (1), 8–13. https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/mapscontent/news-letters/v29n1/v29n1_p8-13.pdf

    Schaefer, S. B. (2018) Fertile Grounds? – Peyote and the Human Reproductive System. In McKenna. D. (Ed.) Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs (Vol. 1 & 2): 50 Years of Research. Synergetic Press.

    Stuart, R. (2004). Psychedelic Family Values. Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, 14(2), 47–52. https://maps.org/news-letters/v14n2/psychedelic_family_values.pdf

    About the Author

    Jasmine Virdi is a freelance writer and editor. Since 2018, she has been working for the fiercely independent publishing company Synergetic Press, where her passions for ecology, ethnobotany, and psychoactive substances converge. Jasmine is also a writer for Psychedelics Today, Chacruna.net, Lucid News, and Cosmic Sister. She is currently pursuing an MSc in Spirituality, Consciousness, and Transpersonal Psychology at the Alef Trust with the future aim of working in psychedelic integration therapy. Jasmine’s goal as an advocate for psychoactive substances is to raise awareness of the socio-historical context in which these substances emerged in order to help integrate them into our modern-day lives in a safe, grounded and meaningful way.

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    The World of Claudio Naranjo

    By Allan Badiner

    Claudio Naranjo was a Chilean-born shaman of Moorish, Spanish, and Jewish descent. He was also a psychotherapist, medical doctor, author, educator, serious Buddhist practitioner, and pioneer in the areas of psychology, psychedelic therapies, and human development. His integrative approaches to a variety of fields elevated his work and created global reach and influence. He was always keen to point out that “spirituality should not be confused with religious beliefs or moral codes.” Towards the end of his life, he stressed the importance of emotional education, and the forgotten goal of educating for wisdom– and not just for knowledge to be harnessed for financial gain.

    An early practitioner of Enneagram, he enriched it by integrating Gestalt therapy via Gurdjeff, meditation, music and art therapy, and other practices designed to provide deep, personal insights. But he admitted a vulgar commercialization of the Enneagram took place in North America. He explored the power of education to counter the patriarchal beliefs contributing to our deepening global crisis. “To change the world,” Claudio would say, “change education.” Naranjo’s approach to Buddhism was the same as the Buddha’s; he taught meditation with the offer to “ just try it,” and “see what it offers.”

    His many years of teaching at Esalen Institute in the 1960s were both a pinnacle as well as a painful period in his life. One of his closest friends was Carlos Castaneda, who agreed with his concern that the “powerful gentleman Mr. Money” had increasingly taken control of the world, and belittled human beings to the point of dehumanization. Claudio soon became one of Fritz Perls’ three successors at Esalen, along with Jack Downing and Robert Hall. Claudio attended sensory awareness workshops with the legendary Charlotte Selver. Richard Evans Schultes arranged for Naranjo to make a special journey by canoe up the Amazon River to study ayahuasca with the South American Indians. He brought back samples of this drug and published the first scientific description of the effects of its active alkaloids.

    Navigating Psychedelics for Clinicians and Therapists

    Claudio also took part in the meetings of Leo Zeff’s pioneering psychedelic therapy group. He was an early enthusiast of using psychedelics (primarily ayahuasca, MDMA, and ibogaine) as medicines for a panoply of social and psychiatric conditions. Married four times, his last partner was Carolyn Merchant, a marriage and family therapist and a co-worker with Claudio on his book and teachings. In 1970, Claudio lost his only son in a terrible car accident on Big Sur’s Highway 1. He stated that the most significant realization of his life was that “nothing is more important in our time than our learning to be a little kinder.”

    The Naranjo Institute presented the Seekers After Truth (SAT) program in 2012, with a new cohort opening annually. The program consists of four residential workshops, each lasting between six to nine days. The retreats represented a comprehensive exploration of psychological, spiritual, and expressive practices for understanding the human trajectory toward growth and fulfillment. From exploring who we have become and the precise ways we have each become stuck and continue to get stuck, the program went on to encourage processes of active healing and the expansion of one’s sense of possibilities. It was a “supplementary curriculum” of self-knowledge, relationship-repair, and spiritual culture.

    In the course of its evolution as a program for personal and professional development of therapists and teachers since its rebirth in the late eighties, Naranjo called SAT a “psychotherapy laboratory,” in which people learned to help each other through the development of psychotherapeutic skills that do not require a background in the customary academic theoretical literature. He called this the “democratization of psychotherapy,” and education of future teachers, who may be able to assist their students in their personal growth.

    Claudio’s recent and last talk was the highlight of the 2019 World Ayahuasca Conference in Girona, Spain. I will never forget his courage as one of his arms was violently swinging in the air due to his Parkinson’s. For all of his powerful influence on the development of human consciousness, in the bigger picture, Naranjo felt unsatisfied with his work, and disillusioned: “The economy has dominated politics, and practically everything else, asphyxiating life and its intrinsic values, the social order, and all our institutions.” A harbinger of things to come (such as defunding police) was his hope that the community take charge of many things (or perhaps of everything) that it once delegated to its governments, including communications, finance, and maintaining peace.

    Claudio also found time to write or edit numerous books. He revised an early book on Gestalt therapy and published two new ones. He published three books on the Enneagram of Personality, as well as The End of Patriarchy. He also published a book on meditation, The Way of Silence and the Talking Cure, and Songs of Enlightenment.

    Published in 2010 with a foreword by Jean Houston, was Healing Civilization: Bringing Personal Transformation into the Societal Realm through Education and the Integration of the Intra-Psychic Family. Naranjo explored what he saw as the root causes of the destruction of humanity: war, violence, oppression of women, child abuse, environmental endangerment, and patriarchy, which has taken root over millennia in our own conditioned minds. He touted the work of Tótila Albert, who asks us to see ourselves as three-brained with the “Inner Father” (corresponding to the head), the “Inner Mother” (corresponding to the heart), and the “Inner Child” (corresponding to the instincts). As people learn to integrate these three “brains,” Naranjo believed, they (the instincts) may bring about a functional- even divine, family within. For Naranjo, transforming education to be oriented toward personal and collective evolution could help heal civilization.

    In his last book, The Revolution We Expected: Cultivating a New Politics of Consciousness (2020), Dr. Naranjo presents a call for individual and societal transformation in order to rebuild and humanize our institutions and realize a post-patriarchal global ecological community. “Even if the catastrophe of the sinking of the patriarchal vessel in which we have been sailing continues,” Naranjo writes, ”it is better for us to understand, by going through our crisis with faith, that the agonizing death rattles of our civilization are our greatest hope for regeneration.” He speaks of “apprentice shamans, who, without knowing it, are searching for their own development, and will sooner or later have the possibility of being of help in a world needing precisely those qualities they are developing.” 

    Dr. Naranjo observes that ‘realizing’ is the bravest thing of all- “to see that one was wrong and to change direction.” As Canadian psychologist Steven Pinker reminds us, “We humans have a very good eye for intellect but we do not yet have the right organ to understand consciousness.” 

    Claudio Naranjo passed away in July of 2019 at 86 years old.

    About the Author

    Allan Badiner is the editor of Zig Zag Zen: Buddhism and Psychedelics (Synergetic Press). He also edited the books, Dharma Gaia: A Harvest in Buddhism and Ecology, and Mindfulness in the Marketplace (Parallax Press), and he is a contributing editor at Tricycle magazine. Allan feels the potential of psychedelics as an awakening to higher consciousness needs to be seen in an ecological context. His teacher is the Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh.

    Art by Mike Alexander

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    PT212 – Zoe Helene – Colonization, Coevolution, and Cosmic Sisterhood

    In this episode, Joe interviews environmental and cultural activist, founder of advocacy group Cosmic Sister, and originator of psychedelic feminism, Zoe Helene. 

    In this open, free-form conversation, Zoe discusses her career path in male-dominated fields of performing art, then high-tech, then natural products, leading to a major shift leading to the creation of Cosmic Sister. She talks about concepts of othering and ableism, of coevolution and coextinction, and about how people often talk about how ayahuasca “tourism” harms Indigenous communities but rarely talk about the many ways it can and does benefit Indigenous people. She also talks about how many Americans have a fleeting, fickle, media-centric attention span on critical social and environmental issues, how living in “late-stage patriarchy” affects everyone across the gender spectrum, and how most males don’t think about how it has harmed and is still harming them.

    They talk about Zoe’s “Ancestor Medicine” and colonization and the decolonization movement. She talks about ancient Mycenean and Minoan civilizations and their use of sacred psychedelic plant medicines, the tribalism of Greek people in general, and about how early Greek civilizations worked with sacred medicines even more than most people think (not just the Mysteries of Eleusis). She talks about the effects of colonization and the roots of cultural appropriation, and about ancient gold Signet rings depicting medicine women, including one that looks very much like an artistic depiction of ritual ecstatic dancing and ergot. 

    Notable Points

    Colonization is multidimensional, and it isn’t just for people in the United States of America. We need to decolonize from ALL the colonizers. Globally, and throughout herstory. Dominator cultures have been around since the beginning of time, in subtle, systemic ways and in brutally apparent ways—and it’s still going on.

    When people talk about Venus, I get on their cases about it. Please don’t call her Venus. Please call her Aphrodite. When the Romans appropriated Aphrodite, they didn’t just change her name. Venus is a twisted, patriarchal version of Aphrodite, and calling her Venus is no different from other cultural appropriations people talk about. Same goes for Mercury, Mars, Vesta and all the others. Please call Mercury by his original name, which is Hermes. Hermes is so, so much cooler. Mars is Ares. Cupid is Eros. I cringe when pop culture celebrates Diana, rather than the original Artemis. Artemis is a complex and powerful archetype, and we need her now more than ever.

    There’s this prevailing idea of ayahuasca centers and so-called ‘ayahuasca tourists’ traveling to Peru and ‘taking advantage of indigenous people.’ Yes, of course there are always going to be bad people and yes, some tourists are crass and stupid, but most people go to Peru as a pilgrimage, and if anything, are guilty of romanticizing the Indigenous people in ignorant ways like, ‘Oh, they all want to run around in grass skirts.’ No, they want a cell phone. They want a good Internet connection so they can watch soccer or study or connect with loved ones or have access to more economic opportunities. Ayahuasca centers closing because of Covid-19 has been d devastating for the local and Indigenous people.

    I hope people hold onto this passion for change. Fighting Racism should not be looked at as another damn trend rather than something we keep working on. We can’t quit. Same with Sexism and Environmentalism—all the big things. This is, I think, a flaw in our culture. We have this habit—it’s a trait I’ve especially noticed in American culture—where we are fickle about important issues in the news. Remember when the Amazon was burning? It’s still burning, and so many people were devastated by that, as if that was the first time we’d learned about the destruction of the Great Amazon.  In mainstream American culture many people will think, somewhere in the back of their head, that it’s done. It’s fixed. ‘That got solved.’ Well, it didn’t. It’s still raging on. All the big social and environmental issues should not be considered trends. If you truly care, you are needed for the long haul.

