Psychedelics: The Manifested Mind, Part 1

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of I
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, you welcome to Stuff
to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and
I'm Joe McCormick, and stay. I wanted to start with
one of those great naval gazers. Are you ready? Let's
do it? Okay? So the question is we know how

(00:25):
to describe what we see when we look at things.
You know, you can look at the room you're in
right now and write down the features, or you can
try to describe a great landscape that you remember from
some trip you took. But when somebody asks you to
look inside yourself, how do you begin to describe what
you see in your own mind? I mean, in a way,

(00:48):
you are forced to resort to metaphors. You know, we
talked about this a lot. They are like concrete metaphors
for abstract mental properties. And so maybe you think of
your mind if you you try to examine it as
something like a uh, you know, like a castle or building,
a solid landscape you can walk through that has features
you could describe, or maybe you think about it like

(01:08):
a weather pattern that's constantly transient and changing, or maybe
you can't really think of it in in comparison to
any physical object at all, in which case, how would
you ever even be able to describe what you're looking at?
And how different of a person would you be if
you had the tools to see more clearly what's inside

(01:30):
your own mind? Well, even in this we're using terms
of about about seeing in visualization and uh. And certainly
I think a lot of us fall back on cinematic
interpretations of the inner mind states and you know, identity
and who we are. But but there's you know, there's
more going on there. Like I I sometimes when I'm
more self conscious of what stays going to stay is

(01:52):
going on in my you know, default mode network, it
it won't even be visual Like my visual world will
be just wrapped up in whatever I doing, say driving
down the road. But it's uh, it's this non visual
world that is wrapped up in like voices of the
past and perceived you know, possible future. Would you like
to think about death and about all the ways in

(02:14):
which you have failed? Yeah, exactly that sort of thing,
you know, and that and they may be flashes of
visualizations in there, but but but often not, at least
in my case. Uh. And of course in all the
things concerning the the inner mind. This is going to
change from individual to individual. Yeah, totally. And so today
we are embarking on a multi part episode series that

(02:34):
we're gonna be doing here on stuff to blow your mind,
looking at the general topic of psychedelics and most specifically,
I think, with it with a strong focus on the
fungal domain there on, on psilocybin, mushrooms and related species
and compounds. Yeah. Yeah, not only about you know, to
our point earlier, not only about what they seem to

(02:56):
change in human perception and cognition, but what they reveal
about human perception and cognition, how they factor into our past,
how they factor into our present, and how they may
well factor into our future. Yeah, that's right now. I
think maybe one thing that has pushed us in this
direction is some books we've been reading recently, So maybe
we should mention them at the top. I know we've
both been reading, uh, Michael Pollen's most recent book, How

(03:18):
to Change Your Mind, which is all about psychedelics and
about uh, you know, the concept of spirituality and mental
life and why this is so elucidated by and associated
with psychedelic compounds. Right, and it is just an excellent book.
You know, It's gotten rave reviews for for for excellent reasons.
It's it's one of these where you can pick it

(03:39):
up without knowing anything really about psychedelic culture or you know,
or the you know, the nineteen sixties, or or or
botany and ethnobotany. You know, you don't really have to
have a background in any of these things. And Pollen,
as with his other major works, and it just really
walks you through. It adds in personal experiences and is
very much approaching it as an older individual who did

(04:02):
not have a lot of experiences with psychedelic substances. And
I think that's a very interesting and appropriate treatment because
a lot of what I've at least learned recently about
psychedelics makes it seem like psychedelics maybe of much greater
use and a much greater interest actually to older, more
mature people dealing with thoughts of life and death and

(04:23):
the meaning of life and all that than as say,
as it is often presented as sort of a party
drug to you know, experience by teenagers. Right, yeah, I
think I can't remember it was Paulin said this, or
who's quoting somebody else? Is saying that psychedelics are are
wasted on the young. It might have been Carl Young.
Was it Carl Young that said? Okay, maybe Paulin was

(04:44):
counting with quoting Young on that, but but yeah, I
can see there being an argument to that to a
certain extent. However, that's not to discount the possible benefits
to younger individuals as well. Um, but we'll get into
all that as we proceed. Well, I just think it
seems very plausible to me that it's actually much more
useful in general for older people to be given tools

(05:04):
to when they're doing that mental introspection, you know, looking
through the window into their own mind, to have the
tools to see more clearly what's inside and to go
in and move the furniture around right, or to sort
of knock the barnacles off the hull of the ship,
because that's that's one way of looking at it is
just the the younger vessel may have fewer barnacles or
or or at least for a lot of people, when

(05:25):
you were younger, perhaps you were fortunate enough, privileged enough
to not have that many psychic barnacles that need to
be dislodged, or could conceivably be dislodged, etcetera. Yeah. Uh, though,
despite everything we're saying right now, I also want to
make clear that our approach over these following episodes is
going to be mainly a sort of like descriptive and

(05:45):
and analytical discussion, not one where we are advocating any
sort of personal course of action. So we're not going
to tell you to take psychedelics. We're not going to
tell you not to take psychedelics. That that's not our goal. Instead,
we want to talk about what they can do and
what they mean. Right. But in addition to mentioning Poullen's book,
another important book that I haven't read but that you

(06:05):
have and I've read about is a book by Terrence
McKenna that I know you've been enjoying greatly, which I
think is out in uh maybe is uh you might say,
on less solid footing or a little squishy or territory,
but it's also very interesting. Well. Yeah, one thing about
about Fit of the Gods. First of all, it's book,
so a lot of time has passed since it came out.

(06:26):
And then also it is it is kind of a mixture,
you know, so McKenna, you know brings his background and ethnobotany, ecology,
and an understanding of shamanism uh into this uh this book,
and he's ultimately making a rather grand hypothesis that that
I'll talk about here in a bit. But yeah, I

(06:48):
feel like with With the Food of the Gods, one
has to be a little bit choosy and what what
you really like grab onto, But but he has a
lot of very interesting things to say, some wonderful insight
that still stands up to this day. But it is
a book I think needs to be appreciated alongside aside
other sources, especially today. Well yeah, I mean, I think,
especially in the kind of perspective we tend to present
on the show, I feel like there's a lot of

(07:09):
great literature in the realm of psychedelia that falls into
this category where it's stuff written by people who are
genuine experts, who you know, really do know what they're
talking about in the realm of psych psychedelic compounds, the chemistry,
the botany, the cultural practices and all of that, and
have great things to say on those subjects, but then
also tend to be prone, I would say, much more

(07:32):
often than people in other subject domains to kind of
get out into highly speculative and even seemingly supernatural territory. Right,
So you have that tendency, but also just the you know,
the post nineteen sixties taboo aspect of the subject, where
for for as we'll discuss, for decades, uh, it was
not something that was in an accepted area of study.

(07:56):
It was left to the fringes and the counterculture, and
so there was a lot of baggage. Are you know
the both of those those things can sort of hurt
in individuals work in this area. But another sort of
compelling inspiration for these episodes is of when I attended
the recent World Science Festival in New York. There was
a panel on psychedelics as well. Oh yeah, when eduard O.
Cone was on. Yes, Cohne was on here. This is

(08:18):
where I learned about him and his work, plus a
few other individuals that will discuss as we proceed. So
obviously we've covered psychedelics and stuff to bliw your mind
numerous times in the past, discussing LSD, SO cybin as
well as such counterculture figures as tom As, Timothy Leary,
and John C. Lily, And we've we've been meaning to
come back to psychedelics for a deeper die for a while.

(08:40):
But one of the real reasons that we're reaching back
into the subject right now is that we are living
in a very exciting time as far as these substances
are concerned, because in research terms, in research terms, yeah,
because basically, these are substances that modern Western medicine explored
for a brief time in the mid twentie cent tree

(09:01):
and then and then, and when they were looking at them, um,
they were encountering many promising results indicating how they might
be used to treat addiction, address psychological problems, and even
unlock a better understanding of the human mind. But due
to political and societal pressures, uh, they were all in
turn declared illegal substances Schedule one drugs in the United States.

