Psychedelic Science | Dr. Dennis McKenna | EP 299

yeah well I don't think any experiments have been done yet on like family experience of collective family experience of psychedelic transformation for example um we haven't got that far in the scientific analysis of such things it's worth attempting to do that because I think that that would again be a significant step toward creating this new this new paradigm around death you know that uh medicine that's a big deficit of medicine you know this idea that uh death can be death is inevitable but death doesn't have to be terrible [Music] hello everyone uh thank you for tuning in and watching and listening I'm very pleased today to have with me Dr Dennis McKenna he's an American ethno pharmacologist lecturer and author he is a founding board member and director of ethnopharmacology at hefter Research Institute a non-profit organization dedicated to the use and exploration of psychedelic medicines Dr McKenna received his PhD from the University of British Columbia and worked as a postdoc at the National Institute of Mental Health and at Stanford he is the brother of Terence McKenna who believed that the human relationship with psychedelic plants played a major role in our cognitive and social Evolution it was a very well-known figure to denizens of the modern psychedelic movement Dr McKinnon and I first met some years ago 2016 in Toronto at a conference hosted by mind matters at the University of Toronto where we shared our views on the significance the potential significance of Altered States Of Consciousness it's really good to see you again Dennis thanks very much for agreeing to do this podcast thank you so much Dr Peterson uh it's a pleasure to be invited I'm very happy to be here it's nice to see you again after eight years so neither you nor I were famous at that time now you're quite famous and I'm a little more well known so time passes yeah well it's very it's very good to see you so tell me tell me what you're up to recently as you said we haven't spoken for a number of years so what are you busy doing now well basically uh so I immigrated to Canada in 2019 and I left Academia I left the University of Minnesota immigrated up here with my wife and uh I started a non-profit called the McKenna Academy for natural philosophy and originally it was incorporated here in Canada but then we we dissolved that and Incorporated in the States because it made more sense and the McKenna Academy for natural philosophy is uh basically devoted to education as you can tell by the name primarily about psychedelics and plant medicines uh originally are our vision for it was to do Retreats and conferences and that sort of thing but in 2020 coven came along and kind of put a spike in that so we the last actual physical conference we did before covid was uh was in 2019 in South America we did a mystery School retreat with my friend uh Alexandra tanu who is a ethno musicologist there's that ethno term again and then we did a lot of online events we did a we offered a six-week-long ethyl botany course in collaboration with the organization for tropical studies uh in this year we did our first physical conference since Coven in the UK that was called espd 55. which is espd stands for the ethno pharmacologic search for psychoactive drugs and uh 55 is it was the 55th anniversary of the original conference which was uh sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health in 1967. and I actually did an espd50 in 2017 but that was before the McKenna Academy was formed so so we did these two and people could look at uh espd55.com it's open access and see what we talked about it was very well received it was at this uh beautiful venue in in Yorkshire uh and endorsant I guess it was and it was very well received and we had 37 speakers covering a whole range of topics related to this General topic of the Etho pharmacologic search for psychoactive drugs so that's that's what I've been doing Jordan basically working through the academy and and doing that sort of thing [Music] government continues to spend borrowed money inflation continues to swell dragging down our economy and the stock market has entered bear territory so what's your plan are your assets Diversified I'm Phillip Patrick precious metal specialist for the Birch gold group for nearly 20 years we've helped Americans diversify into gold and we can help you too did you know you can own physical gold and silver in a tax sheltered account we can help you transfer an IRA or 401K tied to stocks into an IRA in Gold if you're skeptical about the trajectory of the economy in the US dollar then text Jordan to 989898 Birch gold group will send you a free info kit on securing your savings with gold with thousands of satisfied customers five star reviews and an A plus rating with the Better Business Bureau we take Precious Metals seriously text Jordan to 989898 for your free info kit maybe we could let everybody watching and listening know a little bit more about what ethnobotany is exactly sure so could you could you elaborate on that sure well ethnopharmacology is so I like to term it so if no pharmacology has a kind of formal definition if you want to get down on the weeds with it but I kind of like the formal definition for a couple of reasons death though pharmacology is the interdisciplinary scientific investigation a biologically active substances used or observed by humans in traditional societies so it's a kind of a you might say tortured definition but there's a reason for that for one thing it's not its study is not confined to plants it includes fungi and any anything that may have biologically active substances it's not necessarily about medicines for example Aero poisons are certainly within the purview of the study of ethnophobicology or any kind of biologically active substances fish poisons this kind of thing would be subjects for ethyl pharmacology but usually it's medicinal plants and not necessarily psychoactive and uh and it also it's important to note that this is really about indigenous societies not not you know what we call developed societies developed Nations or whatever because if it was under that definition everything would be ethnopharmacology the two terms ethno is people and pharmacology is pharmacology the study of drugs and their actions but so this sort of uh you know elaborate definition kind of ticks all the boxes if you will it's interdisciplinary it's biologically active substances it's uh it's indigenous use of of these things and Indigenous people as as we know are very ingenious about discovering these things in the in the biome and utilizing them for medicines or poisons food or whatever right so you're you're one of a number of researchers who's going out to um let's say pre-scientific uh locales or peoples and finding out what they know traditionally before their culture is lost so that we can pull that knowledge into the broader scientific domain and and Associate it with what we already know and also preserve it and hopefully extend it if if we're fortunate that's exactly right that's exactly right and much of what the McKenna Academy does and and that we're about is collecting and preserving this knowledge you know this indigenous knowledge that is uh in danger of being lost that's rapidly being lost due to all sorts of factors you know the the decimation of cultural Traditions there are lots of habitat the loss of species climate change all of these things are leading to the uh disappearance of this knowledge and yet there is still a lot left to be known so so the McKenna Academy is trying to make a bridge between traditional knowledge preserve it and uh and scientific investigation science is the Nexus that brings these things together and we have you know we we have done various seminars about this like espd50 we currently have a big project going in Peru uh for which we're seeking support which is to uh the the uh University in aquitos Peru unap I've worked with the uh the the scientists there for over 50 years and there's one person there that I've worked with since we were both graduate students and I first came to Peru in 1981 to do my graduate work I met this gentleman who was a also a student at the time and we have worked together over 50 years on various projects he's now the curator of the herbarium at uh at udap at this University there are burial evidence and we have a project going to digitize this herbarium and put it all online and make that a resource for scientific researchers or anyone with an interest in the