Michael Pollan and Chris Bache - Buddha at the Gas Pump Interview

[Music] welcome to Buddha at the gas pump my name is Rick Archer Buddha at the gas pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people I've done over 500 of them now and if this is new to you and you'd like to check out previous ones please go to bat Capcom ba t GA p where you'll find all the p the past interviews menu you'll find all the previous ones organized in several different ways this program is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers so if you appreciate it and would like to support it in any amount there is a PayPal button on every page of the site and there's a donations page for people who don't like to deal with paypal my guests today are Michael Pollan and Chris Bosh I'll introduce Michael first Michael is the author of eight books including how to change your mind Michael say something cuz Chris's voice is a bigger pictures on the screen yeah there we go there's Michael Mike I think Chris sniffled or something he's the author of eight books including how to change your mind which is the one we're gonna be talking about today and the number of books about food including cooked food rules in defense of food the Omnivore's Dilemma and the botany of desire all of which were New York Times bestsellers Michael's a longtime contributor to the New York Times Magazine he also teaches writing at Harvard and the University of California Berkeley where he is the Jon s and James L Knight professor of science journalism in 2010 Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world okay Chris ba Bay SH has been on that gap before in a panel discussion about five or six years ago you go ahead and say something Chris so your picture very good to be here looking forward to our conversation today good there you go my software switches back and forth according to who's talking Chris is a professor emeritus in the Department of philosophy and religious studies at Youngstown State University where he taught for 33 years he's also adjunct faculty at the California Institute of integral studies and a fellow at the Institute of noetic Sciences an award-winning teacher Chris's work explores the philosophical implications of non-ordinary states of consciousness especially psychedelic states chris has written four books life cycles a study of reincarnation in light of contemporary consciousness research dark night early dawn a pioneering work in cycled psychedelic philosophy and collective consciousness and the living classroom an exploration of teaching and collective fields of consciousness his new book is LSD and the mind of the universe and you get the cover-up that's Michael's book LSD and the mind of the universe diamonds from heaven and I didn't show Chris Michael's book when I mentioned it here's a picture of Michael's book how to change your mind subtitle is what the new science of psychedelics teaches us about consciousness dying addiction depression and transcendence so it's great to have you guys as I've been really looking forward to this and really enjoying preparing for it and there's been a lot of excitement I think among the back gap or the listeners and viewers in fact I mentioned this interview of the other day on some Facebook group I mentioned Michael Poland's name and some guy said the food guy Michael how did you how did you switch if you did from being the food guy to invest into exploring psychedelics well before I was the food guy I was I was kind of a nature guy I've always been interested the reason I got into food is I was very interested in the in the reciprocal relationship between people and particularly plants but other species in general and coevolution and in book you mentioned earlier the botany of desire I had looked at this whole question of domesticated plants and proposed the idea that they manipulate us as much as we manipulate them and that a very fine evolutionary strategy for a select group of plants and this is true for animals too is to figure out and by that I mean you know through trial and error natural selection or artificial selection what sorts of how how to gratify human desire and a big human desire obviously is for food and then it's that's what most domesticated plants have have worked on that strategy but beauty is another and I mean there's a whole bunch of them and but the one that I found most curious is the plants that thrive by gratifying our desire to change consciousness and so in that book I wrote a long chapter on cannabis and and looking at the you know how it has served the cannabis plant to basically through trial and error figure out how to engage with the whole receptor network in our brains and elsewhere in our body and so I've had this long-standing interest in in plant medicines and psychoactive plants and so that was good and I kind of laid that you know aside while I was doing all this food research for the last several years and then stumbled on this new research going on to use psilocybin specifically which I realized is not a plant but a fungus mushroom - well no it's technically it's not it's another kingdom entirely actually we're more like fungi than we are like plants plants are primary producers they can take sunlight and make food from it we are parasitic on them and so our mushrooms so we share that common we depend on that it's use of photosynthesis anyway um I heard about this research giving psilocybin to people who were had terminal cancer and that it was helping them deal with the prospect of death or the fear of recurrence and this struck me is a very curious very curious thing to do on its face I didn't see the logic of it and and then I was also kind of as journalists do picking up that there was something in the air around psychedelics right now and that there was a kind of renewed interest that was very serious from a scientific or philosophical point of view and that came I was at a dinner party and with a group of people I didn't know it was a long table in a big house and I heard down at the end of the table this woman who looked at food about my age talking about her acid trip and I figured she was talking about some college adventure and then I listened a little closely and it was you know a couple weeks ago and she was very prominent a developmental psychologist talking about the insights into the consciousness and children that her new acquaintance with LSD had given her and so you as journalists we put together a couple data points and that was enough to convince me that there's something going on here that I want to look into so that's kind of how it happened I was also just thrilled to have a new topic as rich as this and and one that you know I mean I was a total neophyte when it comes to spiritual matters neuro scientific matters psychological matters so to me the great thing about writing books and being a journalist and not a specialist is you get to master whole new topics as an adult and you get paid to do it it's kind of a big yeah I kind of feel that way doing this it's although it's pretty much the same topic but a different flavor of it every week and I love just focusing on it so one thing that comes through in your book Michael is that and one thing you just kind of alluded to is that there's certain intelligence in the plant kingdom and alts and specifically in the psychedelic plant kingdom that you know they're not just dumb chemicals there it's almost as if there is a spirit of the of the plants which has an agenda which has an initiative which wants in some people's estimation to foster human evolution by providing themselves to us as means of shifting our consciousness you want to touch on that a little bit yeah I don't think I would go that far or I haven't had are the plants are bearing a message and and trying to get us to save them or save the planet it could be true but I don't have evidence of that but I've have written on plant intelligence and I'm I'm constantly amazed at what plants can do and how much we underestimate them you know we're learning now that plants have a pretty elaborate communications network that the trees in the forest convey messages using mycelium which are the filaments of mushrooms to send messages to trade nutrients that the trees and forests can warn each other when there's a threat and when they when they told her that threat they'll actually change their flavour and though in their leaves to make them less appealing to insects or they'll start producing toxins of various kinds plants have memory plants plants are intelligent I have no question about that it has something to do with how you define intelligence of course but a basic definition is a problem-solving ability that their reactions to situations are not simply automatic or instinctual but that they can deal with novel threats in novel ways and that they can remember things - there have been some very interesting trials Monica gagliano is a botanist who's demonstrated that that plants can remember and and store information in a way so I have enormous respect for them I think that they had do have we have to acknowledge they have a kind of subjectivity the way we do their conscious not in the sense I think we normally mean by that word which also folds in ideas of self consciousness and a subjective sense of what it's like to be crisp a chore Rick Archer or Michael Pollan I don't I don't I don't have any reason to believe they have that but they have a point of view and they have interests and they pursue these in a different way than we do and they're conscious in the sense of being aware of their environment and responding appropriately we may get into this later but some say that you know consciousness is fundamental and matter is sort of an epic phenomenon of consciousness rather than the other way around and that all forms of matter reflect or Express consciousness to varying degrees even a stone and obviously way on up the evolutionary ladder but let's table that for for a little bit later um so you hurt you overheard this conversation at the dinner party and so how did you proceed I know you proceeded in many cases with a great deal in every case with a great deal of caution and seriousness electric trepidations you were often unable to sleep the night before a session because you were sort of anxious about what might happen so you having a session came you know came a little later the first thing I did was reached out to an editor at The New Yorker and say I've got a really cool story and I'm gonna write about these trials interview the people who were who were going on these psilocybin journeys talk to the scientists try to understand the neuroscience of it and the psychology and to my delight they were willing to underwrite that project so that was the beginning of my investigation and I wrote a piece for The New Yorker which came out in February 2015 called the trip treatment and it's available online for free and if you just search that and that was a kind of straight ahead piece of science journalism there was no participatory angle to it I don't think they would have published it if there were it was all like white coats and scientists and inpatients volunteers and but the interviews were extraordinary and the people I met and the kinds of transformative experiences that a single psychedelic journey had given them completely resetting their attitude toward death lifting their fear entirely in many cases you can see evidence I'm sorry cancer patients these are cancer patients yeah with serious diagnosis I mean some were terminal some were paralyzed by fear and anxiety at the the threat of a recur but in always they were they had this what the doctors called existential distress and and they found relief in about 80 percent of the cases which is quite remarkable and it's a single intervention I mean we don't have much like that in psychiatry right or palliative care you know we have morphine we give people which dulls their perception and relieves their pain but doesn't doesn't help them spiritually deal with the situation they're in tell us the more act outs and give us an overview of the research that's taking place and it's not only cancer patients but alcoholics and oppressed people and it started with cancer patients you know the first kind of clinical applications and and the reason for that is a couple one is it's a sympathetic group the regulators are a little less worried about any potential toxicity in the case of people who or have terminal diagnosis in the same way that you know people with AIDS they would they were willing to give drugs that hadn't been thoroughly vetted yet if people wanted to take them so there was a comfort level I think for the regulators and a sympathetic angle for the for the public in general I mean how could you withhold this from someone who is dying and had fear you know tremendous fear and here was something that promised to to lift it but since then since the success of those trials there have been several others looking at different indications of medical indications an important one that's being worked on now is depression and this grew out of the the cancer trials and that they saw that depression scores as as the psychologists measure them had dropped significantly and so the FDA actually encouraged the researchers to why don't you look at depression more widely because this is a tremendous problem the the tools we have to treat it at very poor raise and depression are rising rapidly I think a big question remains is whether depression is one thing and if the kind of depression that a cancer patient experiences is similar to the kind of depression of someone who has a you know general depression or treatment-resistant depression for years and years and years the cancer patients depression is recent very often and has a has a clearly defined cause and that's not true for everyone struggling with depression so we'll see we'll see if it works there's some evidence that it will there was a trial at Imperial College in London of depressive patients treatment resistant I believe they were and many of them most of them showed significant but short-lived results they were there their depression lifted for a couple months and then gradually it's returned not in all cases but in most of them so there's a there's encouraging reason to pursue this and they're there are