The Psychology of Psychedelics | Roland Griffiths - Jordan B Peterson Podcast - S4 E20

hello if you have found the ideas i discussed interesting and useful perhaps you might consider purchasing my recently released book beyond order 12 more rules for life available from penguin random house in print or audio format you could use the links we provide below or buy through amazon or at your local bookstore this new book beyond order provides what i hope is a productive and interesting walk through ideas that are both philosophically and sometimes spiritually meaningful as well as being immediately implementable and practical beyond order can be read and understood on its own but also builds on the concepts that i developed in my previous books 12 rules for life and before that maps of meaning thanks for listening and enjoy the podcast [Music] i'm very pleased today on this good friday as it turns out to welcome dr roland griffiths phd professor in the departments of psychiatry and neurosciences and director of the center for psychedelic and consciousness research at the johns hopkins university school of medicine and author or co-author of more than 400 scientific research publications and i should let those of you who aren't that familiar with scientific enterprise know that um three publications is roughly equivalent to a phd thesis all things considered in the biologically oriented or psychologically oriented research domain so that means that dr griffiths has been involved in something approximating 150 phds and if you just think about that for a minute then you can understand what that means about 20 years ago he initiated a research program at johns hopkins which is one of the world's foremost universities investigating of all things transformative psychedel psychological experiences the mystical type and insightful type experiences occasioned by the classic psychedelic psilocybin the active component in what are popularly known as magic mushrooms his research has indicated that the participants in his studies rate their experiences of psilocybin use as among the five most personally meaningful of their lives and later attribute to them enduring positive changes in moods attitudes and behaviors months to years after the experience he's also conducting a series of intense related studies of brain imaging and drug interactions examining the pharmacological and neural mechanisms of psychedelic action he's conducted a series of extremely interesting and well-received therapeutic studies with psilocybin including the treatment of psychological distress in cancer patients and more specifically fear of death major depressive disorder nicotine addiction so smoking cessation anorexia nervosa and various other psychiatric disorders his research group has also conducted a series of survey studies characterizing both naturally occurring and psychedelic occasion transformative experiences including mystical experience entity and god encounter experiences near-death experiences and experiences that have been associated with their with those who have had them with reduction in depression anxiety and proclivity for substance use he's also engaged in a series of ongoing studies in healthy volunteers in beginning in long-term meditators and most interesting as far as i'm concerned in practicing religious leaders and so well any one of those topics would do for two hours but we're going to try to delve into as many as possible in the next in the next in this following conversation and so thank you so much for agreeing to talk to me i'm extremely excited about this conversation and have been thinking about it for for weeks well it's a great pleasure to uh to join you uh jordan uh uh you and i met some uh 15 or 16 years ago at a at a retreat in california uh and uh and uh and and frankly as this work has unfolded and as i've followed uh the your fascinating uh uh course maps of meaning and uh and your other uh books i really became intrigued by having a conversation with you about all this and so i'm very grateful uh for this opportunity and also uh delighted that you and tammy are are now back uh in in in the land of the living and atlanta in the land of the living right uh so yeah thank you yeah i was i was really taken with our first meeting i remember that that was just before you were about to publish the first of what are really a series of revolutionary papers and i would say revolutionary not only for their findings but for the mere fact that they're being conducted at all i mean the psychedelics burst into the west into western consciousness in the late 1950s and caused so much trouble and distress that they were rapidly made illegal and that was the end of research really for what 20 years more than that yeah more than that yeah and i thought that was a complete catastrophe because as a psychologist my sense was that the most interesting possible domain of study for a truly curious psychologist was the mystical domain that appeared to be opened up by these psychedelic substances which indicated something that we do not understand in my opinion at all yeah um absolutely right but by the time i got to uh graduate school that was university of minnesota in uh in the area of psychopharmacology which is a predecessor to neuroscience the idea of studying psychedelics was entirely off the table as a matter of fact it was a considered a third rail issue to even suggest interest in that it was a career destroying interest yeah yeah it was let alone a pursuit well i was so interested meeting you and when we met in california we went to this conference on awe which actually turned out to be quite a good conference we was a small conference there was about 30 of us if i remember correctly off for three days for the full days and and they're really a series of extremely interesting um experiences we did laughing meditation at one point which i found extremely interesting and quite easy but i couldn't duplicate it myself at home but i was really struck by you in particular because you're you're not there was nothing about you that i would have associated with the probability of restarting the psychedelic the investigation into psychedelics in in the scientific community and that that's a compliment that's the deepest compliment because it seems to me that the reason you were able to pull this off is because your um what would you call it surprisingly sensible and level-headed and so that i'm very curious about why it was that