    Links

    Cosmicsister.com

    Cosmic Sister Instagram

    Smithsonianmag.com: Gold Rings Found in Warrior’s Tomb Connect Two Ancient Greek Cultures

    Imdb.com: The Nightingale

    Her past appearance on Psychedelics Today

    About Zoe Helene

    Zoe Helene is an artist, environmentalist, and cultural activist best known for women’s empowerment and sacred plants such as cannabis, ayahuasca, peyote, and psilocybin mushrooms—our co-evolutionary allies—and for “Psychedelic Feminism,” a term she coined and popularized in support of women in psychedelics. Zoe’s personal work with sacred plants continues to deepen her determination to help protect the earth’s diverse biological abundance. She believes that creating a true balance of power across the gender spectrum—globally—is the only way humans (and non-humans) will survive, and that it is our moral responsibility, as Earth’s apex predators, to protect and defend the rights of non-humans to live freely in thriving, uncompromised wilderness sanctuaries. She founded Cosmic Sister, an environmental feminist collective for progressives who understand that the current, grossly imbalanced “power-over” patriarchal model will continue to lead humans down a devolutionary path that will eventually end in the destruction of life on Earth as we know it. Cosmic Sister’s psychedelic feminism educational advocacy projects promote sacred plant spirit medicines as a way to “jump-start rapid cultural evolution,” starting with women.

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    Indigenous Voices in Peyote Conservation: Preserving Medicine for Future Generations

    By Jasmine Virdi

    Peyote (Lophophora williamsii) is a small, spineless cactus endemic to North America, growing in the vast desert thorn scrub that runs from the southwestern United States into north-central Mexico. For centuries, the mescaline-containing cactus has been used by Indigenous groups in Northern America as a ceremonial medicine and a religious sacrament considered integral to their way of life. The rapidly growing psychedelic movement has generated a new wave of interest in plant medicines, including peyote, requiring us to tread with awareness for the impact this has on the Indigenous cultures and communities who have long stewarded these medicines.

    At present, the peyote cactus is in the midst of a deep conservation crisis. Over the past few decades, wild peyote populations have been rapidly declining due to a convergence of factors including oil and gas development, illegal poaching, agricultural development, and unsustainable harvesting practices. Amongst Indigenous communities, there is a growing need to conserve this quickly disappearing natural resource that is a core element of the Native American Church (NAC), the largest pan-Indigenous religion in the United States. 

    Due to growing evidence of the decline of peyote and mounting concern about obtaining their sacred medicine, the NAC commissioned the Peyote Research Project (PRP) in 2013. The first phase of the project (PRP 1) concerned itself with documenting the decline of peyote as well as assessing threats to its natural habitat, while the second phase (PRP 2) focused on identifying conservation strategies, including “securing sovereign land” to protect the Peyote Gardens and building relationships with landowners to lease space for replanting and harvesting.

    Sandor Iron Rope, former President of the Native American Church of North America, current president of the Native American Church of South Dakota, member of the Oglala Lakota Oyate (Oglala Sioux Tribe), and Indigenous Peyote Conservation Initiative (IPCI) board member, reflects that “supply and demand have always been an issue, and when we started looking at it through the lens of the PRP, we found out many issues were in the forefront of the longevity of supply.”

    The research activities of the PRP showed that peyote was under threat, both in regards to its populations and quality of the plant. As the need to conserve peyote became more pressing, the National Council of Native American Churches (NCNAC) called for the establishment of the IPCI. “The coalition of the NCNAC were involved in PRP 2, and the collective decided that conservation itself needed to be addressed. Hence, IPCI was born in 2017,” says Iron Rope. “The Church is a religious, spiritual organization, however, peyote is a cactus that needs its own attention as far as its conservation status.” IPCI is not a religious organization, but a conservation center focused entirely on supporting the broader NAC community in North America. It is led by a Board of Directors controlled by NAC leaders from across the United States.

    In late 2017, the NCNAC secured 605 acres of peyote habitat in southern Texas, often referred to as “the 605” on behalf of IPCI, with the help of the RiverStyx Foundation. Later that year, IPCI was formally established with the aim of empowering Indigenous communities across the U.S., Mexico, and Canada to conserve and regenerate peyote for generations to come. IPCI operates as a non-profit, officially becoming a 501c(3) organization in 2018. In early 2019, IPCI held its first peyote harvest on the 605, educating children alongside their families on how to harvest in an ecologically and spiritually respectful way. 

    Unlike other conservation initiatives, IPCI is a cooperative Indigenous-led initiative, and is employing a range of biocultural strategies in order to conserve, as well as facilitate spiritual reconnection with peyote. Beyond purchasing land allotted for peyote conservation, they are also building alliances with local landowners, and developing a system of harvest and distribution that is in line with their values. 

    IPCI considers the rancher community in south Texas an important ally in its efforts, and its members have established an ongoing relationship with landowners from whom they lease land for biocultural harvesting and replanting. “Sharing our perspective as practitioners with the ranchers, we were encouraged to seek our own land and regain sovereignty over our medicine,” shared Iron Rope. “Most ranchers that we spoke to had a lot of issues concerning poaching, and lack of respect for their land making them fully supportive of our cause.” 

    Lophophora williamsii - Peyote
    Lophophora williamsii – Peyote

    How and When Did Peyote Become Endangered? 

    For decades, Indigenous cultural practices and peyote ceremonies were suppressed across the U.S., with peyote ceremonies being illegal in many states where peyotists practiced. It wasn’t until the American Indian Religious Freedom Act (AIRFA) was passed in 1978 (and further amended in 1994 to expressly include peyote) that the NAC was finally granted exemption on a religious basis, allowing federally recognized tribes to use peyote as a ceremonial sacrament. The possession, transportation, and use of peyote by persons who are not members of federally recognized tribes remain illegal under federal law. 

    The endangered status of peyote is by no means a new problem. According to Dawn Davis, a Shoshone Ph.D. candidate at the University of Idaho and an Indigenous researcher studying the peyote habitat, researchers and scholars have been talking about peyote’s endangerment since the 1960s, when so-called “hippies” became aware of its “psychedelic” properties. 

    In the heat of the 1960s countercultural revolution, peyote was brought to public attention, gaining worldwide popularity through the works of Aldous Huxley and Carlos Castaneda. Their writings generated a newly sparked interest in the psychoactive properties of the plant and resulted in an influx of eager psychedelic tourists traveling to Texas and Mexico to seek out the famed cactus in its natural habitat.

    To some extent, this trend continues today as we find ourselves in the midst of a psychedelic renaissance, and interest in the therapeutic potentials of visionary plants continues to grow. Such “psychedelic tourism” has inevitably impacted the availability of peyote for Indigenous groups. In fact, it was the countercultural movement of the 1960s and the corresponding interest in psychoactive substances that resulted in the U.S. government enacting The Controlled Substances Act of 1970, which classified peyote as a Schedule I substance. 

    Due to improper harvesting techniques and overharvesting, peyote populations were left decimated, and it was declared an endangered species in Mexico as early as 1991. Currently, peyote is listed as “vulnerable” as populations in the wild continue to decline. “The International Union for the Conservation of Nature placed peyote on their red list as a vulnerable species in 2009 and the next level after re-evaluation of the population, it could move to endangered status,” says Davis. “It is also important to acknowledge that within the United States, in Texas, peyote is considered an endangered species at the local level.”

    Other threats to peyote populations are largely a result of exploitative land management practices, including mining, oil and gas development, the construction of wind turbines, rancher root plowing, cattle grazing, and poaching. “Over the last ten years, wind turbine development within peyote gardens has had a huge impact on peyote populations, completely extirpating large populations of cacti from the natural range,” says Davis.

    Lophophora williamsii - Peyote
    Lophophora williamsii – Peyote

    Another less obvious threat to peyote lies in the ongoing debate between Indigenous groups and the decriminalization community. Earlier this year, IPCI and NCNAC leaders produced an official statement in response to Decriminalize Nature Oakland’s resolution to decriminalize all plant medicines, including peyote. Although those working with Decriminalize Nature (DN) might have been well-intentioned, NCNAC leaders felt disappointed in Decrim’s failure to consult with Indigenous peoples, as well as their oversight of the cultural and religious history of peyote and the plant’s endangered status. The NCNAC’s statement requested that Decriminalization initiatives should not include peyote in their efforts to decriminalize all plant medicines, with the concern that it would provide citizens with a false sense of legality. Indigenous leaders fear that the decriminalization of peyote could unintentionally cause damage to populations by serving to “increase interest in non-native persons either going to Texas to purchase peyote or to buy it from a local dealer who has acquired it illegally and unsustainably in Texas.” 

    Very recently, Decriminalize Nature Santa Cruz issued a formal apology to the NAC for not consulting with them prior to proceeding with the resolution to decriminalize all entheogenic plants and fungi. DN Santa Cruz’s apology was accepted, and both the NCNAC and IPCI have stated that they “look forward to building a continued relationship based on unity, solidarity, and allyship.” DN Santa Cruz hopes other Decrim efforts will follow their lead, building a respectful relationship with Indigenous peyote practitioners. 

    A licensed distribution system was established in Texas as a regulatory companion to the federal exemption for Native religious use of peyote. This system employs licensed dealers, also known as peyoteros, to legally harvest and distribute peyote to NAC members, however, not all peyoteros necessarily consider Indigenous values of spiritual and ecological sustainability.

    There have been issues with over-harvesting and improper harvesting by the current licensed dealers. When harvesting is done sustainably, the top of the root hardens and is able to produce more peyote pups in the future. Peyoteros (and black-market poachers) sometimes sever the root, causing the entire plant to die. 

    Iron Rope expressed IPCI’s intentions of being inclusive of and working with existing peyoteros, wanting to build relationships with them and start a dialogue about sustainable harvesting techniques. “The IPCI are a new family in the neighborhood,” he says. “We come as friends, as neighbors, as partners, and we don’t want to engage in any type of conflict.” However, IPCI also wants to take a step towards sovereignty, training Indigenous distributors so as not to rely solely on current suppliers. 

    “As Indigenous practitioners, it is important for us to reconnect in order to gain the full spiritual benefit of our medicine,” Iron Rope shared. “We are learning how to sustain our peyote for generations because a lot of our tribes have never harvested medicine and we have become lazy in a sense, relying on the non-practitioner distributors to send it to us in the mail.”

    At the beginning of this year, there were four licensed peyoteros. According to Davis, the process of becoming a licensed peyotero is both time-consuming and costly, involving submitting an application to the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). Up until last year, peyoteros were licensed through the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS). However, the law has changed and the DPS regulatory program was dissolved, making it only possible to acquire a license through the DEA.

    “The stringent process of becoming a licensed peyotero involves annual application fees and thorough background investigation, but as far as harvesting protocols and regulations, there are now none,” adds Davis. “This has contributed to a lot of the issues that peyote is having in regard to propagation, because distributors aren’t necessarily harvesting ecologically. “If you look at pictures taken from peyote harvests, you can see that a shockingly high percentage of peyote are harvested unsustainably.”

    Even if harvesting protocols and regulations were implemented through the DEA, Davis is doubtful that they would be effective, in that peyoteros operate in sparsely populated areas and such regulations would be hard to monitor. She also fears that increasing regulation would push distributors out of the business, making it more difficult for tribes who don’t have a connection to landowners in Texas to access their medicine.

