Psychedelics, Therapy, and Spirituality | Robert Wright & Michael Pollan [The Wright Show]

hi Michael hey Bob how you doing pretty good thanks good you're in Berkeley I am yeah my desk I envy you let me introduce this I'm Robert right this is a right show available in both streaming video and via audio podcast you were Michael Pollan very well-known writer um you've written books like The Omnivore's Dilemma the botany of desire number of number of well-received books but your latest is one we're going to talk about how to change your mind what the new science of psychedelics teaches us about consciousness dyeing addiction depression and transcendence transcendence which is a lot of stuff I wish I wish I hold a book up but I've actually been listening to it on audio podcast I mean on audible so that's what I'm gonna hold up that's kind of the book very interesting book it's a best-seller are you surprised at the bestseller I am actually I you know people know how to buy a book about food whether they knew how to buy a book about psychedelics or felt comfortable doing it was up in the air one of the reasons that you you know that long subtitle that you read that we decided to go with that was to make clear that even if you're not interested in psychedelic psychedelics or a window on these other issues that maybe you are interested in and that really is a book about the mind in the same way your book you know Buddhism is truth is really as much about Buddhism but it's also about the mind so so anyway yeah I was shocked and and you know gratified because it suggests the culture is more open to this conversation than it has been in a very long time yeah I mean it's also very good book that's part of the explanation but but but yeah I agree it may say something else I mean in a way part of the premise of the book is that you know we may be at the birth of kind of a second age of psychedelics yeah and I think that I mean that a lot of the stigma that attached to psychedelics in the 60s some of that is fading you now have people in power who know the territory and are not as quite as freaked out by the idea of psychedelics as people as adults were in the in the 60s and I think that you have it's part and parcel of the interest in mindfulness and meditation and and then the last factor I think is the fact that mental health care is is such a disaster right now and that there's so few tools to deal with what is an extraordinary amount of suffering and that depression rates are up addiction rates are up suicide rates are up and yet mental health care doesn't have much to offer and there's a general recognition that the antidepressants which is really the last major innovation in the field are fading and their effectiveness people don't like taking them they're addictive and hard to get off so that I think that there's an openness to look at unconventional solutions that we haven't seen in a while yeah a certain amount of book is about therapeutic uses psychedelics and in fact I guess one one thing that marks this is maybe a new age of psychedelics is that that that research into that is once again viewed as legitimate which it was the art for a long time right that's right and there was a change in the weather at the FDA at a certain point in the 90s where they basically told the researchers we're gonna look at look at this at your applications as if there's somewhere any other drug and not with this special you know radioactivity that had attached to it I think that was part of it and then you got then some very serious researchers decided they wanted to work on it Roland Griffith in particular who is a you know very prominent drug abuse researcher at Johns Hopkins he got interested because he had had a mystical experience in his meditation practice actually and that opened him up to this idea of looking for neural Karla's for a mystical experience and so so you know a couple factors had to come into play including the passage of time and the fact that the 60s are somewhat faded although I'm always surprised at how how the 60s can reassert themselves and at the drop of a hat they keep coming back the flash gas I guess it's flashbacks the the so you know you mentioned mystical experience and one of the interesting thing of things about the therapeutic uses is that they often have an arguably spiritual dimension I mean even when you're talking about treatment for like alcoholism which sounds pretty mundane right I mean there are drugs that treat alcoholism that that just basically dull your appetite for it or something but but with psychedelics with almost all of these therapeutic uses I think it's fair to say that you get into a kind of spirit or or many of the people get into what you can call spiritual territory yeah I mean how we define spiritual territory is you know as you know that's kind of fraught but what's interesting about the therapy is it it only works when people have had a very big experience mystical or spiritual or if you want to put in psychodynamic terms and experience an ego dissolution I think they're all the same thing but but people can disagree about that and that there is a kind of conversion experience people have and and that kind of has an interesting echo with the history of AAA and alcohol alcoholism treatment which was that you know there was this sense that you did have to undergo a conversion to get out of it and the DTS the delirium tremens might be that conversion experience but a kind of a hitting bottom and a recognition that you were powerless and that there was a higher power all these things there's some kind of connection between that and psychedelic therapy I think but we do we do know that the the best predictor of a successful outcome whether you're treating addiction depression obsession and all the other indications are looking at is having had what what the researchers called a complete mystical experience and thus you know this psychologists have a have a survey and a rating for everything and they've gotten one for mystical experience and it's based on William James's ideas and then it was you know is the sense of merging with a larger entity this sense of significance or sacredness very often an experience of bliss or ecstasy and this so-called noetic quality this this idea that what you perceived the insights you've had are not just your opinions they're not subjectively true they're objectively true and they have a they carry an immense Authority that seems to be very helpful in the process of changing behavior right so noetic meaning that it imparts knowledge but as you suggest it's more than knowledge in the conventional sense it almost imparts conviction right yes belief in the ideas in fact sometimes the ideas don't sound that extraordinary at least other banal sometimes yeah like smoking is stupid is the most important thing right but it seems like more profound and that carries commitment yes I think that's right I think that and I had that experience in my own psychedelic journeys that that ideas that can seem really you know in their nakedness kind of banal and stupid kind of glow with this this aura of significance well