it was you that was able to get through all the regulatory social career hurdles psychological hurdles all of that ethical hurdles and actually managed to establish this research program and at such a prestigious university why do you think you were able to do that you know part of it was the innocence with which i came into the area so i i came into the area having initiated a meditation practice and i had been i was trained as a radical behaviorist uh in psychopharmacology you know and and which means uh that you don't pay any attention to uh uh you know motives or thoughts uh those are irrelevant you want to focus on behavior that's yeah observable behavior it's great scientific training to be trained as a rigorous behaviorist though yeah and uh but even in graduate school i you know i was curious about interiority uh and had tried to do some meditation but like so many uh when i tried it became uh hopelessly difficult three minutes felt like three hours and so i set i set that aside i went about my uh developing my career in psychopharmacology at johns hopkins became internationally prominent in drug abuse pharmacology and then 25 years ago started a meditation practice again and this time there was something fundamentally different about it and i don't know why but i engaged with it and it became really intriguing to me and there were you know uh states of consciousness that emerged from that getting me to ask questions about the nature of spiritual and transformative experience uh you know what's going on with meditation i didn't have a strong religious grounding or background a matter of fact i had flunked out of confirmation school and in the sixth grade but there was something really compelling and it got me reading about different meditation traditions different religious traditions i was trying to understand this whole area of spirituality and then came to be reintroduced and i was reintroduced incidentally by bob jesse who organized that conference we went to and he's a engineer who founded a group called the council on spiritual practices and i got reintroduced to the idea well you know roland if you're interested in spiritual experience if you want to investigate that take another look at the psychedelics and um and and so i came into this just out of raw curiosity uh and and and frankly i i would have to say that my intrigue with the nature of these experiences was so compelling that it made me question whether i should be allocating all my time to running around the world and giving conferences and giving papers and doing studies on the next uh abuse liability risk uh for a new uh uh for a new compound and so uh that in itself seems quite remarkable okay so let me summarize that to some degree so you you had your you had rigorous scientific training and of the of the least mystical kind possible in some sense because that's a good way of characterizing behaviorism no concentration whatsoever on subjective experience and the reduction of everything to measurable uh to to to that which can be objectively measured and and i would say like some of the most impressive work ever done in psychology was done by behaviorists like jeffrey gray is a good example he's an absolute genius and that all came out of that behavioral tradition and so did i think the field of neuroscience itself so you established and then you established your credibility methodologically but also as a communicator within that domain so what do you what do you think you had for a publication record by the time you started the meditation practice and and followed this other interest well i mean at that point i was a full professor i had a long history of publication in drug abuse pharmacology and and in that sense we did measure subjective effects and uh euphoria and and things like that um uh but i was i was very well established in that field had done also a whole parallel set of studies in animal behavior pharmacology and drug abuse looking at physical dependence and drug self administration uh right so there was no there was no way by that time of casually dismissing any interest that you might manifest you'd already established yourself and as a highly credible researcher and so that was a precondition for for the next move why do you think your interest in this alternative domain let's say became so intense that it was able to displace an already developed expertise and a fully functioning career in this other direction what what was going on well there's there's something very compelling about the nature of these transformative experiences and that's what you know we can describe the kinds of uh effects that emerge with the psychedelics but you know more than that in in meditation in prayer practice you know there's there really is uh there arises a sense of the ineffable and and there are a lot of things tied to that but uh but but meaning is is uh integrally uh uh involved in that and and that frankly just became so compelling to me as a matter of fact it it kind of dwarfed my interest in drug abuse pharmacology to the point that i actually considered at one point uh dropping out of uh uh the scientific academy and and going off to india uh to an ashram to do much more intensive meditation practice so were there exist were there existential reasons for that or was it merely a matter of where your curio curiosity took you i mean so i mean you had a you had a very well established and productive and i would presume meaningful and engaging career i don't know how you found the teaching aspect of that were was that rewarding to you as well or were you more a pure researcher a peer researcher okay okay but i mean you had a fully functioning professional life at that point but but something gripped you and were there personal reasons for that or do you think it was more a manifestation of curiosity i i i think it was raw curiosity but you know one once one en enters into that relationship of investigating this mystery of of of what it is that we're doing here right i mean this is it's it's kind of the core existential mystery of being that i think comes up in this this is my framing now at the time i didn't you know i didn't know how to even contextualize this i knew it was something that emerged from meditation i thought it had something to do with what religious teachings were about i couldn't i had i just had no context for putting that uh together but it was it was super compelling and it seems incredibly important and