Speaker 1: I think fear is really a key driver of human
Speaker 1: action and inaction. Welcome to the one you feed Throughout time,
Speaker 1: great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have,
Speaker 1: quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what
Speaker 1: you think ring true, and yet for many of us,
Speaker 1: our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
Speaker 1: self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't
Speaker 1: have instead of what we do. We think things that
Speaker 1: hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
Speaker 1: just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent,
Speaker 1: and creative effort to make a life worth living. This
Speaker 1: podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in
Speaker 1: the right direction, how they feed their good Wolfe thanks
Speaker 1: for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Michael Pollen,
Speaker 1: author of many books, including Cooked Food, Rules in Defensive Food,
Speaker 1: The Omnivores Dilemma, and The Botany of Desire, all of
Speaker 1: which were New York Times bestsellers. A longtime contributor to
Speaker 1: The New York Times magazine, Michael also teaches writing at
Speaker 1: Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley. In two thousand ten,
Speaker 1: Time magazine named him one of the most influential people
Speaker 1: in the world. His new book is How to Change
Speaker 1: Your Mind. What the New Science of Psychedelics teaches Us
Speaker 1: about Consciousness, dying, addiction, depression, and Transcendence. Hi, Michael, welcome
Speaker 1: to the show. To be here. It's a real pleasure
Speaker 1: to have you on. Your writings have been wonderful over
Speaker 1: the years, and you have a new book called How
Speaker 1: to Change Your Mind. What the New Science of psych
Speaker 1: Adelics teaches Us about consciousness, dying, addiction, depression, and transcendence.
Speaker 1: And we'll jump into that book in just a second,
Speaker 1: but let's start off like we usually do with the parable.
Speaker 1: There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says,
Speaker 1: in life, there are two wolves inside of us that
Speaker 1: are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which
Speaker 1: represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the
Speaker 1: other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed
Speaker 1: and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and thinks
Speaker 1: about it for a second, looks up at his grandfather
Speaker 1: and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins. And the
Speaker 1: grandfather says, the one you feed, So I'd like to
Speaker 1: start off by asking you what that parable means to
Speaker 1: you in your life and in the work that you do. Well,
Speaker 1: that's a good question, um. You know. I think fear
Speaker 1: is really a key driver of human action and inaction,
Speaker 1: and we feed it all the time. Our ego feed it.
Speaker 1: Our ego uses fear to uh try to defend us
Speaker 1: and relies on fear. I don't know. My dad actually
Speaker 1: was a very wise man. He died in January, and
Speaker 1: his clients used to call him a professional fear remover
Speaker 1: um in that he recognized that what kept us from
Speaker 1: realizing our dreams and doing what we want to do
Speaker 1: in life was our fear. Um. You know. He said,
Speaker 1: your obstacles are all between your ears, and that obstacle
Speaker 1: was usually fear. I thought about that a lot in
Speaker 1: the case of working on psychedelics, because one of the
Speaker 1: things they do and you need to do in order
Speaker 1: to get a benefit from them is removed fear, overcome fear,
Speaker 1: stop feeding fear. Um, so terrible means quite a bit
Speaker 1: to me, wonderful. So what I'd like to direct this
Speaker 1: conversation towards in a relatively short time is um sort
Speaker 1: of the second part of the book or the title,
Speaker 1: which is really what does the science of psychedelics tell
Speaker 1: us about consciousness? UM, dying, addiction, depressed, and transcendence. UM.
Speaker 1: It's kind of the whole book, and I'm I'm kind
Speaker 1: of asking you to maybe start us down that path.
Speaker 1: But but from your perspective, what are some of the
Speaker 1: things that psychedelics are telling us about how the human
Speaker 1: experience works? Well, let's take consciousness. Consciousness is a big mystery.
