Ashley Lande vs Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes • Are psychedelic drugs a path to spiritual enlightenment?

[Music] welcome along to this week's edition of the show with me justin briley do make sure to like and subscribe if you're watching on youtube and of course you can find out more about the show get subscribed to the podcast and the newsletter the links are all with today's video well today we're talking about getting high with the most high our hallucinogenic drugs a pathway to spiritual enlightenment and my guests today are ashley landy and peter sherstat hughes now ashley landay rejected her childhood faith as a young adult and instead pursued enlightenment through hallucinogens and psychedelic drugs in fact she was a regular user of mushrooms and lsd however after a series of bad trips she came to believe there was a negative spiritual dimension to the use of psychedelics she left the drugs behind she became a christian my other guest is dr peter sherstad hughes he's a philosopher who specializes in research pertaining to pansysm and altered states of mind now he's actually an advocate of the use of psychedelics to understand consciousness and perhaps to expand the limits of our understanding of spirituality and indeed existence so we're going to be looking at this whole area today asking why has psychedelics been enjoying something of a renaissance recently in popularity um whether hallucinogenic drugs could be some kind of a pathway to enlightenment or whether they might be ultimately a spiritual dead end so welcome ashley and peter to the show great to have you both with me today um thank you let's let's get a little bit of both of your experiences in this area um ashley first of all um it's gonna have to be the short version and there's a great article i'll direct people to where you tell your story in a lot more depth but tell us tell us um yeah how you got into psychedelics and that kind of thing first of all okay sure i will do my best to keep it brief so i was raised in a marginally christian home i had a wonderful childhood in many ways and my my parents got much stronger in their faith after i had become an adult but as a child faith and religious instruction spiritual instruction wasn't a big part of my childhood and so it was quite easy we did go to a methodist church service most sundays but it was kind of compartmentalized it didn't really bleed into the rest of our lives and so it was quite easy for me when i was i believe i was 14 to just disavow all of it and my parents were pretty scandalized but there wasn't necessarily an intervention at that time we were having a lot of stressful family events at that time so sadly i made it that much worse for my parents um and so that that continued i i've always been a reader and enjoyed reading so at that time i read a variety of things the beat poets william burroughs um jack kerouac i think i read the electric kool-aid acid test by tom wolf and i found it kind of fascinating i was intrigued by psychedelic usage but not not to the extent my husband on the other hand he loved the beatles and so by the time he was 11 he said someday i'm taking it let's see uh i wasn't necessarily like that um and i i smoked marijuana a couple times as a teenager but it didn't really catch my fancy it wasn't a big deal when i got to college i sampled a few other different drugs not psychedelics yet but really alcohol was was the big thing for me just got into binge drinking and partying and and i enjoyed that alteration of consciousness even though it was ultimately a destructive and soul-siphoning mode of consciousness but my it was my senior year in college one of my friends came over with some psilocybin mushrooms and i was intrigued i didn't really have a lot of knowledge in that area but i said you know why the heck not sure let's take them and we did and it was a very enchanting experience it felt very magical it wasn't spiritual for me at that point uh there was nothing to really shake up my atheism at that point i didn't i don't think i thought that deeply about whether i was experiencing a supernatural dimension or it was just this epic phenomena of my mind i didn't think about it that deeply but i just thought it was really fun and it was really cool and neat what was the actual experience that you had at that point what can you describe sort of what this actually felt like when you actually started engaging in this sure yeah well there was certainly a distortion of perceptions uh things just appeared differently colors moved like if you i looked deeply into the grain of wood i could see it moving and and transforming and there would be eyes that would emerge uh from wood or from rocks i remember my best friend and i uh she also took the mushrooms and we sat and stared at at a photo in national geographic for what seemed like hours just trying to figure out what it was and it turned out it was the back of a shetland pony in wales actually uh and i remember listening i put on an electric light orchestra record and the music was cutting in and out and swelling and day crescendoing and i thought that was really interesting uh when we went outside it seemed like the air was glittering it seemed like uh emerging into the outside world was like emerging into a into a new dimension you know it's a whole new world so there was an aspect of it it made things uh made things seem fresh and new and different and it was unlike anything that i had ever experienced before you were having these experiences and and obviously these captured you quite significantly didn't they so what um and were they overall a very positive experience were you feeling like yeah this is this is something that's kind of enhancing my life what would you say were the kind of benefits that you were experiencing from your use of psychedelics i mean i would have said that i think at that time i would have said that it enhanced my creativity that but it was still it was all a very inwardly directed uh any kind of transformation that i would have said i experienced was very inwardly directed i don't know that by anyone else's metrics it would have made me a better person i mean i was still a pretty adamant atheist i was something of a misanthrope i wasn't very nice to people outside of my friends i was very judgmental so so i think i would have thought that i was embarking on this inward journey and then as far as the experiences being by and large positive once i encountered lsd uh mushrooms for me at that point were just more they were fun they were a good time they were fascinating and enchanting you know psychedelics i would say they they cast a spell in a way and but my first experience on lsc was emotionally psychologically spiritually shattering and i certainly experienced the classic ego death that is referenced in like lots of psychedelic literature and i remember in the aftermath i was just so shell-shocked that it was i found it difficult to conduct day-to-day life i was working at a newspaper at the time and i i just found it difficult to stay motivated in my job and just to even do basic toiletry functions i was just so shell-shocked and i remember i i couldn't decide whether what had happened was good or bad but two weeks later and i said i'm if i ever do that again i'll do it maybe once a year and then two weeks later i was looking for llc again so that that kind of was my embarkation on my what i would call my love affair with psychedelics i mean lsd in particular was my idol uh it was my my love it was my greatest enemy too and actually the worst experience i mean i think uh the bad trips certainly certainly were devastating and led me to question the nature of the experience and what i was doing to myself but the very worst trip i had was actually quite early on with my experience with lsd so that alone i think was not not enough to to make me quit or to make me believe that perhaps pursuing enlightenment through psychedelics was a dead end at that point yeah well we'll come to the story of of where things went from there if you like um in a moment let me introduce my other guest uh peter um peter schuster hughes is a philosopher as i mentioned who specializes in really looking into this whole area and you're something of an advocate i think peter for the value potentially of hallucinogenic drugs um i mean do you do you mind telling me first of all whether you've had your own personal experiences i'm i'm assuming yes uh on on psychedelics um um yes i i have and uh my roots very different from ashley's quite the country in many ways the only similarity is i started with psilocybin mushrooms if you exclude you know alcohol and and so on um so my my route was um i never really took drugs as a teenager or youth you know or in my twenties really early twenties and um i was teaching um fl well philosophy and philosophy of religion and partly and philosophy of mind and um i was asked on the syllabus there was um you know different arguments for the let's