two big trials going on right now for depression are about to get started there have been as you suggest trials for addiction in alcoholics and cigarette smokers and cocaine addicts and those employment area we're showing very promising results and I think that's interesting and may turn out to be I think behavioural change may be one of the really big applications of psychedelics with that in mind they're looking at John John's Hopkins I think is going to look at eating disorders and that's very important because anorexia is actually the hardest psychiatric illness to treat and has the lowest rates of success and the highest mortality of all psychiatric problems so I think if we can make progress on that if you fantastic let's see what else is being tried there was a small trial of obsession obsessive compulsive disorder and they'll be more work with that the drugs have been used with high-functioning autistic people who have social anxiety and that that result is been encouraging also so there's a there's a whole range and to people who think well how can a psychedelic be such a panacea I think it's important to note that the kinds of problems it works on or seems to be effective with have a lot in common they're all at the end of the spectrum where people's thinking becomes too rigid - trapped in in deep groove of habit whether mental habit or behavior will have it people are in these loops and they can't break out of them and what the psychedelics seem to do is is a real jolt to the system and gives people the kind of perspective on their lives that can actually break mental habit and it needs to be accompanied by lots of therapeutic intervention they say these aren't people going off and having a psilocybin trip in the woods alone these are guided trips and I think is a really important distinction people are very carefully prepared in advance told what to expect how to deal with difficulties that will come up if they you know because it can be a very very frightening things can happen especially if you're if you're facing your mortality and then during the experience the guides are with you the whole time in the University trials are usually two guys a man and a woman and they're not saying very much it's very non interventionist the idea is to basically give you a sense of safety so you can surrender to what can be a very disturbing set of mental events and then after this session you come back usually the next day or in the next couple days and you have what's called an integration session where you tell the therapists what you saw what happened what you're puzzled by and with the therapist you try to kind of come to some interpretation of what's happened and figure out how you can take the lessons the insights of that trip and apply them to the conduct of your life have these therapists usually taken psilocybin themselves so that they have a better idea of what the person is going through well I can only guess about that because none of that will admit it but you know but I I can see why it would put them at reputational risk for objectivity people would challenge the studies saying these people are you know aficionados of psychedelics um you know I have reason to believe that some of them have but none of them would talk about it on the hurt a couple to talk about it off the record and some would just simply say no so it's hard to believe you wouldn't develop the kind of curiosity I develop because in the course of doing this research I became clear to me that I couldn't really understand what these volunteers were going through without having a similar experience myself and that's and that then became the more autobiographical part of the book where I engaged with several underground guides because I couldn't get into the above-ground Trials and work with them to have a very similar experience in a slightly different context yeah your your answer to that question brings up a point which is that since I guess it was the early 70s when Nixon declared Timothy Leary to be the most dangerous man in America and psychedelic research was clamped down the pond there hasn't really been much going on and now it sounds like it's kind of burgeoning but is it I mean can anybody anywhere who's qualified study this or is it still like a real trickle compared to what might be taking place the only reason is trickly at all is that there's no federal funding all the funding is is private money charitable donations and luckily there's a lot of visionary people with a lot of dough in this country and they're supporting the work but there's quite a bit of it there are many universities around the country getting interested and getting involved there's these two depression trials each are gonna have six or eight sites each of which is a medical school or a university the FDA is not standing in the way they made a decision way back in 92 because people have been knocking on the door for a long time that they would treat psychedelics like any other drug and if you could persuade them that there was a good reason for this experiment they would grant permission and the DEA would grant a license to use it so I haven't heard of people you know I mean serious researchers encountering federal obstacles the main obstacle is is okay yeah your comment about the kind of commonality of all the types of difficulties which are being addressed with psychedelics being that all these people are too kind of rigid or locked down in their thinking or in their perspective I was thinking that as you were leading up to that comment it seems like psilocybin and some of these other drugs they're using are so different from usual protocols because most things tend to dull you in one way or another you know whereas this is a real opening up of your awareness and a radical shift of your perspective in fact I think you saying many times in your book that a lot of people say wow that was the most profound experience I ever had in my life and I don't feel like drinking anymore or taking smoking cigarettes anymore or something so essentially there could be such a thing that you know with one session would give you such a radically different perspective and shift your behavior permanently yeah and I also you know other psychiatric drugs essentially deal with symptoms and you take them every day yeah perhaps for the rest of your life and its chemical czar in your brain all the time here you've got this one shot or two shot intervention the big chemical which is not very toxic whether you're talking about psilocybin or LSD is in your brain for a short amount of time and you are dealing with cures in many cases you're solving the problem because you're you're as you say you're not dulling the the patient you are opening them up and I think we're leaving them from ego consciousness for a period of time I think that's that's probably important wait you know mechanism for how this works one of the really interesting findings of the research that I cover in the book is you know the effort to figure out what's going on in the brain when someone's having a psychedelic experience and the the current thinking is that there's one particular brain network the default mode network which is this tightly linked set of structures in the midline that connect the prefrontal cortex to older deeper areas of memory and emotion and the posterior cingulate cortex and this this is kind of the the orchestrator or conductor of brain activity in this network it is closely associated with the generation of the idea of a self and so it's where self reflection takes place it's where time mental time travel takes place theory of mind the ability to impute mental States to others and what's called autobiographical memory the the the faculty by which we take the events whatever it happens in our lives and tie it into the story we tell ourselves of who we are so you know if the ego could be said to have an address it's probably in this area and this area of the brain is suppressed dramatically and this was a big surprise because they thought psychedelics in the brain would just represent a lot of fireworks you know an excitation of everything in fact it's the opposite for this one particular Network and you can correlate a radical down regulation in the default mode network with recorded experiences of ego dissolution when people tell you yeah on that trip I just completely my sense of self was obliterated they will see on the MOR fMRI that their default mode network has been essentially deactivated so that's a very interesting insight into where that kind of thinking to the extent it has a material you know manifestation where that's happening and and it may be that the relief from ego consciousness and an overactive default mode network is implicated in a lot of these problems like depression you know there is research to suggest that depressed people have an overactive default mode network that's that is kind of punishing and they can't get out of their heads the default mode Network also lights up when you're when you're mind wandering when you don't have anything in the world getting your attention it operates in a seesaw relationship with the intentional Network the attentional networks and so giving people a vacation from that that of you know that kind of regulatory Authority allows lots of other activity to bloom and there's an illustration in my book that shows it was an attempt to show people how the brain gets rewired during the psilocybin or LSD experience and so and in this drawing you you around this circle you get all these different brain networks you know the visual cortex or the auditory networks or the you know the networks that direct your physical activities and suddenly you get all this communication between networks that don't ordinarily communicate with one another and that might explain synesthesia the the phenomenon of you know being able to see musical notes that perhaps your auditory Center is talking directly to your visual cortex without going through the default mode network so the brain is temporarily rewired and we know that brain connections you know are new ways of thinking and if you have them even temporarily you can exercise them and make them more salient and so it's just a theory but that's one of the operative theories of what am I going on here that you know when you have some profound insight on psychedelics it may be that the product of you know connecting the dots literally in a new way yeah a couple of thoughts on that one is that if we think of the brain as a filter or a lens or a receiver of consciousness rather than as a generator of consciousness then you know what you said about the default mode Network shutting down or being becoming more quiet would imply perhaps that there's less filtration taking place so whatever consciousness is can shine through more fully and you know the ancient traditions say that consciousness is bliss in one of its attributes and so you know you can experience very gratifying fulfilling states if if that default mode network has shut down somewhat another little point there is that a lot of the meditation research has shown that there is a remarkable degree of coherence between different parts of the brain that are ordinarily not correlated or coherent with one another as measured by EEG so you know frequencies will just sort of line up in synchrony whereas before they were asynchronous and also you know the meditation research done by people like Justin Brewer who also has taken fMRI images of experienced meditators while they're meditating those scans look very much like the psychedelic scans he saw that actually and was quite struck by the similarities so that meditation also down regulates the default mode Network and I think that's really significant but your point too about you know opening up the the doors of perception is Huxley called it you know when he talked about the reducing valve it was pretty clear he was talking about the ego the ego is really what walls us off from you know whether it's internal unconscious material or external sensory information and and what seems to be you know it is what defends us from being overwhelmed by reality by being overwhelmed by nature by being overwhelmed by what's in our unconscious and and those walls come down I think during psychedelic experience and that that accounts for the sense of merging that people have and so I think that you know I think we're talking about a lot of different vocabularies for the same thing I'm using ego and walls and I know that's very psychodynamic and you're using a more spiritual vocabulary but I think we're talking about the same thing yeah I think so um Chris do you have any questions or comments on what we've been saying so far I've just been enjoying the Michaels presentation a great deal and so deeply appreciative that a person of your caliber Michael has done such an excellent job of presenting the history and the issues and people's lives being touched in this form of therapy you just opened up the conversation too many people who previously would have just never been willing to have a conversation about psychedelics and you've done such a good job with it you've you've done it so well and the cat you capture the personality is involved so well just really appreciate what you've done thank you well I was you know I was approaching it from outside obviously and with a certain you know naivete and skepticism and I'm you know I mean there are people with a lot more knowledge and and experience in the psychedelic world but they've tended to be in a conversation that takes place within the psychedelic community and I wasn't coming from there and and and I also always write for an audience that I don't assume has any interest in the subject I'm just much more interested in in in talking to the general reader and and you know grabbing them by the collar and say hey this is really cool you should you should read this stuff whether it's about food or agriculture or all these kind of things so I think that that stance was very useful to me in in bringing people into this conversation and it's been very gratifying to see how many people and whether they're in the therapeutic community or the neuroscience community have gotten excited in the last year about the potential here and want to get involved as researchers and as people