Amazonian Flora this will be a tremendous uh repository of information about the plants you know that have been collected and deposited this or in this herbarium over uh really uh for about 40 or 50 years it's it's it really was established around 1970. I didn't get to Peru until 1981. but uh that's a big project that we're that we're that's our main focus now that uh espd50 is or espd55 is more or less behind us we're working on this other more ambitious project now you you spent some time um studying Ayahuasca yes and that's kind of an interesting story so maybe you could tell everybody who's watching and listening how Ayahuasca is prepared and also how unlikely it was that that preparation method was discovered and I'd like to know if you have any more insight into how in the world that ever came about yes yes yes to both I so I did my PhD research uh at the University of British Columbia was basically about Ayahuasca about looking at the chemistry pharmacology Botanical sources traditional uses of Ayahuasca uh another aspect of my thesis research was kind of a comparison of Ayahuasca with another much more obscure episodian uh psychedelic uh called ukuhe uh which is comes from an entirely different Botanical sources but like Ayahuasca it is also an orally active form of dimethyltryptamine and that's the key to this DMT is a short-acting psychedelic but it's not uh orally active by itself if you consume DMT if you drink a tea that contains DMT or you know just eat DMT or whatever it's not active because there are enzymes in the gut monoamine oxidases that will inactivate DMT before it's ever absorbed in the active form what indigenous people have done when they prepare Ayahuasca they combine it with another plant that contains monoamine oxidase Inhibitors this class of compounds called beta carbolines very potent very selective MAO inhibitors so if you make a a beverage a drink or decoction is really the technical term with a plant that contains DMT and a plant that contains these beta carbonates then it becomes orally active and instead of a 10 to 20 minute experience which is what you get when you smoke DMT or vape DMT they do that now these days or inject it even you get about 20 to 30 minutes of an experience but in the oral form it stretches it out to six or seven hours so it's a very different experience it's not as intense but in some way it's deeper it's more profound because the thing with taking DMT by a parental route other than through the gut it is profound it's very intense it's also so fast that by the time you're uh you know by the time you're just beginning to sort of get to the place that's already fading you know so you come back with not a lot of information that kind of a sense of astonishment but not a lot of hard data so the idea of Ayahuasca is you get to spend more time in that place in that altered state and there's a chance to learn more now how did this come about the question always comes up how did these indigenous people figure out this combination one plant containing beta carbolines and another containing DMT out of the 80 000 or so species in the Amazon how did they stumble on this one combination was a trial and error or how if you talk to the people they will say well the plants told us you know but to a western scientist this doesn't make a lot of sense you know the plants the plants told you what are you talking about you know actually I think the real story is a little more uh prosaic in a sense that in uh in our uh espd50 conference we had a anthropologist Dr Manolo Torres who presented on this and uh the fact is that at a certain point uh maybe a thousand years ago possibly a little earlier than that there was a very active there were different cultures that were living sort of in proximity to each other in the region where Colombia Venezuela and Peru now come together these cultures were very uh experimentally oriented toward plants they had shamanic traditions and uh they used uh they were also very active in making chicha they were essentially beer producers they distilled or they didn't distill them but they had different fermented beverages prepared for fruits and Grains and things like that and they had many different kind of teachers mostly prepared from manioc and they were also experimentalists they were like they were like uh craft Brewers today sort of you know craft Brewers will they have their beer but then they'll just reach for anything on the shelf or an ingredient will come up and they'll say oh let's make it let's make a craft brew with uh with cave in it or with some other some other plant let's make something interesting well the the people making the the Chicho had the same sort of curiosity and in in their medicinal pharmacopoeia they had the snuffs right that's the other way in the Amazon that the DMT is used in the form of stuff and they had these snuffs they had these edited anthra stuffs which are don't require mbal Inhibitors because you take them you know as a snuff they also had better stereopsis which is the vine that contains uh the beta carbolines they use that separately as a medicinal plant for various reasons and it it has some psychoactivity basically I think they stumbled on this formulation you know the the plants were in the mix as it were and they stumbled on this formulation but it wasn't wasn't entirely uh trial and error you know it was it was more like an educated guess not really from the standpoint of biochemistry they didn't think in terms of monoamine oxidase inhibition and that sort of thing but they were familiar with the effects of these different plants and they thought well what happens if we mix them you know and they did they had a spectacular result designed for anyone to sell anywhere Shopify gives entrepreneurs the resources once reserved for big businesses an all-in-one e-commerce platform Shopify makes it simple to sell to anyone from anywhere whether you're selling succulents or stilettos start selling with Shopify and join the platform simplifying Commerce for millions of businesses worldwide with Shopify you'll customize your online store to your brand discover new customers and build the relationships that will keep them coming back Shopify covers all the sales channels to successfully grow your business from an in-person POS system to an all-in-one e-commerce platform even across social media platforms like Tick Tock Facebook and Instagram thanks to 24 7 support and free on-demand business courses Shopify is here to help you succeed every step of the way it's how every minute new sellers around the world make their first sale with Shopify and you can too go to shopify.com jbp for a free 14-day trial and get get full access to shopify's entire Suite of features start selling on Shopify today go to shopify.com jbp right now that's shopify.com jbp I was talking to Brian Murray rescue I think it's probably yeah more than a year ago he wrote the immortality key and you know he he was although a lawyer he was the book is about ethno pharmacology in many regards and it sounds to me like the account that you're making of what happened in the Amazon jungle sounds to me very much like what seemed to happen in ancient Greek culture with their formulation of various psychedelic wines that's right so all these different people were just brewing all these different concoctions and experimenting to see what produced the most uh remarkable effect and and in Greece they seem to have stumbled across something that was perhaps LSD based or essentially LSD based whereas in the Amazon jungle they they came across both DMT and the and the chemical that inhibited its breakdown and so that's it's very interesting to see that that is likely the case in both those disparate cultures right well Shamanism which is what we're talking about here uh shamans are experimentalists you know and and many of our even most important medicines again we can point to aeropoisons I mentioned aeropoisons before and arrow poisons are not regarded as medicines in in the in the context in which they're used you know they're they're used as poisons for hunting on the other hand the ingredients in Arrow poisons do have medicinal properties that have been recognized in the 20th century and they're they're important they're important medicines for uh for muscular surgery and this sort of thing there there they block the neuromuscular Junction and the reason I mention aeropoisons is that that's another example of people do what I like to characterize is mucking around with plants you know throw things