(09:24):
I think it was psilocybin. I think was made illegal
in the United States in nineteen sixty eight, and then
made a Schedule one substance in I think nineteen seventy. Yeah,
I believe that that was the timeline. And uh, and
of course this also in in you know, involved LSD
and various other substances. But basically the result was that
decades of potential explora floration were lost when modern science

(09:47):
had scarcely explored, you know, more than what ancient people's
understood about the substances involved, or you know, to a
certain extent, understood them less well, uh compared to ancient societies. So,
I mean we're talking three plus decades during which these
powerful substances were purely the domains of counterculture and illegal

(10:07):
activity in the West. You know, no nobody was studying
so well, there was some study, but it was sort
of driven underground or not taken very seriously in the
academic community, right. It was it was considered like risky
to propose, say a psilocybin study for a while. Yeah,
like if you're a pharmacologist, psychopharmacologists pursuing uh, psilocybin, it

(10:29):
could be a bad career move, right yeah. I mean,
so it was almost treated as if all of these
substances were dead ends, as if you know, would reach
the point where it was like, oh, well, this is
a this is just a poison that you know, for
that that some people are going to dangerously use for
recreational purposes, which you know, as as will explore, is
wrong in two ways, Like it's wrong in the historical

(10:51):
context when you see how substances like this have been
used for thousands of years and it's wrong on the
medical research front. Yeah, I mean one of the funny
things is, given our view of the very like square
buttoned up nineteen fifties, the nineteen fifties were relatively a
time of uh, you know, abundant research and permissiveness exploring
these topics. So yeah, there were some decades there, some

(11:15):
some pretty dry decades as far as psychedelic research was concerned.
But as we emerged from the nineteen nineties, the culture
began to shift and we began to see new experimentation
into how especially psilocybin could be used to treat specific conditions.
And you know, this is what we've covered in the
past on the show and what you've you've heard covered
a lot elsewhere. You know, the studies here and there

(11:35):
that reveal new potential and perhaps point the way for
greater and renewed study and even decriminalization at least for
clinical uses, you know, in study and studies if nothing else.
And so as Michael Pollen points out and how to
Change your Mind, you know, we're living in a true
renaissance of psychedelic study. And I don't think that's you know,
an overstatement to say that. I think, especially since around

(11:57):
the year two thousand six when there was a big
seminal research paper out about psilocybin that we will talk
about in detail in a later episode in the series. Right,
And I'm not and I'm not referring to say, like
what Colorado efforts in Colorado to decriminalize them for you know,
perhaps with with recreational usage in mind. Uh, you know,
I'm talking about like clinical uses. The potential benefits here

(12:18):
are profound, and if the trends of you know, continue here,
you know, modern medical science has a has a lot
to gain from it. You know, it's it's it's frustrating
to to think about those decades in which you know,
less was being done with them. But but you know,
we could have easily remained in kind of a dark
age and had several more decades in which these substances

(12:41):
of not being studied. So it's a remarkable time really.
All Right, Well, I think before we dive into especially
psilocybin the psychedelics in general, maybe we should do a
little foundation work because I know one thing that you
were talking to me about that Terence mckennag gets into
a good bit and in his work is the idea
of like what is a drug? What are drug and
what do people see as drugs? Yeah, yeah, he he

(13:03):
had a lot of great thoughts on this, on this
matter that I think I really good sort of disrupting
the sort of like mental concrete that ends up getting
embedded in our head regarding the different substances that we
take into our body. So yeah, let's I think we
should talk about like what a drug is, because, for instance,
if you look at just a basics, say Webster's definition,

(13:23):
a drug is a medicine or other substance which has
a physiological effect when ingested or otherwise introduced into the body.
Now how this certainly applies to say cocaine or ibuprofen.
It also applies to coffee and alcohol. It applies to melotonin,
herbal supplements, chocolate, tea, wheat, grass shots, camerameal, sugar, licorice, oatmeal,

(13:45):
you name it. Yeah, we were talking the other day,
I know about it. Was it was it melotonin supplements.
You were looking at that? Oh no, I heard uh
an ad on the radio for them. Yeah that we're
calling them drug free and all these drugs people take
that advertise themselves a drug free, which I think is
just I'm not sure what people mean by that. I
think they mean maybe like not containing synthetically or lab

(14:08):
isolated chemicals that you can't pronounce the names of. Yeah,
it's you know, all natural or something. Well. Yeah, it's
weird how we we use the term drug to sort
of refer to things that are either in the domain
of the illegal is in like the War on drugs,
or something that is in the domain of medical professionals. Yeah,
maybe something that requires a prescription is produced by the

(14:29):
pharmaceutical industry. Yeah, but yeah, I don't see any reason
why these all natural substances are not drugs. They certainly
are drugs. I mean, I'm doing drugs right now. I've
got my coffee cup next to me, And the whole
drug free thing kind of reminds me of like the
people who say I don't put any chemicals in my body.
I know what they're talking about, Like they you know,
they want to eat sort of like all natural whole foods.

(14:51):
You know, I I'll eat an apple. I'm not going
to eat an apple bar that was made in a
factory and has all these chemical ingredients listed that I
can't renounce. You know, I don't know what that stuff is,
so I mean I understand that. And of course you know,
there there are some reasons that you might in truth
want to avoid certain kinds of industrial food additives. But
the whole idea that you don't put any chemicals in

(15:13):
your body is ridiculous. Yeah, And and of course we're
not arguing that one should put everything into your body
by any means that you know. And ultimately we all
have to draw lines in the sand concerning the sort
of thing and those those lines may you know, not
make you know, a whole lot of sense if you
really analyze them. But I think one of the important
things is to be able to realize where we're drawing
the line in the sand, and where that line is

(15:35):
being drawn for us by you know, other other parties
in society. But anyway, this is one of the the
the ideas that Terence McKenna discusses and Food of the Gods,
and I think before we go any any further, I
should just go ahead and like summarize like what this
book is about. It's kind of about a lot of things,
but but ultimately he has this central hypothesis that he's pushing. Um.

(16:00):
You know, he makes a passionate case for not only
humanities connection with psychedelic substances and the promise of their power,
but also with the notion that they played a role
in the emergence of consciousness. Yeah. Well, and sort of
like in language and and human intellectual abilities, right right, right,
UM's self reflection and language in particular. And Michael Paulan

(16:21):
actually mentions it in his book as well. He refers
to it as quote the epitome of all mico centric speculation. Right. Uh.
And really, you do encounter some people in this world
who maybe their enthusiasm for for psilocybin and the effects
of these psychoactive mushrooms or psychedelic mushrooms. Uh, you get
the sense that they have had such positive experiences with

(16:44):
them that it drives them to think about, you know,
mushrooms as a sort of like center of everything good
and holy in the world. I mean, in a way
that might be unfair. Maybe that's over psychologizing their their
hypotheses and points of view. But like for example, the
mycologist Pulse s Dame It's or Stammits who comes up
in Michael Pollan's book, who we've talked about on the
show before. I think we talked about him in our

(17:05):
Dune episode because I think he was friends with Frank Herbert. Yes,
I believe so. But you know, he's got a very
like mushrooms centric view of the world, where in a
way sort of mushrooms rule everything, and that the mushrooms
are like trying to communicate with us through these compounds
and all that, and mckennic kind of falls in this
category to he sort of like sees the mushroom regime

(17:26):
everywhere on Earth. Yeah, I think that's that's undeniable. At
the same time, I mean, he does make a very mean,
in a very robust case in this book. Again books,
so you know, a lot has happened since then. But
but as Michael Pollan also points out, you know, it's
ultimately not something that's not really susceptible to proof or disproof,

(17:47):
and ultimately McKinnon never really fills in the blanks on
how this would have actually affected biological evolution, right, So
you probably can't put a lot of stock in his
hypothesis being correct barring some other evidence that we're not
aware or yet. But basically you know, his idea is that, like, well,
humanity owes its mental and cognitive capacities to mushrooms because,

(18:08):
for example, I know, one of the arguments he adduces
is that because psilocybin, mushrooms caused the experience of synesthesia,
you know, the cross pollination of senses, so like colors
have sounds or or music has colors or whatever. You know, uh,
sounds have a taste or something. That this led to

(18:29):
the creation of language, because the language is a sort
of cross pollination between the idea of a sound and
the idea of a concept. And so this kind of
like uh, a mental boundary crossing that wouldn't have been
useful in animals, uh, suddenly is spurred by ingestion of
psychedelic substances in this case, I think psilocybin, and then

(18:50):
that leads to humans creating language. Again, I don't know
what the direct evidence for this would be. It's it's
like an interesting speculation, but I don't know how you
would prove it, right, Yeah, I think it. Ultimately you
would not be able to prove it or really disprove it,
and which makes it, I guess, kind of a safe
hypothesis in that regard, but also a hypothesis that will
probably never evolve beyond the hypothesis level. Yeah, this is

(19:14):
kind of stuck at the interesting speculation station. Yeah, and
it is interesting speculation. But anyway, I just want to
go ahead and describe what that is because I feel
like with McKinnes, especially depending on what you know about
him and his work, you might enter into it thinking
only about same machine elves and the time wave zero
and some of the the you know, the fringier things
that he discussed, the thing and you know, his discussion