experimenting with psychedelics so you know look this renaissance was happening I mean I was reporting on saying that was already happening but I feel very lucky that I was able to play some role in bringing people into the tent yeah so we can probably spend an hour going through all the various stages of your exploration you know with psychedelics and different experiences you had and all that stuff and all that is covered very well in your book so I think what I'd like to do is just ask you a question which came in from someone actually named Suzy Parkinson and Carlsbad California she asked them since your original psychedelic journey or as a result of them perhaps has your belief system or perspective changed deepen or taken on a meaning which it didn't previously have yeah it's a great question thank you for proposing it my experiences have changed me in various ways I think for the most part the personality changes are pretty subtle um you know my wife's not here right now but I would drag her in and to say to tell me Ben I've asked her this question because your partner Newton than anybody else and it's very sensitive to any changes and she basically feels that I'm a more open and patient person than I was and she was very apprehensive when I started getting involved with this that I might change for the worse she doesn't seem to think I have intellectually there's been a change I think my understanding of spirituality has changed and what that means I think it's important to understand you guys work on these issues all the time but I was really kind of spiritually before I started this I mean it's just a part of my life my mom my mind that I hadn't developed I mean some people look at finding desire and it gets very spiritual take or die talking about food in a very spiritual way and the importance of communion but I really didn't see myself as spiritual partly because my understanding of spirituality was that it existed in opposition to science get these skepticism and that implied a I'm telling you I was um fighting for but it implied a belief in the supernatural things beyond the scope of science were to understand and so I approached it that way and I was very much a pretty confirmed materialist in my philosophical outline that that the laws of nature could explain everything and I realize how limited this was and so I had after my psychedelic journeys and after one in particular where I had a very profound experience of transcending my ego my sin my usual sense of self and I actually beheld myself too I'm first bursting into a little cloud of post-it notes that was me and it was there was nothing left and then another time where I was I felt myself kind of spread out on the ground like a coat of paint or butter and but a new perspective arose for me to observe this scene and that was the spooky part and it's the part I still don't understand from what new point of view was I taking in the scene it was an eye that wasn't familiar to me it was an eye that was completely fine with what was happening unburdened untroubled disinterested and reconciled to whatever there was and it was quite profound and and once that sense of self was gone I was totally open or unprotected undefended against anything and and then started merging and in this in this particular instance I merged with a piece of music I had had my guide put on this unaccompanied cello suite by Bach number two and demon which is a very sad beautiful piece of music and I became it there was no subject object duality at all I I was identical to this music I could feel yo-yo Ma's the horsehair on his bow going over my skin and I was inside this dark well looking out and and the breeze of the the vibrations of the music I could physically feel the nose it was remarkable and I came out of that you know the next day I went to my guide for integration and I said well I had this experience of complete ego the solution and the and she said wouldn't you learned from that I said well that you're not identical to your ego you don't have to there's another ground on which to stand but it was a very mysterious other ground and then she said well it wasn't that worth the price of admission and I said yes if it was really interesting but what do you do with it you know now my ego is back in uniform back on Patrol and so what good is it and she said well you'd had a sample of this way of being and you can cultivate it and I said how and she said through meditation basically and and like I'm like a great many people and a great many American Buddhists this will opened a door into and made it it made me much more comfortable in the mental space of meditation and I could navigate it better and and and sometimes I do attain that effective that I had had during that that psilocybin trip so did that make me more spiritual I'm not prepared to conclude that that new perspective that opened up is some trans personal perspective or some universal consciousness I know that Aldous Huxley you know when it happened to him said that was the mind at large which was something that we tuned in that sounds like I'd be really here curious to hear Chris's take on that I don't know it could just just as easily be another product of my mind that you know I hadn't experienced before because the damn ego you know overshadowed it but I came to see that my my understanding of spirituality was faulty because the what spirituality is for me is powerful connection an openness an undefended ability to connect whether it's to nature which is very important to me in the natural world and and during another psychedelic experience I had the sense of nature being very much alive I mean the leaves in my garden were returning my gaze in some sense and it was a beautiful experience it was really wonderful so there was the connection to nature that is opened up and then there is connection to other people this the the feelings of love that so many people report on psychedelics and this powerful connection other people and the universe in some more general way and so that's what spirituality is now to me it's it's opening the gates so you you can connect at a very deep level without any screen between you and the other no so object and so I learned that the opposite of spiritual the word spiritual should not be material as I understood it it should be egotistical because it really is the ego that stands in the way of those powerful connections and that the ego is the enemy of spiritual development so that's kind of that was my takeaway it's not final in any way I think I have a lot more to learn from the experience and I might come out in a different place I'm very curious about well Chris I'm gonna be curious to know how you would interpret that experience of this new perspective opening up on your dissolved self well you know as I listen to you speak I'm reminded of Surya Suzuki in his beautiful little book on meditation big mind little mind and you know it's like there's little mind which is very efficient getting things done sits at our deaths you know answers a phone and then there's big mind which is really that dimension of mind which is just so profoundly larger than other than an inclusive of blue line it's just a different wavelength of consciousness and so then the question is of course all of the meditation traditions agree that there are many many layers to ego so you can kind of get clear one level and get caught in another and clear that level get caught another it's a labyrinth kind of thing but according to their ways of thinking it is possible to profoundly quiet still allow ego to become transparent to when ego becomes transparent this this larger background context surfaces in awareness so that rings true in my experience the question then becomes okay if there's little mind and big mind what is the nature of mind just mike and that opens that then we're now we're off to the races because then we get into a very interesting discussion of what is the nature of consciousness and what is conscious and and who can have consciousness and so on and so forth so I mean what is the nature of mine I know that's a big fat question yeah that's a big one and it's it's it's personally I don't have a vested interest in specific definitions of consciousness and in specific definitions of mind I'm kind of happy to go where different people want to go with understands of consciousness per se as long as the definition is open to a complete phenomenology of mind because my background training is in philosophy of religion and phenomenology has been a large part of that so I think it's important for us to critically not naively but critically look at the broadest body of data that we have for what mind is and how mind manifests and what it can do so can mind influence the health of the body can mind actually influence physical objects of telekinesis can is there a mind can linking between human beings and plants so that there can be a genuine exchange of information at some level I mean that opens that gets us into the deeper question and then when we go to all the sucks Lee and he goes to mind at large that's the assertion of a of an encompassing mind that holds all Minds all sub minds are held within a master kind of intelligence of the universe I'm comfortable with that concept just because I've had so many experiences of so many dimensions of that mind that I'm comfortable I talk about the creative intelligence of the universe I don't know what to call it honest I don't know what name we should give it and I'm sometimes I'll talk about it as the divine but I'm not a theist and I'm not a super naturalist I completely agree with you on that way to me it's all natural it's all nature it's all part of nature and there's nothing about for me the study of consciousness which should be beyond the range of scientific and to Gatien but I've spent so much time over the many years exploring different aspects of that mind that using what tools well my primary tool has been LSD in my explorations I also have experienced with psilocybin and other in ayahuasca and salvia divinorum and but my primary instrument of exploration was LSD use in a particular a very specific modality so I don't should I describe this Rick should we do this now or let me just wrap up a point that Michael made earlier and then let's do it Michael was saying that he used to have a sort of a aversion to the notion of spirituality because he felt it was anti scientific excuse me if I didn't express that quite right but there was you know some distrust of it because it seemed probably you've heard you heard a lot of woo things they I mean look at I mean religion and science have been at each other's throats for a long time people used to be burned at the stake for believing that the earth wasn't the center of the solar system and I feel that we've reached a point where science and spirituality can complement each other tremendously if we take anything that spirituality or any religious tradition has ever proposed or suggested as a hypothesis rather than as something that we ought to believe in then it's something that's potentially open to investigate experiential investigation and I think Chris will comment on a lot of things he's investigated experientially which it might seem extremely hypothetical to the average person that has some of these things have very far-reaching implications for humanity for religion for spirituality I don't think there's a heck of a lot of value in just believing in something because somebody says you want to or some tradition says you ought to or anything I think everything should be open to experience all investigation so that's what's the scientific attitude brings to spirituality on the other hand spirituality can bring something to science because science doesn't possess the tools for investigating the subtle realms that spirituality has specialized in has dealt with and LSD is as such a tool although ultimately our own our human nervous system is such a tool and throughout the ages I think what Mystics have been doing is using that tool to and fine-tuning it and learning how to use it such that they can explore all sorts of subtle dimensions and you know add to human knowledge in ways that modern science couldn't even hope to begin to do at its current stage so anyway I just want to get that out and then you go ahead dressing segue from that oh just a footnote and a note on to what you said Rick it's one thing to study the quantitative qualities of consciousness and it's another thing to study to study the qualitative nature of consciousness and I think science is extraordinarily good at studying the quantitative nature of consciousness and looking at the various physiological correlations various states of awareness so on and so forth but I think we can study scientifically if we broaden our methodology of science we can study the qualitative characteristics of consciousness we do so by controlled experiment we do so by getting carefully screen different people from different backgrounds for example putting them through the same exploratory regimen carefully recording their experiences afterwards comparing their experiences across populations I mean that we we can't put experience under a microscope but we can use all of our critical skills to study the qualitative nature of experience and then we can start broadening it into cross culture and historical come on analysis so I think we can be critical but being critical is larger than being neurological mm-hmm well I mean you can't I mean the interesting what's interesting to me about consciousness is a subject for scientific exploration is you can't study it without experience there's no other rule right I mean phenomenology is the only tool to understand the subjectivity and at least so far and so yeah I think I agree I think you have to you have to go down that path and you can do that with a lot of rigor and it's one of the interesting things about the psychedelic work the reports and the volunteers are critically important and you car and sometimes you correlate those reports with what you're seeing on your brain scans and some but sometimes you don't need to so but going back to this question of but I think a big question is whether you know whether there's any real evidence to think that brains don't produce consciousness or that you know that mine