together and see what happens you know and that's true of the psychoactive plants and these different chicha uh uh formulations that they have or the arrow poisons which are not just one ingredient they're complex mixtures of many kinds of psychoact or or you know more or less toxic plants so it was curiosity driven you know the the people immersed in this Amazonian biome this this this chemical ecology if you will uh of of complex secondary plant products and and driven by curiosity you know what happens if we take plant a and plant B and combine them or plant a b c and d and mix them all together and what go what happens so in that sense their approach is very scientific you know because science really Discovery is driven by curiosity these folks were curious they didn't keep notes they didn't write lab reports you know what what knowledge that they had they transmitted through the culture through oral traditions and as as this knowledge became you know more widely disseminated other groups began to also take the core knowledge but then expand on it because they had species you know in their biomes that maybe not were originally around and that's the way uh that's the way I think folk knowledge works it's it's a uh it's an evolutionary process it's a process of sharing information and accumulating this knowledge that then is uh you know transmitted through oral traditions and and through migrations and this sort of thing so it's it's not formal science but sort of the impulse that leads to this is Curiosity Discovery and that is at the core of Science in my opinion so I was I I gotta I want to tie a couple of things together here I I recently talked with a Dr Carl friston who works at University College in London and he's formulated a theory of cognitive function that's very influential or elaborated the theory of cognitive function that's very influential and I want to run it by you because I think it's relevant to well it's definitely relevant perhaps to your interests in uh in in the effects of psychedelics so Tristan and other observers have posited that we we look at the world through a hierarchy of Concepts and that this is necessary and that AI systems do exactly do the same thing um and that that the nested the hierarchically nested Concepts range from those that are trivial that you would just use in a throwaway manner let's say maybe your opinion about what you're going to do in the next 10 minutes might fall into that category to those that are uh that are the profound axioms upon which you predicate your life so for example if you're married one of your axiomatic conceptions or or presumptions or even perceptions might be the faithfulness of your partner and the willingness of that person and you to continue to engage in your long-term uh relationship and then you so then imagine a hierarchy of presumption such that some presumptions are much more fundamental than others or in other words upon some presumptions many other presumptions depend and then for some other presumptions there like I said they're just the moment the the opinion of the moment and easily replaceable now then imagine that there's a gradient of information processing so that some neurological mechanisms process the relatively trivial conceptions and others process the more profound and deeper presumptions and then imagine that's laid across the hemisphere so that the left hemisphere more or less deals with the particulars and the right hemisphere deals with the more fundamental presumptions and then imagine further and and this has been reasonably well documented now that variants of Serotonin affect different levels of that hierarchy of conception so that the serotonergic systems that are affected by psychedelics in fact the Deep presumptions and the serotonin mechanisms that are affected by antidepressants stabilize the entire structure and so what friston's work along with Carhartt Harris is indicating there was others working on this as well that psychedelics induce entropy into the conceptual hierarchy at the most fundamental level and so and maybe that's associated the the hemispheric specialization element is something that I added to that net set of presuppositions partly because of Investigations I've done into hemispheric specialization but also because of the work of Ian mcgilchrist who's been positing such things and so it looks like the psychedelics effect systems that are naturally affected by high levels of stress because when you're extremely stressed maybe that's a time to revisit some of your fundamental presumptions because something has gone wrong in your life so that you're fundamentally stressed and so in some sense what the psychedelics seem to do is mimic the process of revolutionary cognitive adaptation okay so that's only half the question but then then I have another question though and that all strikes me as highly plausible except for one thing and this is a stumbling block for me and maybe you can shed some light on it I know this is a complicated question but I read Rick strassman's book uh The Spirit Molecule after meeting you I believe and I know Dr Strassman who's a pretty um let's say mainstream psychiatrist was quite shocked to put it mildly by what his research subjects were reporting as a consequence of of being administered DMT they would report being shot out of their body and then going to other places and encountering what were essentially alien beings of one form or another and when Strassman would suggest to such people that this was like a dream or maybe they were encountering something akin to a jungian archetype they would say no you don't understand this was more real than being there than being in reality itself and so so this is the thing that doesn't fit for me is that and and I know that in the shamanic rituals that are associated with Ayahuasca people often report encounters with entities and I don't understand how that if that's true and I believe it to be true phenomenologically I don't understand how that fits in with the idea that what the psychedelics are doing are loosening the constraints on our most fundamental presuppositions and so sorry for the tremendously long uh build up to that question but it's a complicated question and I'm wondering what you think about well first of all the theory that psychedelics do loosen up our conceptions at the most fundamental level but then how you square that with the reports that people make continually of meeting entities of one form or another well they're well they're under the influence of these chemicals right well uh how long have we got here I mean it's going to take a while to unpack this good good but I'm looking forward to it man as to the first uh the first part of this the Carhartt Harris uh notion that uh psychedelics I think one way they put it is that they disable temporarily this so-called default mode Network you know which is which is kind of the framework that we construct I like to call it the reality hallucination it's the it's the modeled if the brain creates some model reality that we inhabit you know we're we we don't live we don't inhabit reality itself because it would be too overwhelming what we experience is a a schematic or a model of reality that is much less information dense than reality itself and the brain does this in order so that we can cope with it you know uh a lot of what the brain does as you well know you're a neuroscientist at least to some degree you know that what the brain does is filter information out there are gated mechanisms a lot of information from the external world through our sensory neural interface never makes it into the brain because it's it's not it's I mean it's stuff that it's not important it's just extraneous to our construction of this model of reality that we have to inhabit just in order to navigate you know in order to to function and what psychedelics do is they temporarily disable those gated mechanisms they just throw the gates wide open you know and you get flooded with all this information that normally is not accessible and that can be a very useful thing from a therapeutic angle because we can get trapped in our default mode Network in our reality uh hallucination if you will our reality model uh it can be dysfunctional it can be not helpful you know and and then you get things like addiction and PTSD and and so on and I think I think something I think the the the the core of the therapeutic use of the therapeutic promise if you will of psychedelics is they let you step out of this reference frame