(19:37):
two of things that he saw saying on d MT.
But but on the other hand, you know, he was
that was an accomplished ethnobotanist, and when he was talking
about about mushrooms, he certainly knew what he was talking about.
And uh, and he also just had a lot of
wonderful insight into just what was culturally going on and
had been going on at this point in time, especially

(19:58):
in the United States, concerning the separate of drugs. So
he points out that drug is a you know, is
at times an amorphous term that we used to apply
to certain substances, you know, especially if we want to
demonize one substance or elevate another exclusively to the domain
and control of medical professionals. But he writes this quote,

(20:19):
eating a plant or an animal is a way of
claiming its power, a way of assimilating its magic to
one's self. In the minds of preliterate people, the lines
between drugs, foods, and spices are rarely clearly drawn. The
shaman who gorges himself on chili peppers to raise inner
heat is hardly in a less altered state than the
nitrous oxide enthusiast after a long inhalation. In our perception

(20:43):
of flavor, in our pursuit of variety, in the sensation
of eating, we are markedly different from even our primate cousins.
Somewhere along the line, our new omnivorous eating habits and
our evolving brain, with its capacity to process sensory data,
were united in the happy no shin that food can
be experienced. Gastronomy was born, born to join pharmacology, which

(21:05):
must surely have preceded it, since maintenance of health through
regulation of diet is seen among many animals. That offers
you a little bit of a glimpse that you know.
McKenna has a fantastic way with words, and I think
he's also a fantastic public speaker. If you've ever seen
videos of him giving hists, you know which are you know,
he's one of those people who I think is able

(21:26):
to put things in a way that's captivating that maybe
makes the ideas uh shine as if they have more
merit than they would have put in a less captivating
way by another speaker. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, And you know
he's certainly there's a little bit of shamanistic flavor at
the beginning of that passage. But I think what he's
saying here, we can we can all really agree with.
I mean, we are what we eat in so many

(21:47):
many ways. You know, we're continually rebuilding our ephemeral bodies
out of the materials we consume, the chemicals and the nutrients.
And Kennal also said, quote the strategy of early hominid
omnivores was to eat everything that seemed food like in
to vomit whatever was unpalatable. Plants, insects, and small animals
found edible by this method were then inculcated into their diet.
I mean, that's certainly I see that in other animals.

(22:09):
You know, you think about the way even domestic dogs
who are tend to be quite well fed, you know,
like it's not like they're lacking for nutrition. But it's
just like if there's a thing that even might be,
they're gonna try to eat it. They're gonna give it
a shot, and if it doesn't work out, they just
vomit it up. Yeah, I mean, it's this is one
of those areas that it is I think, really remarkable
when we stop and try to imagine the process of

(22:33):
human beings, especially figuring out what they can eat, what
they can't eat, what what substances they can use just
to the right amount of and not kill themselves and
potentially you know, have some sort of benish official effect,
medicinal culinaria or otherwise. Uh, you know, because ultimately we're
talking about a long, multigenerational process of human beings figuring

(22:56):
out the properties of plants in their immediate surrounding and
then passing that knowledge on. And it's you know, it's
really it's it's enough to tempt us with the tales
of ancient astronauts, you know, the idea there was surely
some other force, some alien or some angel came to
us and told us what we could eat, but resist
that impulse. No, you're looking at real scientific labor in

(23:16):
the ancient world. Yeah, the kind of scientific labor that
was on the subject of the self and like putting
your own life on the line. Yeah. Absolutely. Anytime we
we touch on this topic, I'm always reminded of a
particular Chinese myth, uh, the mythical emperor shin Nong, the
divine farmer and ultimately the founder or the mythological founder

(23:37):
of Chinese herbal medicine as well as agriculture itself. There's
the link again between medicine and food. Yeah. Absolutely, and Uh. Anyway,
he's credited as having authored, you know, a couple of
really important books on you know, the herbal world. And
according to the myths, she Nong either tasted hundreds of

(23:59):
herbs or thrash them with a magic whip in order
to learn their properties. According to one legend, he consumed
seventy different poisons in a single day. Uh, in order
to just you know, continue this examination of the natural world.
I also ran across some variants of the story online
that mentioned him having a transparent stomach so that he

(24:21):
that allowed him to see you know how food is
being broken down in his body. But I didn't see that.
This is not referenced in either of the main Chinese
mythology textbooks that I m I frequently refer to, So
I don't know, you know, to what extenter's falidity to
do that, or if it's an accurate translation, etcetera. But still,
you know, in in mythology, Shinong is essentially classifying all drugs.

(24:43):
He's humanity's multigenerational process of food testing condensed into a
single individual. Because you know, of course climates change, Humans
move into new environments and destabilize their own environment. Ancient
people's would have figured out roughly what was in their
immediate vicinity, and and they would have perhaps tried to
take their important plants with them, but not every plan

(25:04):
is easily suited for agriculture or new environments, and new
plants would have continually presented themselves in the course of
their migration. You've got this image of Shinong here in
the outline, and he's just sticking something in his mouth
and grimacing. Yeah, there's some wonderful paintings and drawings of
Shinnong where you know, he seems to be just doing

(25:25):
the work, you know, just out there chewing on a
twig or a leaf here and there and and sensing
it out, seeing what, well, okay, what is this good for?
What can this be used for? What can this be
used as a treatment for? And uh And in the
writings attributed to him mentioned a host of different substances.
At one point, cannabis comes up and said it quote
will produce hallucinations if taken over a long term, it

(25:47):
makes one communicate with spirits and enlightens one's body. And
while cannabis is not generally considered a psychedelic, this does
bring us to contemplation of psychedelics, which are our primp
i'mory concern here in these episodes, especially the two major
psychedelics that have played a role in the often stunted
Western exploration of their potent powers to bring about a

(26:09):
different state of consciousness. All right, well, maybe we should
take a quick break and then when we come back
we can dive more into the question of what are psychedelics. Alright,
we're back. So we've been talking about psychedelics in this
first of our series exploring the subject, and I guess
let's go into the origin of this term. Why why

(26:30):
do people use the word psychedelic as opposed to other
terms that might mean similar things are the same thing. Well,
the term psychedelic derives from the Greek words for soul
or mind and manifesting, and this name was bestowed in
nine by British psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond. Yeah. Another frame for
the etymology is so it's mind manifesting. Of course, you

(26:53):
know the Greek see here smelled like psyche is a
term for mind or soul. Uh. The Greek word delun,
where the psychedelic part comes from, can mean multiple things,
might mean manifesting. It can also, I think, mean like
to reveal, to make visible, or make clear. And this
is interesting because it fits with the early uses of
psychedelics and psychiatry and neuroscience in the nineteen fifties and

(27:16):
sixties when they were considered a revolutionary research tool. And
multiple people, I think have made this comparison, but one
of them is the psychedelic enthusiast Stanislav Graff, who wrote
that quote the potential significance of LSD and other psychedelics
for psychiatry and psychology was comparable to the value of
the microscope for biology or the telescope for astronomy. Uh

(27:39):
so he's framing it as like a tool of magnification
and clarification. It's something that allows you to see farther
or see inside at a greater resolution. Yeah. Now, the
term psychedelic, you know, ended up taking on a lot
of additional baggage because this term was was definitely taken
up by the champion, by timoth the Leary. I know,

(28:01):
there's Timothy Leary. Of course, we have a couple of
episodes of stuff to blow your mind on him, um
that I recorded with Christian several years back, and as
we discussed there, like Leary, Leary ultimately I think did
a lot of damage to the perceptions of psychedelic he
became he was. He was ultimately more of a more
of a guru type as opposed to you know, you know,

(28:23):
a pure and dedicated scientist. He began as a you know,
Harvard academic researchers studying psychedelics. But yeah, he clearly he
became the dice word I think would be an enthusiast,
somebody who was clearly at a certain point not studying
the subject in an objective and dispassionate way, but was

(28:43):
more just sort of like an advocate for psychedelics, like
these things are great and everybody should be taken him right,
And then he did willingly embrace the the position of
being so sort of this leader almost this unofficial um
and you know guru figure that was the forefront of
this counterculture movement, both in in the the ups and

(29:04):
downs of that counterculture as well. Yeah, and so I
think this is your correct one reason why the term
psychedelic has acquired some perhaps negative baggage. I think sometimes
people think of that word more having to do with
like recreational and sort of music associated or party associated
uses of of these compounds that tend to cause you know,

(29:28):
hallucinations or highly altered states of consciousness. And I I
don't I don't think that's quite fair. I mean, I
think psychedelic is a good term, and I want to
keep using it throughout these episodes. Yeah, and I think
there's a reason that people have stuck with it despite
other terms having been presented. For instance, in Theogen's is
one that comes up the most and has been uh
taken out then championed by you know in some respects,