one of your experiences will talk about the your several experiences but one of them you you you they start playing music and you and you think in the beginning was the note is that it left meaning the musical note and it's like and that seemed really profound and who knows maybe it is but thinking about it now right it's like what the hell does that yeah well you're pointing to some of the challenges of writing about these experiences which were profound in their own way but yeah there's a very fine line I think between profundity and banality and you know I say at some point that a platitude is a is the truth it's barely been drained of all emotion and and conviction and and sometimes the psychedelic experience kind of resets that husk love is very important but we've heard it so many times and it's appeared on so many Hallmark cards that you know our brains are tuned for novelty right I mean that's and that's very adaptive I mean you know about that and the familiar kind of fades into the background because that's not good the threat is not going to come from them familiar right but one of the things that drugs like psychedelics do and cannabis does this too is it changes that tuning and and suddenly the familiar looms very large and important and the familiar is large and important we take things for granted we take our spouses for granted we take art you know we take the love of our children for granted we take the beauty of nature for granted because it's not posing any challenge to us so that revaluation of the novel and the familiar is actually a very very important I think function whether you achieve it through drugs or other ways so there's a sense of wonder often that childlike wonder that's right and Wonder is something that experience tells us to and and to recover that is a big deal it's it's a kind of first sight and definitely that's one of the things that that psychedelics do for people it can give you a profound appreciation for things you take for granted okay so it kind of charges things with meaning is that fair to say and yeah and gives you a sense of wonder and I mean as you said I guess the peril of everything seeming meaningful they may not be you know I mean for example things may seem like weird coincidences and deeply and you know messages from the beyond that arguably are in fact not but at the same time there are as you suggested there are on the matic things that seem to recur in psychedelic experience and often through deep meditation that you could argue on behalf of for example the idea that the self you mentioned ego dissolution the idea that itself is is not necessarily the the clearest kind of vehicle or you know the best vehicle for viewing the world or yeah and I think that's one of the for me that was kind of the biggest takeaway was that there was another ground to stand on besides the your usual ego consciousness and I had that experience during one of my psychedelic journeys of so a complete ego dissolution first into this sheaf of little post-its that were blowing around in the wind and but there was this other eye that manifested or this other consciousness that was untroubled by this you would think that this is you know I'd want to rush and pile them back together in some sense but I didn't I was okay with it and that was a to me that opened up a just a different window on on life that oh you don't you're not identical to your ego you don't have to respond with it to everything it's its usual defenses and protective this contracted quality of ego is is is not your only option and that was a big deal for me I had assumed that I was identical to my ego and and for me the takeaway from the experience was that you know it's funny after I had this experience I I told my guide I was this happened in a guided psychedelic experience on a very high dose of psilocybin I told Mary the name I give my guide in the countess's so I had this experience I learned that I'm not identical my ego there's another ground I want you to stand but what good is that am i here my egos back in uniform and on patrol and so I don't know what the value of that was and she said well you've had a taste of this other approach this other way to react or not react to what life throws at you and you can cultivate that and and actually and I asked her how and she said through meditation and that that is a way to re-access that that mode of consciousness and and I found that that's true and I you know one of the one of the things psychedelics have done for me has given me a you know a deeper commitment to a meditation practice that was pretty careless both long yeah and in fact near the end of the book you go and see Judson Brewer whom I've a little longer it about he does this he did kind of path-breaking research showing that when people are in a deeply meditative state what's called the default mode Network quiets down and and and you know that's the part of your brain that's active when your mind is wandering so you go to him and you do a little don't you do a little kind of revisiting of the idea that yourself is not real like intentionally you intentionally revisit a kind of a psychedelic experience involving the dissolution of the self I guess and or something like that and it registers on his equipment and in a big way right in terms of what he's doing yeah which was really remarkable so he's set up this kind of it's like a neurofeedback setup where you you wear this bathing cap of with all these electrodes and it's focused on one particular part of the default mode network called the posterior cingulate cortex which he explained is involved in kind of the autobiographical or narrative self it's where we tell stories about who we are you know and generate this sense of continuity over time it's also where we connect whatever is happening whatever new stuff is coming in to the abiding story of who we are so if he shows you a list of adjectives on a screen as he does to get his baseline and you see cheap handsome short you know Democrat you know whatever and you just read those adjectives it doesn't register and there's no activity in the posterior cingulate cortex but if he then says simply think about how those adjectives apply to you or don't apply to you in other words start writing some stories about you and that adjective boom that's the posterior cingulate cortex that's its job it lights up so we did a series of experiments and in one of them I merely tried to recollect some of the things that had happened on a recent ayahuasca journey and I summon these images and began thinking about them and and I could see them in my mind's eye and while I was doing that it it depressed the posterior cingulate cortex activity there in the same way it presumably would have done during the psychedelic experience and we know that you know the mind actually when you think about when you think about a visual image that's not in front of you the same neurons light up in your visual cortex the wonder is you can't see it you know and so something like that was happening and that the the having had the experience under the psychedelics I guess some pathways some neural