temporarily look at it as though you know as though you're separated it and it helps give you insights as to you know your your existential situation so it enables you to look at trauma or addiction or depression or things like that from a different angle from different perspective that normally we can't because we're trapped inside this this default mode Network framework and I think I think that's helpful and I think that that lets you re-engineer it in a certain way and and and this is actually reflected on the neurological level because we know that psilocybin things like this can actually uh you know lead to changes in neural architecture and connectivity and all of these things neuroplasticity is the is the is the sort of overarching term for this and it's really so you disrupt you blow up the default mode Network but it the brain is resilient the brain is always going to tend toward equilibrium right so it's going to fall back together but it's going to fall back together in a more functional way I think it's very similar in fact maybe I think it's quite similar to what happens when you reboot your computer you get this big reset essentially and it comes back together but it works more efficiently because it's you purged all the cludge out of it that builds up in in this system and in that sense it's very much like sort of purging your computer when you reset it you get rid of all that stuff and it works more efficiently so that's important I think for the therapeutic that's that's really the therapeutic promise almost everything that psychedelics that that people are excited about psychedelics from a therapeutic standpoint I think has to do with this uh ability to uh you know first of all disable and then reconstruct the default mode Network in a way that's more functional and and you know more more well simply in a way that's more functional less less dysfunctional so I think that's what's going on now when you blow it up especially with something like DMT which is where you get more than other places but Ayahuasca these other things as well you sometimes have a feeling or you get a definite sense that ear in a place where as people say it seems more real than real and there are entities there or what's perceived to be entities and you're in communication with them and they are very interested in communicating and transmitting information uh I mean so a number of questions come up about this right people have these experience experiences not always not always on all psychedelics not every time but under some circumstances people have these experiences I just came from this conference in in the UK a couple of weeks ago so I well primed for this because this this was the this was the the topic of the conference it was called the sentient other and everyone was uh presenting their ideas about the entities I am I mean my my first you know I I mean I don't think you can take psychedelics and not be open-minded I think that one thing that psychedelics don't do teach us is how little we know it's a it's a useful reminder of how little we know about the universe about reality about the way things are you know and and in that sense it can be it can be very useful because science especially in scientists particularly tend to be arrogant you know there's there's a tendency for science to say we pretty much have this thing figured out you know and and psychedelics are a reminder that no actually we have only a very tiny slice of it figured out and even that is subject to question because that's the nature of science right you never prove a theory all you can do is not disprove it you know so we we understand in great detail a very small piece of reality but there's an infinitude of reality beyond that that we know basically nothing so we need science Science And scientists should be humble they should always keep that in mind how little we know that said though so with that Preamble I do have to say uh you know reductionism or skepticism or what they come sometimes call okum's razor approach the principle of parsimony is a useful tool in science it is a statement that the what explains the data the simplest model that explains the data let's start there you know and then it's it's shortcomings its limitations its deficiencies will come to light as we as we begin to investigate phenomena and eventually we're gonna but but science starts with hypotheses about the way things are what my granddad used to call how the board ate the Cabbage you know uh it it begins with theories about the way a certain aspect of reality is you create a hypothesis you test it against the observed data and if something comes up that the data you know can that that your model can't explain then you say okay the the the model is deficient we either have to modify the model maybe we have to blow up the model maybe it's completely invalid usually that's not the way it works I mean you tweak it you change you know a thing here a thing there and you make it fit better with what you know what we presume that we know right when it comes to entities foreign here's the here's the thing I know that people say oh no this is real this is more real than reality itself but you know people are not epistemologists people are not qualified to say what is more real than reality itself you know I mean people may think it's more real it may seem more real than reality itself you know we've all had vivid dreams right and we wake up and we think oh my God you know that was so real but you know it was a dream right because you woke up and it's not there and so I think that the judgments made by people who encounter these entities uh you know the the fact that they have this impression that these things are real and more real than real itself does not necessarily make it so okay so so let me okay so let me let me ask you this so um obviously when we dream as you pointed out we can encounter entities of our imagination those are other dream characters all right I had a client once who who was a lucid dreamer and a very good one right and she could actually ask her dream characters what they represented symbolically and they would tell her right and so okay so let me let me modify the question that I posed to you before and tell me what you think of this so we know that the psychedelics produce an increment in trait openness and we know with the site with the psilocybin in particular that if people have a mystical experience with psilocybin once or a couple of times that their level of trait openness which is the creativity Dimension increases by wonders one standard deviation and that appears more or less permanent so we could say that that one of the things the psychedelics do by loosening the strictures on the morph on the more fundamental Realms of conception is place people into a state that's analogous to the state of creativity and so if you're creative you can shift conceptions and the the downside of that is you shift them when it's not necessary and the upside is now and then you shift them in a Direction that's extremely productive and so that shifting becomes more possible under the influence of psychedelics and then we could say that while it's possible that one of the uh sources of creativity might be the capacity of the human imagination to generate fictional personalities we do that in dreams obviously your brain is we would say your brain is producing these fictional characters that have many of the attributes of real characters when you dream you can see them you can hear them you can interact with them you don't have immediate access to their contents contents of Consciousness they seem like autonomous beings and so we could say maybe what happens when you're experimenting with psychedelics is that you enter a Dream escape that's populated by creatures of the imagination that have a certain degree of autonomy and the influx of information that's also characteristic of the Psychedelic experience produces that sense of hyper reality that's then attributed to the characters themselves does that seem plausible I know it's just a hypothesis obviously but well but it is it does I mean obviously all we're doing is uh tried to construct hypotheses you know that fit the data that fit what we know so far always with the caveat that we don't know much and the picture is incomplete and so on but here's the thing I I I think I mean the the question perpetually that comes up with these entities is you encounter these entities in the Psychedelic State and then the question is are they real but I think you have