proceeds Matt or I think that's a very interesting question and I went into my own investigations assuming because that's the consensus among scientists is that well we don't know how it happens but we assume that these neurons these cells are producing consciousness in some way even though it's it's very hard to get from cells to that phenomenon nobody has a clue how to do it that seem to be the more parsimonious you know or starting principle but a lot of people after experience of psychedelics come out in a different place yeah I interviewed he got a few months ago named Mark Gober who wrote a book called the end to upside-down thinking which addresses this very point and you know it may seem parsimonious initially that gosh this is just a epiphenomena of brain functioning but there are so many anomalies when you look at it that way that keep pecking away at that materialistic worldview and Mark in his book really gosu these in a very brilliant way and it's called the end or maybe it's an end I think maybe the end to upside-down thinking by Mark Gober gob er and he's he's been on backup a few months ago so you can find him there but it's like by Geoffrey Krupa yeah this book is fascinating I recommend him for to come back on the show but he's also looking at a series of people some of them scientists others philosophers who under one of this flip and they're thinking to to believing that they're that you know mind may well proceed matter and has these case histories among other things yeah oh go ahead address you're gonna say the the field of study that shifted my thinking in that regard because I finished graduate school even though it was in philosophy of religion I was a pretty a theistic Allah inclined agnostic by the time I finished graduate school I was well versed in the rise of science and human in human values and in enjoy that and join that movement fully I tell my students if you haven't fallen in love with can't with science you've missed the great one of the great romances of history I mean this is just such a massive extraordinarily ground-shaking pivot in human understanding but one of the areas which shifted my thinking about the idea that our brain creates consciousness and of course clearly our brain does generate consciousness in a sense but it was the reincarnation research they was Ian Stevenson's research at the University of Virginia and the multiple volumes that he had published documenting very detailed cases of from around the world children very small three four five years old who had detailed memories of what appeared to be their previous life and he was able to extract get those memories consolidate them and verify sufficient number of those memories to build an extremely strong case for the the fact of reincarnation with knowing the theory of it without knowing how it actually takes place that there is some type of continuity of consciousness now this there's lots and lots of levels of issues involved in these things one by two another life yeah it seems to be I mean some people would say well those memories are actually drawn out of the collective unconscious and you know that doesn't show continuity of life to life but I think Stevenson's evidence is really a strong evidence for some type of continuity of an awareness from lifetime to lifetime especially his last two book which is a two-volume book on philosophy and on reincarnation in biology in which he studied 170 87 cases of children who not only had psychological recall from their previous lifetime but actually bore the marks in their body in the form of birthmarks which replicated wounds of death in the previous incarnation so somehow it was as if consciousness had been traumatized in such a way that it not only imprinted on subsequent mind but it imprinted on the body of subsequent mind so after looking at this data a lot I think what it tells us is we have information in our mind that predates this body and if that's the case if and if those can be legitimated verified memories then that indicates that there is at least in some way in which our awareness our memory our mind is not generated by our brain a very simple metaphor for this which I'm sure you've both heard is you know I mean radios and televisions they are detectors or not transfers they're receivers of fluctuations in the electromagnetic field which is ubiquitous and if the radio breaks the radio transmission from the you know power 50 miles away or something doesn't stop other radios can still pick it up and we can get a new radio and listen to it again so if consciousness is a field as opposed to just a product of the brain then you know very we're all tapped into that and we kind of share it in common as a foundation but then how do you account for individuality and an individuality moving from life's to light from from one body to another and that leads me into a question I'd like to ask which will get us a little bit back to psychedelics which is that you know research shows that subjective experiences in meditation and other spiritual practices have physiological effects which we've been talking about and Western science is only able to measure the gross physiology and traditionally it's understood that we also have a subtle physiology Chinese and Vedic systems offer elaborate explanations of the subtle body using terms such as chi or prana or sushumna and EDA and pingala nadi etc and these traditions understand that it's necessary to condition and strengthen the subtle body to sustain the enormous flows of energy that accompany spiritual awakening often spiritual aspirants spend years or decades doing this before awakening occurs so what are so this whole subtle body thing has implications for reincarnation because it would be the subtle body that moves from one gross body to another when the gross body wears out the bhagavad-gita says it's like changing clothes so but here's the question what are your thoughts on the fact that anyone can ingest a psychedelic substance without having prepared the subtle body or can psychedelics facilitate such preparation [Laughter] [Music] in answering in responding I don't want to assume the your observation that is the subtle body that transfers from incarnation to incarnation it may be I'm just not sure that we've nailed it down that close it's let's take its hypothesis and so again individuality is the whole question is what is individuality so is the individuality of one life transferring to the individuality or in in tact in another life and I think those are very excited and complicated questions and I don't mean to prejudge them at all so I don't want to assume a set answer to what is individuality or what is the subtle body that said my experience I have a lot of convictions around the subtle body and sub simp act the way psychedelic experiences can impact the subtle body but to explain I mean I can't let me say a little bit of but my background because there are so many different variations of psychedelic experiences and I want to define mine that's the body of data that I draw from when I finished graduate school in 78 I had met the work of stanislav grof immediately he had just published realms of the human unconscious he had hundreds of a hundred I would say is published by that time and I was immediately taken atheistic aliy agnostic as I was I was immediately taken by his research proposal that through these substances if they were used in a careful and control circumstance that we could use them to experience deeper dimensions of our own mind and I was particularly interested in his observation that one can go deeper than personal consciousness of one can go deeper than even collective unconscious you can go deeper into the mind of the universe itself he didn't say it quite like that but that was the implication of what he did and I was immediately fascinated by that because I was a philosopher of religion and exploring the the consciousness of the universe if there is a consciousness of the universe could do you have enormous implications for a variety of philosophical questions so this was 1978 and I wanted to do the psychedelic work I was just like Michael after doing the research and looking at the literature and looking at some of the people's lives who had been changed I wanted to participate and I basically did what Michael did I basically made it choice to have some underground experiments with psychedelics I mean I don't like going underground I'd much rather be in a legally sanctioned experimental protocol but that wasn't available to me so I chose to learn Stan Grof Smith it's for working with psychedelics and can and how to have a psychedelic session and all the incidents that have now become kind of standardized in psychedelic protocols to use his methods and then to use them privately to explore my own consciousness and to do it as rigorously as I could using all the philosophical and phenomenological and psychological tools I had gathered in graduate school now Stan differentiates between two different types of psychedelic work load of psychedelic work usually between fifteen to hundred micrograms and high dose psychedelic work which is usually up to maybe 500 micrograms 600 micrograms these low dose method generates a soluble a gradual slowly peeling back the layers of consciousness to this personal unconscious through the perinatal or the death rebirth dynamics into trance personal reality the high dose psychedelic work was in the early years focused on working with terminally ill patients cancer patients and they were basically trying to not heal the personal unconscious but to kind of blow through all the levels of the personal unconscious trigger a near-death type experience a trigger a profound encounter with the universe and then see let that encounter with the deeper structure of the universe to see how it might impact their anxiety around their imminent death so what I did after about four three low dose sessions I opted to work with a very intense regimen with LSD I worked at psychedelic therapy I did what turned out to be a 20-year regimen of doing high-dose psychedelic therapy always using the same protocol always using the same test conditions I worked at 500 to 600 micrograms we'll just not a protocol that I recommend I really don't I didn't know it's much then this I don't know but what I did was to do 73 high-dose fully internalized therapeutically focused psychedelic sessions with the sitter and my wife first wife Carol who is a clinical psychologist agreed to be my sitter and was my sitter for all of my sessions and I just presses I worked for four years and I stopped for six years and then I came back and worked for ten very aggressive years so over the course of 20 years I did 73 sessions now I wouldn't recommend this protocol I would really recommend people work with lower doses and you know there is no research protocol right now federally sanctioned that is recommending or looking considering using doses as high but I wanted to push the limits and I thought that if psychedelic high dose psychedelic work could be done safely three times in the Spring Grove project then it could be done safely more than three times what I found was that it could be done safely more than three times but it's very very demanding work and it's more demanding than the original protocols at Spring Grove envisioned and it opens up opportunities that the early protocol did not envision but it also opened up challenges that the early protocol had not envisioned and one of those challenges has to do with how these deep states of consciousness impact our body and impact our subtle energy system because what I found was that when I would go when I went into these states and went into deeper levels of consciousness and then stabilized Michael of consciousness my consciousness at that level so that my conscious experience was coherent and stable at that level eventually pushing continue to push I would drop down later into a deeper level of consciousness and then stabilizing at that level and then dropping into a deeper level of consciousness each state into a deeper level of consciousness was a state into a higher level of energy just extraordinarily very very powerful levels of energy so that I had to work very conscientiously it's all long-term psychedelic journey errs do work with the body work with the subtle energy system work to detoxify the body work to clarify negative emotions work to basically strengthen the subtle energy body so basically purification I think is essential and is endemic to working with psychedelics in Tibetan Vaudrey onna the monks have to do ninja before they are allowed to take into the the high teachings capable of generating you know enlightenment so ninja with the found mentor or the foundational practices there the five 100,000 practices that every month does in thought Rihanna one of those practices involves doing a hundred thousand prostrations while reciting mantras and prayers and doing visualizations that's a tremendous transformation clarification strengthening of your subtle energy system and they do this as a preliminary to enter to receiving the teaching that were allowing to enter into the very very deep states of consciousness that Vaudrey onna makes possible if you go into these deeper states of consciousness quickly like you tend to do in psychedelic states tremendously powerful purification processes are start triggered physical purification processes physical detoxification emotional detoxification mental detoxification there's a tremendous kind of catharsis that takes place at all of those levels and some of those levels I think are well described in terms of our subtle energy system so we you really have to work with the subtle energy bodies and I don't think of them it's just one body but multiple bodies but mesh very well is against the the Indian Ayurvedic system or the Chinese acupuncture a Meridian system yeah you're actually almost downplaying what you went through here if people were to read your book and when they do it's a tribute to your wife that she was able to sit through these sessions as your sitter watching you go through this because you were going into convulsions there was projectile vomiting you were making all kinds of weird noises and you know what your experience each subjectively was excruciating in many cases I mean