linkages were created and that you could exercise those and when you did similar things would happen in your mind so I thought that was really interesting he did too he was very surprised I didn't tell him what I was thinking about and he said that I had brought I brought this activity way down he says what the hell were you thinking about and I said well I was thinking about one of my psychedelic trips where my ego had dissolved so that's but meditation had cultivated this ability and regular meditation you think and cultivate your ability to to get back into that place yeah there's some extent I can't always do it you know I'm not a I'm not a great meditator I know we're not supposed to make value judgments like that but but occasionally I can I can I mean you know this is a very rich history of American Buddhists in particular starting on psychedelics and this has opened up a kind of field of consciousness they wanted to explore in a more daily practice obviously you can't take psychedelics every day and so there was this move and and it's very logical I mean I do think psychedelics could be a very good way to kick-start a meditation practice because you get a sense of the destination and and that's hard to get when you're starting out on meditation of like you're always wondering am i doing it right is this how I'm supposed to feel and then you get lost in those loops and but having had a vivid experience of a kind of selfless consciousness I think it makes it that much easier to get to and there may be a there may be a neurological reason for that you may have exercised that that muscle okay so let's talk about your kind of systematic experimentation with psychedelics that you described in the book I mean the first part of the book is your very interesting kind of history of psychedelics some of which are only very recently discovered they had this phase during the 50s and 60s of publicity then they had a phase of bad publicity arguably owing partly to Timothy Leary's clownish miss you get into all that and then the revival and then and then you talk about and you had you had done I guess psilocybin a couple of times in your 20s and then you did them I guess after he started researching this book you had one more psilocybin experience all of these were with your wife no not all of them just that one Oh what yeah I'm sorry the psilocybin experiences before I had the guided experiences yes all three of those rooms well with you like that's what I meant sir so but those were not guided come in 20s and then one after you started researching the book where you you you actually eat a mushroom that you yourself had found I guess in the presence of the world's foremost mushroom and but then you do these guided things and apparently there's this whole subculture of psychedelic guides and if you want you get in touch with them you can arrange for them to oversee a trip and I hadn't realized that what they tend to do is it's actually very carefully controlled you lie down cover your eyes they put music on with headphones and that's kind of the whole thing right I mean the that is so it's not like out there experiencing the world is it in Korean Journal it encourages hallucination and in a certain sense right yeah and it encourages a kind of more psychological journey that you're you're you're going inside I mean there's so much I mean psychedelics has such an effect on the sensorium you know that's really profound and but it also can be very distracting and and so the idea of the that wearing on shades and music is to make you go inside and it is important though to draw the distinction between the way psychedelics are typically used which is to say without a guide outside you know in a very kind of informal way which is fine for some people people have amazing experiences but they also get into trouble because there are real psychological risks to these drugs and they can put you in a very dark place and and also your debilitated so you can do stupid things people really have jumped out of windows on psychedelics and so the idea of the guided psychedelic journey is a very different way of approaching these substances and so basically it's got three stages the first is preparation where the guy who is often a you know a trained therapist of one kind or another tells you what to expect and encourages you to essentially surrender to whatever happens and that it is in the effort to resist the dissolution of your ego or this sense of going crazy or dying that people really get anxious and so they they have all these mantras trust and let go you know relax your mind and float downstream from John Lennon and if you see a monster it's like if you see a you know a mountain lion and you know you're not supposed to turn and run you're supposed to stand your ground and so all that which is actually it turns out to be very important advice and then during the experience they're sitting with you basically they're there they're changing the music helping you if you need to get up and go to the bath or get a sip of water and that creates a sense of safety there you know they're not taking this substance there they're gonna answer the door if anything happens or the phone and you can really especially as adults I mean you know there's always the FedEx guy coming to the door or something like that right I mean so they create an environment where you can really focus on what you're doing and then after they have what is called an integration session where they try to help you make sense this is the most conventional therapeutic part they try to help you make sense of this amazing you know and confusing experience you've had and figure out how to apply any lessons or insights to the conduct of your life so that's the that's the three-part structure of the guided trip and I was essentially trying to simulate what was going on in his research projects at NYU and Hopkins and UCLA where I couldn't get in I didn't qualify for any of the indications that they were studying so I went looking underground and as you say there is this very interesting community of very serious and professional people who are practicing psychedelic therapy underground and great risk to themselves and that they are doing pretty much what's going on over ground they tend to be a little more shamanic in their approach and there's a little more you know ritual and blowing and smoke and things like that but it's pretty much the same idea and and I found for me that doing the psychedelics in the company of the guide allowed me to go much deeper and further than I ever would have because if you think about it to put down your defenses you know there's a reason we have defenses they do us they protect us and the willingness to completely let them go you have to feel very safe that's a terrifying experience and so in the case particularly of this high-dose psilocybin experience I did with a guide named that I call Mary I just felt so safe in her place and with her that could let myself go and and that ended up being quite a profound experience I don't know that I could have done that on my own and I know when I did this with my wife in