to step back from that and first of all you have to say well what do you mean by real you know well yeah that's a problem man yeah yeah that's a big problem I mean my sort of default position is anything that you experience is real it's real because it can be experienced but is it originate within is it come from the collective unconscious does it come from out there in some other dimension and do these terms even make sense I mean you just get into it an epistemological mess because how can you even posit there there is an outside I mean one one thing that psychedelics do is they teach you it's all one you know there's no separation between the self and and the cosmos at large and all that so so it's like it's a a non-starter it's a zero-sum game to you know to maybe it's maybe it's maybe it's more useful to say uh rather than to say are they real you know because they're real enough that they're experienced so in that sense they're real whether they're inside or outside originate from the self or some other dimension maybe the question we should ask is is the information that they transmit useful can we learn from it can they teach us something that we could not otherwise know you know and and that seems to me potentially a more useful question you know and my my brother was all about this like he would he would take uh high doses of mushrooms you know by himself and uh in total darkness that was his formula you know heroic Doses and total darkness and he would have these dialogues these conversations with these entities and it was all about how do I know you're real how or more like can you tell me something that I cannot possibly know and if you do that I'll know you're real and they would say well we don't care if you think you're we're real or not you know but but and then again how do you define some how do you [Music] Define something that you can't possibly know you know and if they say I mean you could say give me you know the square root of a large number and if it comes back and it turns out it's correct as trivial as that is that would demonstrate that it that it was real information they're they're giving to you but it still doesn't really no you know no and they're in mathematical Geniuses who can do that yeah uh yeah yeah well okay so let me push let me push on that a little bit I everything that you said so far seems to me to be Rock Solid um so with regards to these entities again so um I I was reminded of two things I mean Carl Jung spent years talking to uh entities of his imagination documenting that books like the red book he made that a Visionary practice and had Illuminating conversations with specters of his own imagination but of course he also believed that there was a collective element to those and so you might say that well to to the degree for example that we're each inhabited by dark impulses we might say well we're each pray to the same demonic forces that's one way of thinking about it and they're the same and they're transpersonal and they exist to some degree cross-culturally and they spend time and so these creatures of imagination can have histories and can inhabit Us in some real sense and they can do that collectively and then so so that complicates things tremendously but then I would also ask in your investigations your long-term investigations of multiple Ayahuasca experiences across different people are there any commonalities of entities that strike you as particularly significant I know people talk about clown figures for example mechanical clowns in the DMT State and health machines and this sort of Elvis yeah yeah exactly the health machines and of course that's that's complicated too because once one person starts talking about it that might increase the probability that other people would experience it but have you seen commonalities of entity experience that would suggest something the existence of something that is is at least transpersonal even though it might also still be subjective whatever that means in such a context yes yes I I I have and I think this exists in these in these uh shamanic Traditions uh and the ayahuascias are particularly good uh good example of of that you know uh uh and and again I I have not seen anything that convinces me I mean I'm basically a jungian you know so I believe in the collective unconscious is this it's a good model this this transpersonal realm of shared archetypes and all that and then there's the individual unconscious I haven't seen anything in the reports of the Psychonauts that would that would not fit into that model that says oh well this doesn't really fit this is outside that model and it and it and so that model's not valid I haven't seen that I I think that it is I think basically these entities they are experienced as real but they come from the collective unconscious and if you if you look at uh the Ayahuasca traditions and there is a uh an interesting book here that that's very illustrative of this which many people know about it's uh it's the book that uh you're familiar with the artist Pablo amaringo the the Visionary Peruvian artist he and Luis Eduardo Luna wrote a uh a book he painted his Visions right he remembered all his Visions in perfect detail painted these visions and Eduardo and he collaborated on a book called Ayahuasca Visions the religious iconography of a Peruvian shaman uh it's still in print the book is remarkable because it's its typical coffee table style format with full color illustrations of of the Visions on one page and then wordo's descriptions in English on the facing page dissecting all the elements of the entities and everything else that you see in these Visions as narrated by Pablo I mean public you know Eduardo Luna was was basically just the transcriber but uh uh Pablo described in great detail dissected each one of these paintings and the and they're about I guess 20 or so of these of these paintings in this book and it's basically a course in vegetalismo it's talking about digitalismo this this practice which is really a amalgam of many indigenous traditions and and kind of mushed together into a mestizo tradition but he describes uh these entities you know they all have names they have a particular appearance and you know the plants the animals even you know there are UFOs there are all kinds of things in this in these Visions Pablo describes every one of them and any ayahuascaro in in training work you know in my apprentices under under Pablo or any of these traditional uh ayahuas Heroes they're gonna see these things you know I mean this is a cultural context they're going to see these things and what they see is going to be similar you know so it's sort of like it's sort of like uh terence's uh you know self-transforming elf machines I mean Terence says that you know he has a huge voice in the meme sphere pretty soon everybody's seen self-transforming elf machines you know people that's what people see well you can imagine you know the the the the brain is obviously a an organ that can produce personalities because it produces our personalities and it's it seems to me that it's highly probable that the way that we we organize information is in the form of personality so I mean and I certainly got a fair bit of this from thinking about Jung's work I mean if you're inhabited by a rage state which I think is a good way of thinking about it you might think well what form does the anger take and the answer is well it has a personality you might act like enraged people that you've seen in movies you might act like enraged people that you've seen in your life the rage has a goal which is the crushing of the opponent let's say and it has perceptions and it has action patterns it's a personality and you could conceptualize the rage Spirit as Aries the God of War and that would be a perfectly reasonable way of looking at it and it could be that all of our micro perceptions and all of our macro perceptions for that matter have the intrinsic form of personality and that that's partly what we encounter when we dream and so I was thinking too you know that as as the gods if the gods are Aggregates of micro personalities that might be one way of thinking about it they're micro personalities that are aggregated within societies across time and then and then can be apprehended collectively to some degree As you move towards a monotheistic vision of the world what you're moving toward is the ultimate aggregation of all these socially modified micro personalities into one conceptual scheme and that would parallel that hierarchy that