suffering beyond anything you could have imagined and you you chalk it up to a deep purification you say in your book the core of the cycle is this increased awareness triggers the surfacing of toxins in the system that in turn precipitates a crisis of disease followed eventually by a higher level of health this cycle operates at many levels at the physical level the psychological level and the soul level and very often I'm just you know summarizing here but very often in your sessions the first part would be one of these horrible ordeals that you would go through and then the second part having cleared that away you'd go into an ecstatic realm and experience all kinds of beautiful things yeah basically again my I'm going to discuss this strictly in terms of the LSD body of work after I stopped my sessions I had I've done psilocybin a number of times I'm comfortable in that world I've done ayahuasca several times I'm comfortable in that world but I really would like to restrict myself to just the LSD work in describing this when you when you die as a self when you know when you think I am psychedelics following stan grof and this is a description in terms of their psychoactive properties not and their physiological and neurological properties but psychologically they seem to activate they seem to function as amplifiers and catalysts of psychological processes so they take what is small and make it loud and they take what is distant and make it close so it basically hyper it's a hyper catharsis and a hyper amplification we for a number of hours we enter into a temporarily hypersensitive state of awareness and what we do with that awareness determines what happens in a session we can listen to a concert and have a good time we can have conversations or we can go deep within and use this hypersensitivity to unearth the obstacles to healthy functioning but then if we go deeper we can enter into deeper levels of existential functioning and deeper relations with the universe it's important to remember I think that what we are doing in our laboratories is we are rediscovering a class of chemicals that have been used in cultures for thousands of years and you know ayahuasca is we have at least a thousand five hundred years in psilocybin mushrooms and peyote and mescaline so there's there's a lot of history between humanity and these substances now what we're doing is studying them in a particular context which is giving us great insight into these processes but there's also a large body of wisdom held in these cultures that have been using these materials for a long time according to many of these systems their view is that consciousness is a universal quality of life we are individually conscious other aspects of the physical world are individually conscious but the universe is conscious and that there are there are many tiers of comprehensive functioning in the universe and when you enter into deeper States of awareness each of these deeper states is a higher level of energy which then requires a stabilization that requires a purification process and stabilization process to be could stay coherent at that level now here's the tricky part when I started this work I was thinking this is all about therapy or this is about healing my personal psyche arts about enlightening Chris Bhatia's poor psyche you know it's about something personal but some of the pain that you're referring to Rick came about when I went through after two years of work went through a crushing ego death experience just cracked me wide open and then it took me into a new layer of work were for the next two years I went through excruciating psychological psychophysical suffering so it was so large and so broad and so deep and it went on for so many years that eventually I became convinced that this was not about healing Chris Bosh's psyche it's not about purifying something that somehow personal to Chris Bosh that eventually I was forced to draw the conclusion that somehow something had happened in my sessions that the universe or some functional dynamic of the universe was using my sessions to bring about some type of healing at the collective level of consciousness some type of healing aimed at the personal psyche that there is and eventually the way I understand this is that just as I remember ultra spacious experiences for better for worse the human species there is a mind of the human species that remembers all of the experiences of all the members of its species so then if you think about all the terrible things we've done to each other and all the wars and all the killing and all the bloodshed Maldon rape and all those terrible pains that somehow the species is stuck with those has to digest those in the same way that I am stuck with Chris Bosh's experiences and that just asks it's good for Chris beige if I can somehow confront the darkest pieces of my shadow and bring that to rest the same thing happens at the collective level for the species as a whole usually that type of confrontation takes place in terms of social transformations or social revolutions but I think in very very deep psychedelic work my experience was that somehow something was using my sessions to Deek effect some body of pain and suffering that was stuck or lodged in the collective psyche so to me I just had to go to a collective model in order to understand the data new meaning to the saying that Christ died for our sins you know I mean if if a being is of c-calm you know great enough stature in terms of his the vastness of his awareness then it's like you know an ocean being able to dissolve lots of mud and stuff as opposed to a glass of water which can only take a little bit of mud without becoming entirely overwhelmed by it we see that also in the Buddhist traditions of the Bodhisattva is basically someone who's basically places the good of the whole over their individual good makes that their project but I don't think this is heavy-duty spiritual requiring great great beings I think any mother any father worth their salt would do what they can to help end the suffering of a child that they saw this is just part of the natural case went what means to be a human so if you're given an opportunity and in some deep psychedelic sessions you sometimes are given an opportunity if you're given an opportunity to relieve suffering it's just the most natural thing in the world to try to do that as best you can sure but as best you can it's a question of capacity you know the Rupert Sheldrake talks about no more for genetic fields and you were just alluding to fields being able to store the traumas of humanity and I've also I've heard I've heard it said that Wars break out when there is enough stress if you will accumulate it in the field that it can no longer be contained like the way lightning strikes when there's enough static electricity you know built up in clouds and so if we can sort of become that field there our tune ourselves with it then it seems from what you're saying in your book that we can become an an instrument for its purging for its purification yeah I think the universe seems to be intensely interested in us as individuals but the universe also seems to be intensely interested in us as a species and when you're moving into that level of consciousness where the universe is communing with the species and you kind of you've gone through ego death and you've gone through a series of deaths where you basically have dissolved your boundaries and have basically opened up into not all that is not mind at large but species finding the collective mind of the species it seems very clear that the universe is nurturing the well-being of this universe of the species just as it nurtures the well-being of it all individuals within the species and all the other species on the planet that there is a there is a tremendous power that cascades through all of our lives individually and collectively Michael have we lost you I'm kind of curious to know Christmas what where did that turn come from thinking you were dealing with your individual suffering to realizing that this was a collective matter that this this was a trance personal question was it was it an insight you had during one of these one of these high dose experiences or was it in processing and after the fact because that's a big that's a big shift yeah it was a big shift and it is a both/and but probably the most important part of it was after the session as I processed and worked it it took me years because I kept trying to process in terms of Stan's paradigm in terms of the paradigms that were available and all of the paradigms approaching psychedelics were always about healing the individual enlightening the individual something like that and I kept trying to understand and I wrote dark-matter lead on in large part to answer the question why did suffering get as large as it did in my psychedelic sessions to try to answer this problem and eventually that's where I made the jump beyond the person-centered model into a collective model now my thinking has gone further since then but that was where I made the jump and I I wrote that 95 96 I started the work in 79 I wrote that book when I was about 15 years into that process so it took me at least 10 well after that when these experiences started it took me years before I could really say that idea and then agree to that idea and then once I began to see it and understand it then a whole lot of other things began to make sense mm-hmm because the collective level yeah yeah when going after going through that ocean of suffering I call it the ocean of suffering which lasted two years when that came to a culmination when that culminated and I went through a death and rebirth process that was associated with that level of consciousness and went deeper into our code a reality higher archetypal and low archetype of reality I had I had many many experiences it basically showed me how that worked showed me how the species mind is alive within all of our fractally embedded individual Minds how our individual minds feed into the collective mind as Rupert Sheldrake says and how the collective mind move feeds into the individual mind that this a constant feedback system in that process and that's intellectually it was Rupert's work when I integrated Rupert's morphic field theory into Stan Grof paradigm that's the part that gave me the intellectual permission to make this radical reinterpretation of the data that's fascinating and how do you how do you respond to people who say well you just had a drug experience ah you mess with the chemistry of the brain and you have these delusions that you were getting some kind of insight into something collective I mean that's how a lot of a lot of people not versed in this world or having had this experience would automatically go like why should a molecule afford such insight yeah well that's an anthropological question and I'd rather leave that one to the anthropologists but I understand the objection I understand this the the cautionary concern I mean I was trained as an analytic philosopher and I was trained in a highly kind of highly skeptical discipline so I really affirmed that I value that skepticism but I also I think it's important that we look at the history of human beings use of these substances and look at some of the literature and how these substances had been regarded in other civilizations I think it's important to look at all the data that is emerging in the modern study of psychedelics so that in dark and early dawn I have a chapter on the methodology of basically taking a philosophical approach to psychedelic inquiry and I list some of the reasons why we should take these series these experiences seriously and we should not dismiss them one of the data is we sometimes get knowledge in these states of consciousness that we did not have prior and we can reasonably exclude that we did not have but this knowledge turns out to be true and valid like the perinatal research that standed for example some people have will relive aspects of their birth that they can later verify right or kind of more radically one can have an experience which teaches you something about how whales give birth or how lions experience hunger which you had never no idea of before never crossed your awareness before and it turns out to be physiologically and accurate sometimes in one case I remember Stan saying that in one of his sessions he was confronted with a person who basically was insisting that stan call his mother and father gave them a telephone number and wanted to reassure the parents that he was okay and this was really really strange and out of left field but they wrote down the number wrote down the names and after the session was over everything was stable again Stan very carefully reached out to this phone number and found the husband and wife on the other side and the phone and it turns out that their son had just died I don't remember where there were several days ago or several weeks before and they they understood that their son would wish them to know that he was okay so you get very very unusual circumstances like that this wasn't the physical person in the room that gave the phone number this is something Stan kind of cognized in some psychedelic state and Jack young with commute was given a phone number by some non-physical entity and then called the parents and it panned out you was verified Wow you know it's interesting so Chris you-you-you said also that you wouldn't recommend this kind of regime I have two questions about that why not and second after the agony that you went through in these sessions how did you ever muster the courage to do it again let alone yeah before you answer that Chris I just want to add a little related bit did you ever feel that maybe you were frying the circuitry you know in your action that all this suffering was a result of some damage they were inflicting upon yourself or that maybe we're opening yourself up to some negative astral level or something like that how did you have the confidence to proceed I'm just adding that on to Michael's question well I really trusted Stan Gross work I mean that's why I consider myself in his lineage my work is based upon his scholarship I trusted what I saw in Stan's work I trusted the methodology I trusted his surveying of the literature I trusted his evidence