our home there were I was constantly distracted was she okay I should go in and check with her I was I was you can take yourself out of the experience there's kind of more willfulness than people talk about it's you're not totally out of control of your mental faculties so if you know if the doorbell does ring you can pull it together and you know answer it but you don't want to you want to kind of let go and the guide makes it possible to let go okay so you're first so that was your the second of your guided experiences the psilocybin the first was LSD which you had never done before yeah and so you you do this you put on the headphones in the like eyeshades or whatever the music starts and you you start you know visualizing things first there's kind of a nature scene or something but you start doing this thing where you're imagining this kind of scaffolding or some kind of structure kind of being built and it represents your life but what beginning with your marriage or something it represents you're going through stages of your life as the edifice gets built is that right yeah it was kind of like this autobiography and that went on for quite a while and they were you know there was period I know I was reflecting this was not a high dose experience this is kind of a middle dose experience and I was I found my I expected you know LSD I expected to see the birth of the universe and fractals and you know all sorts of crazy stuff but I was seeing the people in my life I was seeing my son and my wife and my parents my sisters and one after another and there was this there was something of a chronology too and I saw I kind of felt like a life being built and I could see it almost like a tree house with many many floors and all of them were just different stages of my life so it was this interesting sort of review accompanied by very powerful feelings of love for everyone in my life I mean it was just and respect I just remember having this admiration for my sisters and they're very tight they're three very powerful women in very different ways and so that's that was a kind of the revaluation of the familiar that we were talking about earlier that was happening on that and there was this very strong I describe it as this cascading dam break of love for all these people in my life and it was yeah it was a very positive experience did your life seem to have a kind of coherence in some sense that you or did it seem to I mean if the idea of a structure of like a coherent structure suggests that the thing adds up to something did your life seem to add up to something in in with a with a new kind of power or something yeah it did actually I mean you're right it was a it was a structure and so that implied it had a kind of order and it wasn't a bunch of random experiences but that one was building on the other and and this happened just at a time when we had one child and our son was you know leaving home and so we were entering a new phase and and the the insight was well this phase would be built on this very sturdy structure and so we shouldn't worry too much about it that we will kind of figure out another way to be now that he's not in the house anymore so it did it did have you know look there's this way in which psychedelics leads to imputing a meaning to things everything becomes more meaningful you you don't you're not an existentialist on psychedelics you know there's no no sense of meaninglessness although Sartre did have a psychedelic experience that he felt was pretty meaningless but that's sort it everything is significant and in fact they've done some really interesting studies where they'll play music that has no meaning for you at all no personal significance at all and they'll play it to you when you're on LSD and from that time forward that meaning that music will have it'll be like that song you heard when you were 18 that brings back up something every time you hear it there's something about the attachment of meaning to events in our lives that perhaps is mediated by the serotonin receptors that was the speculation of these researchers so there is this sense of significance that comes to everything and yeah is that an allusion or not hard to say yeah the one reason I asked about you know what whether your life seemed to have a kind of unity to it is because it seems like along other dimensions psychedelics impart a sense of unity in other words things that previously seem disconnected seem connected we're seeing yeah like one and and that's that's of course you know as you as you suggested that may be part of a pretty classical mystical experience but it seems to be able to work along a number of dimensions you know Steve Jobs I think there had a early on had a psychedelic experience where he was think about like technology and the liberal arts is before he started Apple and then he just saw them coming together like technology in the liberal arts and then that became like his mission in life now you know it's unclear you could ask questions about whether he actually pursued that mission I mean in retrospect Apple computers are a lot like Windows computers I mean did it matter you know but but but in any event that well except that aesthetics were a big concern with Beauty which is a classic concern of the humanities did it kind of infuse what he did yeah he famously taunted gates by saying when does it be much better product if Bill Gates had tripped and Bill Gates responded by saying I did I did apparently didn't work didn't work but you know this connecting of dots I think is really important things that were separate come together I mean think about synesthesia that's that's a really interesting very common part of the phenomenology of tripping is that different senses get kind of integrated so that you the number-7 you think of as blue or something right or you can taste a musical note or see it I mean and mice in my experience music I you know that line you quoted earlier in the beginning was the note every note generated a physically a physical structure that I could see and so and there's a map in the book of a there's a very interesting mapping of brain connections that's that I reproduce in the book I don't know guess you don't get it in the audio book sorry but on page 318 of the actual book doesn't ring a bell now yes they have trouble doing imagery in audio books anyway it's a they did a map of the brain on a placebo this is connections different networks and how they're connected to one another and on the placebo there's a few big big super highways connecting connecting networks and then on the psychedelic they did psilocybin for this there are all these lots of little roads connecting everything and so instead of instead of connections passing through that central hub of the g-load network they're striking up their own relations and that may explain synesthesia you might have the visual cortex talking to your you know your sense of smell it may also be I mean we think of insights as connecting the dots bringing you know a metaphor is bringing two different realms together so it's too soon to say but there's definitely some temporary rewiring of