    “I feel that there is a more organic way of resolving this than relying on western law,” says Davis. “Rather, NAC practitioners could prevent these issues by educating fellow peyote practitioners about what a properly harvested peyote button looks like, encouraging them to buy sustainably harvested peyote.” Demanding properly and spiritually harvested peyote is the first step to bringing about lasting change.

    Lophophora williamsii - Peyote
    Lophophora williamsii – Peyote

    How Can The Psychedelic Community Respect Indigenous Traditions?

    As the psychedelic renaissance continues to unfold, it is increasingly important that we learn from the mistakes of the past, and make efforts to avoid another wave of colonial entitlement when it comes to peyote as a plant medicine. 

    Despite being given such reverence by Indigenous tribes and the NAC, peyote traditions have been extremely misunderstood by outsiders for centuries. From the persecution of peyote traditions beginning in the early 1600s by Spanish colonists in Mexico to the 19th and 20th-century legal suppression of peyote practices in the U.S., Indigenous people have had to undergo countless struggles to ensure the continued use of their sacred medicine. 

    Rather than feel entitled to peyote, the psychedelic community can serve as an ally to Indigenous communities by listening and choosing to support them in the ways that they wish to be supported. “It starts off with respect. Those that want to help can do something as simple as supporting Indigenous initiatives such as IPCI,” offered Iron Rope. “Indigenous people know what is best for them for the most part, and allowing them to take lead on certain matters is important.” 

    Beyond this, Davis expressed that one of her biggest concerns as a practitioner and a researcher is that non-Indigenous people should try to understand the history of peyote and what Indigenous people have endured in order to access and use their medicine. “Peyote went back underground until the passing of the AIRFA amendments in 1994, and now we have this movement pushing for peyote to be a sort of ‘free for all,’ and completely negating the historical struggle of Indigenous people’s use of peyote.”

    Further, Davis also urges people to stay clear of harvesting wild peyote populations anywhere throughout its range, suggesting that one of the most important things that allies can do for peyote is to take the position that they will refuse to harvest wild populations while encouraging others to do the same. “Whether it be in Texas or Mexico, people who are truly respectful of this medicine- this plant, this way of life, will not harvest any wild populations because of peyote’s status as a vulnerable species with potential for future extinction.”

    As we traverse the developments of this renaissance, it is crucial for our community to be aware of the impact we have, not only on mainstream culture, but also on Indigenous communities who have so frequently been left unheard. There are several steps that we can take to support peyote conservation, including sharing information about peyote conservation issues and educating oneself on the ethical considerations to be made when choosing to buy or use peyote outside of a bona fide NAC context, which must include awareness for the socio-historical baggage specific to this plant medicine.

    About the Author

    Jasmine Virdi is a freelance writer, editor, and proofreader. Since 2018, she has been working as a writer, editor, and social media coordinator for the fiercely independent publishing company Synergetic Press, where her passions for ecology, ethnobotany and psychoactive substances converge. Jasmine’s goal as an advocate for psychoactive substances is to raise awareness of the socio-historical context in which these substances emerged in order to help integrate them into our modern-day lives in a safe, grounded and meaningful way.

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    Wade Davis – Ayahuasca and a New Hope for Colombia

    In this episode, Joe interviews Wade Davis: Ph.D., Professor of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, explorer, ethnobotanist, star of the recent documentary, “El Sendero de la Anaconda,” and author of several books, including  bestseller The Serpent and the Rainbow, which was optioned for a movie, starring Bill Pullman and released by Universal Pictures in 1988. His new book, Magdalena: River of Dreams: A Story of Colombia, comes out on September 15th. 

    Wade discusses his history with Richard Evans Schultes, the strange phenomenon behind the growth of ayahuasca compared to other more benign plants, how set and setting can shift expectations across generations, how Indigenous people treat plant medicines in comparison to the western world, the difference between ayahuasca and yagé, Haitian zombies, Voodoo, and the mystery of how Indigenous people have been able to identify plants and learn of their combined effects through the plants speaking to them.

    He also speaks about his hatred of cocaine and the damage it has caused Colombia and its people from US drug laws and global consumption leading to violence and deforestation for generations. He’s working to decouple cocaine from the coca plant (hopefully through some sort of future coca nutraceutical like a chewing gum or tea), encourage people to stop supporting the illicit cocaine market, and to think of Colombia differently than its unfair reputation encourages. Through his new book, which has been called a love letter to Colombia, he hopes to show people that everything they think they know about Colombia is wrong.

    Notable Quotes

    “This sort of quest for individual health and healing, for individual enlightenment, individual growth – which, at some level, is completely understandable, but it is also a reflection, in good measure, of our own culture of self; the ongoing center of narcissism, the idea that one’s purpose in life is to advance one’s own spiritual path or one’s own destiny – that is, in my experience, very much not what is going on in the traditional reaches of the northwest Amazon, where the plant (the medicine) both originated, but also, where today, it’s taken very much as a collective experience, such that the ritual itself becomes a prayer for the continuity and the wellbeing of the people themselves- where you’d never even think of this in terms of Self or I.”

    “All of these cultures are fundamentally driven by this idea that they, themselves, are the stewards of the forest- that plants and animals are just people in another dimension of reality, that there’s a transactional relationship between human beings and the natural world so that the hunter is both hunted and the hunter; where you don’t simply go to get meat, you must seek permission to get that meat; where the shaman is less a healer than a nuclear engineer who periodically goes to the very heart of the reactor to reprogram the world.”

    “I still am incredibly loyal to that passage in my life, and I find that I’m very proud and happy to say that I wouldn’t write the way I write, I wouldn’t think the way I think, I wouldn’t treat gay people the way I treat gay people, I wouldn’t treat women the way I treat women, I wouldn’t understand the power and resonance of biology- of nature itself, if I hadn’t taken psychedelics.”

    “Everybody who uses illicit cocaine, I’m sorry to tell you, has the blood of Colombian people [and] the near destruction of a nation on [their] hands.”

    “Everything you’ve ever heard about Colombia is wrong, and this dark cliche that has persisted is completely inaccurate, and an injustice to a people whose miseries have largely been caused by our actions- our prohibition of drugs and our propagating of this war on drugs, and of course our consumption of this horrible drug.”

    Links

    Website: daviswade.com

    Pre-order his new book, Magdalena: River of Dreams (out 9/15)

    “El Sendero de la Anaconda” documentary: trailer and info

    Recent Rolling Stone article: “The Unraveling of America”

    About Wade Davis

    Wade Davis is an Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society. Named by the NGS as one of the Explorers for the Millennium, he has been described as “a rare combination of scientist, scholar, poet and passionate defender of all of life’s diversity.” In recent years his work has taken him to East Africa, Borneo, Nepal, Peru, Polynesia, Tibet, Mali, Benin, Togo, New Guinea, Australia, Colombia, Vanuatu, Mongolia and the high Arctic of Nunuvut and Greenland. An ethnographer, writer, photographer, and filmmaker, Davis holds degrees in anthropology and biology and received his Ph.D. in ethnobotany, all from Harvard University. Mostly through the Harvard Botanical Museum, he spent over three years in the Amazon and Andes as a plant explorer, living among fifteen indigenous groups in eight Latin American nations while making some 6000 botanical collections. His work later took him to Haiti to investigate folk preparations implicated in the creation of zombies, an assignment that led to his writing Passage of Darkness (1988) and The Serpent and the Rainbow (1986), an international best seller later released by Universal as a motion picture.

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    Dr. LaMisha Hill – The Fight for Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity

    In this episode, Joe interviews Dr. LaMisha Hill, licensed Counseling Psychologist, board member of the Alameda County Psychological Association, and Director of Multicultural Affairs for the Office of Diversity and Outreach at the University of California, San Francisco.

    Hill talks about how race and gender of underrepresented people come into play in the psychedelic sphere- in studies, professions, and even in people’s consideration of psychedelics as a possible healer for them: how most psychology follows the same well-worn, Euro-centric, fairly western, mostly-for-well-off-college-students paradigm, how even when culture and history are added later on, it’s never the center of it, how ignorance (or flat out erasing) of history leads to entire groups of people feeling that they’re not welcome in this world, how classicism is a much bigger problem than people make it out to be, and how to most people, there is a certain image that comes to mind when PTSD and trauma are discussed, and it rarely includes historical trauma, human trafficking, sexual violence against women of color and people across the gender spectrum, etc.- it is usually of a white soldier or white victim of sexual violence.

    She talks about how we can all improve- having discussions and supporting groups that are doing the right thing, including more people from underrepresented cultures in studies (or even centering the studies around them), living the indigenous culture ideas of “spirit first” and honoring and respecting the magic (and doing so with energy), and most importantly, being an ally: educating yourself about people outside your normal social identities, centering the people you choose to be in alignment with, identifying where you have power and/or a voice, and using your resources for the betterment of the community.

    Notable Quotes

    “Race is not real. We have been set apart from one another for the purpose of capitalism, colonialism, exploitation and subjugation of a particular community that has roots in colorism and anti-black racism and slavery in our western American culture, and we continue to adopt in other people in the world based on the categories and classifications that we label onto people. So racism has huge effects, but race, in and of itself, is not real. So the opportunity that we have in the landscape of psychedelics, I really think, is towards unity.”

    “If you didn’t think about your neighbor, if you showed up from a place of i– that you didn’t come from a place of we, try again. It’s not too late. If you showed up and your website or your narrative around whatever you’re doing in the landscapes of psychedelics doesn’t include honor and recognition for indigenous communities around the world, rewrite it. If you have the ability and the power to actually say ‘hey, we’re engaging in these studies and we did it in the way that studies are always done, and maybe we can actually reframe who we’re centering in this work,’ try again. If you give a talk or a TED talk or go on the next podcast and you’re talking about your particular jam that you love and that’s the thing that you do, but you didn’t give honor and recognition, try again. That’s all. Because in doing so, other people are going to be able to hear themselves- it’s like a drum, it’s like a call- because you have to thump it and let them know that they are invited. They are welcomed.”

    “The invitation to practice inclusion- let’s pause and look at the ways that we’re perpetuating structural oppression and non-belonging, and pivot towards strategies and principles of equity. Because when equity becomes structural, it’s not contingent on people doing the right thing. People are always going to need to catch up, examine themselves, learn more, grow. …Hearts and minds have to grow, but while they’re growing, we can actually pivot policies and practices that are going to bring about equity.”

    Links

    Twitter

    Naming It podcast, with Dr. Bedford Palmer II and Dr. LaMisha Hill

    About Dr. LaMisha Hill

    LaMisha Hill (pronouns: she, her, hers) is the Director of the MRC. Originally from the Chicago-Land Area, Dr. Hill moved to the west coast to complete a Doctoral degree in Counseling Psychology at the University of Oregon. Dr. Hill holds over 6 years of experience in higher education, and has supported students at two UC campuses. Most recently, she completed a Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Psychology at UC Berkeley’s Counseling and Psychological Services. Prior to moving to the Bay Area, Dr. Hill completed a Pre-Doctoral Internship at the Counseling Center, UC Riverside.
    Dr. Hill’s professional experiences include providing direct clinical services to graduate and undergraduate students, engaging in outreach with campus partners, group facilitation, and program development/evaluation. She holds expertise in college student mental health, multicultural counseling, and assessment. Dr. Hill was the recipient of a 2014 UC Berkeley Spot Award, for herservice with The Mentoring Center (an Oakland based non-profit that supports youth of color).
    Dr. Hill is passionate about advocacy, education, equity, and mentorship and strives to support students with navigating the complexities of a University system. Professionally, she is dedicated to multiculturalism, diversity, and supporting underrepresented communities. Dr. Hill is honored to join the Office of Diversity and Outreach under the leadership of Dr. Renée Navarro.