say you know for god and for the spiritual or the transcendent and one of those was from william james the great philosopher psychologist william james um especially from his book the varieties of religious experience published in 1902 and um in it he says you know alcohol is the first step of the mystical consciousness then he goes into nitrous oxide ether and um and so on another um intoxicants and he's and he speaks about how they are all part and parcel of the mystical experience so this is a debate in itself where the mystical experience from sort of um you know religious legacies are the same as those induced by psychedelics we can speak about that before but anyway um it interested me because i had never experienced anything like that you know anything outside of ordinary consciousness if you accept that term so one day i was um walking around the field my brother and he said to me peter i think these are magic mushrooms down here and um so i picked about 70 of them and um i dried them and i checked on the internet that they were safe and so on so forth i think they they were the liberty caps and um and i took a little dose in my london flat at the time um and there was not much effect but um i went to to the cinema watch the three what i thought was a 3d film but it turned out to be 2d i realized later um so small effect and then i took a large dose about a week later and that was you know it's so incredible it's so incredible i mean so as ashley was saying i mean it's it was so um beautiful sublime i was traveling through space meeting aliens um uh all kinds of things i've written in my book um but anyway it was a life-changing event really and i i thought wow just i thought i always thought psychedelics were just like you know kaleidoscopic colors and so on and so forth but it was so much more than that it was like the fusion of concepts and percepts the slowing down of time and space which is very interesting for a philosopher really and uh so i thought okay i'll read the literature on it and there wasn't much i mean there's william james obviously and uh later i've discovered other writers like h.h price and john smithey's and gerald hurd and so on but not much relatively speaking so then i thought okay i'll start writing something you know just to get people interested and um and that sort of um put me on this trajectory where i um looked into it more and more i should say as well another interest important i suppose for this show feature is that i was brought up i wasn't i wouldn't say i was brought up as an atheist but i mean that was a default view here in cornwall very secular county really and also i'm half swedish and sweden's one of the most secular countries in europe that czech republic i believe so it was um you know christianity religion was just something very strange to me um so i would say but you know psychedelics actually made me much more interested in theology especially mysticism the mystical aspect of theology and brought me closer that way i would say do you do you have a particular label that you wear would you describe yourself as an atheist or would you say you're somewhere i don't know agnostic because you think there might be something more than just the the natural purely natural realm when it comes to this sort of stuff um well i wouldn't call myself a christian or uh any uh religio you know any traditional religion but i i wouldn't really use word atheist anymore because you know i've done a lot of research on spinoza recently and he's you know the first pantheist really or the most famous pantheist pantheism was coined for him um and he says that god is nature you know and by nature he doesn't mean physical nature he means something much more than that so i'm interested in looking at spinozism in relation to psychedelic experience unity experiences and so on so forth so i mean i call myself perhaps a modest which means that mind and matter are the same thing but not just uh brain matter um i call myself a pan psychist which means that minds are ubiquitous in nature um so they're not just um in advanced mammals um they're implants as well to a basic extent like the greeks believed and uh i don't know what other labels i've got moral anti-realist blah blah blah but i wouldn't nothing nothing uh nothing common nothing yet normal women right no but but it sounds like you're not a hard naturalist in the sense of i don't know daniel dennett who believes that you know consciousness is purely a result of physical phenomena no no i mean i consider that yeah that's fair i'm not that i'm that i'm not i'm not a physicalist in that sense and uh i think that in physicalism is a religion in itself i mean it's an ideology and you look at the history of that with galileo descartes and so on hobbs um you see why we're in the state we're in where we cannot explain the relationship between mind and matter and that's why i'm particularly interested in psychedelics because of that relation well i'd love to come back to all of that in a way but but i want to keep this also very much in the realm of experience as well because that's that's primarily where ashley has come from in this this whole story um take us a bit further on in your journey then ashley because what you know you were obviously deep into using the psychedelics you were using them on a regular basis they were giving a sort of sense of i suppose purpose or at least taking you outside of your your normal every day um in the way that you were using them yes what what ultimately changed for you why why did they eventually for you become a spiritual dead end rather than a kind of an enlightening thing ultimately yeah i think just the trajectory was ever ever downward with psychedelics and i think i think that's the nature of an idol that we see in the bible that's the nature of an idol that it's very attractive and seductive at first and ultimately it hollows you out and i just felt like like it was a dead end like it was a void it was an abyss i was getting nowhere and i realized too that and this is after years of using lse fairly frequently i and also being very immersed in yogic philosophy and you know dabbling in a variety of so the term new age is kind of an umbrella that encompasses encompasses a lot of different things but dabbling in all these different healing modalities and all these different philosophies and and also regularly taking psychedelics and regularly experiencing ego death uh i was no better of a person i was i was still this wretched miserable person just help me to understand this this concept that you've both mentioned a couple of times now ego death because this might not be immediately obvious to people watching or listening um what what is this experience and and why does it get produced regularly with taking something like lsd ashley if you kick us off on that okay yeah and pete i'm sure peter could explain this in a much more sophisticated philosophical manner than i will be able to do but experientially i can say it it feels like it feels like death it feels like the known world is crumbling it feels like your identity is crumbling uh the first time i experienced it was which was my first experience on lsc i i was beginning to sink into this panic which the psychedelics are such an amplifier and the level of panic and terror that you can feel on them if you begin to panic and terror and be terrified are amplified so far beyond i mean i've experienced anxiety and panic attacks in quote-unquote normative consciousness but in psychedelic when you're on psychedelics it's just amplified to a point where it feels like the entire world is sinking into an abyss never to return it feels like and it feels like it's in terminal like it's going to go on forever and then i remember and i remember saying i need to go to the hospital i'm dying i i it really feels like you are actually dying and then it felt like and i want to be cautious too and and i i i because of my posture i do not want to make secondary sound appealing or peak anyone's interest but but i feel like describing it is also important and so the sky cracked open this light poured in and i felt like i had i had come like i had been compressed and compressed and compressed and then i had come out this tunnel on the other side into open space and it felt like there was a and i could say a lot about this too but there was a mimicry i feel like of the death and resurrection that we experience the reality of which i believe is in jesus christ and i think there's a mimicry of that the mimicry of it was counterfeit and didn't have power to affect and during transformation i believe but um yeah and it's difficult to describe perhaps peter could take a better a better stab at it well yeah go ahead peter tell us what how would you you would describe because i often hear you know of people who go on trips saying oh i felt at one with everything and i assume this is the kind of what ego death is this idea if there's no longer a me there's just kind