(29:50):
But more and more you do see people coming back
to U two psychedelics, and that's what we're going to
use in these episodes, and of course in Theogen's I
think one reason that's difficult is because in the agens
means like sort of like you know, God revealing, like
it conjures up, it brings up the gods or brings
up the divine right. It didn't bring up the nineteen

(30:12):
sixties as much. To its credit, like that's I think
the benefit of it. But then when he actually, uh,
you know, take it apart and look at what it means,
it is perhaps leaning more heavily into the mystic Yeah,
which is fine because I mean, to be fair, the
mystical experience is very important part of the sort of
research history of what the what these what affects these

(30:33):
drugs produced, and the most common reports about the effects
that they have on people's thinking and on their lives.
They very often do encourage types of mystical thinking. They
very often do lead to people reporting mystical experiences or
experiences that people you know, relate to God or God's
or some kind of divine spirit. But at the same time,
not everybody has those experiences on them, and not everybody

(30:57):
who has those kinds of experiences on them. Would it
tribute it to any kind of real spiritual force, though
a lot would so I think in the Agen's does
have the negative property of maybe assuming a little too
much of a thorough association with the spiritual um and so. So. Yeah,
I like the idea of psychedelics. It is. It is

(31:18):
mind revealing. Now, they're also sometimes called hallucinogens, you know,
just sort of roughly, which of course is is confusing
as well for starters. Something can be an hallucinogen and
not be a psychedelic compound, for sure, it isn't. Cannabis
sometimes classified as a hallucinogen. I think, I think I've
seen it classified as such. Yeah. One part of this,

(31:41):
of course, is you don't have to take a psychedelic
to have an audible or visual hallucination. There are many
other causes and conditions that can be involved, and you
can make a strong case that our default perception of
reality is nothing short of an hallucination. Likewise, psychedelics don't
always cause hallucinations. In fact, full blown hallucinations are actually uncommon,

(32:01):
and they're probably not going to be like the hallucinations
you've seen in a psychedelic film, right, I mean, I
think often the hallucinations that are depicted in psychedelic movies
are given far too um, far too concrete of a
character that makes sense, Like so you see a glass
dragon flying out of the Andromeda galaxy to eat your pain,

(32:23):
and you know, rebirth you as a fire child or something,
where Whereas that kind of thing you might see, especially
on some higher doses of some of these psychedelics, but
more often, you know, people especially on lower doses, will
have some states have altered perception, but they're not necessarily
going to see like whole concrete visions of agents and

(32:43):
objects coming towards them that aren't there. Yeah, I mean,
we have to cut films a little bit of slack,
I think, because ultimately it's a largely visual medium. That's
what they're telling their stories with, so of course they're
going to gravitate towards hallucinations and visualizations of psychedelic experience,
some of which are just laughable. Uh. And and occasionally

(33:04):
you'll have a film that that really does a good
job of capturing something that feels like an authentic psychedelic experience,
but I don't know, I find those to be few
and far between. Yeah. Oh, and I should also point
out that if you, when they're you classify psychedelic as
an hallucinogen, you're also kind of limiting it, you know,
because ultimately these substances do a number of different things

(33:27):
outside of something that you could even loosely describe as
an hallucination. Yeah. I mean again, I think psychedelic is
a good term. They are more generally mind revealing or
mind manifesting. Yeah. By downplaying the role of hallucinations, we
don't want to suggest that these drugs can't cause hallucinations.
They very often do, especially at higher doses, right, Yeah, absolutely,
especially when you're also things are a little different as well.

(33:50):
Discuss when you get into clinical situations where you know,
just the way that a particular substances is uh it
administered can make it more potent. How however, you know,
on the subject of visualization. UM. At that World Science
Festival panel that I attended, one of the speakers was
it was a British professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience

(34:12):
at the University of Sussex uh And L Seth, and
he pointed to the Google Deep Dream generator as actually
being a decent approximation of the sort of visuals that
can go on during a psychedelic experience. Um, I think
everybody's probably seen images or video that you utilize this
deep dream generator, but it's the kind of thing where

(34:35):
it's like there's a face of a dog and everything exactly. Yeah,
so if you've never seen it. Basically, what it was
was it was an algorithm that would take a photo
that you supplied, you know, you'd upload a photo, and
then you run it through the system. You could i
think determine like to what degree it would get, you know,
to how crazy it would get basically, and it would
start to reveal fractal patterns emerging from the lines and

(34:58):
boundaries in the m A and very often, yeah, like
faces and other recognizable forms that would show up in
images from around the internet would start showing up in
the image. You might see forms of plants, very often,
forms of animal faces, dog faces, and the couch cushions. Yeah. Yeah.
And this this absolutely matches up with with my experiences
where it's not like you're going, oh my goodness, there

(35:20):
are dogs everywhere, but it would be more like there's
a there's a fractal pattern to my immediate environment that
I that is not there usually, or it looks like
the grass is breathing, or you know, perhaps you're looking
at something like say a work of art, or in
my experience of hanging African mask and it seems to
be alive and a certain to a certain extent, not

(35:44):
in a way where you're like, oh my god, the
mask is coming alive, you know, or anything like that.
It's uh, it's uh, you know, I guess it's rather
hard to put into words, but there is a you know,
a sense of fractal life to everyday objects that is
that is not the are otherwise. Yeah, And I think
another way that the deep dream is appropriately compared to

(36:06):
psychedelics is that the deep dream generator, I think basically
worked by a recurrent pattern of extrapolation and amplification. So,
you know, it sees something that's zero point five percent
like a dog face, and it recognizes that because it's
tried to track a lot of dog faces across the Internet,
and it says, let's lean into that, and then it
makes it two percent like a dog face, then ten

(36:27):
percent like a price, and finds more dog faces in
what it's been extrapolating from the original image. So I
can't help but notice that, you know, one tendency of
the hallucinatory experience or of the psychedelic experience, seems to
be extrapolating and amplifying perceived significant patterns from random noise.
So let's take another step back and and talk just

(36:49):
in general about psychedelics and what particular substances we're talking about. Yeah,
I guess we we need to briefly address the chemistry
part of this, right, Yeah, So we're largely talking about
the the indules psychedelics. There's lysergic acid diathylamide l s D.
There's psilocybin, which occurs you know, naturally in um several
different varieties of mushrooms what I think two hundred different varieties.

(37:13):
Then there's also in in a di methyl trip tomine
which is d MT. There's uh the gain and they're
the beta carbo lines. The ones that we're going to
be discussing the most here are psilocybin, which again occurs
naturally in mushrooms. And then of course LSD, which is
is a synthetic psychedelic that was first generated by Albert

(37:34):
Hoffman in eight from lysergic acid, a chemical from the
for the fungus or god, which we've discussed on the
show before. H and Hoffman actually played an important role
in isolating the compounds from the psilocybies mushrooms as well. Yes, yeah,
so he sort of figures in both of the main

(37:54):
streams here. But one thing I want to make clear
that I didn't understand for a long time is that
there there is not just one species of mushroom that
is the psilocybin mushroom and it's that species. There is
this whole class of the philocopies or the psilocybin mushrooms
that is a you know, a multi species, huge range
of hundreds of varieties of mushrooms that have these related effects.

(38:18):
I think mainly based on the compounds silicon and psilocybin,
which breaks down into silicin in the body. D MT,
by the way, is a naturally occurring compound as well.
It's found in many different plants and animals and is
found up inside the human brain as well. But it
was also first synthesized in ninety one by chemist Richard
Hillmuth Frederick Matzk there. But there are plenty of other

(38:40):
additional psychedelics that that occur and that pop up in
the research and all there that occur naturally in the world.
There the ib A gain substances that are found in
two related African and South American tree genera UM mostly
known as an aphrodisiac in Africa, but it also has
psychedelic properties that higher doses. Uh, there's a There's the

(39:00):
hallucinogenic mescaline, which is found in the spineless cactus pot.
It's a fin ethylamine, as is m d m A,
as is methamphetamine, and as are a host of other drugs,
including just like basic decongestions. Uh, yeah, you mentioned m
d m A. Yeah, and Christian did a whole couple
of episodes I think MM years ago. Yeah, and we
we're not really focusing on m D m A here,

(39:22):
but you know, it is also a powerful Schedule one
substance with some promising possibilities for therapeutic therapeutic use and
also some promising history of therapeutic use. But it kind
of fell victim to the same anti drug efforts and
the sort of moral panic that was associated with with
the hallucinogens as well. But according to Stephen Ross, m D.