the brain that goes on and that does tend to bring things that haven't been in contact into contact and does that result in an insight like Steve Jobs is or not it's it's we can't say yet though all those lines we don't know what those lines are doing now you could say that the dissolution of the ego or the or what food is called a not self experience or whatever the things all of that order or themselves an example of seeing different things as interconnected in this case the the you know seeing the most fundamental distinction between me and everything else that's kind of breaking down and seeing seeing a kind of to do any there yeah I I think that's a big big part of it is that our minds seem to be designed to keep things apart and and the ego certainly is about creating a certain distance there's the self and the not self there's you know the ego patrols these boundaries around us between us and other people us in nature and us and our subconscious right it's you know it stands up here and pretends to be a king of all these domains and and that wall comes down or gets softer more permeable and that's a very interesting experience and that is in its extreme mode there's this sense of merging with something larger than yourself which can be you know terrifying or ecstatic depending on how you approach it and how you've been prepared for it but it also can yeah I mean I felt I had very strong connections to nature on that psilocybin trip I had without the guide I was in my garden in my home and and I was not an observer in that garden I wasn't your typical some you know perceiving subject in a world of objects I was one subjectivity among many spirits and I never felt so much you know a part of nature that I was they were there were a lot of characters here and I was just one of them so nature seemed more alive yeah nature seemed more alive and again that's the imputing of significance to but you have this sense that consciousness is spread more democratically over the landscape and it's not just a property of humans now this is an interesting irony it seems to me because on the one hand people sometimes take the seeming significance of psychedelic experience to in a way diminish the significance by that I mean they say that look this this proves that you know it's all just material because you're just fiddling with the chemicals and then this stuff happens it seems amazing but but obviously all this shows is that everything is mechanistic because by fiddling with the chemistry you alter your perception that's one order you can make is that this is kind of reductionist and diminishes ya and diminishes you know cosmic speculation and and spiritual Sensibility on the other hand a common experience of the people whose neuro chemistry has been so fiddled with is to be more aware of whether you call it mind or consciousness or something that is not itself strictly material I mean maybe being more conscious of yourself having that you know some sense that there's this you that's not not the physical but also there are a lot of reports like yours of of attributing consciousness to things you might not have previously attributed conscious yes whoo right yeah oh yeah without question I mean it's one of the ironies of psychedelics that yes it would seem to argue for a material cause for consciousness and consciousness change because you've interested you've introduced a chemical and and all these things happen on the other hand people come out of the experience very often with much more cosmic ideas of consciousness that consciousness lies outside of the brain it's a field that I can access I didn't come out of it with that but you know I'll just Huxley did you know the mind at large and I've talked to many Psychonauts or who are convinced that the theory that brains produced consciousness is wrong and that that's just a hypothesis and it's true we haven't proven it but it seems to me a pretty strong hypothesis and that I think that's an interesting irony I think it mixes up though our categories of material and immaterial in lots of ways you know presumably the kind having the same sort of experience during meditation there are neurochemical things going on too I'm you know all brain activity is probably mediated by chemicals and electricity and so then the issue is well this is an exogenous chemical not an endogenous chemical and how much how much weight should we give to that distinction in traditional cultures the fact that it was a mushroom that was making this happen or a plant was more evidence for the wonders of nature that that nature could do this to you we tend to put that in a more reductive frame and and we think it's kind of cheating to use an outside chemical - a change - to achieve a change in consciousness I think that's an interesting that may just be a Puritan prejudice though that we haven't worked we haven't worked hard enough and so I that's to me a lot of what was really interesting about the experience is that it scrambled a lot of ideas I had I mean my definition of spirituality my resistance to spirituality had to do with the fact that I was a materialist and I assumed that spiritual was a synonym for supernatural and that it was it was things that that the laws of nature or science couldn't explain now or ever that these these are other orders of you know other laws applied and and I didn't find that credible but rather than discovering oh it is true there is the supernatural realm I came out of it in a different place which was that the real opposite term for spiritual is egotistical and that if you remove the ego these profound connections manifest themselves whether with nature other people the universe and that that is for me at least the core of spiritual experiences is connection and that kind of expansion and so that was you know that I wasn't looking for that I was very surprised by that I'm I'm struck by the fact that people can interpret the mystical experience in very different ways some of them scientific some of them religious so you know many people have had a psychedelic experience or other kind of mystical experience and it's convinced them of a beyond and that beyond is you know God's realm or the divine or whatever but then you talk to other people including some scientists and they have a very different experience but it is also of a beyond so the example that I come across that I think is really interesting is Carlo Rovelli the the Italian theoretical physicist who wrote seven brief lessons on physics and has a new book out called the order of time he said that he got turned on to physics by a psychedelic experience when he was 15 or 17 on LSD and he'd had this whole new understanding of time that it wasn't linear that it was kind of more spatialized and it didn't have a direction and and a present opened up all these ideas and and after it was over he realized well how do I know that my lived experience of time in normal consciousness is the right one is accurate and he realized he didn't and that physics was proposing its own version of a beyond wishes to say a world very different than the world as it presents itself to our senses