i would say if anything it's it's at least uh you know that that interest and the importance in it hasn't faded one bit for me so why did you decide then instead of abandoning what you'd already created and journeying let's say to india to for the the second half of your life that that's how the unions would think about it i suppose is the spiritual part of your life why did you decide to continue walking down the scientific pathway and what do you think of that decision uh well i think it's one of the best decisions i could have possibly made um uh let's see it uh it was what i knew i mean it was all all the tools i had i i was in a unique position i started reading the literature on psychedelics and going huh this is uh this is interesting and i i wonder if this is true and and frankly i went into that first study and and this and this may have made me an acceptable person to take this on i went into that first study with a deep sense of skepticism i was very happy with what i was learning about the nature of these experiences from meditation i was kind of put off by the what struck me as excessive enthusiasm among those people who have continued to be engaged in psychedelics well enthusiasm means to be filled with god's spirit so it's exactly the right word for for for people who've been by psilocybin let's say or hypothetically excessive enthusiasm and of course that is a danger there's no it's not like there's any shortage of religious manias i mean that can manifest itself as part of manic depressive disorder and you see you see religious experience of a sort often in schizophrenic delusions as well so it's not like there's no danger there there's plenty of danger i i i agree and and there there still is um and the first study the first study was which one was that the first study was uh looking at a high dose of psilocybin and comparing it to a fairly high dose of methylphenidate or ritalin under under very deeply blinded conditions so it's a good study because you used an active placebo so to speak did you have a placebo in there as well or was it methylphenidate versus psilocybin it was just straight up comparing methylphenidate in psilocybin but under deeply blinded conditions where people knew that in the course of two or three sessions they would have at least one session in which they would get a dose of psilocybin but they were also told that they could get i think it was 13 other psychoactive compounds we recruited in only people who had zero prior experience with psychedelics so because the allegedly the the profile of subjective effects are so unique uh that it that uh people could unblind themselves by taking in naive people we also eliminated a potential recruitment bias of people who were had good experiences so we could actually how did you convince the ethics committees that it was acceptable to you to first of all to do this at all and and also the administrators at your university and second that it was acceptable to use naive uh participants yeah why did why did they why did they and do you think that in today's climate do you think that that study would now be possible if well let's say if you hadn't laid the groundwork for it you know i i think partly it was uh good luck and partly it it actually speaks very well of johns hopkins and their ethic review procedures so when i assembled that protocol with some help from the council on spiritual practices and counseling from bob jesse when i assembled that protocol i actually thought that there's probably less than a 50 percent chance it would even be approvable because because of these you know ethical committees it has to go through you know not only the hopkins ethical committee but fda and and fda hadn't approved a study giving a high dose of a psychedelic to a psychedelic naive individual for i i don't know you know 25 plus years decades uh and uh and so it was no means clear that it would even uh even go but but it was so interesting to me and as i said i was losing losing comparative interest in the other things that i was doing that i thought well you know why not um the the ethical scrutiny that that got was as was unlike as you might imagine unlike any previous protocol or even any protocol since it went through many levels of scrutiny within uh my institution johns hopkins including being looked at by the dean and the managing attorney's office and and whatever and i and i'm i have to say i'm very proud of johns hopkins as an institution it's stunning that they did it i can't believe that they did it i i can't what what what arguments did you marshal to to put up against because i mean it's so easy for a committee to s if they see risk just to say no because no is simple the problem goes away and no one's accountable for it yes yes is complicated and so like how did you convince them this was a worthwhile endeavor especially given your own skepticism at that point well it really came down to a science and risk benefit ratio i think the big risk that most institutions would have caved in on is a political risk a reputational risk you know what you know to be associated with psychedelics like that yeah look what leary did for harvard yeah exactly and but uh the committee at hopkins that looked at this uh really put the the politics to one side and and weighed the risk benefit ratio to uh to the volunteers what did they see as the benefit oh yeah in terms of just understanding the the nature let's see we put it forward as a comparative pharmacology study okay and so and we've done a lot of work with comparative pharmacology and in fact i had a grant from the national institute on drug abuse to compare one of my specialties at the time was sedative hypnotics and and i had a grant that had proposed to compare ketamine which is a nmda dissociative anesthetic with some other compounds and um and so i i modified it uh to say well we were going to look at ketamine but i think we'll look at psilocybin and instead of comparing it to a classic okay some mentalism there because ketamine is already like radically psychoactive although perhaps not so much as a pure psychedelic let's say so there was some incrementalism and and you'd already got support from granting agencies and and you had all your credibility behind you yeah and and so what we could what we could argue is we're we're looking at relative abuse potential uh here now the study as it's published doesn't read out as that but that that was really uh how it was designed as a