(39:46):
Of the n y U Pilocybin cancer anxiety study. Speaking
at the two thousand nineteen World Science Festival, he said
that we're you know, there's a very strong chance we're
going to see M d M A rescheduled in the
next couple of years due to uh, you know, the
promising ref church that's going on using yet you know,
particularly dealing I believe with PTSD, and you're talking there
about it being reclassified as a less dangerous and less

(40:09):
legally prohibited drug in the United States, because a Schedule
one in the US means like there's nothing, there's nothing
you can do with it, there's not even like a
medical use for it. Uh and uh. I think in
in some times in the past and to some degree
still in the present, the schedule one classification I think
is treated more as a sort of punitive category than

(40:30):
I say, truly you know, research or science based category. Right.
For instance, So at cannabis schedule one, in d m
A schedule one, psilocybin schedule one, LSD schedule one, cocaine
schedule two, there you go. Interesting, Well, since we're gonna
be focusing more on psilocybin mushrooms than on other psychedelics,
I also thought it might be useful to just quickly
mention a few of its more straightforward medically recognized effects

(40:53):
and medical significance before we get on into the uh
the more phenomenological common reports. So I mentioned this minute ago,
I think, but the primary compounds responsible for the psychedelic
effects of psilocybin mushrooms are the compound psilocybin and silisin,
which ultimately amount to sort of the same things. Since
psilocybin breaks down into silicon once inside the body, silicon

(41:15):
is a more potent compound, but it occurs in smaller
original quantities within the mushroom flesh. UH, and compared to
almost all other known drugs, psilocybin has an exceptionally low
potential for abuse and exceptionally few known risks. According to
the University of Maryland Center for Substance Abuse Research quote,

(41:36):
there are no reports that psilocybin mushrooms are psychologically or
physically addictive, and use does not lead to dependence. For
several days following the use of mushrooms, users may experience
a period of psychological withdrawal and have difficulty discerning reality.
So that's like a potential drawback. But right the way
I've seen it described is that there's there's virtually no

(41:59):
physical uh ramifications, you know, like in terms of like
just physiological damage to the body as you would encounter
with various other substances. That's that's not the risk. There
is like a small risk uh psychologically, especially for namely
for individuals with a family history of say psychosis or

(42:19):
um schizophrenia. Right. So, no psychoactive drug is completely without risks.
And we're not encouraging people to take psilocybin, mushrooms or
any other drug. If you decide to take a psychedelic
any psychedelic compound you or any compound at all, really
you should thoroughly research it's its effects for yourself, any
possible risk factors from trustworthy and science based sources. Right.

(42:42):
And I think this is an area where, like people
talking about recreational drug use, I think that can be
it can ultimately be kind of damaging because it implies
that powerful substances like this can be purely recreational. It's
kind of like are you flying this F fourteen fighter
jet recreationally or you know, or you taking it seriously?
Like you know, it's a powerful thing. It's a powerful tool. Uh,

(43:06):
you should if you're going to choose to engage with it,
do so with with forethought exactly. So, yeah, like you
were just sort of alluding to. While pseulocybin has an
exceptionally low level of recognized risk when compared with other drugs,
it still is possible to experience negative psychological consequences. For example,
if you have pre existing risk factors like high anxiety
or past episodes of derealization, then, of course also we

(43:28):
should just mention the sort of practically associated risks, as
the mycologist Paul Stamitz makes clear, psychedelic species of philocopies.
You know, the psilocybin mushrooms look extremely similar to many
other species of poisonous little brown mushrooms that can lead
to an agonizing death if ingested. So people who plan
to take psilocybin mushrooms should get them from an experienced,

(43:50):
knowledgeable source who knows exactly how to identify them reliably.
You don't want somebody who doesn't know what they're doing
foraging psilocybin mushrooms. For of course, when you have substances
outlawed um, that's kind of the thing a lot of
people end up falling back on. So I mean, that's
one of the other benefits of I think personally, of
decriminalizing this sort of thing, yeah, I would agree. Now. Also,

(44:10):
according to the Maryland Center, there are plenty of possible
physiological effects of ingestion, depending on tons of different factors
like the exact species of mushroom you're dealing with and
the preparation method, which you know can affect these, but
they include, just to read through a few of these, nausea, vomiting,
abdominal cramps and diarrhea, muscle relaxation, weakness and twitches, drowsiness, dizziness,

(44:32):
lack of coordination, lightheadedness, pupil dilation, dry mouth, facial flushing.
You might have increased heart rate or blood pressure, body temperature, sweating, chills, shivering,
numbness of the tongue, lips, or mouth, and then feelings
of physical heaviness or immobility, um or feelings of lightness
or floating uh. And then of course that you get

(44:52):
to the psychological consequences. These aren't all the possibilities, but
just to mention a few, you of course have the
possibility of hallucination and heightened sensory perceptions where maybe colors
seem more vivid or sounds are more cute flavors, more
explosive smells are stranger. We mentioned earlier synesthesia, the cross
sensory contamination colors make sounds, sounds have colors, that kind

(45:15):
of thing. The lack of ability to focus is commonly
cited alterations and perception of space and time. You might
kind of like time seems dilated or sped up. Anxiety
and restlessness, or a sense of detachment from the self
or from the surroundings, including the concept known as ego loss,
which we'll get into in more detail later. But beyond

(45:37):
all those sort of like top line descriptions of psychological consequences,
I think maybe we should take a break, and when
we come back we can discuss in a little more detail,
like the kinds of common reports that people actually make
about their experiences with psychedelics and and the more complex
phenomenological responses to them. Thank thank you. All Right, we're back.

(46:00):
We're talking about psychedelics and some of the we're about
to get into some of the common reports about the
the the psychological effects of taking them. Yeah. Now, I
we are talking sort of about psychedelics in general, but
with a special emphasis on psilocybin mushrooms, or the philosopies, right,
and uh, you know, and we should probably mentioned, you know,

(46:21):
one of the reasons we focused on on psilocybin but
also l s D to a certain extent, is that
when you look at the studies that we're done with
these early on, like you know, in the the fifties
and in early sixties, when they were when they were
you know, widespread studies being they were looking into psychedelics,
they were mostly using LSD because that was what was
readily available at the time. Today's studies are going to

(46:44):
be almost exclusively using psilocybin for a couple of different
reasons that will explore later. Yeah. I think we're going
to especially get into those more recent studies maybe in
our third episode. So yeah, so what what are these
common reports the phenomenological reports. One thing that I think
we should emphasize upfront is the thing that a lot
of people maybe who would take these for the first time,

(47:06):
don't quite realize is the extreme importance of what's known
in the psychedelic literature is set and setting. So the
psychedelic drug is a fairly reliable gateway to an altered
state of consciousness, possibly containing hallucinations. Uh, and feelings that
parallel the classical forms of mystical experience. You know, we'll
we'll get into more on the mystical experience in a

(47:27):
minute here. But the experience produced by the compound is
not standardized by the psychopharmacology itself. It appears to be
extremely sensitive to external factors like the personality, the emotions,
the thoughts and expectations of the person ingesting the compound. Uh.
You know, this is referred to as the set or
the mindset, and the physical environment and stimuli encountered while

(47:51):
on the trip, which is the setting. Uh. And in
my experience, a hallmark of the majority of especially negative
experiences people report with psychedelics come from inattention to set
and setting, right. Yeah, Like I remember speaking to somebody
and they said that, like they had a terrible experience
on mushrooms or E. L S D and uh. And

(48:12):
but but the the setting that they had was like
really trying to drive away from a firework show and
having their car overheat out side of the road. That's
a terrible, terrible set and setting. Yeah. I mean this
might seem kind of obvious, but like these are the
kind of things that if someone is going to experiment
with them, and in addition to all the you know,
research you should do beforehand, making sure that you feel

(48:33):
safe and you know what you're doing and all that,
it's also important to pay attention to set and setting,
to approach it with the right mindset, maybe to approach
it in the company of someone who can be a
positive guide for you, and also to approach it within
a setting that feels positive and comfortable, such as a
place where you feel at ease and at home, maybe
with access to nature and natural settings. People often report

(48:57):
wanting to be outside, wanting to be among plants and things.
And it's interesting how all of these these things are
matching up with some of the uh what really most
of the the traditional ritualistic and shamanistic practices concerning these
substances that were around for thousands and thousands of years
before you know, anybody thought about going to woodstock or

(49:17):
burning man right, I mean, very often these compounds were
ingested as part of a ritual and a huge part
of what rituals are. I mean, even outside the consumption
of psychedelics are set and setting manipulations. What is it
when you go into a Gothic cathedral and there is music,
you know, their sacred sounding music echoing throughout the stone