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    Jerry and Julie Brown – Healing Through Mystical Experience

    advertisement for Psychedelics Today episode with psychologists Jerry and Julie Brown called Healing Through Mystical Experience. Photo of Jerry and Julie Brown holding a religious painting on left, text on right.

    In this episode, Joe interviews Jerry and Julie Brown. Jerry (Ph.D.) is an author and activist, who served as founding professor of anthropology at Florida International University in Miami for 42 years. Julie (M.A.) is an author and integrative psychotherapist, who worked with cancer patients with a focus on guided imagery. Together, they are co-authors of The Psychedelic Gospels: The Secret History of Hallucinogens in Christianity.

    They talk about their blogpost on Psychedelics Today and inspiring studies: Walter Pahnke’s original psilocybin study at Marsh Chapel and Roland Griffiths’ recent studies at Johns Hopkins and the amazing results at each, Robin Carhart-Harris’ MRI analysis, and some of Julie’s successes using guided imagery to empower 3 cancer clients to heal after conventional cancer treatment was ineffective.

    They talk about guided imagery and the body’s ability to heal itself, how mystical states actually help heal people, how disease starts in the mind, Ancient Greece’s psychedelic Rites of Eleusis, and their own personal life-changing psychedelic experiences related to Johns Hopkins’ 5 common elements of mystical experience.

    And they talk about their most popular book, The Psychedelic Gospels: The Secret History of Hallucinogens in Christianity, which highlights images of mushrooms and psychedelic art found throughout Christian history (all the way back to Gnostic Gospels), and their possible relationship to the birth of Christianity and the story of Jesus. 

    Notable Quotes

    “The questions are: Can psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy be used not only to alleviate the psychological anxiety (as we saw at Johns Hopkins) and the depression, but can it also be used to facilitate the physiological healing in cancer patients, as Julie has done through facilitating mystical experiences? That’s a big question. The second one is: in time, are we going to see what today, is long-term costly, clinical psychotherapy of a variety of different modalities, eventually be enhanced by short-term, much more affordable psychedelic psychotherapy?” -Jerry Brown

    “In astrophysics, dark matter, which they say makes up most of the universe- it can not be directly detected or seen. It can only be implied through the gravitational effects that it causes. So, in psychology, mystical experience cannot be easily accessed, but it can be reliably created both through psychedelics, and as Julie’s work has shown, through guided imagery. In other words, hidden from ordinary consciousness, mystical experience manifests from the dark matter of the mind to facilitate healing.” -Jerry Brown 

    “F. Scott Fitzgerald, the author, said there’s no second acts in American lives, but fortunately, psychedelics is having its second act, and I think if we do it right this time, we can really integrate it into our culture, both in a therapeutic setting, and [also in settings] modeled after the Greek Eleusinian mysteries, where healthy people can go to explore psychedelics for personal growth and for spirituality and creativity.” -Jerry Brown

    Links

    Psychedelics Today blog: Mystical Experience and Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy: Insights from Guided-Imagery Therapy with Cancer Patients

    Website: psychedelicgospels.com

    Psychedelic Gospels Facebook

    The Psychedelic Gospels: Evidence of Entheogens in Christian Art presentation on Youtube

    Email

    About Jerry and Julie Brown

    Jerry B. Brown, Ph.D., is an anthropologist, author, and activist. From 1972 to 2014, he served as founding professor of anthropology at Florida International University in Miami, where he taught a course on “Hallucinogens and Culture.” Julie M. Brown, M.A., LMHC, is an integrative psychotherapist, who works with cancer patients. They are coauthors of The Psychedelic Gospels: The Secret History of Hallucinogens in Christianity, 2016; “Entheogens in Christian Art: Wasson, Allegro and the Psychedelic Gospels,” Journal of Psychedelic Studies, 2019; and “Mystical Experience and Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy: Insights from Guided Imagery Therapy with Cancer Patients,” Psychedelics Today, May 28, 2020.

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    Solidarity Fridays – Week 19

    In today’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Joe and Kyle sit down and talk about recent items in the news, and dive deep into analyzing 2 articles that are very critical of MAPS’ involvement with the police, military, and government. 

    They first discuss Canada-based nonprofit TheraPsil’s recent win of four people with incurable cancer being granted the ability to use psilocybin for end-of-life therapy, and how this framework could be copied and used in the US through the Right-to-try act, signed into law in 2018.  

    They then discuss Dimitri Mugianis’s recent article in Salon, which highlighted the long history of psychedelics being used in negative ways, from Vikings presumably using some sort of mushroom to get to a pillaging, “Berserker warrior” mindstate, to the 11th century Nizari Isma’ili State, which reportedly used hashish as a tool for motivation and control, to MKUltra and experiments on Whitey Bulger, to the most recent death of Elijah McLain from a large forced injection of ketamine. And they discuss David Nickles’s article in Psymposia, which poses that since MAPS is working to provide treatment to police and soldiers with PTSD, they are essentially in bed with the enemy, and only promoting organizations that create more violence, division, trauma, and PTSD, while treating the perpetrators instead of the victims. 

    Both articles are critical of MAPS but neglect to see the importance of diplomacy and working to see eye to eye with people in disagreement for the greater good- that yes, these tools can be used against people, but can also be used by people, with immense benefits. Joe reads a comment sent in by listener Danny McCraken, pointing out that “as the saying goes, ‘only Siths deal in absolutes.’” This leads to more discussion: when and how should ketamine be used for submission? Why do healthy, trained cops need to even get to that point? How much of this is just governments trying to make the costs of war cheaper? Why don’t more people see things from all sides?

    Lastly, they remind us that on September 17th, 2 new rounds of (now CE-approved) Navigating Psychedelics will be starting up, and there is a new class for sale developed with Johanna Hilla-Maria Sopanen called “Imagination as Revelation,” which focuses on Jungian psychology and how it can be applied to understanding psychedelic experience.

     

    Notable quotes

    “I remember when we chatted with Dr. Katherine MacLean way, way back when we first got it rolling. Something that she said- ‘it’s almost like a birthright for us to try to prepare for death. And do we have to wait to have some sort of end-of-life illness, or can we start trying to prepare a little bit earlier?’ Just really awesome to see that these 4 patients will be able to have an experience and maybe discover things about themselves during their last time here. So congrats TheraPsil for making that work for these folks.” -Kyle

    “From the anarchist perspective, this just helps governments, which are typically organizations that have monopolies on power (what anarchists are against, primarily). So any kind of government that’s using tools against people is bad, and these are tools that are being used against people. They’re also being used for people. It’s this weird dichotomy of: these things have such huge healing benefit for so many different types of people, and they can also be used to support things that are against people, like any tool. Like a knife or a gun- it can be used to save a life or take a life.” -Joe 

    “Is this what we want? Last episode, we talked a lot about decriminalization vs. legalization, and we didn’t really talk about how that contrasts with medicalization. Do we really want these powerful people in groups telling you when you can and cannot take these things? I think the answer is no. We don’t want that. We want autonomy. We want cognitive liberty. We want to not go to jail for this stuff. We want safe access.” -Joe

    “Essentially, the critique is that MAPS is supporting cops (PTSD) and soldiers (PTSD), and as a result, MAPS is supporting violent organizations that are causing more PTSD, and treating the perpetrators vs. treating the victims. I understand why they would write this article, but I think it’s not done in good taste. I think it’s not necessarily aware of the broader implications of these things coming to market and being prescribable and healing a lot of people. But it is helpful in that it says, ‘Look, cops are doing bad stuff. Military has done bad stuff. Should we be supporting it?’ …How do we balance those two things? …I think MAPS is almost at the finish line, so I’m going to cheerlead for MAPS to finish [and] cross the line with MDMA, even though they’re kind of pandering to the militarized people who have a monopoly on violence, both inside and outside of the country.” -Joe

    Links

    4 Palliative Canadians approved for end of life psilocybin therapy

    BP will slash oil production by 40% and pour billions into green energy

    Salon: How psychedelic drugs are used as a tool of state violence

    Psymposia: We Need to Talk About MAPS Supporting The Police, The Military, and Violent White Supremacism

    Psychedelics Today- Imagination as Revelation: The Psychedelic Experience in the Light of Jungian Psychology

     

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    Mike Crowley – Secret Drugs of Buddhism

    In today’s episode, Joe interviews Author Mike Crowley to talk about his book, Secret Drugs of Buddhism.

    Links

    About Mike Crowley

    Michael Crowley was born February 26th, 1948 in Cardiff, Wales. He began studying Buddhism with a Tibetan lama in 1966, becoming an upasaka of the Kagyud lineage in 1970. In order to augment his Buddhist studies, he acquainted himself with Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Mandarin Chinese. Mike has lectured at the Museum of Asia and the Pacific, Warsaw, the Jagiellonian University, Cracow, the California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, and at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His work has been published in Fortean Times, Time and Mind: The Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness, and Culture, Psychedelic American, and Psychedelic Press UK. In January 2016, Mike received the R. Gordon Wasson Award for outstanding contributions to the field of entheobotany. He currently serves on the advisory board of the Psychedelic Sangha, a group of psychedelically-inclined Buddhists, based in New York and he teaches at the Dharma Collective in San Francisco.

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    Solidarity Fridays – Week 10 with Kwasi Adusei

    In today’s Solidarity Fridays Episode, Kyle and Joe interview Kwasi Adusei, Nurse Practitioner, and board member of Psychedelics Today. In the show, they talk about the root of protesting, privilege, the country’s leadership, the importance of this conversation and ways to support the Black Lives Matter movement.