of cognition and conception that well we already discussed that people like friston are working on and so it isn't that surprising I suppose if you think about it that way if the brain is a personality producing machine so to speak that there are certain states that you can encounter under the influence of chemical alteration where you encounter those personalities even those that have some degree of autonomy I mean rage has some degree of autonomy and so does lust and so does thirst and so does hunger they're not they're not exactly you they're forces or personalities which is a more accurate way of thinking about that you can fall prey to and so why can't why can't that occur in a more complex manner well I I think it can I mean I mean this this totally fits within the yogi in a bottle you know that that within the collective unconscious there are these these uh I forget the exact term that he used but these these complexes almost like uh uh autonomous personalities you know and and and and and multiple personality disorder is a recognized thing and I guess in some ways all of us have it in a certain sense in that we have you know we do have these multiple personalities but they like rage lust and and and so on but they they don't take over the controls you know most of the time they're suppressed to a certain degree but they're always there their influencing whoever it is in the in the cabin in at the bridge that's running the thing and in pathology they can't take over you know and then you've got a problem well they do with Tourette's Syndrome they do with Tourette's they do with obsessive compulsive disorder and you know you know and you you can think about the relationship between these motivational States like Rage or anxiety let's say that that are transpersonal in that everyone experiences them we know that with the Psychedelic experience that set is very important and that if someone is in a negative emotional state or situation that elicits fear and let's say rage and then they Embark Upon A psychedelic experience that that particular State can be magnified beyond belief and so that's a good way to have a hellish experience and so you know we we do have to remember and I know of course you do that the Psychedelic experiences that we're talking about are ritualized so that a an absolutely Dreadful outcome is less probable but you might say if it was just done randomly it could easily be the Magnifique magnification of a state of Terror or a state of Rage as the magnification as a state of Enlightenment or Bliss right so this is the importance of the ritual of the ritual context this is exactly that what these Traditions have grown around is the idea that there needs to be a an appropriate set and setting there needs to be an appropriate scent the most important variable certainly and uh uh you know I sometimes say in my talks I say Ayahuasca is a liquid Ayahuasca will fill any vessel you create for it you know and hopefully the vessel is appropriate to uh you know to foster a positive experience and insights and all that but we know that it's not always that way you know we know that you know again like with any uh spiritual tradition where you're finding where you're dealing with powerful spiritual uh forces uh they're always bad apples you know they're a bad shop and they're they're they're bad Shaman who's who's don't have your best interests at heart you know and there's a term for it in in Ayahuasca it's called ruharia I mean basically witches or or Sorcerers they they have this understanding these people are power freaks you know they want control over other people and they'll often you know use Ayahuasca that way they'll often you know Spike their Ayahuasca with uh datura with Brook manzia which is a drug that you know basically renders people both delirious and confused but also very suggestible you know and it's it's used as a date rape drug and things like that some you know bad bad shamans will put that stuff into Ayahuasca uh so you want to you want to be careful there is no uh you know there there's no Good Housekeeping seal for Iowa's girls you want to be careful who you get mixed up with right well the same thing applies when you're looking for a psychotherapist I mean and and in in terms of the importance of set in relationship to positive transformation I mean Carl Rogers tried to lay out some of the preconditions for successful psychotherapy and so I'll just run through those because they're very much akin to the manner in which the stage needs to be set for a positive psychedelic experience so Rogers essentially I'm paraphrasing but but it's okay is so first of all the person who's coming to psychotherapy has to want to change it has to be voluntary and that's actually something that's been hammered home by now generations of psychotherapeutic practitioners regardless of their theoretical school that voluntary exposure to information that might have a transformative quality so that can be threatening voluntary exposure is Redemptive it has to be voluntary so you have to want to change and then if you come to psychotherapy for it to work it has to be embarked on in a spirit of mutual Trust and so there's some courage there um on on both the part of the practitioner and the client and then you also have to swear or vow in some sense to engage in truthful exploration and dialogue and so it has to you have to admit you have a problem so there's a certain humility there you have to be willing to learn and change you have to engage in truthful exploration and dialogue and you have to be aiming for improvement and if all of those things are there then well in principle the psychotherapeutic process can begin and you might say well if all those things are there then learning itself can begin and it might be that the set that is being established at the beginning of a psychedelic experience is just precisely akin to establishing the preconditions for Learning and personality expansion itself because you know in this conversation you and I will look we're we're sitting here we're kind of relaxed we trust each other for a variety of different reasons we've met before but I I know of your reputation scientifically and I trust your work and and and so we can embark on a creative creative dialogue that's hypothetically mutually Redemptive because we're both going to learn something and we can bring everyone else along for the ride and I don't really see that as any different in some fundamental sense than establishing the proper set for a psychedelic experience or the proper preconditions for any relationship including a therapeutic relationship right I I think you're exactly right I think those preconditions are an almost exact match for the ideal set and setting you know I mean there's a great deal of uh emphasis on the set the setting the sept and I I don't limit the set to just uh you know in my mind it's it's everything you bring to the table it's not just your mood at the moment or you know it's it's everything you bring to the table it's you you're the sin you're always the same but you're bringing it to this very special situation and then the other variables that are sort of in the background not often mentioned but very important are the dose and the medicine you know because you're that's part of this four-part Dynamic of variables that's going to interact and the most important thing about a a therapeutic uh psychedelic session really like you say it applies to any therapeutic session it's number one you know a safe setting a safe a setting where you feel uh you trust the other person you feel that the situation is safe not threatening and you're willing to learn you're willing to surrender you do everything you can to to make sure everything's kosher and then at the critical moment you just have to let go because that's an important thing you have to say okay let go you know I mean it's kind of like jumping off a cliff or out of a plane you trust that the parachute is going to open at some point you know and and you just have to accept that yeah well we do that while we're talking you and I I mean because at the beginning of this podcast neither of us knew what direction the conversation was going to take but we what we're doing in some sense is loosening up our cognitive structures you and I both have some perspectives on what the Psychedelic experience might consist of and what psychological transformation means but we're willing to play with that to some degree and so we're willing to open ourselves up to the transformative