(49:38):
architecture in the room is dim and lit by candles.
And someone passes you by with a sensor. You know
that incense smoke is coming out of and and it
alters your senses with the smells and the sites and
the sounds. This is creating a sort of a set
and setting for you to have a slight mystical experience
even though you're not ingesting psychoactive compounds. No. Well, but

(50:00):
then again, when I go to church, they always have
coffee out front, sugar and cookies for the kids. There's tea,
and if you're going to church in the Middle Ages,
you might be getting some of that ergic rye always
always a potential risk. But yeah, I mean that's just
one example. I mean a huge part of what people
do in religious rituals. I think his manipulation of set

(50:21):
and setting to create a sort of sacred or altered
mind state in which you have a certain kind of experience.
One thing I wanted to talk about is something that
Michael Paullen mentions and how to change your mind. At
one point, he's describing his own personal experiments with psilocybin.
At one point, I know, he talks about how he
he took someone he was much younger, and he had
kind of a bad time because he was out away

(50:43):
from home. I think he was out in a park
in New York City and he was getting worried about
if people could tell when they were looking at it.
Sounds like he was not in a comfortable environment. Yeah, well,
I think he were he related to and one was
further out of the city and one was in the park.
And the one in the park was a little more
anxious because it was like, oh, can they tell that
I'm in drugs? Thing? But he also describes one that
he did much later as an adult, when he was

(51:04):
preparing to write the book, And so he describes the
altered sensory and conceptual experiences that he has on the drug.
This is interesting not as hallucinations, but as quote projections,
and so he says, you know, projections are determined largely
by his physical surroundings and by his own present thoughts
and preoccupations. He defines a projection as quote when we

(51:27):
mix our emotions with certain objects that then reflect those
feelings back to us so that they appear to glisten
with meaning. So again, you know, he's not seeing the
dragon flying out of the Andromeda galaxy. Uh. Instead he
sees two different trees standing in a meadow when he
feels deep insights about his parents looking at these two trees.

(51:48):
And this experience is largely determined not just by the drug,
but by the environment that he's in and what's his preoccupations,
what's on his mind. But certainly set and setting our
are essential. Really and in all the literature concerning psychedelic experience,
be it you know, ancient rituals, counterculture usage, usages of
the substances, or the various clinical trials that are ongoing. Now. Yeah,

(52:11):
so let's go to the next big common report that's
pretty interesting. This one we should call in iff ability.
This extremely common report is that the psychedelic experiences one
either difficult or impossible to put into words, or two,
if it is put into words, the words do not
accurately capture the nature of the experience. And and this

(52:33):
is interesting in the way that it's both similar and
dissimilar to everyday experience. Is totally mundane ones you know
we're all familiar with You were hanging out with some
friends and something happened, and you know you have an
experience that has features that are hard to put into words,
like anytime you're telling a personal story and you end
with the conclusion, well, I guess you had to be there.
You're saying, well, you're saying there was something interesting or

(52:57):
funny or notable about the experience the you don't know
how to recreate with words, and that maybe your shortcoming.
Maybe you're not very good with words and you can't
do it, or maybe there's something that nobody could adequately
put into words. Or I always am suspicious. Maybe they're
just too lazy to tell me that you not care
enough about conveying this experience to maybe you can't just

(53:18):
take take a few steps back, put it, put it
in some better words, and then have another go at it.
Don't play so holy. I know you've said it. I
know you've said it at some point. I don't know, Um,
I don't. I don't remember having said it, but I
may have well said it. You are very good with words. Well,
I think there is a tendency with a background in writing,
is that you tend to think that writing can do anything,

(53:40):
that anything can be captured in words. But then again,
it's it's interesting to to then turn that on its
head and think about what our words to do. Our
words don't always sometimes they do capture an experience, and
in capturing it, they cage it, and they cage it
within the limitations of those words, you know. So we're
so used to doing this with though a lot of

(54:00):
different experiences, we don't even think about how we're we're
taking something that was observed. We're taking this this experience
of reality that is rather different than you know from
the paragraph that you create out of it. But we
think of that paragraph isn't accurate depiction of reality? Yeah,
I mean, something of course is always lost in the
translation to words. And everybody has had this experience every

(54:22):
now and then of not being able to explain things.
But it is notable how often, how almost always, ineffability
emerges as one of the most salient features of psychedelic experience.
You pretty much always just had to be there, uh,
you know, you had to be me basically, is the
only way you can understand what the experience was. And often,

(54:42):
if you at least in my experience, if you read
a description of somebody else's experience with LSD or psilocybin,
that it was incredibly profound and meaningful and notable to them.
You might think, Okay, I don't get what's so profound
about this. Something important is lost in the translation of
the experience in to a verbal narrative. Well, I mean
it's kind of like dreams, right, I mean, you know,

(55:04):
there's the old thing that you know, there are the
old observation that we we only find our own dreams
interesting and we're not interested in or we don't understand
other people's dreams. More certainly, the sort of you had
to be there that applies to dreams all the time.
I'm I certainly, I'm always having dreams that when you're
having them, they're profound or scary or frightening or beautiful
or weird, And then when you try and describe them

(55:26):
later outside of the trappings of dream, you realize that
sounds kind of hokey. Yeah, there's a quality that you
can't really identify in words. And here here's an interesting distinction.
Maybe we can come back to this as the episodes
go on. But I wonder, is this quality of ineffability
that's so common to psychedelic experience because we don't have
the vocabulary yet, or because there is a quality of

(55:48):
the experience that's inherently indescribable in any words. I mean,
I've heard some psychedelic enthusiasts frame it in the first way.
It's like, you know, there's someone who's quoted in Hollin's book.
I think it might have been Bob Jesse, but I
don't want to it could have been somebody else. But anyway, Uh,
he's describing psychedelic experiences and saying, you know, it's like
you took a paleolithic person and then transported them through

(56:12):
time to modern day Manhattan and sat them down, let
them look around, and and then sent them back and
had them try to explain their experience. They wouldn't have
the words to describe what they were looking at cell
phones and skyscrapers and all that. So that's one way
of looking at why psychedelic experiences are hard to describe.
It's like we we don't have the words to put
it into yet. But there's another way of looking at

(56:33):
it says, no, it's not that we lack the words.
It's just that it can't be put into words. There's
a there's a permanently irresolvably unexplainable quality to the experience. Well,
it's kind of in a way maybe too. It's we're
removed of some of the shackles of of language and
our linguistic thinking for a little bit. You know. It's
kind of like you go on a trip and your

(56:53):
cell phone battery is dead. You don't bring back any
pictures because your cell phone wasn't operational during that time.
You know. That's interesting, Yeah, Paul. And by the way,
there was an excellent interview with him from Terry Gross
on Fresh Air, and in that he talks about this, uh,
the the ineffable aspect of the experience, and he mentions
that William James said that the mystical experience is ineffable,

(57:15):
yet we try very hard to effit, of which I
thought was was clever. Yeah, that is good. William James
is going to come up a lot in the in
the next few minutes. But you know, I think back,
you know, just on the power of language and and
and also you have to I always have to realize that,
you know, there are plenty of very talented writers and
speakers who have discussed this, people that that surely have

(57:35):
the tools to communicate what they experienced. But then again,
like Terence McKenna, I think is an example of someone
who you know, he only speaks of the ineffable rarely
and is otherwise more than up to the task of
discussing and describing what he experienced on psychedelics or you know,
interpreting and reinterpreting what he experienced. But even he at
times kind of falls back on the hey, look, you

(57:56):
had to be there explanation, particularly when he was talking
about experiencing this other like the idea of like experiencing
an other entity while on d MT he was, he
kind of sort of leaves it with with like, hey,
you try it as well, you tell me what it is. Well,
that experience of the other, I think is the next
thing I want to get into. Oh yeah, you're right.

(58:16):
This does flow directly into the next area where you're
going to discuss. Yeah. So the next feature that's a
common phenomenological report of the psychedelic experiences verticality, That's what
i'd call it. William James called this the noetic quality.
So this feature of psychedelic experience, which has long interested me,
is the way that a lot of people emerge from

(58:39):
their experiences on psilocybin or on LST or something, believing
not just that they had an experience that was fun
or was interesting or was unique, but that they learned
something crucial and objectively true, that they acquired real, true
information or genuine understanding that they did not have before. Uh.