of meaning and consciousness and reality now having not had any of these experiences i wouldn't know exactly but but um is is that is that the idea what what could you give it more well eager losses is uh one one term that is used for what traditionally is called unity experiences uh in the christian tradition it's referred to as union mystica um so this is yeah a feeling of um both well there's two aspects to it really first of all losing yourself that's ego loss um but you thereby also um seemingly connect with a greater whole and um this is very uh i mean i must say actually painted it in very negative very negative way for a lot of people it's very um life-affirming it can be very terrifying as well but there are both aspects to that um like i say there's a christian tradition christian tradition of this as well of course um so you lose your sense of self so you you you forget you don't not forget you just don't realize who you are you lose concepts basically you all you lose all modes of thinking concepts percepts um memories and so on um so you have no awareness no self-consciousness you don't know that you are you you don't know anything you can't see anything or you're not sensible to anything um in a way it's like a complete blackout except it's the complete opposite it's also sometimes referred to as a white out um especially with a psychedelic intense psychedelic drug like 5 modmt which induces it as far as i know as as personally as possible it's just a complete you know quick within a few seconds you you're losing everything you can't see anything and then boom um you've it retrospectively feels as if time stopped or you enter a state of timelessness it's very interesting when you look at certain theologies of a god being eternal meaning without time outside of time rather than infinite within time and all theological debate i believe anyway it's almost like an experiential um is almost like an experience of what we can own philosophers and theologians have only spoken about theoretically that's what makes it quite fascinating to me um of course losing yourself for people who are not used to it is very terrifying yeah and i was going to say obviously the way the way peter speaks of this actually is is obviously in in sort of a kind of enlightening you know this is an experience that kind of connects you in in a radically new way and causes some of the typical boundaries you know that we experience physical limitations to to fall away in some some fashion um and and i'm sure many many people have interpreted this as an amazing spiritual experience you know and we've got you know the whole of the 60s and the music that came out of these experiences yeah i had those experiences as well i should say it wasn't all terror and you know i had those experiences that felt very unitive and felt uh joyful and felt ecstatic at the time um so yeah yeah i mean i wouldn't have kept going back if if if you know there wasn't something good that or that i perceived as good in the day it's so powerful i wouldn't necessarily go back or at least i would be very hesitant to take it too i mean it's so overwhelmingly powerful it can be that it's really not recreational at all you know it's um really i mean you don't need to call it religious but it's a it's an intense experience whatever it means evidently it's an intense experience it's a it's an experience i imagine a lot of people kind of it's quasi-religious in in the way that it obviously has this very intense effect um i mean actually so just just sort of take us on the road to to obviously you had rejected faith you you were into the psychedelic drugs you were having these experiences but then you had some particularly negative ones was was it that negativity that eventually sort of propelled you away from it or was it a kind of diminishing returns ultimately on on the experiences you were having and and what i suppose ultimately took you to christianity um and and and i suppose lots of questions here forgive me but and is is is in your view the use of hallucinogens and being a christian are they mutually exclusive as far as you're concerned but yeah go ahead ashley uh yes um yeah and there were certainly uh diminishing returns involved i just i got to the point where i could no longer have a good trip on lsd no matter if it was two hits or you know sometimes i would i would micro dose uh which to me microdose was a fourth of a hit i guess contemporarily among people who are practicing it now it's like a 10th or 20th of a hit which i don't i have difficulty understanding how that would even do anything but um there was like i said there was absolutely a downward trajectory uh there were several other things happening in my life at the time i think my husband and i had just gotten to a point of spiritual desolation and desperation and we both had tried so many different roads and they had all turned out to be dead ends you know lsd itself was turning out to be a dead end and at that point of course i thought and this you know you can read the long version of this in my essay i thought well maybe the problem i had all these rationalizations in my mind and i thought well maybe the problem is chemical like maybe the fact that lsd is a quote-unquote synthetic chemical maybe i should just i should go back to mushrooms and so i grew my own mushrooms and my thinking was i can just speak the right words over them and i can pray over them with whatever you know whatever words i would have prayed at that point and and then i i had a horrible time and i remember at one point during that final mushroom trip and it was quite strong i was pacing around the house that we lived in at the time there's a living room and then a bedroom a jack and jill bathroom and another bedroom so you could just go i felt like i was wearing a rut in the floor going around and around and i kept saying where is god i can't find him i don't know where god is and it felt like i was just missing him and he was rushing around you know and i would kind of see tracers i imagine i could see tracers of his robe if god wears a robe i don't know but it was very it was very sorrowful it was deeply deeply sorrowful it seems kind of comical to retell it but it was it was deeply sorrowful and so after that point i felt like i i was done i was done and my husband at that point was actually beginning to be interested in eastern orthodox christianity and he was seeing a psychologist who recommended to him that he tried this church jacob swell in the area in kansas city where we lived at the time and i said no absolutely not i'm not on the one hand i was you know in a place of spiritual desolation but i was still absolutely completely resistant to christianity while simultaneously being open to virtually anything else but i said no absolutely not and he started going i held out for a long time probably six months and during that time i i became pregnant uh with our second child and also um i had a dear friend from childhood who was a christian who lost her two-year-old daughter to leukemia very very in a very quick time period from diagnosis to death was just three months and that really had a profound effect on me seeing her and her husband's peace in the midst of course they were mourning intensely but seeing their peace in the midst of this and she i had stayed in touch with her since childhood and i would i think she probably knew that i was into drugs and i would whenever i visited with her i would babble on you know pratalon about whatever new age theory i was into at the time and she's a very gentle person and she would she but she would respond with bible verses and i would i would just say oh whatever that's her thing you know i know better um but just seeing uh witnessing her process of grieving and the hope that she had in the midst of it through her daughter dying really had a profound effect on me and then when i was around eight months pregnant i finally conceded to go to church with my husband and i remember i sat near the back you know like a solemn teenager i was just sitting there i didn't want to be there but i just remember oh being overcome with emotion awash with emotion and beginning to weep during the worship portion of the service and and that's when i really started to think maybe maybe that was like a little fissure in my heart and heart that i thought maybe there's something to this jesus person even though i could rationalize that too and i did at the time say well i'm pregnant i'm hormonal you know and i i'm not someone who could ever be accused of being out of touch with my emotions as it is but um so yeah that was that was the beginning for me we'll talk about the the way you know in the next section of the program the the way that others have so often linked psychedelics to religious experience and everything else um because that might be interesting to chase up as well but we're talking today on the show about hallucinogenic drugs are they a pathway to spiritual enlightenment is