Speaker 1: We don't know how brains produce consciousness. In fact, we're
Speaker 1: not even completely sure they do. That consciousness may some
Speaker 1: people believe reside outside of minds, and that minds tune
Speaker 1: it in in some sense, that it's a property of
Speaker 1: the universe like electro magnetic waves. You know, I don't
Speaker 1: have an opinion on that. It seems implausible to me,
Speaker 1: but people do believe that. UM. One of the things
Speaker 1: that psychedelics and other technologies for changing consciousness do is
Speaker 1: show us normal, everyday, waking consciousness from a new perspective,
Speaker 1: and it it's sort of relativises it. You see that
Speaker 1: it's not the only way to go through life, and
Speaker 1: that curiously, as William James wrote more than a hundred
Speaker 1: years ago. There are these other forms of consciousness that
Speaker 1: that have a very different flavor and a different kind
Speaker 1: of set of rules and laws than everyday normal consciousness,
Speaker 1: and they're not that far away. UM. I was really
Speaker 1: struck by the fact that either a molecule you ingest
Speaker 1: like a psychedelic or even a certain breathing exercise or
Speaker 1: a sweat lodge or a sensory deprivation, all these technologies
Speaker 1: rock normal consciousness and and suggests that, um, there are
Speaker 1: other forms of consciousness. The other thing that I think
Speaker 1: that's really interesting, and this is kind of more on
Speaker 1: the neuroscience side, is that using these drugs now we
Speaker 1: can image the brain when it is tripping, when people
Speaker 1: are in these altered states of consciousness or alternate states
Speaker 1: of consciousness, and that has taught us some very interesting
Speaker 1: things about consciousness. So when they started this kind of
Speaker 1: imaging word using fMRI I and another technology called magneto
Speaker 1: and cephalography, they discovered something surprising. They expected to see
Speaker 1: lots of brain areas light up, lots of activity, you know,
Speaker 1: consistent with the fireworks people report on the experience, the
Speaker 1: hallucinations and the synthesia and things like that. But what
Speaker 1: surprised them was that they found that a very important
Speaker 1: brain network that's deeply involved in our sense of the
Speaker 1: self goes quiet under the influence of psychedelics. And this
Speaker 1: is called the default mode network. This is a tightly
Speaker 1: linked set of structures that's kind of at the top
Speaker 1: of the hierarchy in the brain and exerts a regulatory
Speaker 1: function on the whole um. And it's involved with self consciousness.
Speaker 1: It's involved with self criticism, it's involved with time travel,
Speaker 1: the ability to think of the past or the future,
Speaker 1: theory of mind, the ability to compute mental states to others,
Speaker 1: and something called the experiential self, the sort of place
Speaker 1: where we go to tell the story of ourselves. You know,
Speaker 1: who we were, our biography, and who we want to be,
Speaker 1: and it's where we fit whatever happens to us into
Speaker 1: that story. You know, we're narrative beings. Without a sense
Speaker 1: of a continuous story, it's hard to be a self.
Speaker 1: I mean, if you don't have that sense of story,
Speaker 1: you you have no sense of identity. So all this
Speaker 1: is going on in this particular network, and when you quiet,
Speaker 1: it is when people have this radically different set of consciousness,
Speaker 1: a sort of consciousness where they essentially feel their their
Speaker 1: sense of self or ego dissolved and when that happens,
Speaker 1: and I had an experience of ego dissolution during one
Speaker 1: of my experimental journeys for this book. When that happens,
Speaker 1: you're not annihilated. Um. We we think we're identical with ourselves,
Speaker 1: but in fact there is another place to stand and
Speaker 1: and experience life and another form of constance. And it
Speaker 1: is a most uncanny thing. I had this experience, and
Speaker 1: many other people have reported the same thing of watching
Speaker 1: myself essentially scattered to the wind as as a bunch
Speaker 1: of post its. And then I saw myself spread out
Speaker 1: over the landscape like a coat of paint or butter Um. Now,
Speaker 1: when I say I saw what am I talking about? Um? Well,
Speaker 1: there was a split in my consciousness between my usual
Speaker 1: ego self and this other, much more disinterested, objective, unperturbable
Speaker 1: way of experiencing things that you know, to whom all
Speaker 1: this was fine? You know, what could have been a
Speaker 1: catastrophe losing your sense of self was absolutely just hey interesting.