    Show Notes

    About Kwasi

    • It’s difficult for all groups of people to talk about, not everybody is coming from the same place on this topic
      • Kwasi says it’s wonderful to see so many people rising up to fight against injustice
    • These things have been happening for a long time, and it speaks to the history in America
    • Kwasi grew up in The Bronx, and it wasn’t uncommon to hear about deaths, gun violence, etc
    • Kwasi went to receive his Doctorate, but reflects on his time in middle school and barely graduating
      • It wasn’t because of him and his willingness to learn, it was because of his environment
      • The high school he went to is now shut down because of the low graduation rates

    The Perfect Storm

    • Kyle says he wonders why this time in particular, why this is impacting the nation and the world more than anything else going on
      • Kwasi sees it as a two part thing, it’s a snowball effect, the anger around these instances continue to grow
      • The other part of it, has a lot to do with the Coronavirus, people are losing their jobs, having trouble paying rent, feeding their family, etc
        • They are losing their outlets to grieve, and they go through it for weeks
        • Then something like this happens and it results in rage 

    Making the Right Statement

    • It’s important to look to the family of George Floyd, they are angry at the violence coming out of the protests
    • Some people believe that the anger that people are showing when damaging property, is causing the same anger when lives are lost
      • But some people are capitalizing on chaos, burning buildings and bringing destruction, and it takes away from the message of changing the systemic issues, it perpetuates it
      • It brings the spotlight to those who are inviting hate by graffiti-ing, lighting buildings on fire, ec
      • The conversation needs to prove that protests are making a statement 

    Poor Leadership

    • We have a President that is enforcing law and order to remove peaceful protesters in a violent way
      • The leadership we have is very important, how crisis is approached is really important
      • “How [as a leader] do you calm the nerves of people, while getting to the root of the problem?” – Kwasi
      • We have a lot of people that support Trump, and he doesn’t do the best job at leading and supporting the country in a respectful way, especially in these times
    • Joe mentioned videos out there of undercover cops breaking windows that are ‘bait’ to bring in stronger forces to shut down the protests
    • “We should all be asking ourselves, if I care about the messaging, how do I use my sphere of influence to change things?” – Kwasi
    • There are so many roots to this problem
      • How much are we using to fund the police force versus funding education, community services, public health? 

    How to Support 

    • Joe says this platform (Psychedelics Today) is to create a space for people to give back, have an impact, share stories and support movements like this
    • Kwasi says to look locally to give your time, money and support
      • He says look to get involved in local elections, making a small difference in your local community, makes a difference on the larger scale when multiplied
    • Stay informed for yourself and share that information with everyone else
    • People are thinking heavily right now “where are my tax dollars being spent?”
      • Instead of extra funding to the local police force, you can vote for that increase to go toward something else like education 

    Having the Conversation

    • Our voice is our vote
    • Many people who listen to the Psychedelics Today podcast are probably privileged
    • The psychedelic movement is (and if not, should be) connected to so many other movements like BLM
      • Psychedelics Today is mainly about social justice, changing the narrative on drug policy, the drug war, psychedelic exceptionalism and access
    • Kwasi says that for those who have acknowledged their privilege, not to just keep themselves in the pillar of ‘because I support the psychedelic movement and its connected to the BLM movement, I’ve done enough’
      • He encourages becoming an ally of the BLM movement, as well as any other movement

    Privilege

    • Being a spiritual and privileged person, you have even more time to sit and process and think about all of this, especially when it’s not affecting you
    • It’s difficult to analyze one’s own privilege
      • Kwasi says he went on a medical mission to Ghana, where he was born
      • Going back and seeing what the lifestyle was like there, it shifted a lot in him to understand his own privilege
      • He had the privilege of coming to America, receiving an education, etc
      • Because of his education, he is asking himself how to give back

    Making Change through Action

    • If you’re going to voice your support, that voice needs follow up with actions
      • Actions like donating to groups, educating yourself on local authority measures, voting, etc
    • Sometimes an organization’s agenda isn’t always aligned with what the people want
    • Kwasi says that he had a few people randomly venmo him money and it offended him
      • He doesn’t want money, he wants change to be made in other ways
      • He says for those looking to help, ask first and see what ways those who have been oppressed want to see the change and be supported
    • “We can all be change makers, and all make a change in this world” – Kwasi

    Final Thoughts

    • Kwasi wants to bring mental health into communities of people of color
    • He says email him at kwasiadusei@buffalo.edu

    Resources to Support

    Reading list

    Viewing list

    • 13th: An in-depth look at the prison system in the United States and how it reveals the nation’s history of racial inequality.
    • I Am Not Your Negro: Explores the history of racism in the United States through Baldwin’s reminiscences of civil rights leaders Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr., as well as his personal observations of American history.

    Ways to take action; Donate to victim funds

    • Official George Floyd Memorial Fund: These funds will also go towards the funeral and burial costs along with the counseling and legal expenses for his loved ones. A portion will go towards the Estate of George Floyd for the benefit and care of his children and their educational fund.

    Ways to take action; Donate to organizations

    • The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund: the NAACP Legal Defense works on advancing the goals of racial justice and equality by protecting those that are most vulnerable in society. Their work includes court cases that work for a fairer justice system, increasing graduation rates among African American students, protecting voters across the nation, and decreasing disproportionate incarceration and sentencing rates.
    • Communities United Against Police Brutality: The Minneapolis organization was created “to deal with police brutality on an ongoing basis.” More information can be found here.
    • Campaign Zero: The organization uses data to inform policy solutions that aim to ends police brutality. Their vision is to create a better world by “limiting police interventions, improving community interactions, and ensuring accountability.”

    About Kwasi Adusei

    Kwasi dedicates his work in the psychedelic movement to altering the stigma in mainstream channels by promoting the science, the healing potential of psychedelics, and civic engagement. Kwasi is a Psychiatric Nurse Practitioner and graduated from the University at Buffalo. He is the founder of the Psychedelic Society of Western New York and project manager for Psychonauts of the World, an initiative to share meaningful psychedelic stories, with the ultimate goal of publishing them in a book as an avenue to raise money for psychedelic research. He is also one of the administrators for the Global Psychedelic Network, a conglomerate of psychedelic groups and individuals from around the world. Born in Ghana and raised in the Bronx, New York, Kwasi hopes to bring psychedelic therapy to communities of color.

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    Black Lives Matter: A Note from our Team on a Matter of Oppression

    Psychedelics Today stands in solidarity. 

    As a media company at the forefront of many tough psychedelic conversations, we are looking to speak up for those who need to be heard and to provide a platform for oppressed people. Working in the psychedelic renaissance, in a space that typically favors the voices of white privilege, we yearn to bring the unheard voices of women, color, and indigenous roots to the conversation. 

    We can all agree that African Americans have been systemically and horrifically oppressed for hundreds of years. Countless innocent black people have been murdered by law enforcement with near-zero accountability or sent to jail for decades for crimes that white people may serve no time for. 

    The drug war has produced horrific outcomes for people domestically and around the world (Colombia, Honduras, Philippines, Singapore, and more). One of the worst parts of the drug war in the US is highly unequal profiling, consequences, and sentencing for non-violent drug offenses. 

    We try to understand every day by bringing unheard voices into the spotlight to have tough conversations. That said, we know that we will never understand. We are committed to listening deeply to better understand these issues so that we can become stronger allies. 

    As conversationalists and educators, we like to dig deep and uncover individual truths of what we think is the right way to behave in this world. Our goal is to help bring justice to many causes: ending the drug war, opening eyes to climate change, protecting threatened psychedelic plants and animals, helping indigenous communities, healing minds and bodies through sacred plant medicines and psychedelic drugs, and ending racial inequality in the drug world and beyond.

    Psychedelics can inspire a deeper connection to nature, relationships, love, equality, and peace. What we learn from these qualities can be applied to fix many issues, such as racist policies and violence. While acting as journalists to help people form their own opinion, we try to embody these qualities in our decision making.

    We will never truly understand what it feels like to be an oppressed black person in America, but we stand with solidarity for those who do know what it feels like. We want to help make the conversation loud, to make the silenced voices heard. 

    Many other groups and individuals are far better suited to help you protest, donate, or get involved politically. Of the many groups doing great work, a few to start with are: Students for Sensible Drug Policy, M4BL, or Extinction Rebellion.

    We believe that the positive lessons that can be learned from psychedelics have the power to change many deeply rooted issues. Our message to everyone right now is to educate yourself and others so you can make the best possible decisions, fight for justice, and hopefully end oppression and racist violence for good.

    Let’s rewrite the narrative together, through conversation, education, sharing, and peace.

    Resources: 

    Please take the time to check out these resources to learn how to donate, help, and educate yourself on the situation better. 

    Psychedelics and People of Color

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    Erik Davis – High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies

    In this episode, Joe and Kyle interview Erik Davis, Author of High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies. In the show they cover topics on La Chorrera, uncertainty, synchronicities and more.

    3 Key Points:

    1. Erik is the Author of High Weirdness, a study of the spiritual provocations to be found in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson.
    2. These 3 authors chart the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality that arose from the American counterculture of the 1970s. Erik examines the published and unpublished writings of these thinkers as well as their own life-changing mystical experiences.
    3. Erik is America’s leading scholar of high strangeness, and talks of synchronicities, uncertainty, and all things weird.

    Show Notes

    About Erik

    • Erik went into the PhD program and always wanted to write about Phillip K Dick
    • He got a sense that he didn’t want to spend 3 years in Phillip’s head
    • He looked into the works of Phillip K Dick, Robert Anton Wilson, The McKenna brothers, etc
      • He wanted to find a way to take their experiences seriously, without taking them literally

    The Book

    • Much like understanding religious experiences, unpacking psychedelic experiences involves clinical analysis, free-thinking, pragmatism, and skepticism. “Creative insecurity is one of the greatest gifts of these compounds.” People want an answer, but maybe there isn’t always an answer. “There’s something else that’s going on that’s more cosmic, and difficult in a lot of ways. I want to invite that difficulty in.”
    • A large reason people have difficulty with uncertainty is because often, there are many “answers” right there, likely from someone trying to sell them something. Studying religion made Davis more critical of these “sellers,” but gave him much more sympathy and patience for religious people because of the fact that they’re seeking something.
    • Davis’ favorite image for the idea of courage in trying to understand the unknown is that of a tight-rope walker. The tight-rope walker steps away from solid ground, and the only way to survive is to maintain balance. “There is a way of continuing to be reasonable, asking questions, respecting balance and homeostasis, even as you enter into really difficult situations.” 
    • He wanted to tell these stories because “that’s what the weird is. [Psychedelic experiences] are great- they can be holy, they can be integrative, they can be healing, they can be unifying, they can be restoring- all those things are true, and they’re totally weird! And what are you going to do with that? You’re going to pretend that’s not there?”
    • The healing part of psychedelics is great, but viewing psychedelics as a learning tool is equally as important.

    La Chorrera

    • Erik says that it’s the great story
      • He says that no one had taken it seriously, and he wanted people to recognize what their work was, which was their experiences
      • Its half science, and half a ritual
      • It was a theater of transformation and novel experience
      • The purpose is to avoid the traps of blaming it on psychosis, and look at it as a creative venture
    • “I think a lot of us wrestling with psychedelics and visionary experiences have our own challenge of, how do we put these pieces together?” – Erik

    Uncertainty

    • “I want to invite that difficulty in, it’s not always love and light” – Erik
      • When someone is uncomfortable, people just turn away from it, and they just live in this lie 
    • Erik says he blames the culture and capitalist scene
      • Because of uncertainty, there are so many experts ready to sell you something
      • “The people who are seeking, I have more sympathy for. The people that are selling, I have less sympathy for” – Erik
    • “If you keep the balance, you can go pretty far and not fall in” – Erik
    • A lot of conspiracy theorists hand over their sovereign-ness
      • “I know” gives you an answer
      • We have reasons to distrust institutions
    • It’s good to have a dose of skepticism

    Conspiracy

    • “Conspiracy theory is a concept that is and has been used to obfuscate real questions” but why do we put our trust in one entity over another? While some of this obviously comes from a growing level of distrust of the media and mainstream authority figures, a lot of it comes from people wanting to avoid “not knowing.” “I see a lot of conspiracy theorists just handing over their own sovereign ‘not knowingness’ and they can gain a false power of ‘knowing.’”
    • Believing conspiracies gives people an answer and story, makes them feel both knowledgeable and a part of something (they’re an insider vs. all the others who don’t know what’s going on), and they’re marginalized because they’re going against the mainstream system- they thrive in an “us-against-them” conflict.  