it okay to get high with the most high um ashley landy and peter shurstead hughes are my guests on the show today and we'll be back in just a moment for more conversations between christians and skeptics subscribe to the unbelievable podcast and for more updates and bonus content sign up to the unbelievable newsletter welcome back to the show today we're talking about hallucinogenic drugs psychedelics and whether they are a path to spiritual enlightenment sort of speaking in favor of hallucinogens is dr peter chester hughes he's a philosopher specializing in research in this sort of area ashley landy um has been talking about her own journey with psychedelics and how she decided to turn her back on it and become a christian eventually um as we've mentioned there's a longer version of her story that you can read in fathom magazine uh and it's a great article online um i'll make sure there's a link to it it's called acid head god took me higher um but returning to you first of all peter um obviously you've heard the sort of the the negative side of this ashley ultimately felt like there was diminishing returns on this she was sort of looking for something but it wasn't ultimately something that gave her genuine answers and and so on um i don't know is that do you generally find that people in your experience have a positive relationship with psychedelics when they're doing this and and or do do you find people you know i don't know maybe people's thoughts about it do change over time inevitably um well i'd say this that um i think ashley it's very interesting article but it's very subjective perspective really because i mean i don't see psychedelics as a competitor to christianity i mean i see it more like um i mean it can be a catalyst for christianity for example in um there's this marsh chapel experiment or the good friday experiment from 1962 um where they gave cellulosibin to these theological protestant students and um they all um all ten who took it um they were ten who took a placebo as well um they all recorded that it had enriched their christianity and their faith substantially um and then you have um like clinical uh like a clinical theologian like frank lake used lsd for um helping people using christianity and um acid lsd and uh today there are no number of uh christians who integrate um psychedelic use with christianity so i don't see them at loggerheads at all i think they're quite harmonious um and i wouldn't like to see them as antagonistic at all um i would say though that of course yeah there is a kind of subculture of psychedelic use in the west today which is a kind of yeah it's a californian based it seems kind of a fusion of eastern you know religions and um certain mystical insights from the west and so on that kind of in some ways are antagonistic towards christianity for example pantheism uh this swedish scholar called patrick lundberg who wrote that um pantheism is a core virtue of psychedelia for example and pantheism is arguably not harmonious with um christianity although it can be i mean you know there are a lot of arguments about that as well but um i mean you you obviously i mean some people don't get what they need from psychedelic experience um uni it seems like reading your article at least you needed some kind of a moral figure moral guide i would i would say interestingly um a lot of people say with regard to mysticism generally if you overlap it that um you know the mystical experience can take you beyond good and evil this is what bertrand russell said for example um that you sort of um are drawn outside of your culture and you see morality and religion and political ideologies all from an objective point of view so um you know i don't it it can be antagonistic but it needn't be um i'd say as well the history the history of christian i mean christianity has been sorry um a little bit um against psychoactive uses i mean the the eleuzinian mysteries in ancient greece where a number of people believe they took a certain potion hallucinogenic potion that was closed down by emperor theodosius the first in 392 a.d um for christian reasons really and um of course the conquistadors in south america they they tried to suppress all psychoactive uses of indigenous culture you know sort of the cacti and the mushrooms used there and so on so there has been this kind of um christian opposition to psychoactive drugs yet there needn't be right well ashley what what do you say to all of that you know that there are these instances where apparently christians have said it's it's improved my faith it's been a benefit in that way yeah so there was a lot in that and i have a lot of thoughts um i i personally do not know any christians who have been uh benefited by psychedelics i uh i suppose it's possible they're out there but as peter said even though and i would i would argue too in response to the um him stating that my article is subjective i mean certainly yes it is subjective but all the psychedelic experience is subjective you know and um the good friday experiment so that's actually not true about the good friday experiment there was at least one of the participants maybe two that had a complete panic reaction and they didn't and i would also so push back against i and i don't know that they said that it enriched their christianity a lot of people will say that it was a very meaningful experience and i mean the category of meaningful that isn't necessarily positive i've had very negative events in my life that have been deeply meaningful i feel like they've been god has made them deeply meaningful in the sense of romans 8 28 that he works all things for our good but they in and of themselves are not positive experiences and in particular i remember listening to dr roland griffiths who's the head researcher at the johns hopkins center for psychedelic research and consciousness research research saying that many people would rate the psilocybin experience as one of the meaning most meaningful experiences of their lives on par with the birth of their first child and i remember thinking it must have been the men who were saying that because having given birth to two children naturally i there's no comparison um but so meaningful in and of itself i mean and like i said subjectivity reigns in the world of psychedelia which is why people splinter off in all kinds of different directions when they're trying to build a cosmology around the psychedelic experience it just it has no center it has no and as peter said as disparate as the experiences are and as subjective as they are pantheism does tend to be a somewhat reliable outcome as far as someone's theological cosmological outlook but um there's no absolutely no guarantee whatsoever and just to to be clear on the terms here so pantheism as peter sort of briefly explained is the idea that everything is god in a sense it's sort of it puts nature in the in the place almost of god and you're saying actually that's a yeah a natural outcome of hallucinogenics because it kind of gives you that sense of experience that al that that you're connected somehow to to every living sort of aspect of nature is that is that why you say it's a kind of a natural outcome yeah it can be and it also tends to lead to people and i don't know if you would call this a subset of pantheism or if this would be included in pantheism the idea that we collectively are god um that there's no transcendent god but we collectively are god um and in response to that i read a really funny segment of there's a wonderful book called god's forever family a history of the jesus people movement in america by larry eskridge and i actually spoke with him on the phone a couple days ago but i was really interested in that book because so many um of the people who uh segued into the jesus people movement came out of psychedelic culture and uh one of the gentlemen when they set up their first evangel evangelistic outpost in the haight ashbury which is of course of hotbed of psychedelic drug taking and everything attendant with that culture charles manson was coming in a lot to this evangelistic outpost and and they let him come you know he creeps everybody out because he was charles manson and and but the thing that really made me laugh and i mean it's kind of not funny because of who it was but he came in charles manson who was charles manson was very into psychedelics particularly lsd and he came in and said i am god and ted wise he was one of the gentlemen who who was ministering to people there he said he just gaffed and he said well if you are god i am truly disappointed and i look back and think like my own conception of i am god i was truly disappointed by that um and so there's no when there's a cosmology there's no reliable cosmology that you can build around the psychedelic experience like i said people go off in in all kinds of different directions and in response to me needing a moral figure i mean yeah absolutely that's absolutely true i think all of the human heart