Speaker 1: So anyway, that's the kind of stuff we're learning about. Consciousness.
Speaker 1: Is a long answer to your question, but it's very
Speaker 1: rich and I think we stand to learn more. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, one of the psychedelic pioneers, a psychiatrist named
Speaker 1: Stanislav Kra, said back in the sixties or seventies that
Speaker 1: psychedelics would be for the study of the mind what
Speaker 1: the microscope was for biology or the telescope was for astronomy.
Speaker 1: That was a really audacious thing to say, But I
Speaker 1: no longer think that's crazy. Yeah, there's so much you
Speaker 1: said there. There was one point in the book and
Speaker 1: we're talking about consciousness, and I'm just gonna read what
Speaker 1: you wrote. You basically said, no single one of our
Speaker 1: vocabularies for approaching the subject, that subject being consciousness, the biological,
Speaker 1: the psychological, the philosophical, or the spiritual, has yet earned
Speaker 1: the right to claim it has the final word. It
Speaker 1: may be that layering these different perspectives one upon the
Speaker 1: other we can gain the richest picture of what might
Speaker 1: be going on. And I agree with that so much.
Speaker 1: I've read that, and I was almost like, that's almost
Speaker 1: a description of what we're trying to do on this show,
Speaker 1: is layer these different approaches biological, psychological, philosophical, spiritual. And
Speaker 1: I love the way you said that and I'm going
Speaker 1: to jump right to one of the models that you
Speaker 1: come up with here, which I think it's not yours,
Speaker 1: but you talk about in the book, and I think
Speaker 1: it encapsulates so much of what we're trying to talk about,
Speaker 1: whether it be ego disillusionment or the mind expanding. But
Speaker 1: you talk about Robin Carhart Harris's theory of the entropic brain,
Speaker 1: and the idea is that as we get older, right,
Speaker 1: we begin to see the world as we're used to
Speaker 1: seeing it. We become kind of set in our ways.
Speaker 1: We drive the entropy out of the system. And entropy
Speaker 1: is a synonymy or for uncertainty, right, I mean, the
Speaker 1: brain is trying to reduce uncertainty and surprise, and we
Speaker 1: do that by developing these mental algorithms that kind of
Speaker 1: predict what's going to happen at any given time and
Speaker 1: reach for the most conventional solution to any problem that
Speaker 1: life presents to us. But that this this tends to
Speaker 1: narrow consciousness and make it very rigid. It's adaptive, it's
Speaker 1: very efficient, it gets the job done, but it blinds
Speaker 1: us also in the way that habits blind us to
Speaker 1: the present moment and to experience. So Robin's theory, and
Speaker 1: I think it's a very compelling one, is that you
Speaker 1: need a certain amount of entropy or uncertainty in the brain,
Speaker 1: or it treeses, it gets stuck. And if you think
Speaker 1: about the mental illnesses that have responded in most robust
Speaker 1: leaks and psychedelic therapy so far, depression, addiction, anxiety, and
Speaker 1: fear of death, these are the products of rigid thinking,
Speaker 1: of getting trapped in a loop and trapped in a
Speaker 1: story that you just can't get out of. I mean,
Speaker 1: this is what this is what happens to depress people.
Speaker 1: They tell they keep telling themselves a very destructive story
Speaker 1: that shape eventually shades out reality and other people, and
Speaker 1: it disconnects them from life. Same with addiction. UM. So,
Speaker 1: all these disorders may be the result of insufficient entropy
Speaker 1: in the brain, and that there is a kind of
Speaker 1: point of criticality, you know, where you have just the
Speaker 1: right amount of to be are uncertainty in the system
Speaker 1: or noise as some people would describe it. Now you
Speaker 1: can go too far. Um And in Robin's model, you
Speaker 1: know schizophrenia, maybe the as magical thinking and you know,
Speaker 1: paranoid fantasy. All these things may be the result of
Speaker 1: too much entropy in the brain. Um. But there's this
Speaker 1: sweet spot, is what he's suggesting, and many of us
Speaker 1: are not there. Uh. We we move away from that
Speaker 1: sweet spot as we get older and we become less entropic.