so he put a different interpretation on the same experience it took him into the realm of theoretical physics rather than the realm of religion so I don't know what to make of that but I but I you know I think that there are beyond yeah I mean it seems to me on the one hand you can point to people who on psychedelics become convinced of the truth of manifestly crazy things right like this just what we don't even need to go into details and in fact I mean Trump rally to but but you know even some of the experts you cite have let's just say eccentric ideas about about say that like the mushrooms are trying to communicate with us something I'm totally not I'm not totally sold on that one myself at the same time I mean at the same time there's no reason to believe that a brain produced by natural selection for the purpose of getting our ancestors genes in the next generation is in its default mode doing a particularly good job of apprehending all possible truths or even perceiving the everyday world with perfect accuracy and certainly not with perceiving the self accurately in conceiving the self accurately since since I mean natural selection would favor a conception of the self that just gets genes into the next generation so it seems to me you you at least have to be open to the possibility that alterations of consciousness that take them far away from the norm have some kind of possibility of showing you something that's truer than what you normally see and I think a kind of relativizing of everyday normal consciousness is one of the valuable things that you can take away from these experiences that there you do have a mode of consciousness that's really good for you know getting your genes into the next generation writing books and having success and various kinds yourself about the writing of books yeah well but it the idea that it isn't the only mode of consciousness you're also sensitized to the idea that the world as it presents itself to us is very much an artifact of our particular sensorium and that you could organize a world very differently than we do and and indeed animals have very different worlds they live in literally different worlds than we do because they have different senses some of them the octopus with its you know intelligence distributed over its eight arms each of which can make their own decisions or the bee that can pick up electrical fields as it moves through nature it's seeing a different world than we are and so realizing that that yeah there's a particular form of consciousness we've devised that is very helpful for our normal everyday objectives what so why would you have these other kinds of consciousness then becomes the question are they are is it adaptive to take a psychedelic you know it's you're putting yourself at physical risk right you're more likely to be have an accident or or be preyed on if you're an animal I mean one of the reasons that plants and fungi make psychedelics is probably to discombobulate prêt predators so they're more like you know that insect is more likely to act crazy and get eaten by a bird so why would we be prone to this why would we be wired for it is a really interesting question and you know I various theories occur I mean obviously some changes of consciousness are are clear and you can explain them like relief of pain or distraction from pain that that seems like very adaptive or relief of boredom too you know just keep keep the mind entertained but psychedelics are so much more radical than that and you know it's hard to say it's hard to say well we're wired for this some people think it it's it's something that helps a creature or a species in crisis that you know you need a kind of mutation at the level of cultural history and that drugs mutate given and forms I mean we've seen this in the history of arts and you know the use of you know opium for Coleridge you know opened up a whole concept of the imagination and then you have all these scientists who you know Kary Mullis and the people who had these these insights on psychedelics into the structure of a cell or or a DNA so it could be that just by adding noise to the system it benefits us that you know most of the ideas people have on psychedelics may not be that interesting or smart but every now and then and the mind of a Steve Jobs or Kary Mullis or you know any number of other people amazing happens I mean it could also be the just net you know natural selection built into us some kind of tunable variables I mean for example compassion if it's my daughter suffering the compassion spigot gets turned on and if it's my enemy suffering not exactly its and and compassion takes me out of myself similarly sometimes you need to be absorbed in a task and not ruminating about yourself and sometimes you don't I mean so if you so if there are these knobs that that and then you just imagine them all getting tuned in ways that isn't itself natural but it's a combination of extreme tunings via the via the chemicals that could just lead to a quality different thing you know yeah well and and the tuning of familiar novelty that we were talking about - yeah yeah definitely I mean their time that's a good model yeah so so you mentioned that so on this the first trip the acid trip you you the first guided of your guided trips you you felt well you talked about feeling you know love for your sisters and other relatives and having a new kind of appreciation of them and I think your sense is that that and other things in that trip reflected some dissolution of the ego I mean you're just you're obviously not obsessing with yourself when you're appreciating other people but it was that second guided trip to psilocybin where you feel that yourself it just got first kind of really dissolved right yeah it was it was kind of a stunning moment when I saw myself first as this little sheaf of papers blowing in the wind and then as this coat of paint or butter spread out over the landscape and that was you know it's funny I it was ego dissolution that's how I experienced but someone wrote me and said it's kind of egotistical to spread yourself all over the landscape so you're right there is there may be a paradox in that I don't know and there is this paradox of ego inflation that comes out of psychedelic experience and you know it's the Guru phenomenon which is it's true in the meditation world too that it's very interesting that people who are expert in ego dissolution sometimes emerge with incredible ego and inflation but anyway that aside yes and what was most amazing to me was this other form of consciousness that that I took part in or adopted that was totally disinterested had no investment in the scene before it no defensive reaction it was very expanded and I think it is that kind of consciousness that Huxley was talking about when he talked about the mind at large it does it felt transpersonal it felt like just because it was so on specific wasn't it didn't it wasn't inflected me it just seems so objective that it seemed like something shared and this is I think it's the interpretation of that kind of consciousness that leads people to think well maybe there's a