needs a moral figure and leslie knew begin who's one of my favorite theologians he was a missiologist in india for a long time and um so is deeply acquainted with hinduism which is a religion that some people claim emerged from the use of psychedelics the psychedelic called stoma there's no hard archaeological evidence for that but some people claim that um anyway and he said that the the real mystery at the center of the universe is not a metaphysical mystery it's not found in contemplating the vastness of things so that can certainly be fascinating it's it's in the mystery of how the holy can embrace the unholy it's the mystery of grace and that is the central mystery of the cosmos and i just found that to be so true in my trajectory and trying to you know contemplate these huge metaphysical concepts and ontological concepts in the nature of being and trying to figure it all out my heart was still not satisfied and i know you know you can look at me and say like well she just needed that you know she just was she just couldn't handle it or whatever but i would argue that that we as humans god has planted eternity in the human heart and that is what we all long for and that is that is the only jesus is the only place where we will actually find true fulfillment and i also would add that i something i was thinking recently in preparation for this and sorry i'm trying to be quick there are no pantheistic fairy tales like i know i think i believe peter has children and i have children and justin i know you have children and there are no pantheistic fairy tales and i wondered about that and i was thinking about uh there was a children's book that one of our friends gave us back in the day you know when we were all into psychedelics after our son was born and it actually was a pantheistic children's book i've never seen another one like it and it it had lines such as i am you know i am in everything everything is in me i am the ball at my feet i am in everyone i meet i am i am the puppy across the street and i my husband and i just looked at each other and it was just so patently false like when you when you boil these lofty philosophical speculations down to that level it just becomes so patently you know bull there's a couple of kind of criticisms coming your way in that sense peter um firstly or something ashley said early on which is the cosmology if you like as she calls it around hallucinogenic experiences it's very hard to actually get anything concrete out of it it is by nature a a subjective experience and so when you say it gives you an objective experience on reality and right and wrong and everything well surely that itself is is by its nature subjective and and then yes i mean obviously ashley feels ultimately the kind of pantheism that it perhaps breeds is is ultimately uh well she finds obviously something of a shallow way of of seeing the world it doesn't map onto really reality once you're off the trip or whatever so any any responses to some of these criticisms well uh i mean you know a number of things what you understand by reality is subjective as well i mean also another thing is i i'm not claiming that psychiatric experiences are necessarily objective obviously a lot of them are to do with one's memories and one's life so that of course is subjective the union mystica that i have spoken of and other christians and theologians are speaking of is supposed to be objective though but the question is how do you know whether to give it that reality or not so for me psychedelics don't give me a cosmology i'm not looking for a cosmology i don't have a desire for a cosmology i don't want all the explanations i don't want the certainty obviously other people need a certainty and a guide in life i'm not saying psychedelics give you that in fact they actually they could do the opposite they could make you question everything and that's fine i mean i don't i don't know it's i i think it's a bit of a strange contrast you have yet that here you know there's psychedelics and they're like attempt a cosmology and then there's christianity which must be true this is not how how i look at it at all i see psychedelics as potential catalysts to um interesting metaphysical perspectives and perspectives on consciousness i mean i don't think we'll ever get the absolute answers but um i wouldn't just say that um you know because psychedelics didn't give me a moral guideline in my life therefore we should reject it i mean it's it's just a wrong way of looking at it you know they're just tools what have they done in that sense okay so but tools to what what what do you how do psychedelics help you live your life better i suppose okay well well i mean you know as as you know um we are at the moment going through the so-called psychedelic renaissance um so there are now in the last 10 years multiple tens if not hundreds of studies on the potential benefits of psychedelics you know so for example maps the association maps are creating using drugs to treat depression and ptsd um so this is why there's a this is one of the main reasons for the renaissance that there's money in antidepressants and instead of psychedelics being harmful to you as was the propaganda of the sort of 20th century in mid to late 20th century we're now realizing they have medicinal benefits which have now been shown uh to be the case now of course you can be cynical and say well that's big farmer getting in on the act and trying to make money out of it which they probably are but nonetheless um they seem to be helping people who need it as well so there's i mean if you do suffer from such uh conditions then of course psychedelics are very um you know at least the latest science shows that they are very very beneficial any response to that actually uh yeah so i would say that the evidence thus far is actually quite inconclusive as to whether there are lasting therapeutic benefits and uh yeah they are absolutely becoming monetized peter thiel who's a gajillionaire he started paypal with elon musk he just poured 125 million dollars into a german psychedelic startup so and that kind of concerns me like why are these huge you know magnets getting involved in this research like in the 60s you know that peter thiel would have been considered the man you know and it's now it's the man that is pushing these drugs and that really i'm not a conspiracy theorist necessarily but it does make me suspicious you said the science is inconclusive can you tell me which papers are you referring to there yes so a lot of the papers that i've read and granted i don't have and like uh you know established with an academic institution so a lot of the papers i can't read them in their entirety but a lot of the abstracts for instance some of the psilocybin studies on depression that are coming out of johns hopkins uh the follow-up period is only a month later and i really don't think that's long enough to measure whether there is an enduring change in someone let me go back to the marsh chapel experiment you're right to say that yes one of those ten who took silicyban did feel anxiety you're correct about that however the other line um it was he panicked and he ran down the street actually yeah okay so one negative one um and of course you know i know you can have panic attacks if you're not used to this i mean even on alcohol if you if alcohol wasn't a sort of popular drug in our culture and you gave someone a bottle whiskey you know one go i think a lot of people would panic they couldn't control their bodies and so on right but you know rick dublin of maps he actually did a follow-up study and he got in touch with those people from the marsh chapel expo in 1962 in in 1991 and uh all of all of those nine they still maintained that this was a life-changing experiment for them and it was um very beneficial okay it's only nine people but that's you know the longest study that exists so um and of course yeah now i'm also skeptical of um the medicalization of psychedelics and i think this is why we're seeing a re renaissance however i mean you know it could be it's it's it's not incoherent to say that big pharma are making money out of it by the same time people who are suffering from uh ptsd and depression so one are also benefiting from it it need not be um a zero-sum game it can be you know winners on both sides i don't see the problem with that i would say that there has been i mean yeah the good friday and i had heard of that of rick goblin getting in touch with them obviously he has an ideological pre-commitment you know um and i mean i would say that using psychedelics was one of the more meaningful experiences of my life uh it ultimately would have led me to ruin a devastation if i hadn't quit and i view it now through the lens of god working all things for my good you know i i i wouldn't view it the same way actually for several years after i quit psychedelics i was so wound and scarred by everything that i had experienced and it was so injurious that i i didn't