    Synchronicities

    • Research synchronicity: “A lot of the synchronicities are actually just books talking to each other in weird and unexpected ways.”
       
    • We are pattern recognition machines on a spectrum. Not recognizing enough can make us viewed as cold and unemotional, but if we see a lot of patterns, we’re more open to paranormal or occult ideas. If we see too many, we may have mental issues.
       
    • These experiences happen, but Davis doesn’t believe there’s much more to it than that, as we are living in a mystery. “I enjoy the feelings associated with them, but in the same way that we do not “believe” great works of art, I don’t leave with some sense that I have now seen something that requires me to revise my worldview. The take-home prize is mystery.”

    Cults

    • Erik says he can’t write off people like Osho or Crowley
      • Even if they may have caused abuse or bad things, they have done a lot of great things for humanity
    • While misogynistic, creepy and cruel, it is rude to not recognize Crowley’s contributions. And “when he was on, he was a great writer. Visionary literature.”
    • Genesis P-Orridge said that cults are actually important to the development of humanity. Davis feels that cults can be like theatre- a creative director sets a stage and usually they’re the only one who knows everything that’s going on, there are practiced, learned scripts, some people like it, while others get screwed and hate it, etc. Cults are more complicated than people give them credit for, and are often seen more negatively because they disrupt families, particularly the role of a parents vs. the parental-like roles of cult leaders. But often, while not a popular opinion, good things can come out of cults.
    • What’s a cult? Its a creative director who sets the ‘stage’ and script that people learn etc

    Links

    Website

    High Weirdness Book

    About Erik Davis

    Davis was born during the Summer of Love within a stone’s throw of San Francisco. He grew up in North County, Southern California, and spent a decade on the East Coast, where he studied literature and philosophy at Yale and spent six years in the freelance trenches of Brooklyn and Manhattan before moving to San Francisco, where he currently resides. He is the author of four books: Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica (Yeti, 2010), The Visionary State: A Journey through California’s Spiritual Landscape (Chronicle, 2006), with photographs by Michael Rauner, and the 33 1/3 volume Led Zeppelin IV (Continuum, 2005). His first and best-known book remains TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (Crown, 1998), a cult classic of visionary media studies that has been translated into five languages and recently republished by North Atlantic Press. He has contributed chapters on art, music, technoculture, and contemporary spirituality to over a dozen books. In addition to his many forewords and introductions, Davis has contributed articles and essays to a variety of periodicals. A vital speaker, Davis has given talks at universities, media art conferences, and festivals around the world. He has taught seminars at the UC Berkeley, UC Davis, the California Institute of Integral Studies, and Rice University, as well as workshops at the New York Open Center and Esalen. He has been interviewed by CNN, NPR, the New York Times, and the BBC, and appeared in numerous documentaries. He has hosted the podcast Expanding Mind on the Progressive Radio Network since 2010, and earned his PhD in Religious Studies from Rice University in 2015.

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    Remembering Kilindi Iyi

    Kilindi Iyi

    By Joe Moore

    In 2014 I became aware of a gentleman named Kilindi Iyi in Detroit, Michigan. He was doing some wildly exploratory and esoteric mushroom trips in community with others. Kilindi was one of the most interesting people I had the chance to talk to during my time running my first podcast.

    Here is a list of things that struck me as important while speaking with him.

    • He had a community of peers and students doing very similar work and sharing results.
    • Kilindi was not afraid to grow mushrooms and was quite public about it.
    • He used VERY high doses in silence (10+ grams being common).
    • Some in his community went so far as to do extractions to help stomach larger doses.
    • His approach of warriorship and courage in mushroom experiences was powerful and unique.
    • His African martial arts practice hugely informed and assisted his psychedelic work.

    To me, he was an important pioneer in the psychedelic world. The psychedelic world will do well to remember him and his work. He did a tremendous amount for his community and our movement. His legacy will certainly continue to help us moving inward, outward and upward for many years to come.

    Kilindi leaves behind a large family and if you’d like to donate to the family’s relief fund you can here. https://www.gofundme.com/f/baba-kilindi

    Visit Kilindi’s website here. http://babakilindi.com/

    https://occultsentinel.com/2014/09/11/os-ep-49-kilindi-iyi-the-mushroom-and-our-trans-human-future/
    If you want to see some of his talks, here are a few.
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    Rob Heffernan – Psychedelic Liberty Summit: Religion and Plant Medicines

    In this episode, Kyle sits down with Rob Heffernan, an independent researcher and activist. In the show, they talk about churches, Ayahuasca, accessibility and the Psychedelic Liberty Summit by the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines. Rob is also part of Chacruna’s Council for the Protection of Sacred Plants. 

    The Council for the Protection of Sacred plants is “an initiative of the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines that endeavors to advocate for the legality of sacred plant medicines among indigenous peoples and non-indigenous communities, encourage legal harm reduction practices that protect those who use them, educate about conservation of plant species, document relevant legal and social issues, and consult on legal cases including possible litigation. ” 

    3 Key Points:

    1. The Psychedelic Liberty Summit is a gathering on legal, cultural, and political issues around the emerging psychedelic renaissance.
    2. Accessibility is not just about whether or not people can afford psychedelic therapy, people cant even afford regular therapy, the whole healthcare model is an issue.
    3. A lot of churches get a bad name, but really most churches are built around community. Psychedelics can help revitalize churches.

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    Show Notes

     

    About Rob

    • Rob is a member of the Chacruna Council for protection of sacred plants
    • He is an integrative sound and music practitioner
    • He is involved in the Santo Daime
    • He has been drinking Ayahuasca for over 20 years
    • He began to ponder and ask a lot of questions about involvement with medicine communities

    Psychedelic Liberty Summit

    • Rob will be hosting a talk on religious exemptions and more
    • There will be speakers of all different initiatives, from decriminalization to indigenous relations
    • There are a lot of investors interested in the psilocybin market
    • The issue is complex because there is this ongoing cultural history of the US and other countries exploiting those cultures and removing resources (oil, medicines, etc)

    Ayahuasca

    • The first time Rob drank Ayahuasca was back in 2000, where there weren’t Ayahuasca retreats going on then
      • People who lived in the area were not familiar with Ayahuasca use
      • People started coming from around the world to use Ayahuasca
      • There are feedback loops between the cities and the forests
    • People typically think integration is what happens afterwards, but really it is also the sacrifice from the start, the preparation, such as a dieta
    • We need to honor what we have learned from the indigenous, and give back
    • Traditional dietas don’t involve actually drinking the Ayahuasca, the culture has come a long way

    Accessibility

    • While these medicines are relatively safe, you can get in trouble using these substances recreationally, there is a role for the therapeutic support
    • It’s not just about whether or not people can afford psychedelic therapy, people cant even afford regular therapy, the whole healthcare model is an issue

    Santo Daime

    • It was founded in the 1930’s in Brazil
    • The reason that the Santo Daime looks more white in the USA is due to the segregation
    • There are all sorts of ways that the Santo Daime may look
      • When Rob first got involved in drinking Ayahuasca, he wasn’t sure that he wanted to get involved in the Santo Daime, but he said the container was so strong
      • There are hymns sung, and it’s very structured
      • It allows you to really go deep
      • Sometimes it can look like drumming, dancing, and fire, but there is also a style of sitting in silence
    • There is a profound ethical foundation which is really important
      • All of the elements make for a really important container
    • In the traditional form, you do not touch anyone, unless there is a certain circumstance, and a prior consensual agreement, and waivers signed, etc
      • There have been issues of sexual abuse in the psychedelic realm, the Santo Daime takes many precautions against this

    Churches

    • There are legal churches in the US through the Daime and the UDV (União do Vegetal)
    • The Daime has 5 churches that are explicitly legal
      • The government has decided not to pursue or prosecute Ayahuasca for those other churches
    • From Shock to Awe
    • Someone tragically died at the Soul Quest Church, but it wasn’t related to ayahuasca
    • There are a lot of people that claim to be a part of a Native American church that are not
      • A lot of people reach out to Chacruna on how to become a part of the Native American Church to hold ceremonies, and it’s not easy, you almost have to already be a part of it, instead of just joining
    • Some people don’t like the word church, but it originates from the words ‘congregation’ and ‘assembly’
    • “The problem is the controlled substances act, that these things are illegal in the first place” – Rob
    • “The experience in all those settings is about community. The goal isn’t to have spiritual experiences, its to have a spiritual life” – Rob
    • Psychedelics and entheogens could be central to creating a new hub
    • It is possible to create psychedelic churches outside of the Santo Daime
    • The Ayahuasca tradition really uses the potential of group process
    • “How individual is the psychedelic experience, where you need some one-on-one work?” – Kyle

    Psychedelic Liberty Summit

    • April 25-26 in San Francisco
    • Discount Code: PsychedelicsToday for 10% off at checkout

    Links

    Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicine

    Psychedelic Liberty Summit 

     

    About Rob Heffernan

    Rob Heffernan has been involved in the Peruvian curandero tradition and the Santo Daime for the last 16 years. He was a member and chairman of the North American Santo Daime Legal Committee for a number of years. He has been engaged in independent research and active in ad hoc groups promoting legal clarity and ethical integrity in the Ayahuasca Community. He is also a certified Integrative Sound and Music Practitioner; Shamanic Breath Work Facilitator; and a long time student and practitioner of Buddhist Dhamma. He has a BA in Communications and Social Studies from Fordham University, and works in the AV/IT communication industry.

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    Mike Jay – Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic

    In today’s episode, Joe interviews Mike Jay, Author of the book, Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic. In the show they discuss Mescaline’s origins and the history of Peyote use.

    3 Key Points:

    1. Mike Jay is a Cultural Historian and Author whose topics include science, medicine, drugs, madness, literature and radical politics.

    2. Mike’s recent book, Mescaline, is a definitive history of mescaline that explores its mind-altering effects across cultures, from ancient America to western modernity.

    3. Over time, Peyote has been used by spiritual seekers, by psychologists investigating the secrets of consciousness, artists exploring the creative process, and by psychiatrists.