that there was no physiological no genetic damage I trusted the cases that he presented I appreciated the rigor with which he had digested all various bodies of psychodynamic theory as he does and beyond the brain and integrated that him into the phenomenology of psychedelic discourse and primarily that one of the primary things I got from Stan's work was an absolute trust that if you surrender completely to what arises in your psychedelic session it will you can trust that and you may not understand it going in and it may be absolutely horrendous and painful going in it may take you months or years to understand why things are unfolding the way they are but you can trust it and it will always come out good in the end and I that was the procedure I took I found that when why not doing this work and then what happened in the work why not doing this work I wouldn't work at doses that high I mean it's not that I wouldn't recommend doing those is that high occasionally but I wouldn't do such a pounding blowing upon chestnuts apart so aggressively for so many sessions in so many years even though I was doing it in a very responsible manner I was doing at about five times a year so I had a lot of time to recuperate I was taking care of my body I was doing spiritual practice during all this time I was keeping detailed notes I kept made a phenomenologically precise record within 24 hours of every session I studied the session so I was really trying to be as methodical as I could but basically by the time I was at the end time I was finishing this journey I had a number of breakthroughs and a number insights we can talk about but I came to understand that one other assumption that I had made about this work was wrong the assumption was that there is a certain goal that you can get to that there was an endpoint that you could sum it could be oneness with God or oneness or the the meta cosmic void or the super cosmic boy that there was an endpoint that you would get to and what I found eventually when I had gotten I had experienced many permutations of one as I found that there were variations and subtleties of oneness and there are even variations in the void and the in the domain of of formlessness and if you if you have a method which is so powerful it keeps pushing you to the edge of your experience of boundaries it'll keep taking you through remorselessly boundary after boundary after boundary leading into deeper deeper intimacy with the I call it the creative intelligence of the universe I don't know what else to call it it it's infinitely vast it's infinitely intelligent it's infinitely compassionate I mean it's just what it has taught me and just the the experience of dissolving into it without any boundaries leftover has been enormous has been deeply life-changing but late into the process about 17 years in the process I had an experience where I was as far deep into the diamond luminosity I call it deep into what the Buddhists called dharmakaya the clear light of absolute reality is far into it as I had ever gone I was a deep state of bliss and clarity and all of a sudden my visual field pivoted 90 degrees and I saw reality far far in the distance it looked like galaxies and a ray of light emerge from that reality and hit me and it absolutely shattered me in in those few seconds I realized it's an infinite progression you cannot get to the end of the universe you cannot get to the end of the mind of the universe it's an infinite progression and that that's one of the reasons I would be gentler with myself I would be gentler because I think what we can do with these substances we can open ourselves up to the infinity and we can take in as much of the infinity as we can get into our system as much as we can psychologically digest emotionally digest physically digest and I I'm more patient now with the slower trajectory of spiritual and psychological development than I was when I was a young man running into the states what you were just saying address is something that Michael brought up a few minutes ago which was how can some molecules you know just our brain in such a way that we actually begin to have cognitions you know deep meaningful cognitions about the meaning of life or the nature of reality and all that and I had written down a question here our psychedelic visions merely projections of our personal psyche or do we experience things that actually exist but are originally but but ordinarily beyond the range of our perception but what you just said about the creative intelligence of the universe or the mind of the universe answers the question because if that's the way it is if there is a mind of the universe if if the foundation or the ground state of the universe is an ocean of creative intelligence out of which the universe emerges then by whatever means psychedelics or meditation or whatever that we manage to merge with that ocean then we sort of realize our ultimate essential identity with that mind of the universe or with that creative intelligence which is we can say the repository of all the laws of nature the repository of all knowledge and although as a human being we can only kind of express so much of it we'll always have our limitations as a finite instrument we can kind of dip into it in such a way that that there is that we we share in a kind of omniscience in a way you know what I'm trying to say and and we absorb it to some extent and so all the great pronouncements of the Mystics throughout the ages have been their attempts through the human form through human language to express that merging that they experienced yeah I think when we have temporary experience of infinity it leaves the lasting impression even when we are back to being a finite being and if we have temporary experience of infinite love all-embracing all-inclusive and a love that transcends species and and reaches out to the the molecules of existence the atoms of existence itself then when we congeal back into our ordinary time space suit it hasn't affected as a profound effect and I guess it's one of the other reasons I would suggest that we should give these experiences a measure of credence it's not just because of the empirical assessment empirical data and the correlation between multiple experiencers and I want to mention there's always deception there's always incompleteness there's always Distortion we always are going to have to deal with well what if it's just this and not that you know absolutely that's the nature of the dialogue that's the discussions that were any question it is what the experience has an enormous Authority I mean I think it's one of the most striking things about psychedelics is that you know what William James called the noetic sense and speaking of mystical experience that it is these don't seem just kind of subjective opinions they seem like authoritative truths and yeah and that's one of that's one of the reasons they're so sticky I wonder Chris whether you feel that I agree with the proper discipline and commitment you could get to the same place with meditation absolutely I think so with some qualifications in that since I'm professor of Religious Studies and I've taught courses and comparative mysticism and I and I studied I have had the luxury of studying some of the mystical traditions the great masters could do this through entirely natural means or there are masters who do it with other assisted means as well the great masters have always been my guiding light in this material and it's always been you know to be able to sustain these states for a few hours is great but to be able to sustain them for months years that's greater still and to be respected now I'll mention that Carol my sitter is serious Vaudrey Anna but as practitioner always was during the years we were working together and she never did a psychedelic session never did a session with me she was always much more contemplative in her practice and subsequently after we have separated and she's remarried and not remarried we're still close she has gone on and completed her three-year three-month three-day retreat under the supervision of her teacher so she's a serious practitioner and I'm a modest practitioner by comparison but I understand the relationship between my psychedelic experiences and the experiences which are preserved in the meditative traditions that she has introduced me to or that I'm injured has been introduced through her and I see a very very strong correlation I don't think the you know the cosmology that we're encountering with deep psychedelic work is original it's not new we receive this cosmology in the great spiritual mystical traditions of history that said I think that all of those traditions in history are all staged specific they all reflect a certain historical context and anthropological context and even an evolutionary context I don't see them as eternal truths I see them as approximations of an ever growing expanding truth so I think that there are certain ways in which the cosmology that psychedelics can introduce us to can push the edges of those classic cosmologies and you can push the edges and that opens up new possibilities I don't think for example a deep immersion into trans-temporal experience is is a deeply ingrained quality in mystical experiences but that is happened a great deal in my psychedelic experiences I mentioned I mean back and say I started this work you know 1979 because I was interested in spirituality I was interested in lightened I had been meditating for a number of years I thought that I could I had encountered the kind of blocks that are pretty typical in early stages of meditation and I thought that by doing some sessions I could deal with those blocks blast through them and I could reach enlightenment faster but what I found was that when I really went into it that was one track the enlightenment track a second track opened that was really a very different track and that's the track of a cosmic exploration to actually explore the consciousness of the universe to explore deeply the fabric of reality and experience at all its ins and outs it's not that these are incompatible but the cosmological inquiry came to dominate my sessions so I wouldn't want to use the measure of enlightenment as meaningful and beautiful and important as that is as the criteria for evaluating everything that happened in my sessions I sort of see they're different projects and in only in the very late years did it kind of come back around into the classical enlightenment kind of work I think they've been plenty of Yogi's and Siddhas and and so on who have done plenty of cosmic exploration and they've they've written down their their findings you know they just going about it through various other means did you want to add something there Michael no no okay I have a line of questioning here that will shift our gears a little bit let me just mention one thing if psychedelics if LSD is only an amplifier of consciousness then by definition it does nothing that can't be achieved through other methods for exploring consciousness because it's not it's like an Alec which does this it's consciousness which does this we're simply amplifying and focusing it and you you're focusing consciousness and meditation you can go into these places in meditation yeah yeah and that said about patience as you get older and you know kind of abandoning me enlighten their bust attitude I mean you know I had done some psychedelics in the 60s for about a year and then I learned to meditate when I was 18 and I've been doing it for 51 years you know a couple hours a day and this for many years there was a sort of a desperate feeling of you know a gothic guy kind of get enlightened you know I've got a breakthrough after a while that just sort of dissipated it just said it moved away and you know contentment kind of dawned and I just don't think that way anymore I don't know whether that's due to eight you know natural maturation or whether it's due to the results of meditation bringing about a kind of an abiding sense of filt fulfilment which is not dependent upon any external circumstances but one way or the other I think that you know whatever one chooses to do safety first is a good rule of thumb because impatience can result in some pretty unfortunate situations you know if one precedes recklessly in any sense you know absolutely yeah you know okay so here's a question I want to ask you I have a good friend named Dana Sawyer who was we've been friends since we were kids practically he's a he's been a professor professor of religion and philosophy at the Maine College of Art and adjunct professor of Asian Studies at the Bangor Theological Seminary and he's written biographies of Aldous Huxley and Houston Smith and he had two questions related one is what are the connections we've kind of covered this so what maybe will maybe the answer to this first bit will be quick what are the connections similarities and differences between psychedelics psychedelic States and mystical states of consciousness have we have we covered that adequately maybe we have well you know the the researchers that I spent a lot of time interviewing see them lining up very closely and sometimes we use the term mystical like experience because I think I don't want to offend anyone on the on the religion side but you know they they studied very closely the you know the anatomy of mystical experience especially as William James described it and they they feel that it has all the six seven or eight characteristics yeah actually I was reminded and the question just came in that Ram Dass gave some LSD to neem karoli baba and apparently it had no effect on him because presumably I guess the the interpretation was that he was already in some kind of high abiding State and LSD really couldn't add to it in any way I've always I've heard that story for a very long time and the dose was one of Chris's doses it was like five or six hundred micrograms and I always thought now that you'll find the story in the book miracle of love which is Rhonda's collection of anecdotes about neem karoli baba and according to the ROM dose he gave him six hundred micrograms the first time and then he you know then basically he wasn't affected he came back to the United States and he told his friends and he said oh he must have palmed it nobody can take six hundred Mike's