classic comparative pharmacology study in which we could compare the effects of psilocybin to methylphenidate in healthy volunteers we had you know we could look at things right so that's like that's i can see that that would be you could make a mount a pretty straightforward valid scientific argument for that you have methylphenidate which is a standard psychomotor stimulant basically dopaminergically mediated something like cocaine and then you have this strange psychedelic and they're the the reason they're addictive is not or if they are and of course there's tremendous discussion about that but they they don't fit neatly into the category of other abusable drugs and so that's that is an issue that's worthy it's very hard to get animals to voluntarily take psychedelics at least regularly whereas you can do it with cocaine with no problem so i can see that that you can make a basic science argument right there and and you said also abuse potential okay okay okay fair enough i'm still stunned that they managed it but but it's so interesting to see how much work and preparation and care at all sorts of levels had to go into that before it was made possible and it it's also even possible that maybe that caution was warranted because one of the things that really strikes me about your research program is that it hasn't got out of hand right i mean and that's what happened in harvard in the early 60s when larry started playing around let's say with lsd which you don't play around with um you've been able to really keep this within a tightly bound scientific box while still um investigating and popularizing the the reality of the mystical experience for the participants okay so you you started the study you had naive people what happened um well what happened is uh is the story that actually changed my career direction because the results you know i was interested in uh spiritual experience uh i i i put in questionnaires into this study that had been used to measure naturally occurring mystical experiences and ralph hood who may have been a participant in the meeting that we went to i think we met ralph there yep yeah had a nice questionnaire um you know but i i wasn't sure what to entirely what to expect and and whether uh the effects would would live up to the what struck me as uh exaggerated claims uh by the psychedelic and enthusiast uh populations uh but indeed what happened was uh under these blinded conditions and both the guides were blinded and the volunteers to what what drugs were administered uh uh other than on some session that get a dose of of psilocybin uh and um and what emerges number one that uh immediately during these sessions that are done uh after careful preparation so they're they're really curated experiences in which we meet with volunteers for eight preparation hours prior to the session and then they come in they take a capsule we ask them to lay on a couch for the duration of the session which can be up to eight hours six to eight hours we encourage them to use blind folds uh so that they're uh so that their visual system is cut off we have them use um earphones through which they listen to a program of of music and so it's an introverted kind of do they select the music or do you select it we select it what were your guidelines for selecting the music well uh our our main guide who played a very important role in our initial study was bill richards and he had actually done psychedelic work at maryland research center back in the 1970s and so he had a strong bias toward western uh classical music and so our initial playlist was very strongly influenced in that direction since that time any particular composers like was it heavy on bach for example well not particularly heavy but it it yeah it covered uh it covered a a range of of uh classical composers uh actually i'm focusing on that because i mean music and dancing are components of psychedelic experiences that stretch back tens of thousands of years and so the fact that it's easy to skip over these details in some sense you had people lay down their eyes were closed okay so they're not they're not having a sociological experience of psilocybin they're having an interior experience and then you use music and god only knows what music does in it in the final analysis but um and it's it's certainly the case that that you know there isn't a tremendous amount of space between classical music and religious music and so so there's also sorts of things that you've done that are implicit in the uh experiment that are integral in some some indeterminate sense to the outcome now these preparation sessions eight hours okay what are you doing with people during those eight hours and why let's see the preparation is is uh really developing rapport and trust with them these these experiences are can be hugely disorienting and they and uh fear anxiety can arise in at very strong magnitude it's very important that people feel safe and cared for so i think of it that we're trying to create a container around these experiences they have to trust their we sometimes they're called guides or sitters they really have to implicitly trust these people to to take care of them okay so how important do you think you know because you said they have to feel safe but i would think that it's more that they have to be safe and you know what i mean that if this this is why psychological research in particular is so likely to go astray because its validity depends on on on integrity in ways that aren't obviously measurable or describable in a research paper so you know i would think and please correct me if i'm wrong that if you didn't have exactly the right sort of people qualified intelligent insightful competent caring awake all of that and dedicated to actually taking care of the research subjects like none of this can be a show for that to work right because this can go wrong very badly and it didn't go wrong so so to to to what degree how did you select the people who were going to serve as the as the protector slash guides and and what were you thinking about when you did that so in that initial study bill richards who i already mentioned he came came in so so bill c came in as someone who was uh already a strong believer in the power of these uh kinds of compounds so we we actually he was a perfect person to bring into uh in that in that role and was he associated with the council of spiritual practice was he a bob jesse contact he was yeah actually you