Speaker 1: So we you know, we tend to think of getting
Speaker 1: older as as entropy, as things slowing down and breaking down,
Speaker 1: but in fact, in the mind, it's just the opposite things.
Speaker 1: Things are freezing up tight and we need to lubricate
Speaker 1: our cognition, as he says, and or or shake the
Speaker 1: snow globe is another lovely metaphor he has, and psychedelics
Speaker 1: appear to do this. They inject noise into that system.
Speaker 1: They disorder the brain literally and give an opportunity for
Speaker 1: a reboot, in the same way that your computer gets
Speaker 1: frozen after know, if you haven't turned it off in
Speaker 1: a long time and everything gets kind of sticky and frozen,
Speaker 1: and what do you do. You wouldn't plug it, and
Speaker 1: then you plug it back in, Suddenly it's lubricated. H h.
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Speaker 1: the interview. The phrase that comes up in the book
Speaker 1: is all just Huxley's um speaks of the mind's reducing valve.
Speaker 1: You know how our our ordinary consciousness is, you know,
Speaker 1: basically filtering out down to only what we need to
Speaker 1: stay alive. So Huxley saying that these mystical experiences that
Speaker 1: they have are the same thing as what people are
Speaker 1: having in religious experiences or meditation experiences. And you know
Speaker 1: a little bit about me is I'm recovering from alcoholism
Speaker 1: and drug addiction, I have dealt with depression. I'm a
Speaker 1: long term meditator. I just came back from a seven
Speaker 1: day silent retreat, and so all these things really resonate
Speaker 1: with me, and I just wanted to sort of talk
Speaker 1: about how that, you know, we're looking at these mystical
Speaker 1: experiences being occasioned by lots of different methods, psychedelics being
Speaker 1: one of them. Yeah, I think that, um, if we
Speaker 1: could look at the mind during the vision quest, or
Speaker 1: sensory deprivation, or or holotropic breathwork, all these other modalities,
Speaker 1: we might find the same suppression of activity in the
Speaker 1: depot mode network, and we have found it in UH meditation.
Speaker 1: The brains of people are very experienced meditators. If you
Speaker 1: put them in an fm R time machine and let
Speaker 1: them meditate, their brains will look very much like the
Speaker 1: tripping brain. The same networks are turned off. And and
Speaker 1: that makes sense because the experience is similar in in
Speaker 1: the sense of it may not be as visually dramatic,
Speaker 1: but there is this sense of ego dissolution. That that
Speaker 1: is achieved in meditation is a transcendence of the self.
Speaker 1: You know this better than I do. But Buddhist or
Speaker 1: convinced that the self is an illusion, and uh, it's
Speaker 1: a contingent thing. It's a projection of our minds. And
Speaker 1: one of the things psychedelics give you, and you can
Speaker 1: do it sort of more easily than you can. Meditating
Speaker 1: is a glibs of an ego free state of consciousness,
Speaker 1: and that is there's something very liberating about that. So yeah,
Speaker 1: I think we're talking about the same phenomenon, just different
Speaker 1: technologies for getting there. And some people think it's cheating
Speaker 1: to use a drug to achieve these states, But you know,
Speaker 1: no doubt there is some chemical that's involved in the
Speaker 1: in the more natural achievement of that state through meditation. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, all mental experience is mediated by chemicals and
Speaker 1: electricity in the brain. Um. So you know, I think
Speaker 1: it's our moralism to say that one is more legit
Speaker 1: or earned than the other. I think so too, And
Speaker 1: I think you've you made a very interesting point about
Speaker 1: that in the book, where you said that a lot
Speaker 1: of going to use the word civilizations thought that the
Speaker 1: fact that it came from nature, that they got this
Speaker 1: experience from nature a plant made it more valid, not
Speaker 1: less valid than them. Induced. Yeah, yeah, you know, we
Speaker 1: think that if you get it from nature, from matter, uh,
Speaker 1: it's less spiritual. But they thought and that this owed
Speaker 1: to their relationship to nature, that it was more sacred
Speaker 1: thing that nature was doing this to you. I mean,
Speaker 1: how amazing that a mushroom or a plant could change
Speaker 1: your consciousness. Um. And you know, we tend to look
Speaker 1: down on that idea because we're we want our spirituality
Speaker 1: to be so pure. We conceive of spirituality as in
Speaker 1: oppositions who materialism. And I think that that some mistake.