and not be affected and he went back to the ashram and neem Karoli Baba called him over he said do you have any more of that Western medicine and he brought everything he had twelve hundred micrograms and Rambla and an incredible according to Ram Dass put them on his tongue and made him see that he was taking the and swallowed them and and it didn't affect him did you ever hear Bruce Joel Reubens story no Bruce wrote the screenplay for the movie ghost and he won the Oscar for that and he also wrote the screenplay for was Jacob's Ladder and and some other movies anyway he's been on bath gap but he was a teenager living in New York City and some apartment and somebody brought over him like I'm made of glass mayonnaise jar full of liquids and O's that was going to be shipped up to Millbrook for Timothy Leary's gang and asked if they he could store it in their refrigerator so it was in their refrigerator so they're sitting around they think we should try this you know and so his friend was gonna put a drop on his tongue using a dropper and he squeezed the whole dropper anyway you can look it up it's it's quite a story Rob says that there is a natural threshold of about 500 micrograms if you take more than that you don't necessarily get higher so there's a kind of a cut-off there around five to six hundred micrograms that's good to know saturation so here's the important question that we should let Michael go this is my second one from Dana this I should have asked this one first he said that Houston Smith ones argue that traits matter more than states and even if psychedelics contribute trigger religious experiences it's less clear they can develop religious lives Dana mentioned that psychedelics can definitely trigger genuine mystical states as measured by you know eight of the nine parameters of the stay Spanky typology but the ninth parameter is continued improvements in behavior so is there evidence that psychedelic experiences lead to more compassionate or selfless behavior I think it's a really good good question I don't I don't think I know the answer to it you know some people feel that the fact that attaining knowledge through psychedelics is so rapid I hate to use the word easy especially after what Chris has told us that it is it is less enduring has less traction in our lives you know the analogy sometimes used is that if you climb the mountain and you get to the top and you get that view and then someone lands on the mountain in a helicopter they get the same view but they haven't earned it in the same way and therefore it is less powerful that strikes me as kind of a Puritan view you know that the you know that that that you need works you need good works to to justify faith so I don't know if it's true I think that there are many people who've had psychedelic experiences that they've carried the insights and the convictions through to their lives and change their lives and become more moral or more ethical people and there are people from whom it hasn't been sticky and I think that's part of the work of integration I think that's part of you know of approaching it with reverence and and recognition of the power that that that there is another big step which is how do you apply what you've seen and what do you with it and how does it change your behavior and I don't think there's any there's nothing inherent in the experience that makes you more or less likely to to to do that it's it's really up to us but you know I think it's something everyone doing these explorations should bear in mind it's not going to be automatic I mean they're people who've done psychedelics and come out and behaved really badly and their people have had their ego dissolved and and during psychedelic experience and then it inflated enormous Lee after and so I think I think we have to be very wary of those pitfalls you know and I think the same can be said of meditation I know people who've been meditating for decades that I wouldn't want to associate with you know they act like real sob sometimes and others who really underwent a deep transformation and became much better people so maybe there does need to be in addition to whatever the the practice for dipping in the consciousness maybe there needs to be a kind of a conscious attention to ethics and you know being reason being a more responsible human being yeah I completely agree with both of you I agree with you Michael that a mystical experience does not a mystic make to paraphrase Houston Smith but also a mystical experience can a materialist philosophy unmake and but I think and so I think it has philosophical significance if we have X number of people who do X number of sessions and have an emerging consensus around what they envision the the cosmos to be like that's significant but I think you're absolutely right to have an experience does not necessarily make you a wiser kinder gentler person but if if you use those experiences and work conscientiously in integrating them then hopefully they will there that they don't flip the switch they don't make you what you are becoming automatically but they act as I think a see catalyst yeah cultivate those seeds yeah yeah well I think that's a great note for me to leave you on I'm very sorry I have to leave but I have another appointment and I thank you very much for a very stimulating conversation and I look forward to continuing sometime yes thank you so much thank you and I should add that Michaels book will be coming out in paperback on what did you say the for Tuesday Tuesday and well Tuesday well anyways but the interview is up the book will be out and you can get it on Amazon and I'll hubbell link to it on on the page on Beth Capcom where I feature this in Chris I look forward to your new book and I'll be sure to order it thank you Michael we have more conversations I hope we have like more to talk about we've just begun thank you absolutely my pleasure and those who are listening hang on because I'm going to continue a little longer with Chris let me start Chris by asking a few questions that have come in from the audience and I want to save time before we wrap up to talk about your notion of the birth of the future human which i think is fascinating in the and the changes that humanity may have to go through as that birth takes place okay so it's budget on time let me know when you feel he should cut through the questions and get to that so here's one from Amit in New Zealand he asked after ayahuasca sessions I experienced some detrimental energetic shifts for lack of better words waking up deeply physically tired from months afterwards it became somewhat worrisome are there specific methods or practices that you can personally recommend for the most efficient integration and minimization of any potential detrimental physical energetic effects after some deep sessions it's complicated question first because every psychedelic is a little different and so you have to you're talking about ayahuasca it has a different quality than LSD and a different quality than psilocybin mushroom but basically ayahuasca potential assume a rather strong dose of ayahuasca has tremendous impact on our physiology in our psychology and when we jar ourselves that way when we when we enter into these temporary conditions of awareness which are so radically different than our ordinary awareness it's going to shake up our system and it's going to impact us and it I think we have to be gentle with ourselves and we should cultivate practices of contemplation to help us integrate these experiences I don't think there's necessarily any formula that will ensure ensure an outcome that doesn't lead to these periods of physical exhaustion there sometimes a psychological kind of exhaustion that follows but basically I think if we go to the spiritual literature and we look at the literature about what is it what does it mean to take up a spiritual practice my belief is the more powerful the psychedelic experience you want to cultivate either by the nature of the chemical the strength of the chemical or the frequency with what you're doing the chemical the more you push your system into this new territory the more important it is for you to cultivate meditation and the classic forms of contemplative practice taking care of the body stretching the body taking care of the subtle energy system taking care of your emotional taking care of years of your mental life your spiritual life I think those are all important now how actually cashes out to a specific regiment I mean I know I have my regiment I always have had my regimen that changed through the years I just think it's good to ask the question that he's asking it's asking and to just seek advice and to cultivate the regiments which will help stabilize the system when it's coming back from such an extreme experience good answer and there's other things exercise diet you know I mean obvious stuff that anybody benefits from if if they do it regularly and properly so you know all that stuff everything is interconnected this is a question from Bobbie and Griffin Georgia Bobbie asks if psychedelics give a glimpse into true nature or reality then that seems to beg the question of there being some sort of sheath or mask covering common daily experience is this sheath or veil developed during early childhood and therefore would infancy and early childhood experience be akin to psychedelic experience well I understand the logic and I saw to see that and I I know that number of people would say that and at the same time I hope no child has ever had some of the experiences that I've had on psychedelics not just the the negative ones but even the cosmic ecstatic ones that's an extremely powerful experience and I hope a child doesn't have to take that in but within that caveat I think there's a certain sense in which children are more naturally receptive to some of those sense more sensitive dimensions of consciousness and they lose that sensitivity as they get older and this kind of talked out of them and conditioned out of them until later they have to rediscover it I think it's it's it's not just like something that happens in childhood I think you know there's again I don't just study psychedelics I studied reincarnation research near-death episode research out-of-body research I study lots of different forms of non-ordinary states of consciousness and I think the the image is coming clear is that when we die we expand into a larger subtle higher state of consciousness and when we incarnate we contract into a small physically dominant kind of consciousness we die we expand into great spaciousness we incarnate it gets small we keep this up over and over and over again the more we do it the more over thousands and thousands of years the more we do it slowly we begin to integrate spiritual dimensions and physical dimensions so that they're not really an either/or that they begin to be probably both and within our own lifetime within our own body so I think it's actually taking up an incarnation at all has a naturally contractive effect on consciousness so I don't think it's something we're doing wrong to our children but once you understand that progression I think there are things that we can do that would help our children adjust to this world yeah that cycle you just mentioned can be true of meditation too I mean you use yeah my teacher used to use the example of dying a cloth in India where they take the white cloth dip it in the color dive and bleach it in the Sun then dip it in the dye then catch it in the Sun go back and forth and back and forth until eventually it becomes color fast even if you leave it in the Sun so you know you dip into Samadhi and then you're engaged in activity do it again engage in activity then the nervous system gets transformed thereby yes and the Samadhi becomes stabilized so you end up having nearly couple Samadhi all the time you know or whatever they call the term doesn't have to just be with eyes closed yeah okay one more question from the audience and then I want to get into the birth of the future human um so David from Cambridge England asks if psilocybin or similar substances were made widely available to the public do you think there would be in there side effect to consciousness and or society are these substances restricted perhaps due to society not being ready for them and I'll add that Michael Pollan wrote an op-ed in The New York Times just the other day now commenting on the recent permissiveness in in Colorado for the use of psychedelic mushrooms and he cautions be criminalized mushrooms right so he cautioned you know take it easy you know we shouldn't go too fast here because yeah there could be negative consequences yeah we should have gotten michael to comment on that so that just came out today i ran out at the time yeah yeah yeah okay focus on the cambridge question again oh just you know is it perhaps prudent that psychedelics are restricted to the extent they are or at least to some extent because it you know all hell might break loose if they just became like the libertarians you know wanted didn't want to legalize all drugs I don't know if that would be advisable one of the points that Michael makes in his article if I can just invoke something he said there which I completely agree with is that when you look at cultures who have a long-term relationship with psychoactive substances you do not find them being used recreationally you find them being used under very careful ritual spiritual conditions you find them being used in collective circumstances that you don't just go trip off by yourself we have a great deal to learn from cultures who have a living history with these substances our culture has very little living history with these substances except recreational or in the underground movement so we are given our naivete may be it is good to be cautious for bringing these into our culture but I absolutely agree with something else Michael says that nobody should be put in jail for possessing some psychoactive mushrooms I mean it's just I don't think they're there toxicology they're very safe psychologically extremely safe they're not habit-forming you want to use them carefully you want to use them under guidance but but there is there much less destructive than cigarettes or alcohol and we've learned how to live with cigarettes and alcohol so I