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    Show Notes

    About Mike

    • Mike Jay is a freelance writer, an author and cultural historian
    • Mike has been interested in Mescaline for a really long time

    Indigenous Use

    • James Mooney is a crucial figure in the transition from indigenous use of peyote to the more current applications
    • The New Deal made religions respected, protected under the First Amendment for freedom of worship

    History

    • There is a ton of literature before the 60’s on psychedelic use
    • It was obvious that if people were interested in psychoactive drugs, they would take it themselves
    • Back then, science was much more proactive than it is today, but it is becoming more popular again

    Peyote Experience

    • It’s hard to find an ethical source of Peyote
    • Mike says its unpleasant but warm and tingly and euphoric
    • By 1970, Mescaline was this legendary substance, but it was hard to find on the streets unless you knew an underground chemist
    • On the Erowid site, they have a bulletin that the DEA created about all of the street drug seizures
      He wrote a book 20 years ago called Emperors of Dreams
    • 2CB is not as intense as Mescaline
    • Mescaline is a phenethylamine
    • It does not cross the blood brain barrier as easily. So you need to take more of it
      • It is a body and mind drug

    Indigenous Use

    • The Comanches were in a reservation in the Wichita mountains
    • He was notified by the Comanches on some history
      • He went to meet with them, and they told him stories on the history
      • Peyote use originated inside of a Tipi
      • “The way that we see psychedelics in modern Western culture, is not the only way of thinking about it:” – Mike

    Native American Church

    • There is an interesting thing that happened between Mexican/South American Shamanic practice and Native American Church
      • In the ceremony, the facilitator is made to not ask like a priest, everyone is their own priest
      • It is a healing modality for everybody
    • The very first peyote experiences in the west encouraged artists to make art
    • Salvador Dali was apparently anti-drug use
      • The surrealist movement had a number of rules
    • Huichol art is a very psychedelic inspired art

    The plant

    • Peyote is so fast growing, in some places it is growing naturally
    • San Pedro is way more sustainable than Peyote
    • There is a lot of demand for Peyote currently
    • Joe says he thinks that Peyote is not scheduled in Canada

    Accounts

    • The western story is full of first-person experiencesIts based on the personal
      • experiences and visions
    • In the indigenous accounts, there are very little stories on experience or personal matters, its more recording on the collective experience

    Links

    Website

    Twitter

    About Mike

    Mike Jay is a leading specialist in the study of drugs across history and cultures. The author of Artificial Paradises, Emperors of Dreams, and The Atmosphere of Heaven, his critical writing on drugs has appeared in many publications, including The Guardian, The Telegraph, and The International Journal of Drug Policy. He sits on the editorial board of the addiction journal Drugs and Alcohol Today and on the board of the Transform Drug Policy Foundation. He lives in England.

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    John B. Cobb – Whitehead and Psychedelics – Part 4

    John Cobb - Part 4

    This is the fourth and final blog of a podcast recorded in John Cobb’s apartment in Claremont, California. This was recorded during a small weekend conference on psychedelics titled “Exceptional Experience Conference.” You can listen to the full talk in this episode of Psychedelics Today.

    John Boswell Cobb Jr. is an American theologian, philosopher, and environmentalist. Cobb is often regarded as the preeminent scholar in the field of process philosophy and process theology, the school of thought associated with the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead.

    John Cobb: Obviously, I’m not going to put this forward as a great psychedelic experience, it still doesn’t feel like it’s just simply my talking to myself. It feels like I didn’t know what to do. I hadn’t thought about this before. Suddenly, yes, of course, that’s what I need to do.

    Kyle: It feels like it comes from somewhere else, but it is inside.

    John Cobb: But of course somewhere else is not as special somewhere else.

    Kyle: Right.

    John Cobb: It doesn’t come out of my normal ego consciousness. It feels like that there’s a wisdom in it that was not my wisdom. There’s an otherness about it.

    Kyle: Right. And that it’s coming from somewhere.

    John Cobb: I know. They’re coming from somewhere, it is immediately… Vision is so spatially oriented that if we talked in a visual language somewhere else is going to be very prominent. With just hearing music, the location of the music isn’t that important, is it? It’s the music in your ear or is it inside your body? Is it in the airwaves around you? Is it where the orchestra is? Well, yeah, any and all of the above. But you see a book, all right, that book is on top of that book. It’s so very clearly located and each object that you see has boundaries. And so that just creates a language and a culture.

    The difference between Gautama and the other great Indian thinkers, for Gautama when you seek the self, there is nothing. But the others there is Atman, and Atman is the same as Brahman. The ultimate substance. And Gautama and many of the Buddhists assume that if you conceptualize at all, you will be misled. That just shows how powerful concept and visualizing is such a scene too. Whereas I belong to the view that it should be possible to have… like Bohm was saying, “Okay, let’s just use gerunds.” I don’t think it’s impossible to conceive process. That’s the part, I hope you understand, this is not me anti-Buddhist. I think it’s amazing that 2,500 years ago somebody was able to think so deeply. I regret that the tendency even today is to become anti-concept, when what we need are better concepts.

    Joe: Yeah. I’m feeling like you say you can’t skillfully conceptualize process, but perhaps it’s more about feeling like

    John Cobb: You can conceptualize feelings.

    Kyle: Right. True.

    John Cobb: It’s just that our Indo-European languages haven’t, so you can’t quickly think of examples.

    Joe: That’s interesting.

    John Cobb: And conceptualize maybe the wrong term. But I don’t like a kind of retreat into mysticism. If you say it’s mystical, then you say you can’t think about it anymore. I think we can think about it, and if you don’t want to call it concepts, call it whatever you want. But we can think about processes. And science needs to think about them. And thinking about them doesn’t necessary… I mean, what it has so often meant is locate it in a sight oriented world or substance oriented world, then you’ll see then you’re not really thinking about them anymore. Anyway, that’s why David, I think, has done a remarkable job of thinking about process. And has given us a language that can help us do it. And I think that’s very useful.

    Joe: Yeah, I think it’s really helped me quite a bit with perhaps handling psychedelic experiences with a little more grace because it’s not so… Just Lenny has put a lot of this knowledge on us and it seems like it’s really helpful. And it’s hard to put, for me, at this point, to really phrase that well. But it’s certainly been a Boon.

    Johanna: What was the one thing that was helpful for you? I’m sure there’s lots of things.

    Joe: Lenny’s complicated. And as a result that…. probably more of a gerund type attitude towards the thing as opposed to this is this, this is an Apple. It’s more like, wow, this is just a dynamic flow of things through this very complicated system.

    John Cobb: I see. I don’t know Chinese, so my statement that it is not so substance oriented. But when I’ve tried to talk about this with Shahar he points out that the same character can function as either.

    Joe: Oh, wow.

    John Cobb: An example of a word that this has happened to in English is the word pastor. It was a noun for a long time. You were a pastor. But now people talk about, “I’m going to pastor such and such a church.” No, I think that that gets closer to reality to say a person is a pastor, what does it mean? It means that he pastors. But when you locate it as a pastor, it’s just sort of strengthens this individualistic thinking rather than a focus on the activity.

    Kyle: It is versus it’s doing or it’s happening.

    John Cobb: Yeah. Well to pastor people means you listen to them when they have something to say and you hear them without judgment. I could go on and on. But that’s what a pastor does. And to call a pastor is really to be pointing into that dimension of activity. The same person who is a pastor is also a preacher, but unfortunately we have a verb to preach so we don’t say to preacher. I just wish there were more cases where I could point to how a noun has just come to be used as a verb. And there are others, but at the moment I’m not thinking of them.

    Joe: Do you recall the first time you heard something that made you interested in the positive impact of psychedelics or anything around the beginning?

    John Cobb: Lenny was certainly one of the early ones. But I don’t want to say his first because I just don’t know.

    Johanna: Right. It was southern California in that period of time when it was probably pretty intense.

    John Cobb: But obviously having him, he was really trying to convert me. I appreciated it. This is not a criticism. Anytime one discovers something that’s very helpful, one wants other people to benefit from it. So my relation to him was the first time this had become something that I really had to deal with. But that doesn’t mean I hadn’t heard of it before. Probably I had heard of it more negatively than positively. Because of course the hippie culture included some negatives. I grew up in a context where drinking was already a bad thing to do. And the tendency in circles I moved in, which by that time has ceased to be particularly strongly against drinking, was to associate alcohol and psychedelics.

    I was quite sure alcohol did a lot of harm as well as working well for conviviality… You know what I mean. Of a mixture. So I thought psychedelics, and I had no doubt that some people had great experiences and other people that may found them very attractive, but it… Generally, I suspected that society was better off not to have it. So Lenny was probably the first person who really opened my eyes to the potential of very positive use.

    I had another experience not too long after I came to Claremont. I had always assumed that civilization was a good thing. There was a professor at Pitzer College, who I worked with quite closely. We co-taught courses. He was very convinced that civilization was the basic evil. I’m not convinced. I mean I think every civilization we’ve had has been pretty horrible. I wouldn’t have said that if I hadn’t had to interact with him about that. But I think if there are people today of course, who just think we need to get rid of civilizations and then we’ll be all right. My impression is today it would be very remarkable if 10% of the world’s population survive without civilization.

    Even though I appreciated his opening my eyes, I didn’t walk through that door. And the same thing was true with Lenny, I really appreciated his opening my eyes, but I didn’t walk through that door.

    Kyle: I appreciate your openness and curiosity of the subject. For somebody that didn’t walk through the door, you seem to very curious about it.

    John Cobb: I’m confident there’s much good that could come from it. And so when there are people who are using it for good, I want to be as supportive as I possibly can. A lot of people today will say, “Yes, we really need basic changes.” But you know what it means to make basic changes in worldview, and most of them don’t. So it’s very comfortable to be in a group of people who when they talk about changes, they know what the-

    Joe: Extraordinary change.

    John Cobb: Yes.

    Joe: Yeah.

    John Cobb: Whitehead has made me understand what I think would be the changes that might make us behave in responsible ways. So I don’t feel the necessity of having unusual experiences.

    Johanna: And what would be some of those changes?

    John Cobb: Have to change from our substance thinking to our process thinking. This would be a change from our thinking of every individual as self-contained, to understanding that we are all our products of our relationships with each other, and that the human individual is… Well, for one thing, I mean from Whiteheadian viewpoint, any individual is the many becoming one. That’s what it is to be an individual. So to be an individual is to be part of everything, is to have everything being part of us.

    Economics, as an example, I think economics is the worst, because it is the most powerful shaper of the world and is the worst expression of the university. It assumes radically individual and really the only relationships that count are economic relationships. I think those are just two absolutely erroneous views. If they are not changed, then they have to be changed existentially, not just, oh, that philosophy might work better or something. And it’s because what you do helps to make the existential change that I in no way want to say, “Oh, all we have to do is to do philosophy.” No, no. I think the change has to go way beyond that.

    I had one experience out there, which made me very high. So in that sense, but it had nothing, it wasn’t a matter of breathing exercises. It was being in a group where I just felt completely accepted, completely loved. I think that can happen just by the way a group of human beings relate to one another. I was still feeling that deep comfort when I came home. It took my wife a little while to puncture the balloon. So I’m not suggesting that everybody should always be in that state, but nevertheless that’s a feeling of being one with that group of people that people need. The church should be doing this. I’m not trying to push me into the church, you should understand that’s important for me in my understanding.

    When I was in the army, one night I said, “Kneel beside my bed.” And the whole room just simply itself felt like it was filled with love and acceptance. You’re not just an individual when that kind of thing happens. You are part of something else. So I’m just saying you could call them psychedelic experiences, if you want, they don’t have many of the characteristics that people describe as psychedelic, but they are experiences of a different possibility that is still a perfectly human possibility.