Speaker 1: And I conceived of it that way. There was you know,
Speaker 1: the supernatural and the natural in the big insight I
Speaker 1: had after you know, my own psychedelic experiences. Um, was
Speaker 1: a reconception of what the spiritual is. And I realized
Speaker 1: the opposite of spiritual is not material as I had thought.
Speaker 1: The opposite of spiritual is egotistical. Um. It is the
Speaker 1: ego that keeps us from having this deep, profound sense
Speaker 1: of connection with other people, or with nature, or with
Speaker 1: the universe or whatever. Our concept of the divine that
Speaker 1: opened a big door for me. And uh, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean, I know other people have different concepts of
Speaker 1: the spiritual, but it created an opening that had been
Speaker 1: closed before. Yeah. Actually I was headed right towards that,
Speaker 1: because spiritual is one of those words that means a
Speaker 1: million things to a million people. But you gave what
Speaker 1: I thought was a very never heard it phrase this
Speaker 1: way before. But spiritual is a good name for some
Speaker 1: of the powerful mental phenomenon that a rise when the
Speaker 1: voice of the ego is muted or silenced. Yeah that's um, well,
Speaker 1: I wrote it, so it is exactly what I believe.
Speaker 1: But but I had forgotten that line. But that there,
Speaker 1: it is there. It is what pages that on. I
Speaker 1: can't do any underline that I don't I don't have pages.
Speaker 1: I have lots of pages and pages and notes, but
Speaker 1: I can't reference the book page. This is where this
Speaker 1: experience took me, you know, I I just really you know,
Speaker 1: I had not explored spiritual paths in my life at all,
Speaker 1: um and and I was held back from it by
Speaker 1: this very naive understanding of what spirituality was. And thanks
Speaker 1: to my experience of these molecules and also the people,
Speaker 1: you know, all the people I interviewed who had transformative experiences,
Speaker 1: some on these drugs and some on you know, through meditation.
Speaker 1: I went down this path I never thought i'd be
Speaker 1: going down as a writer. Uh And it was actually
Speaker 1: quite um thrilling for me too, you know, at this
Speaker 1: age I'm now in my early sixties, to have embarked
Speaker 1: on such a such a journey. That makes me think
Speaker 1: of something else that you said in the book. You
Speaker 1: said sort of tongue in cheek but maybe not, but
Speaker 1: that psychedelics are wasted on the young, and that you
Speaker 1: himself had said, Hey, you know, it's not the young
Speaker 1: people that need an experience of the numinous, which is
Speaker 1: another way to sort of phrase what we're talking about.
Speaker 1: Its people experience. People are transitioning into the second half
Speaker 1: of their lives are the people who need that more
Speaker 1: transcendent experience. And I thought that was as somebody who's
Speaker 1: transitioning into the second half of their life, or maybe
Speaker 1: maybe a little bit beyond the transition. I totally agree. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, I didn't mean to demean the experience that
Speaker 1: some young people have on psychedelics. It really can be profound,
Speaker 1: But it seems to me what they're particularly good for well,
Speaker 1: two things is this breaking of a mental rigidity of
Speaker 1: habit that that you know, that that kind of ossifying
Speaker 1: mental patterns that we get into as we age. And
Speaker 1: that's that's very important. I mean, the young don't have
Speaker 1: patterns like that. They're still open to experience, they don't
Speaker 1: have all these mental algorithms, these priors in their minds
Speaker 1: to organize their experience yet. And the other is the
Speaker 1: contemplation of death um and people in their twenties, you know,
Speaker 1: pretty much think of themselves is eternal or um. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know death is it's such a great distance, it's
Speaker 1: unimaginable to them. When you're in your sixties, that's not
Speaker 1: the case. And I think that the psychedelics are, as
Speaker 1: his meditation, an excellent tool for um figuring out what
Speaker 1: you think about death and and um and what it
Speaker 1: means UM and so in that sense, I think that
Speaker 1: they're particularly valuable later in life. And Uh, it's ironic
Speaker 1: that they were discovered by the young by and large
Speaker 1: in the West. UM. That's not true in other in
Speaker 1: traditional cultures. UM. But I think they're greater uses for
Speaker 1: people as their aging and UM and and and the
Speaker 1: particular I mean, one of the great successes in the
Speaker 1: research has been thus are has been with people really
Speaker 1: facing their mortality with a sense of urgency. I'm talking
Speaker 1: about the cancer patients who have been tre treated with psilocybin.