process that obtains during the course of what should what we try to make into a genuine dialogue and so and I again I do see that as exactly the essentially exactly the same thing and I think you can think about it in terms of classical virtue in some sense so what you want to do is bring a an attitude of humility and courageous trust to the situation and the humility would be well you know good as I am I probably still have a few things to learn and the courageous trust is well if we undertake the process correctly then the information that will be generated will actually be of benefit to everyone involved but that's a statement of faith in some sense right because you don't know that to begin with but then it's faith in the dialogue essentially and I don't see that it it I don't see that as being particularly different in the in the Psychedelic situation no I don't either it's exaggerated and intensified exactly exactly what have you made of the research that's been conducted in the in the labs at uh by Roland Griffith and his crew well well I mean uh obviously it's groundbreaking you know and uh Roland of his colleagues are uh you know they have set the bar very high and they're the Pioneers for sure and uh uh you know everyone else is kind of following along from that I think that they have uh you know particularly of their work with end of life anxiety and this sort of thing I mean I think that's setting new paradigms for medicine uh uh and and it's addressing a really important deficit in in medicine right because medicine the way it's practiced biomedicine I sort of distinct make a distinction there from say alternative complementary medicine but biomedicine is about preventing people from dying right and they will go to Great Lakes to uh keep people alive maybe to like certain like cancer therapy and this sort of thing maybe going too far to keep people alive it's like survival at all costs medicine needs to face the fact that everybody dies you know sooner or later the therapy is gonna fail no matter what it is but to view it as a failure is an incorrect perception at a certain point you have to reach a point where you say this patient this person is not going to live rather than focus on keeping them alive at all costs let's think about giving them a peaceful death you know facilitating A Beautiful Death that concept that death can be beautiful is something that is missing from medicine as its practice and I I think Iowa I I think that psychedelics offer an opportunity to reintroduce that concept you know right so just to review for people who who are listening so Roland Griffiths who conducts psilocybin research at Johns Hopkins and is a very solid scientists to say the least has Purdue studies showing that with patients who have a terminal prognosis of cancer that a mystical experience induced by psilocybin can produce a profound reduction in mortality related anxiety and that's a very sterile way of describing what's actually a remarkable event because it sounds in some sense like it's reduced to simple Occam's razor chemistry you give people a dose of psilocybin and they're less anxious it's like that isn't what's happening what's happening and we don't know the details of what's happening what's happening is that imagine that one of the canonical fears that people bring to life existentially is fear of suffering and mortality mean that in public uh humiliation and excommunication are probably the two big classes of fear so we'll say fear of mortal suffering and then a mystical experience undertaken under the appropriate circumstances can reduce the fear of mortal suffering itself under the most dire circumstances in the dire circumstances would be wind directly confronted with the inevitability of mortality and suffering and so but I haven't been able to uh gather much information on exactly how the transformation that's induced by the Psychedelic substance actually makes it makes itself manifest because that has to be a very fundamental cognitive and perceptual retooling to be much more sanguine in the face of death itself very big things are shifting underneath the surface and so do you have any sense with with your vast experience in such domains do you have any experience or any sense of what it is that shifts yeah I I do I uh uh my I I think again it goes back to this what we were talking about before about stepping outside your cognitive reference frame stepping outside your default mode mode framework whatever that might be giving you a chance to look at death as you might look at any any problem that you have anxiety or trauma or whatever look at it from a different perspective and what has impressed me about the reports of people uh who have had this end-of-life therapy with psilocybin what what seems to be the therapeutic uh uh what is most beneficial for them is they come away from the experience and they're not preoccupied with death anymore you know they're not looking ahead to this moment of dying you know they know it's out there but their attitude is well wait a minute I'm alive now you know I'm alone I see let's focus on that death is there it will come but I think that's tremendously uh helpful for them and anxiety relieving to say let's just focus day to day on the moment you know being alive in the moment and that relieves their anxiety greatly and it's interesting you know that uh you know we don't evaluate like like many Cancer drugs chemotherapy and that sort of thing they're evaluated their effectiveness is based on how much how long did they prologue life you know did they live longer that would be expected if they didn't take this chemotherapy often many of these things do extend life but by the time you finally die you're just you're a wreck you know it destroys the body you know and it's interesting that it nobody is claiming that psilocybin cures cancer but it certainly can extend life you know beyond expectation I mean there's a woman up here that there's a movie out called Dost two and uh she I I've been in this movie part of it called dose two and she started out with uh terminal uh diagnosis of uh I think it was uh colon cancer liver cancer or something she was told she wouldn't have she would live about six months that was five years ago you know she's had two psilocybin sessions you would never think of this person as being sick they don't appear to be sick her attitude is good and you know she knows she's dying but she doesn't live every moment anticipating that she's more about she's living in the moment and it really it's beautiful to see you know because her her family life her relationship with her husband her friends and all that that's what she's enjoying and she's having a a good time everybody knows she's gonna die sooner or later they've stopped predicting but that then again as you said that's also that's true of all of us to somebody of course yeah and the end can come at any moment and to be preoccupied with that obviously can produce very counterproductive consequences well so I just did a uh a lecture series on The Sermon on the Mount for this Peterson Academy that we're putting together online educational initiative and I I want to just run that by you for a second in relationship to what we just described so as far as I can tell the ethos in The Sermon on the Mount is quite straightforward it's not party like there's there's no tomorrow because uh the Lilies of the Field do not toil and and do not spin it's it's not a hippie ethos at all it's certainly not tuned in turn on and drop out it's it's two parts the first part is it's to love God with all your heart and soul and that means to me technically speaking psychologically speaking let's say to do something like Orient yourself as much as you possibly can to the highest good that you're capable of conceptualizing and so for example when you're ensconced in a family and facing a mortal challenge one of the higher Goods that you might attend to is to make the most out of every moment that you have with the people that you love and so and then once you're oriented in that direction then to pay as much attention to the moment as possible Right to let the day be sufficient let the Troubles of the day be sufficient to to the day to stay say that sufficient unto the day are the troubles therein it's an injunction to focus on the moment and then you might say well there's a tremendous amount of information in the moment a tremendous amount of Redemptive information and the more you pay attention to the moment the more you open yourself up to what's