    There is a woman by the name of [unclear Thandeka 01:13:05]. She’s Afro-American and Bishop Tutu. He gave her the name. And she’s spent a lot of times studying neuroscience and gotten getting acquainted with key people in the field. And she’s created an organization called Love Beyond Belief. She seems to be able to help. She’s Unitarian, and she has worked with Unitarian churches, which are not the places that I would have thought, which I say most readily, but sometimes it turns out that people who have been putting all their emphasis upon reason and rationality and so forth, other ones who are really ready for something else. She thinks it’s possible to organize a service of worship in such a way that people will really existentially feel loved. And to whatever extent she can do that, I think that will accomplish much of what I’m interested in. But obviously a number of people in this group, and in almost any group I’m at, have had a completely different experience of a church. That church is a place of judgment and condemnation and guilt and all of that. And that is of course the absolutely opposite of what is needed.

    I think the church has great potential for good. It has great potential for evil. It’s like almost everything else. Education has great potentials for good, great potentials for evil. And I think the modern world has tended to bring out the potential for evil in both. But that doesn’t mean, I think, in the middle ages everything was wonderful. I really think Europe was better off in the middle ages than it has been in modernity. But I’m not interested in going back.

    Links

    Website
    Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition

    Other books by John Cobb Jr.

    A Christian Natural Theology, Second Edition: Based on the Thought of Alfred North Whitehead

    Jesus’ Abba: The God Who Has Not Failed

    Grace & Responsibility: A Wesleyan Theology for Today

    For Our Common Home: Process-Relational Responses to Laudato Si’

    About John B. Cobb Jr.

    John B. Cobb, Jr., Ph.D, is a founding co-director of the Center for Process Studies and Process & Faith. He has held many positions, such as Ingraham Professor of Theology at the School of Theology at Claremont, Avery Professor at the Claremont Graduate School, Fullbright Professor at the University of Mainz, Visiting Professor at Vanderbilt, Harvard Divinity, Chicago Divinity Schools. His writings include: Christ in a Pluralistic Age; God and the World; For the Common Good. Co-winner of Grawemeyer Award of Ideas Improving World Order.

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    John B. Cobb – Whitehead and Psychedelics – Part 3

    John Cobb Blog - Part 3

    This is part three in a four-part series recorded in John Cobb’s apartment in Claremont, California. This was recorded during a small weekend conference on psychedelics titled “Exceptional Experience Conference.” You can listen to the full talk in this episode of Psychedelics Today.

    John Boswell Cobb Jr. is an American theologian, philosopher, and environmentalist. Cobb is often regarded as the preeminent scholar in the field of process philosophy and process theology, the school of thought associated with the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead.

    John Cobb: There were lots of biologists who have worked with us that they rather resent being constantly pushed into mechanism when in fact they’re dealing with organisms. That organisms are only complex mechanisms. A lot of biologists know that isn’t right. So we have a chance of making breakthroughs, whereas I don’t think Rosemary Ruether, brilliant as she is… I hope you understand that I’m picking people. We get it. We take her with us when we are promoting process theology. Even if she will say, “Oh, I’m not interested in process theology.” What she says is process theology, so we don’t (laughs)… So the label is not that important, the insights are important. And in a foundational way, they are common sense.

    I think the common sense is that our knowledge of each other is not just by visual and auditory clues. But people have been told so long that it is. If you could just have people who never went to school (laughs)….

    Kyle: What else would it be informed by if it wasn’t visual and auditory?

    John Cobb: Just by our immediate experience of each other.

    Kyle: So a felt experience?

    John Cobb: Yeah. I think that we’ve had an experience of being in a group where when you walk in, you feel a climate there. If you go into a room where everybody is angry with everybody, of course, you are told that you really are get visual and auditory clues. It doesn’t feel like that. You just feel this is not… The vibrations here are not good. Okay. So we need to deschool. Are you familiar with Ivan Illich’s book, Deschooling Society?

    Joe: It’s great.

    John Cobb: But of course we also need schools, and there’s no reason, in principle, that schooling has to be indoctrination into a bad worldview. It could be something else. And there are a few schools that are already doing something else.

    Kyle: I think a lot about the education system, but I’m curious what would your vision of an education system be if it’s not working right now?

    John Cobb: Well, I think the one that Matthew Siegel teaches at in San Francisco CIIS. CIIS and Naropa are examples of a different educational system. I have not studied either one of them enough to hold up one and say it’s better than another. Another educational system that I think well of is The Great Books Program. It needs revision because in the past it’s only been the great Western books. And at Chicago when I was there, the college was operated on a great books basis. And I hope by now they have incorporated great books from other parts of the world.

    It’s very different. I’m just saying, I think there are different kinds of educational systems that are better than what we have. If I’m just going to have the opportunity to create a school, it’s going to be a school that teaches ecological civilization. Because in my mind, a healthy human survival is a goal that ought not to be regarded as an eccentric and marginal one, but ought to be regarded as what all we human beings ought to be getting behind collectively together. And if you have a school for that, again, curriculum could really be quite varied, but you would try to see what do people most need? And I think that the production and consumption and sharing of food would be a very, very central part of it. But also we need to understand technology and understand how it can be used for truly humane purposes. We need to understand that capitalism has ignored much of reality.

    In economics 101, you can find out what the assumptions are. They are wrong. So people should be told what the assumptions have been and why they’re wrong. Reflect together about better assumptions and what their implications are. How we can go about changing. I’m not giving you a curriculum, but you will understand. I’d try to get the people who know the most about curriculum in the abstract in general. What students at a certain age are likely to be ready to do. All those things are relevant to developing a curriculum. My role is deconstruction. I just want to make it clear what’s going on now is absolutely absurd.

    Enlightenment is the worst curse of humanity. We have been enlightened into not believing all kinds of things. The disappearance of subjects from the world of actuality. If that’s enlightened, I don’t want to be enlightened. But I think we need a lot of reflection about the language we use. And of course language is a very popular topic. But the questions that I think are most important are very rarely asked.

    Joe: One of my favorite parts of Whitehead is the re-framing of language. In kind of your book, Whitehead Word Book, that’s a really foundational thing. Our language carries weight, our words carry inertia that we’re not aware of.

    John Cobb: And I’m sure that the reason we have 36 universities with Center for Process Studies in China and zero in the United States is that the Chinese… The idea that process is more fundamental than substance doesn’t seem strange to them. To us, we know it ain’t so because we got to talk about books and tables. Those are the really real things. And how do we know that? We know because we’ve been speaking that language the whole time.

    I’m sure language is important. Western intellectual history I have increasingly come to think of as for a long time a marriage of Hebrew hearing oriented with Greek sight oriented. And hearing oriented has made history important. And now, the universities have succeeded in excluding hearing oriented ideas completely. It’s a complete victory of Cartesian sight oriented thinking. History is no longer taught.

    Sight oriented people can know that there have been past events and they can study past events, but history as meaningful, as helping you to locate yourself in a long process, that comes only from Israel. And that used to be very important. I mean a lot of very secular… I mean you didn’t have to be believing Jew and believing Christian in the West to think history was important. If you’d think Hegle and Marx, I mean these are all history thinking people.

    We need to understand how things got to be the way they are. What are the issues today coming out of that history? And I think that’s very important. But the university has finally excluded it almost completely. You see for science only what can be repeated in the laboratory (is true). First of all, what can be repeated. But the whole point of history is that events cannot be repeated. That automatically excludes history. Excludes a lot of other things too.

    Kyle: I’m curious, you said you haven’t had any experience with psychedelics, but you feel really hopeful about their reintegration in society.

    John Cobb: Yes, if they reintroduction in the way this group would do it (regarding a private conference at Claremont College). Obviously if they are reintroduced primarily for the profit of the reintroducer, I’m not confident it would end up being a benefit. The more people use the most expensive drugs, the more profit.

    Joe: Right. And you know, skillfully used, you probably need less than 10 LSD experiences to heal most of what you’ve got. And to do some really creative work. Some people just have one and that’s it for their life. That’s a very different thing than drugs that are around for our whole life.

    John Cobb: That would be sort of like a near death experience. One is usually enough.

    Kyle: I’d say so.

    Johanna: Were you there for Kyle’s story? Kyle had one at age 16.

    John Cobb: No. I was not there yesterday afternoon.

    Kyle: I got in a snowboarding accident and ended up rupturing my spleen, and I lost about five to five and a half pints of blood internally. I guess like where it started to become mystical was when I was in the MRI machine, CAT Scan machine, and they were trying to figure out where the blood was coming from. I was on the other side of the room with the doctors, but I was also in my body at the same time. I kind of describe it as like an orb of light kind of surrounded me, and a voice kind of appeared and said… It wasn’t an external voice. It seemed a little bit more internal, or maybe it felt experienced. I don’t know how to really put it into words.

    John Cobb: You felt internal, but nevertheless, it wasn’t just you talking to yourself.

    Kyle: Yeah. And something just said, “You’re going home, going back to the stars where y’all come from. And this is just a transition. The more you relax into it, the easier it’s going to be. This physical life’s going to cease to exist, but you’ll continue on.” And it was a really blissful kind of experience at that point, and I got excited, I was like, “Oh, I’m going home.” But then coming back to reality, it was difficult to reintegrate that.

    John Cobb: Within the experience itself, there was nothing about coming back to reality?

    Kyle: No, there’s a-

    John Cobb: Because many people report a kind of moment when there’s a decision made.

    Kyle: Yeah. I think they caught me at the right time as I was really starting to slip away. They put me under anesthesia, but I didn’t remember anything. There was a felt sense that I went somewhere and I talked to something. But I couldn’t remember it. And when you say, we’re so fixed on the visual aspect, I mean, that’s what I think irritated me the most that sometimes people report going down a light or they see something. This was a felt experience. Like I knew something happened, but I couldn’t describe it.

    John Cobb: In the auditory world, the location of the words… in the auditory, sometimes a meaning is communicated. And if you explain to somebody else, of course you have to put it into words, but it’s initial reality is not words. I think a lot of the time in the Bible when it says, God spoke to me and said such and such, people just felt called. And I’ve had that kind of experience. I’ve never had hearing in the liberal sense. But I just sometimes sit quietly for a while and then it just comes to me, there’s something I need to do.

    Read part 4 here.

    Links

    Website
    Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition

    Other books by John Cobb Jr.

    A Christian Natural Theology, Second Edition: Based on the Thought of Alfred North Whitehead

    Jesus’ Abba: The God Who Has Not Failed

    Grace & Responsibility: A Wesleyan Theology for Today

    For Our Common Home: Process-Relational Responses to Laudato Si’

    About John B. Cobb Jr.

    John B. Cobb, Jr., Ph.D, is a founding co-director of the Center for Process Studies and Process & Faith. He has held many positions, such as Ingraham Professor of Theology at the School of Theology at Claremont, Avery Professor at the Claremont Graduate School, Fullbright Professor at the University of Mainz, Visiting Professor at Vanderbilt, Harvard Divinity, Chicago Divinity Schools. His writings include: Christ in a Pluralistic Age; God and the World; For the Common Good. Co-winner of Grawemeyer Award of Ideas Improving World Order.

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