even want to talk about it i lived in fear of getting dosed which is completely irrational but i did i was that wounded by it um and so i think when you know like my husband likes to say there has been a privately funded large-scale diffuse experiment going on for decades now with psychedelics and i remember i was very evangelistic about psychedelics um back when i was taking a lot of lsd by myself i had a boyfriend at the time this was obviously before i met my husband uh i and i was just proselytizing about and just waxing poetic about psychedelics how wonderful they were if everyone could just take them it would change the world and my boyfriend had taken them but he wasn't into them like i was and he interjected and he said you know millions of people took psychedelics in the 60s and have since and it hasn't changed anything and i was really really deflated by that and it really took the wind out of my sails how do you know it didn't change things i mean there's a big legacy of how it sort of um you know has caused you know the peace movement ecology movement and so on so forth i mean you don't know what the world would have been like if that hadn't happened uh yeah that's true i mean we don't know what the world would have been like if a lot of things hadn't happened i mean precisely so you can't really make the statement secondly why are you so extreme with this you know you were like extremely into psychedelics and now you're extremely into christianity why not just keep an open mind and say this is an interesting experience we needn't even call it religious we can call it aesthetic if you like you know it's a beautiful experience as you said yourself you know and it can be fearful as well no doubt there's very interesting aspect of dark psychedelic experiences and i don't when you say i advocate them i don't advocate people to take them i advocate the sort of research into them let's see um but uh you know why not why not just keep an open mind and say you know my experience with psychedelics uh was positive to start with and it turned negative and then i turned to christianity and that gave me what uh um something more that i i personally was looking for however for other people it could go the other way around you know you could start as a christian and that might not give you enough and then you turn to psychedelia maybe it will enrich your christianity or lead you elsewhere i don't see the why why the radicalization go ahead ashley um jesus is very radicalizing so i think that's part of it i mean jesus requires a you know i was very into the gnostic gospels i never i you know i would have said i didn't read the bible when i was into psychedelics but i would have said things like oh i'm sure moses was totally tripping when he saw the burning bush you know and i'm sure these things could all be tied to psychedelics because it became this totalizing theory for me but i would never linger on jesus i would certainly would never linger on jesus on the cross yeah but why okay so jesus jesus is radical but what's why this why the radicality in psychedelia as well you had right i mean you had radicality on both sides it seems yeah sure yeah i'm kind of i'm kind of extreme like that i guess but i have i did not see the fruit in my own life i think experientially is a large a large part of it and then i see these people and i have never seen fruit in it in other people's lives and i was part of a large network of people who were taking psychedelics um in preparation for this podcast what do you mean by fruit what do i mean by fruit i mean enduring positive transformation in someone's life i mean christianity like people can say oh i feel like a more loving people okay but i mean i feel like you're painting a very negative portrayal of something that has helped a lot of people well let i'll come back to you peter for some positive portrayal of this let's just let you finish it off ashley though what why do you feel overall that the trend has been negative in your experience yeah because i think that that psychedelics are a very inwardly directed thing and love actual tangible love and christianity is very outward directed so i think someone can say that yes i become more loving i understand i feel at one with the universe but i just wonder like this is the reality in which we find ourselves you know this is the reality that god has provided to us and if someone isn't actively loving out in the world you know like god said or jesus said when asked what the greatest commandment is he said you know number one is love the lord your god with all your heart mind and soul and number two is like that it's inextricable from it it's so entwined as to be inextricable from it is love your love your neighbor as yourself so i have never you know and obviously the church is not perfect there's going to be dysfunction wherever people are but as far as people taking care of one another and caring for one another and being deeply invested in one another's lives and loving sacrificially i never found that in the new age and psychedelic community which is not to say that there weren't nice people who were generous you know and but i just comparatively the fruit i don't see it and i have not seen it let's hear from you again peter why why do you feel that this is too negative a portrayal then of the the effects of well as well as you know a lot of scientific studies from you know johns hopkins imperial college and so on showing the benefits to people from psychedelics i you know i know i know many people who have benefited from them there are conferences in the whole circle of people who do it also psychedelics need not be associated with the new age movement i mean these are two separate things that overlap but then you know you i mean you get the right wing in psychedelia figures like ernst you know albert hoffman's good friend he was a nazi but he he was sort of advocating for and and essentially um well he he became christian later but essentially you don't need to associate psychedelics with a new age and um and uh i just don't see i don't see the antagonism there i mean again you're painting this portrait of two things that are fighting but they are mutually inclusive they can be mutually inclusive and it's you know like i say there's a whole movement of chris christianity and psychedelia here in britain at least you know so um i just don't want people to think actually ashley's concern seems to be that it doesn't involve oh it's a kind of inward focused thing and even the concern that you have to take a particular substance to it to kind of experience uh you know this is is it kind of i guess that that that would be my you know yeah well okay a number of things i mean traditionally um psychedelic use is a communal thing you know in south you know south america and so on so forth without you asking and what not um secondly isn't i mean you could say about christianity there's it's an inward thing you know that it's something personal and to the heart i mean of course you can have it you can do your sermons in church and whatever but it needn't be like that it can be in it'd be can be quite isolated and then i go back again to the christian mystics and monks you know who um wanted to isolate themselves fast diet and so on in order to induce similar experiences so my point there is that christianity and uh these exceptional experiences whether they are um occasioned by chemicals or whether they are occasioned by other techniques such as breathing you know breathing or meditation or prayer or whatever um they are not mutually exclusive and also i should say another thing about um compassion one one last thing sorry um you know um there is this sense of unity that we spoke of makes one a lot of people feel that they are connected to everyone else and to nature and that of course gives a moral framework for appreciating the planet and others you know it has it sort of enriches compassion in many ways well we'll come back to that and see what actually has to say in response loving this debate though on uh the place of psychedelics uh christianity and whether there is um whether they are mutually exclusive or not is sort of where we've got to uh on today's discussion on an unbelievable but my guests are ashley landy and peter shurstead hughes and we're going to continue the discussion and finish it up in just a moment in the united kingdom just today we passed a hundred thousand people who've been killed by the virus i'm not the one here who is claiming that this is being supervised that somebody is watching this somebody knows that this is occurring and somebody's allowing it to occur we're in no position to say definitively there is no morally justifiable reason for this particular evil because we need a god-like perspective on all of space and all of time in order to make that claim welcome back to the final part of this week's discussion a really interesting quite feisty but enjoyable one uh hallucinogens psychedelics