(59:02):
And you know, so the American psychologist William James, we've
mentioned a couple of times already, he called this the
no edic quality, and he noted very pointedly that it's
different from the way people feel about dreams. Where you
go into a dream, you might have a very altered
state of consciousness, some strange things happen. You feel maybe
in the dream like you learn things that are important,

(59:24):
But you almost never wake up from a dream and think,
you know, I learned objectively true information from the dream,
right Like, there's there's this knowledge, there's this understanding that
it was not reality. Even if in the more you know,
extreme cases of nightmares or disturbing dream content, we might
still feel shaken by it. I mean, we've all I

(59:44):
think at that experience where like the dream leaves you,
it affects you and it takes maybe a day to
shake it off, but you're not. You're not viewing as it.
It's like having seen a horror movie that disturbed you,
as opposed to, oh, my goodness, Jason Vordies attacked me.
You easily discard the dreams nonsensical. Um. Now, not everybody
does this. I mean some people think they get you know,

(01:00:06):
prophetic visions and dreams and stuff. And this is usually
part of some kind of supernatural worldview in which you
believe that there are gods that are communicating with you
and all that. But people don't typically uh go from
you know, not believing in supernatural conveyances and communications to saying, oh,
a dream taught me something objectively true about the universe.

(01:00:28):
But a commonly reported type of psychedelic experience, for example,
is the feeling of having been put in contact with
or in the presence of some other entity, frequently interpreted
as God or as some you know, embodied form of
an ideal like love, or an embodied form of the
universe or some kind of universal consciousness, or as maybe

(01:00:51):
a loved one who has died, or as some more
obscure others like Terrence mckinna's machine elves. You know, he
talked about taking d M T and just encountering these
other entities, the machine elves or the you know whatever
he called them, right, yeah, and the foot of the gods.
I don't think he refers to them and as machine
elves there, but he discusses briefly the other that has

(01:01:12):
experienced through d m T. And ultimately he's like, hey,
try yourself, set aside three minutes, eight minutes of your
time and go try it for yourself, and you tell
me what you experienced. Yeah. And so the really interesting
thing here is that so many people come out of
these types of experience is not just thinking wow, that
was an interesting hallucination, like they were watching a movie,
but believing they've actually been made aware of the real

(01:01:35):
existence of a real other entity and carrying this belief
of acquired knowledge with them after the effects of the
drug have worn off. Another way, I would say veridicality
presents his uh in ineffable perceptions of the value of
statements and insights. An example of this would be maybe
a person on a psychedelic substances realizes that, you know,

(01:01:57):
some cliche they've heard a million times, realizes that God
is love and they may have heard this a million
times before, but suddenly the same statement is interpreted as
a profound insight that's revealing in true in ways that
can't really be explained. But you have the feeling that
you've discovered a great truth, even if others, you know,

(01:02:18):
in communicating it to them, they might not see it
as as insightful as you do. Another interesting feature of
this noetic or vertical quality of psychedelic experiences that it
often feels kind of gnostic to me, I mean nastic
in the religious sense, of course. Gnosticism was an ancient
religion in which some form of salvation relied on acquiring

(01:02:39):
secret knowledge or esoteric dogmas and rights that were only
revealed to initiates. Why, you know, there was sort of
like the false, uh, fraudulent public face of the religion
that was for just all the people hanging out and
listening in the crowds, and then there were the real
dogmas and the real truths about you know, the heavens
and what you do to get there. The are sort

(01:03:00):
of only talked about in secret if you're one of
the in crowd. And it's not just that many people
think they've gained objectively true information from psychedelic experiences. It's
often interpreted as a sort of deep secret that they've
been allowed to glimpse, like the curtain has been lifted
for them, and they are they've been let in on
the secret. Yeah, they've seen through the illusion of of

(01:03:23):
perceived reality and maybe had some glimpse that absolute reality. Right.
So a really common version here is the idea that
people have psychedelic experiences and then afterwards emerged with a
strong conviction that there's more to life than what we see,
or that there's some dimension of existence that's beyond the
better understood material dimension of existence. In the words of

(01:03:46):
William James, the experience quote forbids a premature closing of
our accounts with reality. Oh that's nice and and certainly
the history of psychedelic research is filled with examples of
this as well. You know, often very scientifically minded individuals,
you know, emerging with a newfound or developing or enhanced
sense of either the mystic or often is the case,

(01:04:08):
you know, a connection with nature. And there there could
be multiple things going on here. Either way, it's interesting.
I mean, one way of looking at it is that
psychedelic experiences do actually reveal something true to people. In
another way of looking at it is, there's a fairly
consistent psychological effect they produce, creating the illusion that something

(01:04:29):
objectively true has been revealed. But either way, it's very
psychologically important and powerful and fascinating that they do this right.
I mean, you could to ground it more in some
of the the science we've touched on on the show before,
like plasticity. You can look at it from a plasticity
standpoint and you could say, well, you know, it's it's
allowing the mind to change, you know, I mean, that's

(01:04:51):
kind of a Pollen's whole point in the title is
it's not so much these individual substances and what they do.
It's not like and that's certainly one of the hallmarks
of the studies will get too later, but it's the
state of mind that it puts one in and what
can be done with an individual when they are in
that state of mind exactly. I mean. One of the

(01:05:11):
interesting things about the psychedelic states of mind that that
of course is brought up by lots of authors, is
the ways that they parallel what William James wrote about
is the traditional qualities of mystical experience, you know, profound
religious experiences that people have Both of these first two
characteristics we've been talking about, ineffability and the vertical or

(01:05:32):
no edic quality, are also the first two markers of
mystical experience that James writes about in the book The
Varieties of Religious Experience, which is published around the turn
of the twentieth century. Now, of ineffability, James writes, quote,
mystical states are more like states of feeling than states
of intellect. No one can make clear to another who
has never had a certain feeling in what the quality

(01:05:55):
or worth of it consists, and of the no edic
quality or the vertical quality. Writes that mystical experiences quote
our illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate
though they remain, and as a rule they carry with
them a curious sense of authority for after time. This
reminds me that, you know, the one of the key

(01:06:15):
aspects of traditional psychedelic use, some of the more thought
out counterculture uses as well as the clinical uses today
is what occurs after the trip, this period of consolidation
and integration where you're you're stopping and saying, okay, what
did that mean? How how shall I interpret this? And
then and then move on and apply it to my life.

(01:06:36):
I think we have to realize that, you know, our
memories of psychedelic experiences are still memories, and they still
can be altered by the mind, and will be altered
by the mind every time we draw them back out again.
Of course, yeah, as any experience would be. Just as
a funny note, one thing I thought we should mention
is that, you know, William James, he's writing around this
turn of the twentieth century, and James was not afforded

(01:07:00):
the many wonderful options for chemical alterations of consciousness that
later researchers where apparently he did a lot of nitrous oxides.
You read William James, it's funny to imagine him trying
to like talk about this experience firsthand and just doing
whipp its um. But we should mention also James has

(01:07:20):
two other markers of mystical experience, so I'm not necessarily
counting these as as clear markers of psychedelic experiences, but
just to to continue his exploration of mystical experiences since
there's been a lot of overlap so far. The other
two James mentions are transiency and passivity, so transiency means
the experience is time limited. You know. It's true enough,

(01:07:41):
of course for the trip length of psychedelic drugs, UH
doesn't seem a super relevant. But what does seem a
little more relevant is James's comment that while the experience
itself doesn't last forever quote from one recurrence to another,
it is susceptible of continuous development in what has felt
as inner richness and imports. And Paullen quotes this section

(01:08:02):
as well. And then finally, there's passivity as a James
and marker of mystical experience, which means the person having
the mystical experience believes their will has been subverted or
held in abeyance by a superior power. And there are
some psychedelic experiences that have this quality. You could view
it as somewhat, though not exactly parallel to the next

(01:08:24):
characteristic we're about to mention. Yeah, and I think set
and setting likely you know, play a key role here
as well, though, though it seems to be very difficult
to shake with with more intense experiments. UH. Albert Hoffman
reflected this, you know, personifying LSD to a certain extent,
it's like a thing that found him and uh and
mckinna certainly discussed it in these terms as well. Yeah.