Speaker 1: In a very substantial percentage of them found relief, found comfort, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, had their had their anxiety and their depression
Speaker 1: and their fear diminished and in some cases eliminated. That's
Speaker 1: quite a gift. We have very few uh tools to
Speaker 1: offer comforts to offer people in that boat, and at
Speaker 1: least on the basis of these small studies, I mean,
Speaker 1: only eight people are in these two trials and referencing
Speaker 1: there's a really strong signal that these drugs have something
Speaker 1: important to offer people facing death. You mentioned the research
Speaker 1: into psychedelics, and research into psychedelics is really having a resurgence.
Speaker 1: And I don't want to go into the history too much,
Speaker 1: but it's interesting that you talk about before you know,
Speaker 1: the cat got out of the bag, so to speak,
Speaker 1: into the sixties culture with LSD, that there had been
Speaker 1: forty thousand research participants and more than a thousand clinical
Speaker 1: papers from people who were researching psychedelics as really psychological tools,
Speaker 1: you know, as as a way to facilitate improving our
Speaker 1: quality of life for lack of a better mental health. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I was surprised by that too. I thought, you know,
Speaker 1: I thought the story began in the sixties, began with
Speaker 1: Timothy Leariam Harvard psilocybin project, but in fact he came
Speaker 1: kind of late to the to the game, and that
Speaker 1: there had been all this fertile period of research all
Speaker 1: through the fifties that you know, was showing, um, really
Speaker 1: good results, and that many people in the psychiatric establishment
Speaker 1: regarded these drugs as potential wonder drugs, and um, that
Speaker 1: that research got choked off at the end of the
Speaker 1: sixties in the early seventies, it just is a shame
Speaker 1: in retrospect, because imagine, had we not had this thirty
Speaker 1: year hiatus between the closing of research in uh, you know,
Speaker 1: in the early seventies and the resumption in our own time,
Speaker 1: imagine what more we would have learned We you know,
Speaker 1: these drugs might already be in the pharmacopeia as something available.
Speaker 1: I think it's important for people to realize also just
Speaker 1: how limited our tools are to help with what is
Speaker 1: becoming a crisis and mental health in this country, only
Speaker 1: about half the people who need mental health care ever
Speaker 1: get it. UM. Rates of depression are rising, rates of
Speaker 1: addiction arising, rates of suicide are rising alarmingly. And the
Speaker 1: last big innovation was S S R I antidepressants in
Speaker 1: the late eighties early nineties, and those work for some people,
Speaker 1: but there their effectiveness phades over time. They don't work
Speaker 1: much better than placebo, and people don't like taking them,
Speaker 1: they have side effects, they're hard to get off. And
Speaker 1: so the prospect of a new tool that can treat
Speaker 1: a lot of the same illnesses anxiety, depression, obsession, UM
Speaker 1: is very exciting to people in the mental health community.
Speaker 1: And UM, you know, we're not there yet. We have
Speaker 1: to prove these drugs work in larger trials on a
Speaker 1: bigger scale, So we shouldn't all rush to the conclusion
Speaker 1: we've got the panacea here. But the data is very encouraging,
Speaker 1: and you know, we can hope that within five years
Speaker 1: or so that we may have a new tool to
Speaker 1: help people struggling with a very high level of suffering
Speaker 1: in our society. Yeah, for sure, you've mentioned that in
Speaker 1: the psychiatry community that we've we've had a conflict between
Speaker 1: biological based treatments, so drugs and psychodynamic treatments, right, talking therapy,
Speaker 1: and they've been fighting each other for legitimacy and resources.