that's what we're talking about getting high with the most high ashley landay and peter shurstead hughes are both with me now let me give you links before the show ends uh to where you can find out more um a link to ashley's article for fathom mag with today's show go and check that out to read her story in full extremely well written by the way i really actually just enjoyed reading it you're a great writer actually so your journalistic background was obviously coming through there um peter's our website is philosopher.eu and there's a link to that as well and you'll find there things like his ted talk on these issues which i'm sure you'll find in lightning um well just just getting back into this um i mean peter made the case for the sort of the the religious use of psychedelics communally you know they've been used it's not just a kind of introspective i'm by myself kind of thing necessarily ashley and and generally has been he's saying we shouldn't we shouldn't see them as mutually exclusive they didn't work for you ashley but they have been very beneficial for other people um so yeah where do you go with that and indeed i suppose the whole history that's been pointed out by people and i may be mispronouncing the name here is it uh who has done a sort of whole book on why he thinks that you know christianity has has sort of psychedelic roots and that sort of thing be interested in your responses to that as well actually as we start to close up yeah so as far as peter mentioned psychedelic use and community in south america and it's really interesting to their credit i i kind of got on this thread through an article that was posted by the johns hopkins center for psychedelic study it was a vice article talking about how um historical indigenous psychedelic usage is not nearly as widespread like nowhere near as widespread and common as is being claimed and that has just been kind of co-opted into the narrative you hear people state that you know without any qualification as though it's just you know objective truth that that these substances has have been used for thousands of years in all these indigenous cultures and of course in south america and the amazon there's a huge tourism industry that is built up around ayahuasca i mean talk about colonializing like i can't see how that's necessarily been good for the native people but i also it was interesting i found this article or excuse me documentary on youtube called magical death and it was produced by the university of pennsylvania department of anthropology in 1970 i believe and it was a portrayal of these ayahuasca shamans and how they used ayahuasca and they were somehow grinding it making into a power powder and snorting it um through this long tube um but the way that they use it and then of course there's a narrator narrating all this it was it was quite unsettling to watch they would snort it just and it was it wasn't as though they were using it therapeutically i think we as westerners have imposed this therapeutic paradigm on it but for them it was very much a portal into the spirit world and for them specifically in this instance that was being filmed it was um a portal into the spirit world in order to summon this demon that would eat the souls of their enemy tribes children um and and that was the purpose i mean that was the purpose of it this uh they talked about how this one healer had um a demon that he regularly summoned in the spirit world and and called on this demon to inflict punishment on the enemy tribe and so it's i mean on one hand i've heard that that the ayahuasca shamans they will they do believe it you know it's a cure for what ails you and so they would use it it more in a sense of physical ambulance for people in their tribe but as far as this western therapeutic paradigm being posed on it um that's just really not how what indigenous use has been like they were very clear that it was a portal so the spiritual world um and there's a anthropologist named burnt brayback zomori who actually he lived in the amazon for years he married a shipibo woman and his presupposition going down there was that oh they've used this for thousands of years and through his research and his living among these people he completely changed his hypothesis and said oh this is actually it's just spread through the amazon actually interestingly enough with the advent of the missionaries and you know business harvesting businesses like within the last 200 years it's spread throughout this amazon so the evidence for an indigenous use is just not it's just not there okay peter well that's that's wrong that's just false i mean there's a lot of anthropologists have spoken about the the use through thousands of years i mean and not just not just in the americas i mean in europe we have um of course the greek mysteries dionysian mysteries uh eludes indian mysteries it is alleged use the psychedelic potion though it's not proved interestingly um there was these kind of almost conspiracy theorists people like uh chris bennett and danny nemo who spoke about drugs in the bible and sort of a christian basis of um or psychedelic basis of christianity and this was kind of you know left to the sidelines of academia but interestingly uh last year um archaeologists in israel in tel arad found um in a 8th century bc jewish temple um sort of remains of frankincense and cannabis in the inner sanctum of the temple there which is was quite revolutionary because it shows that there was um cannabis use um at least you know 800 bc and um of course also the rig veda speaks as you mentioned of the soma and there's a matthew clark has got a great new book about this you know what were the ingredients of that according to the best evidence of course rigveda is um three you know uh what like uh three thousand to three and a half thousand years old so that and there's a lot of evidence of use i mean throughout ancient civilizations um the delphic oracle and so on and so forth and links to religious related to religious experience and belief yeah so so in ancient greece i mean plato you know all the great all the greeks basically went to the eleuzinian mysteries and the ultimate purpose was to get rid of the fear of death and um now whether they took a potion there called kaiku and of a certain dose and he has to fast so many scholars say that this probably contained um some psychedelic like ergot albert hoffman who discovered lsd said it was probably ergot which is the basis of lsd uh sort of parasite on bali um but uh anyway the whatever it was the experiences therein was you could say were religious they were you know they got they um induced visions plato speaks about that for example in the infedo and the fedris and um and the neoplatonists sort of continued this mystical tradition so there's a lot of historical evidence for this um i mean i wouldn't dismiss it i mean it's not anything in history of course is open to interpretation but it seems more likely than not yeah okay so so passing it back to you ashley um firstly obviously i think you you're going to have to agree to disagree on the question of the the communal aspect of this how far back it goes in in the among these peoples and so on but but this is an important point and as i said people like brian mararescu have been talking about the so-called psychedelic roots of christianity and and so on so what what do you think about those claims that lots of religions including christianity have their roots in psychedelic type experiences and drugs yeah i think it's symptomatic of how psychedelics become a totalizing theory for so many people uh once they really get enmeshed in them they become this totalizing theory and then people feel as though they have to shoehorn everything else i mean i was like that you know back in the day like i said i would have said oh when moses saw the burning bush she was totally tripping definitely no question um and so yeah it becomes this totalizing theory i would never say that oh interesting okay anyway so there is a lack of hard and i knew about the cannabis traces that were found in that temple i mean that's one instance i don't think that's really uh sufficient to build to build any kind of a theory on um as far as the election mystery cults go according to manley p hall i have this book called the secret teachings of all ages according to mainly p hall children women and children were initiated into the mystery cult so that makes me wonder you know where they're seeing children no no no that's not right that's not as far as how do you know that you don't know no one knows no one knows it was a mystery call nobody knows well no but anyway well all all greeks were allowed in the election i mean all greeks were allowed in except for slaves and people who couldn't speak greek if that's a known fact including children okay including slaves so it was a it was an elitist it was an elitist organization and so the kykeon we've never been able to recreate like no one you would think with