field outside of our brains and I think it's also that field of consciousness that provided such comfort to the to the cancer patients who've been treated with psychedelics who emerge from the experience with with a much less fear of death that they felt that there was some field that they would join they didn't necessarily believe in an afterlife or it wasn't a conventional sense of a heaven or hell but it was this sense that there was a larger field in which they would be absorbed and and it might even be natural some of them would have this very naturalistic image of what would happen to them after death like I would be underground and and my cells would be taken up by plants you know well something like that sort of and but it was comforting in a way it hadn't been before I think because they realized that the meat sack that is their sense of self is you know that there are part of something larger and we are part of something larger it's it's wrong to think that's all we are we're not individuals in the way we think of ourselves well in Hinduism there's this idea at mon equals brahman in other words this self is actually part of the universal soul kind of an and so a Hindu of a in a certain tradition would interpret a kind of a not self experience and experience it as a kind of emerging of the self with the universal soul as you suggested earlier different people from different religious traditions might interpret much the same experience differently a Buddhist wouldn't feel what so much as a merger they would still there would be a kind of continuity with the outside world but because the self supposedly doesn't exist it wouldn't be so much a merger and then a Christian might experience as a union with the divine somewhat like it's the Hindu but I've certainly heard meditators very adept meditators talk about this idea that it felt as if there is a universal field of consciousness and they are just one point of access to it yeah yeah I know and that's I think that's a really interesting idea and I totally get the interpretation it leads to you know there's a very interesting study underway right now at NYU and Johns Hopkins giving psilocybin to religious professionals in every face and what will be curious to see is how they how these issues appear to them the sense of self what you merge into if you merge the imagery frankly will it be drawn from their tradition or will it you know be kind of a perennial philosophy as you know Huxley said that at the base of all religion was the similar mystical experience it's a crazy study you know it's amazing they got it funded and approved to do it but I'm very interested to see what people who are very you know have a lot of and read a lot in in their traditions and have congregations to all these people have congregations what the what they'll teach us about this experience now your final guiding trip I guess illustrates that the dissolution of the self is not necessarily an entirely pleasant thing you could say that yeah I had a tariff I don't want to make this all sound like sweetness and light because I also had a terrifying trip this was on a psychedelic a pretty obscure one called five Meo DMT this is a chemical found in the the venom of the Sonoran Desert toad that should've been a warning sign perhaps but you did not heat it you know at this point I was like very open to trying things and basically it's you can milk the toad it's got these glands and produces this venom and you catch it on the sheet of glass and it dries overnight into these it looks like sugar crystals brown sugar crystals and you smoke it to get rid of the toxins and it was the damnedest thing you take one puff and before you've exhaled you are you've just been shot out of a cannon there's no lead-up at all and you enter a realm of where there is no self no nothing though no material reality nothing but pure energy but storm of energy and it felt like a cat ago five storm in your head although there's no line between you and the world at this point you're just just rattling around in this in this chaos and I use several you know it's very hard to describe I didn't have you know for narrative you need person you need a sense of place and you need time right I had none of those things so all I could come up with was a handful of metaphors and one was you know this is before the Big Bang before there is matter before there is time of course none of us remember did finally see the birth of the universe you would hope to see on this our speech well yeah I guess I was in the midst of the bursts but it was not a happy place to be and that kind of merging was obliteration and I really thought I was dying and that this must be what death was like and the best thing about it is it only lasted about 15 minutes and I don't know how long it lasted but they told me it lasted 15 minutes my gods and then I came down fairly quickly and there was this wonderful moment of realizing I felt I remember feeling my thighs the tops of my thighs I'm lying down under a blanket and it's like oh my god I have a body and then I felt the floor and like there is a world and I had this profound sense of gratitude this is like Dorothy coming back from Oz it's it had some of that feeling and this reconsolidation of the familiar world was so wonderful to behold and you know we've all been we've all felt gratitude for being alive I felt gratitude that there is anything and that there is something rather than nothing always just seem like the greatest gift imaginable I won't say it was worth it to have this this this this gratitude it was it was a great thing but I wouldn't want to go through that to have it it was the kind of great it was the kind of pleasure that comes from the surcease of paint and there had been quite a bit of pain but I learned something for that from that trip too not that I would wish it on anybody else okay so uh looking ahead and of course there's a lot in the book we haven't had a chance to talk about you alluded to the the experiments with cancer patients which are fascinating and as the subtitle suggests there's a ton of other stuff depression as well as addiction you know experiments to treat therapy for those things but what do you see well first of all for the I guess two questions one for the four psychedelics let me ask that one first I mean do you think this is kind of here to stay that that we really are you know that that psychedelics are going to become kind of an accepted thing and if so what kind of uses will be accepted and it would be more therapeutic or more recreational or more what well it's hard to say I think that you know we were the trials have been remarkably successful today but they've been small they've been you know pilot studies phase two trials and there's a strong signal here that there's a that there is a powerful therapeutic effect on depression on addiction especially which may turn out to be very similar and anxiety and they all these may be very similar they've been all may represent a kind of stuckness mental stuckness that psychedelic seems to lubricate the brain in a in a positive way the FDA has been remarkably supportive