Speaker 1: And you know, the question you you write, is mental
Speaker 1: illness and disorder of chemistry or is it a loss
Speaker 1: of meaning in one's life? Psychedelic therapy is the wedding
Speaker 1: of those two approaches. And I think that's such an
Speaker 1: interesting thing because I do think it's the answer isn't
Speaker 1: one or the other. It really the answer is it
Speaker 1: is both a disorder of chemistry and a loss of
Speaker 1: meaning in life in a lot of cases, and those
Speaker 1: things are probably connected in ways we don't understand. And that, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a very novel approach because it shouldn't be called
Speaker 1: psychedelic therapy, should be called psychedelic assisted psychotherapy. And you
Speaker 1: are using a chemical not to change the brain's chemistry
Speaker 1: long term, but to occasion an experience, a powerful experience
Speaker 1: that some call a mystical experience or ego dissolution. That's,
Speaker 1: you know, just just a different set of terms for
Speaker 1: the same thing. I think, um, but that that experience
Speaker 1: is so powerful that it becomes transformed. It's kind of
Speaker 1: like this um reverse trauma in the brain instead of
Speaker 1: a negative trauma. It's a positive trauma, but it's a
Speaker 1: quantum change in some people, not in everybody. And that
Speaker 1: that's a new approach um that you're administering an experience
Speaker 1: rather than a drug, and that's hard to get, you know,
Speaker 1: our head around. We're gonna have to organize mental health
Speaker 1: care if this works, because we're set up, you know,
Speaker 1: either with the weekly therapy session that goes on forever
Speaker 1: or the daily drug that also goes on forever. Here
Speaker 1: would be something you would do that would be quite dramatic.
Speaker 1: In short term, it would be one session or two sessions,
Speaker 1: or maybe a session every six months or every year.
Speaker 1: We don't really know how long the effects will last.
Speaker 1: So it's going to take some doing to create a
Speaker 1: container really for this, this new kind of therapy. And
Speaker 1: this is where I remind everybody what you just said,
Speaker 1: that this is psychedelic experience is assisted by mental health professionals.
Speaker 1: And so every time, every time I bring up any
Speaker 1: slightly strange approach to men illness, I get some sort
Speaker 1: of message from people that it's dangerous and don't rush
Speaker 1: off and get rid of your s s R ey
Speaker 1: S tomorrow and go drop acid. That's not what we're
Speaker 1: talking about here now. And these experiences also, it's very
Speaker 1: important to remind your listeners that these are this is
Speaker 1: not the way that people use psychedelics recreational. You're not
Speaker 1: going to get a prescription to go to CBS. These
Speaker 1: are guided trips. You're with someone the whole times, trained
Speaker 1: therapist prepares you very carefully what to expect, how to
Speaker 1: deal with adverse you know, feelings or events in the trip.
Speaker 1: Then they sit with you, um the whole time. They
Speaker 1: don't say very much, but they're they're watching out for
Speaker 1: your body so you don't do anything stupid, you know,
Speaker 1: walk out into traffic or or leave the session room. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then afterward they help you to integrate the experience
Speaker 1: because it's a it can be a very destabilizing experience.
Speaker 1: And that's where the talk therapy comes in. And they
Speaker 1: also help you figure out how to take whatever insights
Speaker 1: you've you've earned during this trip, how to apply them
Speaker 1: to your how to make this an enduring change not
Speaker 1: just a temporary change. So it's a big commitment on
Speaker 1: everybody's part. Uh. It's not done casually and um, and
Speaker 1: it's not done alone. And that's you know, that's the lesson. Actually,
Speaker 1: the traditional cultures who use psychedelics have taught us. We
Speaker 1: ignored it in the sixties. I think that's one of
Speaker 1: the reasons we've got into trouble. But they always had
Speaker 1: a cultural container for the experience. You never did it alone.