(01:08:45):
So the next big thing that is this very interesting
common feature of especially maybe higher doses of psychedelic experience, uh,
is the idea of loss of ego. Uh. It's it's
affected by the ineffability criteria. And I would say, because
it's often hard to describe what this is like, but
many who have had psychedelic experiences report the dissolution of

(01:09:08):
the self, having consciousness reduced to a state of experience
in which there is no eye anymore, there is no
me uh. And one way I've always interpreted this is
that some psychedelics have the power to reduce or eliminate
the self world distinction. You know that we have this
categorical barrier we put up in our minds between everything

(01:09:28):
that is not me and then me. And what happens
when that distinction sort of gets blurred or erased. Yeah,
I mean I can certainly relate to this from experience
with yoga and meditation. Um. You know, when not every time,
but occasionally occasionally about like a really good yoga session,
I can reach that point where it's you know, I

(01:09:49):
I lose the sense of me, it's a wonderful experience
that that can be I think difficult to put into word.
I mean, the only way you can describe it is
like is ego loss or some use the term ego death,
which think is a little it's a little harsh. Let's
not pull death into this whole situation experience without a self. Yeah. Yeah.
One way that Terence McKenna describe these these substances and

(01:10:10):
others you describe them as being boundary dissolving uh substances,
and talked about their boundary dissolving properties, which I think
is is a perfect description the boundary between you and others,
between you and nature um or you and the cosmos.
It seems to dissolve, so the fortress of the self
crumbles away only for a little bit. And and of

(01:10:31):
course this sort of experience, like a lot of the
experiences involved in the psychedelic experience, you know, can can
can of course be achieved via other means, but is
a number of these commentators have pointed out these these
chemical shortcuts are are shortcuts, but they're also kind of
like high speed shortcuts. They're kind of like express lanes
for better or worse. They require a lot less work

(01:10:52):
than achieving loss of ego through meditation or something, and
a lot less practice, I would say, probably too, right,
But but again, I do we love this description of
something being a boundary dissolving substance or even just a
boundary dissolving experience. And I feel like, you know, you know,
putting aside you know, psychedelic substances entirely, I feel like
we do need more boundary dissolving experiences in life because

(01:11:16):
we just throw up so many boundaries between ourselves and
each other and and uh certainly against the nature. Well, yeah,
I mean this is a common I think way that
we will talk more in subsequent episodes about interesting research
about the ways that psychedelics have been shown to have
the potential to actually change adult personality, which is a
fascinating property and makes them kind of worth their weight

(01:11:38):
in gold. Right. But yeah, I mean some of the
ways we can see that as uh so in the
boundary dissolving property to whatever extent that does exist between humans,
I think tends to lead people who consume psychedelics to
have a more communitarian mindset after using them. Uh. The
nature boundary dissolution thing is very interesting because you very
often see uh people having stronger affinities with the rest

(01:12:02):
of nature, with plants and animals and the natural environment
after taking these substances. Michael Paulan in his book compares
this dissolution of the boundary with nature to one of
my favorites, Alexander von Humboldt, who you know. I think
he doesn't name the book, but I think in the
book he alludes to having read The Invention of Nature
by Andrea Wolfe, that biography of Humboldt that I recommended

(01:12:24):
a couple of years ago and is still a great
read if you get a chance. But von Humboldt said,
you know, one of the great realizations is that you
know you are not in nature. He says, I am nature,
and that psychedelics seem to encourage people to think this way.
One last interesting common report is this thing that is
sometimes I think termed the afterglow. Worth mentioning that some

(01:12:48):
users of psychedelic substances report additional subjective experiences after they've
returned to their baseline state of consciousness. So you're no
longer experiencing maybe sensory hallus nations or significantly altered states
of consciousness, but after you're done with the psychedelic trip
on LST or psilocybin. Sometimes people reported that the world

(01:13:11):
just seems very bright and alive and wonderful and full
of possibilities. That Michael Paullen describes this is quote the
opposite of a hangover. It's kind of like the windows
have been opened and allowed the air to circulate, and
then after the windows are closed once more or mostly closed, Uh,
the air is still fresh, the air is still renewed.
And and this brings me back to you know what

(01:13:31):
I just said earlier about consolidation and integration. And I
think this is gonna be very important to keep in
mind as we consider you know, traditional shamanistic and uh,
you know, and and scientific uses of these substances. You know,
both in the scientific research is going on today and
also the sort of underground therapy sessions, uh that are
as well that Michael Paoulan writes about in his book

(01:13:52):
You Know What. Where afterwards, during this afterglow, you ask, well,
what did I learn from the experience? What can I
bring with this, bring out of this into the waking world. Uh.
It reminds me of one of Alan Watt's famous quotes
about you know, in which it compared psychedelic experience to
a scientist using a microscope. Yeah, yeah, And the idea
being that a biologist will use the microscope, but then

(01:14:13):
but he's not gonna have they're not gonna have their
eye glued to the microscope. They have to leave the microscope.
Then in order to understand nature as it is conceived of,
you know, outside of the microscopic or telescopic experience, right,
you don't really see or observe just by looking at something.
You have to also step back and think about what

(01:14:33):
you saw right now. A couple of other bits of
insight that were brought up in that World Science Festival panel,
and el Seth mentioned that there is increased randomness where
there can be and uh and and he also pointed
out that, you know this, our sense of self is
ultimately a perception and the default mode network plays a
big role in it. He said, it's important to point

(01:14:54):
out that the self is not the default fault mode network.
We shouldn't like draw two strong of a comparison between
the two, but there's still a strong connection. And he said,
the psychedelics temporarily reorganize these networks, you know, so so
forget you know, new hallucinations. They mess with the primary
hallucination of the self, the hallucination that we have day

(01:15:16):
in and day out, you know, the idea that we're
set off from the natural world, that we're set off
from each other. So that's I think that's a really
interesting way of looking at it. Don't think about the
new hallucination that is brought on by a psychedelic, but
the primary hallucination that may be disrupted, and then what
we can learn from that. Well, yeah, I mean one
of the funny things is that, so the the idea

(01:15:38):
of seeing hallucinations while you're on a psychedelic can sort
of bias you toward thinking that what psychedelics do is
they give you an inaccurate perception of nature because of course,
you know, you hallucinate things on psychedelics that there's no
way to show that they're actually physically there. But at
the same time, you shouldn't conclude from that the corollary
that the standard, like the default state of consciousness, is

(01:16:03):
accurate and the altered state of consciousness is thus estranged
or inaccurate. It might see things in the physical environment
that aren't physically there, but it's perception of the self
and how the self works maybe no less accurate or
maybe more accurate than your default state, right, And then
a lot of this too. It's like we're not necessarily
talking about a matrix scenario where you know, it's like, oh,

(01:16:25):
now I see the real world, but like the details
that the emphasis is that we play some things, etcetera,
the values that we place. Another individual in that panel
World Science Festival was Berkeley professor of psychology and philosophy
Alison Gottnick, who we we've also discussed in the program
here before because she deals a lot with the minds
of young children and developing mind states. You know, she

(01:16:46):
discussed how it's it's how these how psychedelics seem to
open up exploratory possibilities, uh in individuals, you know, in
keeping with the plasticity of in the mind of a
young child. She calls this lantern consciousness and you know,
comparing it to the illumination of a lantern. And she says,
she said before, that babies and young children are basically

(01:17:09):
tripping all the time. They are basically having a psychedelic experience,
which is why you know, children can be so trying
because they're just really will not boil down and be
a part of the rational world. They're continually in psychedelic
exploration mode. And so maybe you know, part of it
is that psychedelics put one or allow one to connect

(01:17:29):
maybe in a more adult way, with that same level
of plasticity. Yeah, I mean one of the things that's
commonly it's a metaphor that's often used by psychologist psychiatrists
who are interested in this mode of thinking that psychedelics, uh,
sort of like they break the automatic cliches of connection
that you make in your mind, so you're able to
see familiar objects as if you're seeing them for the

(01:17:50):
first time. And our mind is just full of these
nonverbal cliches of connections we make between things. When we
see a pen, we know it's for writing, and you
just see it and like you ignore all of the
other strange associations you might make about the form of
the pen in your hand. But the psychedelics, like they
break that automatic connection, and instead you see it as

(01:18:11):
this radically ambiguous form that appears before you, and you
can make connections to all kinds of things. All right, well,
we're gonna call this episode right here, but we will
continue this exploration in the next at least a couple
of episodes, so a lot of ground to cover. I
think we went kind of long this time, but I
think it was important to get all the grounding there
so we can follow through in in the next few

(01:18:33):
episodes where we're gonna talk about history and the natural
history of psychedelics and especially psilocybin, to talk about some
of the research that's been going on, especially since around
two thousand six, about therapeutic uses of psychedelics and the
ways they can contribute to adult personality change and other things. Yeah,
I think it's it's fascinating how just just in the
history of this show, in the history of Stuff to

(01:18:54):
About Your Mind, like we we have seen so much
progress made with psychede like research. So it's gonna be
really exciting to discuss that in upcoming episodes. Totally all right.
In the meantime, if you want to check out more
episodes Stuff to Blow your Mind, there are a ton
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(01:19:15):
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(01:19:37):
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;} Psychedelics: The Manifested Mind, Part 1