of the research and in fact has encouraged the researchers to expand their focus from just dealing with depression and the dying to dealing with depression in the general population so we'll see in a couple years if they get anywhere near the results they got on these small samples yeah it could well become approved as a medicine as something that psychiatrists could then prescribe the container that we're talking about though the guided trip will probably have to be part of it I think it's it's important to understand it's not simply a drug therapy it's it's not psychedelic therapy it's psychedelic assisted psychotherapy and that the whole package is really what's being tested and that's going to be hard for the pharmaceutical industry and psychotherapy to get their head around it's a new way of doing psychotherapy so it's not just a new drug it's really a new paradigm and and now how you incorporate it into the healthcare system we have is a challenge and then may take a while but I think we're on that path I think that it within five years or so you may see this approved as a therapy what does that mean for people using the drugs recreationally well you know lots of people go to shrinks who aren't pathological you know they want to help with their problems they're unhappy they've got a relationship issue and you know those people too might find a value in a psychedelic experience one of the researchers spoke to me about the betterment of well people and that you know look I I'm not pathological but I gained I gained an enormous amount and so I think we'll have to think long and hard how we can make the experience available to more people without having the kind of risks that have accompany careless psychedelic use in the past you know maybe it's available if you have a licensed guy you know or but the screening process is very important there are people at risk for mental illness who really should stay away from these drugs anyone at risk for schizophrenia for example um these drugs can trip people off people do have psychotic episodes and occasionally a psychotic break so going the path of cannabis you know we're moving to our legalization of cannabis I don't think is right for this um on the other hand prohibition doesn't allow you to regulate right and prohibition has its own problems since it doesn't work so how do you you know the great lesson of the of the traditional cultures that have used these drugs is that they always had a cultural container there were always elders there was always a sense of ritual there was you seldom did the drugs alone and you only did them for very specific reasons with clear intent so I think the important cultural work left to us we're devising a medical container right now can we devise another container to use in the wider culture that might be safe and and and useful to people and I think that's really important cultural work that needs to be done yeah we'd have to we'd almost have to a new kind of category because I mean I mean it sounds like what you're saying is it doesn't make sense to hand this out the way you hand alcohol out it's too kind of explosive in some sense but on the other hand traditionally when we have a you know accompaniment for the taking of a drug you know an official administer or it's it's because it's been defined as therapy whereas where you're saying that this isn't a benefit only to ill people or people who have a problem potentially it can it can enrich the lives of quote normal people and make them better people and and so that that that calls for yeah the invention of some new kind of container I guess well we do have one other container of course and that is the religious use psychedelics you have ayahuasca there are two ayahuasca churches you have the Native American church where Native Americans can use peyote who knows maybe they'll be new churches so that's another cultural container but there's something between religion and medicine that I think needs some development and I don't know that we have a good model for that and then for you personally what do you see ahead I mean I guess it sounds like at the end of the book you'd never really consider yourself spiritual tell me if I've got this wrong it sounds like you now kind of do and you've now kind of rican sieved spirituality to be not not an alternative to a materialistic point of view in the sense of you know philosophical or scientific materialism so much as being as you said the antithesis of self or the antithesis of evil yourselves yeah and that for me is I think the the most important thing I learned and in that sense I can embrace it on a spirituality and and and strive for it I still have a long way to go you know I still have a very present ego but it's made me much more interested in exploring meditation more deeply you know I think it's opened that up for me is an interesting field of inquiry and you know I don't know exactly where I go in terms of psychedelics if they were legalized you know I'm very uncomfortable with the fact that they're illegal and I've been very open about my experience and very matter-of-fact about it but you know I feel someone exposed too so I'm not gonna go near them the time being but if they were legalized I could really see using them every year on your birthday as a really excellent way to take stock of your life figure out what's gone on and what needs to go on and because I met people who use them that way and that seemed to me a very sane use if I if I didn't have a specific problem to address and I wish I lived in a world where I could do that well your book may hasten the coming of such a world who knows and I are you being hailed by the way by psychedelics enthusiasts as the high-profile evangelists they've been waiting for some of them yes I was speaking in Cambridge a couple of weeks ago and this woman stood up and said as the de facto leader of the psychedelic movement and I like shivered with as a journalist you don't want to be in that role right and and I'm not in that role and I disclaim it so yeah there I'm sure there people who are gonna look at me that way but you know I have the example of Timothy Leary firmly fixed in my mind this is so far you doing a more responsible job than he did well thank you it wouldn't be hard well anyway thanks for taking the time really really fun talking about this the book is how to change your mind what the new science of psychedelics teaches us about consciousness dying addiction depression and transcendence notably the transcendence of self that part that last parts not in the subtitle subtitle ends with the word transcendent that was my editorial comment but thanks so much and continue good luck with a book oh thank you Bob great pleasure talking to you

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Published: Fri Jun 29 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/amHammock]

I really enjoy listening to these two interesting people. I have bought both of their recent books but have not yet read them. The appropriate mindful action here would likely be to *make* the time. These topics stimulate good thoughtful processes in my brain.