Speaker 1: You always did it with elders or shamans or some
Speaker 1: kind of person who really knew the territory, and it
Speaker 1: was always surrounded by some ritual and ceremony. Um. There
Speaker 1: was a profound understanding that this was not something to
Speaker 1: be taken lightly, and we took it lightly in the sixties,
Speaker 1: and that's one of the reasons that you had some casualties. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I did psychedelics as a young person. I have not
Speaker 1: re experienced them as an older person, and they were
Speaker 1: certainly lost on me because I used them more in
Speaker 1: a almost a party sense. But I do remember one
Speaker 1: particularly horrific experience where my little brother, who I still
Speaker 1: cursed to this day for this, convinced me to take
Speaker 1: LSD the night of my grandmother's funeral and things got
Speaker 1: things really went down, really went downhill for me. Um,
Speaker 1: he seemed fine, But I want to circle back I
Speaker 1: know we're out of time and you've got to talk
Speaker 1: to get to but I want to circle back to
Speaker 1: what you just said. They're about integration, and then we'll
Speaker 1: wrap up, because, um, you quote Houston Smith who says
Speaker 1: a spiritual experience does not by itself make a spiritual life.
Speaker 1: Integration is essential to making sense of the experience, whether
Speaker 1: in or out of the medical context or else it
Speaker 1: just remains a drug experience. And I would go further.
Speaker 1: We've been talking about psychedelics, but mystical experiences of all stripes,
Speaker 1: from wherever they come from, I think fall right into
Speaker 1: this category. Is somebody who's working to integrate a couple
Speaker 1: of mystical experiences I've had. I realized that the experience
Speaker 1: itself does not make a spiritual life. Integration is essential.
Speaker 1: And I love that you kind of hit that at
Speaker 1: the end there. Yeah, And I saw that myself. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'll leave you with this note. I had, Um, you know,
Speaker 1: I had this experience of ego dissolution and and then
Speaker 1: I met with my guide and uh, and I said,
Speaker 1: so it was amazing. I realized you don't have to
Speaker 1: react to everything you know with your usual ego consciousness
Speaker 1: and she said, well, that's worth the price of admission,
Speaker 1: isn't it. And I said, well yes, but now my
Speaker 1: egos back, you know, in uniform and on patrol. So, um,
Speaker 1: what what good is that? What good is that? And
Speaker 1: she said, well, now that you've had a taste of
Speaker 1: that way of looking at things, you can cultivate it. Um.
Speaker 1: And you can exercise that that new muscle and strengthen
Speaker 1: it and uh. And I asked her how to do
Speaker 1: that and she said, well, one important way to do
Speaker 1: it is through meditation. Uh. And that's kind of how
Speaker 1: I now reconnect with that experience. That's the difference between
Speaker 1: having a mind blowing experience and then having an actual
Speaker 1: state of consciousness connected to it that you can access
Speaker 1: through other means. So yeah, I think I think that
Speaker 1: Houston Smith was so as he was on so many things.
Speaker 1: He was so on on mark. We we you know,
Speaker 1: we've all had amazing experiences and experiences of awe. But
Speaker 1: it's what do you do with them? It really matters.
Speaker 1: And and that's where the hard work starts. Yep. And
Speaker 1: I'm gonna leave you with one quote that came out
Speaker 1: of my silent retreat this week that I think plays
Speaker 1: into all this that you can ponder as you go
Speaker 1: to your talk. And the spiritual teacher said that ego
Speaker 1: is nothing but a contraction. The whole process of ego
Speaker 1: is just that it's a contraction. And that gave me
Speaker 1: a lot to think about and for you and the
Speaker 1: listeners also. But Michael, thank you so much. I really
Speaker 1: enjoyed the book. Um, it was great and I was
Speaker 1: really happy to get a chance to talk with you. Oh,
Speaker 1: thank you well. I enjoyed this and thanks for leaving
Speaker 1: me with something to think about. All right, take care,
Speaker 1: good luck tonight. Oh thanks a lot. All right, take
Speaker 1: care you take care to okay, bye bye ba m m.
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