modern chemistry would be able to recreate that nobody's ever been able to recreate it and there were a lot of mystery cults in the ancient world there was the election mystery called there was another mystery called the called the cybelian mystery called and as the sibelium mystery called so they worship cybele i don't know if i'm saying pronouncing that correctly um but they worshipped her and the adherents would whip themselves up into such a frenzy they would self-flagellate and they would also often castrate themselves because they believed that she demanded eunuchs in her service so you know i can't imagine why that one isn't more popular well people are talking about that one um but look at catholic roman catholicism has a similar history actually i did want to ask you though about the the kind of the spiritual dimension of it actually you i get the sense that you don't believe it's just a kind of just a bad trip just you know that you had a negative experience presumably as a christian you do believe there is a spiritual forces at work here and and that you obviously believe that there are instances in the event reference this documentary where where where there are people calling on demonic forces and using psychoactive drugs to to kind of facilitate that in some way now obviously i'm guessing you're going to be look at this very differently from peter at this point but but for you as a christian you do believe actually there's this negative spiritual dimension that's at work in this so so just talk about that briefly and we'll see what peter has to say in response yes and i'll be as brief as possible i would like to share two specific incidents along that line that happened in my own life when i was using lsd frequently and again peter could claim these are subjective experiences but i have a difficult time uh not thinking that you yourself said it's subjective it's all subjective peter it's all subjective like everything is an article of faith everything everything is an article of faith everything requires a faith commitment so anyway i was it was when i was heavily using lsc um and i i had not taken lsd this particular night i woke up in the middle of the night i saw this kind of column of smoke in the corner of my room and it was not opaque it was had a diaphanous quality so i knew that it wasn't an intruder so i thought okay this isn't real i'm going back to sleep this isn't real and at that moment i had this little dog named gene hackman and he bristled he woke up he bristled he began growling and barking very specifically toward this corner of the room i lived on the second floor of an apartment there wasn't anyone walking by um and another another incident that just recently there's a website that i'm not gonna name but it it's it's a well-known website among psychedelics users you can go and read you know all kinds of trip reports of people on on any any substance including you know traditional narcotics like uh heroin and cocaine but but a lot of it is on psychedelics and i remember when i i smoked salvia devanorum at one point when i was using psychedelics i only did it once it was a very powerful experience it wasn't a negative experience at the time and i guess a lot of people a very high percentage of people have i do have negative experiences with salvia i didn't know that at the time fortunately um but anyway a part of my experience and this is going to sound completely absurd but a part of my experience uh and it does take you completely to another world like you are not you are no longer in the room um but one part of that experience was i like i said this is going to sound absolutely absurd but i was on this water wheel and there was either a ravioli or a postage stamp that was a cartoon character and it had mickey mouse hands and a mickey mouse voice and it said to me it kept beckoning me and it kept saying come on hurry up we gotta go come on and you know after that was over i was like well that was bizarre you know whatever that was and um but then a few days ago i was going on arrowhead and i thought i'm gonna read some salvia reports you know and see what other people have experienced and the first one i clicked on um this gentleman who wrote this i guess it was a gentleman people used pseudonyms but he had had a very bad experience but at one one part of the experience he encountered this this child he said it looked like an orphan like a dickensian orphan child who was in tattered and this child was beckoning to him and saying come on hurry up we gotta go hurry and i i got a little freaked out by that and i look at that and i think how is that not a spirit like how could that be explained materialistically you know that a compound could trigger that specific of a virtually identical except for the appearance uh you know in in this me and this other person who i don't know you know who has different life experiences than me so i was really i feel like that that was confirming for me i there's no way i could explain that materialistically so i think it absolutely opens people up to a different dimension yeah okay um peter any comments on that we are starting to approach the entity so i'll ask you to be brief well by saying that i mean you're you're accepting the fact that these psychedelics do open up a metaphysical reality all right which is kind of what you're arguing against a moment ago saying it was for sure but then you were saying before the subject of illusory no i never argued against that well you said they were subjective well yeah so not fair but now you're saying but now you're saying experiences are subjective okay but now you're saying it's objective right so but the interesting fact there is it opens up form a philosophical point of view i'm not taking i'm not i'm not taking science two different things yeah okay maybe i am maybe i'm not but anyway from a philosophy from a philosophical point of view it's interesting you know opens up interesting questions like this and my personal view is i don't i don't take a dogmatic view one way or the other you know i'm just open-minded to it um and i think this is the way we should treat psychedelics as interesting tools for mental exploration that's that's what they are they're not as harmful as people think whereas you would take a more cautious approach than that ashley presumably you believe that we're dealing with something that is should be treated carefully um not just oh absolutely yes we're dealing with something completely out of our death then i i want to say too that acid casualties are not a fabrication that's where that was propagated by the dea or someone almost every i talk to probably 10 different people uh one of whom is my contemporary as far as age and took a lot of dmt before becoming a christian and the other whom came out of the original psychedelic revolution in the 60s every single one of them knew firsthand not second hand so it's not you know my plumber's brother's cousin's friend knew firsthand someone who was either institutionalized or who no longer you know completely had their mental faculties due to psychedelic use so these aren't you know these cautionary tales they aren't myths they aren't messed up they're real that's anecdote but look at this look at the science okay that that kind of thing is a terrible terrible propaganda which has stopped research into these chemicals uh the fact is i mean okay i might have known someone who said something about something okay it doesn't prove anything look at um a study by the lancet with david nuts and those figures you know you should see that lsd psilocybin and most of the psychedelics are relatively harmless whereas alcohol and heroin they are very harmful and so we make should make the separation between psychedelics and the rest of the drugs and it's very important okay we we we are just about out of time i'm afraid folks it's it's been a fascinating discussion and i've enjoyed the liveliness of it along the way as well so thank you both ashley and peter for being on the show today i will make sure there are links to both of your websites your talks your books and the article ashley in your case um where you can find out more about this and pursue it if you're interested but for now thank you so much for such an interesting conversation on the show today uh thanks for being with me thank you thank you ashley and i'm sorry for any discourtesy but i've really enjoyed the conversation thank you i have to i have to it's been fun for more conversations between christians and skeptics subscribe to the unbelievable podcast and for more updates and bonus content sign up to the unbelievable newsletter

Channel: Premier Unbelievable?

Views: 5,977

Keywords: unbelievable, justin brierley, premier christian radio, christianity, atheism, philosophy, faith, theology, God, apologetics, Jesus, debate, science, evidence, Bible, big conversation

Id: z6-7pJd_nbY

Length: 70min 25sec (4225 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 10 2021