think I hope that we will be criminalized I hope that we more importantly we will learn how to work respectfully with these very positive powerful substances they can be life transforming but we have to be careful as we approach them good so well said you have a section in your book towards the end that's entitled the birth of the future human global Awakening and its impact on society I just want to read a couple little bits from it you say I believe that the global systems crisis taking place in the world outside us is deeply connected to the evolutionary metamorphosis taking place inside us you say Humanity is coming into a time of great awakening a profound shift in the fundamental condition of a human psyche but for there to be a Great Awakening they must first take place a great death this global crisis will be so severe that will impact not only individuals but the collective unconsciousness unconscious of humanity itself and I just got read a little bit more because when you had that session in which you kind of cognize that you wrote or you wrote recently it took me more than a year to recover from this session for months I walked around the city where I live feeling like someone walking around Hiroshima a week before the bomb was dropped with unbidden knowledge of what lies ahead and profound respect for all the participants it was terrible to experience humanity's coming collapse but redemptive to experience the rebirth that followed since that session I have never doubted the larger arc of our evolutionary journey even as I mourn its casualties without a vision of where nature is taking us without understanding the higher good that our collective suffering is bringing forward in history we might drown in the sorrow that lies ahead and we must not drown I believe the form that the future human will take will be the diamond soul so that gives you a springboard to okay let me just back up just a second when you work with high doses of LSD when you're doing it you can totally internalize compacted four and you intensify it with music and eyeshades and all that usual good stuff you basically just explode your consciousness you just shatter your consciousness and you explode it and for six hours or eight hours at a time you become a different kind of being you become a you're not a human being you you open yourself up into unprecedented intimacy with the universe and the universe is in the role of teacher and in the role of instructor and the universe decides where you go and what you learn it seems to be a balance between what you're capable of taking in and what the universe wants you to take in so as it's my journey continued and I was doing this systematically over the years one of the things that began to happen about o23 sessions in started then is that I began to have a series of visionary experiences of where the universe was taking the human race the human species so basically about the the evolutionary dynamics of the species once consciousness became such a powerful factor in human evolution where we're not right now fundamentally changing our body very fast but we are changing consciousness relatively fast and so I had many experiences of the evolutionary dynamics of where Humanity is and where it's going and the the vision that came through over and over again was that humanity was poised on the edge of an enormous breakthrough just a tremendous breakthrough that would forever change the foundation of life on this planet and it wasn't simply a civilizational break through our economic break through our technological breakthrough your production breakthrough it was a breakthrough in the fundamental platform of consciousness the fundamental baseline of human consciousness and that we were that there was a tremendous pressure building up and there was a tremendous kind of acceleration of unconscious dynamics and there was a tremendous detoxification taking place in the reincarnation of generation after generation so this was not simply influencing individuals it was influencing the entire human species there was a collective dynamic so it basically it showed me the vision that we are coming to a Great Awakening just an exponential increase in our psychological and psycho physical capacity but it didn't give me any indication of how it was going to accomplish this I had no idea of two years of vision how it was going to accomplish this and then in 1995 the universe took me deep into deep time is a grueling experience to get there but eventually blew me out into a radical expanded time framework and took me into the heart of the death and rebirth of humanity it the state of consciousness that I was in when I went through this process was not chris bosh having a collective experience of i dissolved completely and I experienced this a coming crisis asked the species experiences it it's like being able to experience a thunderstorm where you can experience the star mists of totality and each individual drop simultaneously and what it showed me was that this tremendous global systems crisis that we are entering which seems to be driven by an ecological crisis this world climate change equal crisis needing to would lead to a tremendous global crisis of a fundamental institutions major die-off around the planet tremendous pain and suffering but that this pain was actually transformative that this pain was actually part of a process of confronting our past and confronting the legacy of that past essentially confronting karma and going through a death and rebirth process that would basically carry us beyond our standard level of functioning before this point in time so there was a sense in which in this event it's not a single event it's a evolutionary process I don't know how many generations it will take I'm assuming it would take multiple generations for this to be enacted but that we actually will be brought to our knees we will lose control we will basically suffer terribly our children and grandchildren will suffer terribly but that this suffering was actually labor it wasn't simply a destructive process it wasn't simply an extinction process or what me feel like that at the time but it was a labor process that when this process reached its absolute peak and it looked like we would all die the storm passed and there were survivors and as the survivors began to pull their life together they began to connect with each other in new and unprecedented ways there was a time of new values new insights new technology new social relationships new a new internalization of deep spiritual values fundamentally a new experience of oneness in our daily lives that we really truly experience that we are all one in this process and we have deep responsibilities to all life-forms not only to each other in human life-forms but to all life-forms on the planet and elsewhere now that's sort of one kind of that's the part that you quoted there's another part of the sessions which basically took reincarnation which is I wrote my first book on reincarnation I've spent a lot of time thinking in terms of reincarnation but it it took me deep and I began it took me into an experience where I began to integrate all my former lives they began to come into me very fast and furious and they they began to it was like winding light kite string made of light around the school and when I had integrated so many lives eventually there was a fusion of all of their learning and all of their experience fused into one and when there was a fusion my consciousness exploded into a diamond like a diamond light consciousness and I became an individual but in an order of individuality which I had never experienced before it was the sum total of all of my lives that had cascaded and lifted me into a state of a consciousness that was more than just the sum of their experiences there was a catalyst into a deeper functioning of conscious awareness with respect to myself with respect to other people and with respect to the universe that's what I came to call the birth of the diamond soul that when we reincarnate over and over and over and over again we are not simply making incremental improvements on our quality of life more compassion more knowledge so on and so forth but in an evolutionary sense there comes a time when sooner or later the soul wakes up inside our physical incarnation so all of our former lives all of our learning all of the spirits as we have kind of fuse and reach a crescendo and we wake up it's like the bubble pops and we wake up and we know we are not just this body we know we are not just as ego we know we are not just this incarnation that we have relationships with everyone around us that's been going on for thousands of years and it opens up new possibilities for a deeper communion with the creative intelligence of the universe it's I think what my visionary experience has been is that this is a transition which we are making as a species we are growing into the birth of the diamond Sol we are also obviously going into a cascading series of crises at the global level so as we are trying to become one planet in the outside I think there is a synergistic coupling to the fact that we are trying to become one being internally we are integrating all of our former lives into ourselves as we are trying to transcend the limitations of our past engineering and ecological industrial practices we are trying to become one planet geo physically geopolitically we're trying to take responsibility for the healthy functioning of the planet the same that reinforces and is fueled by this intrapsychic process where we're trying to grow up we're trying to come to terms with who and what we actually are this is what I call the birth of the future human I think this crisis that we are entering and that we that will dominate the 21st century will continue probably on to the 22nd this crisis is not simply an economic crisis it's not simply an industrial production crisis it's a crisis of consciousness it's an evolutionary crisis and it's giving birth to a future human late in my sessions at the very very end that was the last great vision that the universe gave me in one of my sessions it took me deep into deep time it took me deep into the future and it gave me my last experience of the future human it was as if it took me into the future and allowed me to try on for size the fundamental blueprint of the human psyche at that point in the future this was the most extraordinary being just I can't describe to you quickly what an extraordinary being this being is just picture the highest finest qualities we've imagined to picture the highest spiritual capacities we can imagine a mind completely open to the universe a heart completely open to each other a just extraordinarily magnificent being that's what's at stake here that's what we're trying to become that's where I think we're going beautiful so eloquently put I can't really add anything to it and we're almost out of time and I'll just say that if anybody finds what you just said frightening in terms of what the world may go through in transition to this beautiful future I you know I mean there are people who are sort of stocking up food and stocking up guns and doing all kinds of things you know in preparation for the chaos they feel will be coming I'd say that what you really want to stock up on is consciousness you know spiritual evolution as much of it as you can get under your belt through other means works for you that will be the the best form of preparation for whatever life may bring I absolutely agree the old kind of survivalist is basically trying to take care and hold on to ego but what we really need is the cultivation of service transformation generosity compassion those are the qualities that will carry us into this future yeah all right well I've really enjoyed this conversation I really enjoyed reading your book I want to close with a endorsement from ant our friend and bearing who's been on bat gap about your book she said once or twice in a century a book appears that has the explosive force of a supernova breaking through the limitations of religion science and culture LSD in the mind of the universe is such a book a gripping account of an utterly unique and extraordinary hero's journey that opens our minds and hearts to a new vision of our universe and ourselves as inseparable from the ineffable being we have called God all beliefs fade before the incandescent revelations contained in this book a deeply moving template of our evolutionary journey I think beautifully written it was a marvelous look so um the book as you said won't be out until when November or something November 26 Amazon has it on pre-order but it'll be out then yeah I know I have a link for it prepared to people can order it now and it'll come in time for Christmas I did this work for 20 years and then I waited to publish this book for another 20 years it took a long time to digest everything that happened in those first 20 years before I was really ready to share them with with other people yeah and it's been a great conversation there yes conversations like this could go on for many more hours but interviews are meant to be a sort of a sampling so this is wonderful Rick and the work you're doing here the number of minds that you're opening the number of conversations you're having bringing people together talk about a catalyst for positive change in our future way to go really well thank you very much hope to meet you in person one of these days yes let's do that yeah okay so let me just close by thanking those who have been listening or watching I encourage you to go to bat Capcom and explore the menus there's a few things there you might want to do like sign up for the email newsletter or subscribe to the audio podcast or donate if you feel like donating and there's some other things on the site if you if you poke around so really appreciate your time and attention those in the audience and I'll tell you of course Chris and Michael who has left about that we it was a great conversation and I'm really glad we got to do it thank you thank you you [Music]

Channel: BuddhaAtTheGasPump

Views: 23,240

Rating: 4.8557692 out of 5

Keywords: Plants, LSD, cancer, psilocybin, consciousness, meditation, ‘Rupert Sheldrake‘, ‘Stanislav Grof'

Id: SIjZypJKSFM

Length: 136min 19sec (8179 seconds)

Published: Wed May 15 2019