in some sense the infinite complexity of the moment and so you might say if you Orient yourself properly and that would be a matter of getting the set right at all times not just when you're preparing for a psychedelic experience if you get the set right and you open yourself up to the moment then you can find all the meaning that you need to immerse yourself in life in that moment and that's dependent on the intensity of your attention yeah well that's okay so that's very that's very useful that that conceptualization so your sense is that it turns people's the insights the mystical insights turn people away from the precipice of death to the infinite possibility of the moment exactly that fear of death might be one of those screens in some sense that are blocking or inhibiting the flow of Redemptive information and so the Psychedelic experience obliterates that and says remember what's right in front of you yeah and the fear of death is you know this is what the Psychedelic experience helps defuse you know by by refocusing on the moment I am hopeful I don't know if it will ever happen but I I think the next step in in psilocybin sort of psychedelic therapy for the end of life uh and interesting uh threshold could be crossed if you will if people would if uh you could arrange the this therapy so that the family members could also participate with the dying person you know can you imagine the dynamic that that would let that that would engender you know people to share this experience of you know the loved ones impending immortality impending mortality for sure but just the richness of the relationships the ability that psychedelics give you some time to honestly relate to your loved ones you know in a way that is unfiltered and you know how hard it is sometimes for us to really Express to someone our love you know even though we we love them but sometimes the words I love you is a hard thing to say you know and I I think it would be very helpful for the family to be able to uh not only be present but also be in the altered state with with the people you know and uh because it would be as healing for them as it is for the person who is dying yeah well I've noticed that I've noticed that families who cope well with the impending death of someone that's Central to the family often do that in no small part by paying increased attention to the remaining relationships and so that as they lose one they deepen the others and sometimes in some sense as a consequence of that loss right and so that might be an analog to to what you're describing I guess the trick with a family would be to try to get the set of the entire family match to the circumstance because it is also the case that the stress that impending mortality can can place a family within can also bring out the pathologies and divide people further and so but obviously that's a sub-optimal situation it's worth exploring It's Tricky territory and again I think I think if we look to the indigenous model you know as probably something we should look at as a way to approach this because they often do exactly this kind of thing you know and but they're you know very much more about the collective and all that so so you know it's just an idea I mean it'd be interesting if it could happen you know yeah well I don't think any experiments have been done yet on like family experience of collective family experience of psychedelic transformation for example um we haven't got that far in the scientific analysis of such things hard to get hard to get FDA approval for that but it's worth it's worth attempting to do that because I think that that would again be a a significant step toward creating this new this new paradigm around death you know that uh medicine you know that's a big deficit of medicine you know this idea that uh death can be death is inevitable but death doesn't have to be terrible you know and then and so that's that's the frontier hopefully that could be explored so let me ask you about your plans for the future so what what looms on the horizon for you and your work at the moment well right at the moment my work is uh you know I mean I'm not really doing research in psychedelics anymore uh and never really worked in the therapeutic area I was always kind of a nuts and bolts guy looking at the plants the molecules the pharmacology and so on uh right now what's occupying my time is this project in ketos uh with the herbarium that's going to be that's gonna be a two to five year project uh I need I need to raise somewhere between five and ten million dollars I I should mention that the McKenna Academy is a 501c3 we're happy to accept your money and uh and that's what we're gonna that's where we're gonna put our resources as well as doing additional conferences in the you know and Retreats you know to some degree but our main focus is going to be this this big project and then we'll probably do another espd conference in a in a few years but it takes a lot of effort to pull that off so it would be fun to come to that I wish you could come next time for sure yeah you've been in immersed in the Psychedelic world for a very long time um what what has been the consequences for you personally in terms of the way that you look at the world and maybe we could say the part what's positive about what you've experienced and are there things you regret or cautions that you would put forward as well well uh uh no there's I mean you make choices in life you know uh always you make choices and every choice you make closes off other choices sometimes I look at my career and I'm I wonder you know I could have been a better academic I could have had a more Stellar career in Academia and so on but you know what drove my what drove me was curiosity we get back to that original idea what I was interested in psychedelics emerged early in my life as the most interesting not just the Most Interesting Drug but the most interesting thing on my radar and I sort of grabbed on to that and I really have followed that ever since what what was true 50 or 60 years ago is still true you know psychedelics are the most interesting thing on my radar so uh but you know my era my my phase of doing active research on psychedelics and so on is probably over and so now I just talk about it and and uh as a researcher I I am looking at looking at what I can do to uh preserve indigenous knowledge Preserve biodiversity slow down the devastation of the Amazon a very small part really of the total thing but you know it's what I'm trying to do I don't have any real regrets I I have in fact psychedelics have been a unallied blessing for me in the sense that uh I've learned a lot I feel like from psychedelics and the people I've encountered and you know the experiences I've had along the way uh have all been Rich you know and uh and really I cherish them I mean I'm getting to the point now I'll be 72 in December hopefully I have some time left uh I mean I'm not ready to check out but you never know as you get older you get different health problems crop up and so on so you never really know how long but uh whatever happens I'm happy with the journey so far and it's it's been it's been marvelous and I've been able to meet so many interesting people and go interesting places and meet people like you for example and just have these great conversations so no regrets well that's a that's a lovely place to stop and we've come to the end of our discussion as well and so I would like to thank you Dr McKenna for agreeing to talk to me today and for sharing your insights into this remarkable domain of ethnobotanical research and and research on the psychopharmacological frontier and uh I wish you luck with your documentation project and with your upcoming conventions I think that would be something quite remarkable to attend and so maybe you can keep me in the loop with regards to the timing of the next conference for all of those who are watching and listening I'm going to spend an extra half an hour as I always do with my guests talking to Dr Dennis McKenna we'll talk about the particulars of his career which I think will make for a very interesting discussion hello everyone I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 828,895

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, existentialism, maps of meaning, free speech, freedom of speech, personality lectures, personality and transformations, Jordan perterson, Dr Peterson, Dennis McKenna

Id: tJE8HYFrkT4

Length: 90min 43sec (5443 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 24 2022