drew from that that domain of expertise already yeah yeah and he's and he's a psychologist in uh in the baltimore area and now you know he he may very well be uh among the absolutely most experienced psychedelic therapist in the world so he he already came in with substantial experience he was our primary guide throughout that first study and then and he trained uh an assistant guide who's with us uh still mary casamano uh and it was the pair of them that in that very first study that provided that uh rapport trust and support uh before during and after and it's in the aftercare is also important uh but that that relationship is is critical and you're right people they have to feel safe and they and they have to be safe and and and that's the value of doing this under within the institutional structure of something like hopkins because people know that what we're doing is giving them a compound that that we know to be psilocybin in this case synthesized psilocybin in in capsules and it's done with under medical supervision and if anything went amiss medically were yeah we're capable of intervening and and medical intervention is very rare i mean these things these drugs turn out to be remarkably safe um but they they can these kinds of sessions certainly can go off the rails and uh and so that's the that's the nature of that preparation and caring and and being with them in the session we've probably been possibly more conservative than we need to our sessions even today involved two sitters or guides there throughout the whole duration of the of the six or eight eight hours uh so people are tucked into their couch they're asked to go inward uh we we're not um we're not guiding the session per se we're asking them to pay attention to their own experience as it unfolds we'll check in with them what about mindset like what what do you tell the people about how to prepare psychologically for the experience what how are they informed how what what do you want how do you want them to react yeah let's see we want them to go in and be deeply curious about what they have to learn okay so you want them to be open and let it go and let it happen and you say we'll take care of you but you can let it happen yeah yeah let it go be open trust you know and and we and we prepare them uh to not necessarily expect but uh but not rule out the possibility that what may emerge in during the session is something that they'll find absolutely terrifying or anxiety producing okay so they know that oh oh absolutely okay okay and so i don't know how often do people encounter so i mean the experiences are exceptionally profound and range across the full range of emotional significance in fact past the normal ranges of emotional significance so how frequently in the experience is the negative end of the human experience magnified um actually quite frequently so in our our first study about 30 percent of volunteers would have said actually rated at the end of the study that sometime during the experience they had an experience of fear of or anxiety that they would rate it extreme now very often those are short-lived experiences and to the extent that they drag out over long periods of the session the outcomes are going to generally be less uh less favorable but i think it's a it's actually a very sobering statistic that in spite of all the selection we do i mean we've already screened out people for whom we don't think we can develop rapport and trust we've screened out uh individuals um uh you know with borderline personality disorder for instance uh and so and and so we've already selected a group of people who are open and curious we're giving them all this a time and attention yet about 30 percent will experience some significant anxiety during those sessions what's important is that it's very very rare for anyone who has a session of under these kinds of conditions to report after the session that they feel as though their life satisfaction you know has been decreased most people even if they have a difficult experience will interpret that experience in a context of meaningfulness and and in some cases it's actually through the doorway of the uh the the most difficult portions of the experience that the greatest learning comes up so let's let's dive into that a little bit i mean i know historically i know it it appears as though historically when people were preparing for experiences of this sort that they would often go undergo a process of of ritual purification and and i i'm going to just abandon the ritual part of that and assume that what they were doing was attempting some moral purification that they were settling their accounts that they were trying to ensure that they didn't walk into the experience with with karmic excessive karmic baggage that they could conceivably shed that they were very careful to prepare themselves so that their consciences weren't weighing on them any more heavily than they needed to and when people undergo these negative experiences but still emerge uh let's say with the judgment that that was worthwhile what what's the essential nature of the negative experience i mean it's not contentless terror it's it's it's not that in unformed it's more personal well the interesting piece of it jordan is it it can take many many different forms so um so you know one example that we give is because psilocybin is a so very often has a lot of visualizations attached to it either uh either imagery and sometimes realistic imagery or patterns or whatever and we and so we'll say well for instance if and this can happen if during the session a demonic figure you know comes up and starts to approach you um your your job is to be interested in curious about it to recognize that this is a display of consciousness we will often say there's nothing in consciousness per se that can hurt you and and what you what we want you to be is interested in this and so instead of refining an image in your mind so take the demon instead of reifying it and if you do you'll either choose to run from it and then you'll spend the entire session running from this demon that's going to annihilate you until you're exhausted and the psilocybin's gone or alternatively you may choose to fight it but but by fighting it you've also reified it uh and what we really want you to do is be really interested in it and be curious about it and so it's terrifying it's it's a construct created by you for you probably to turn to to terrify you uh and uh be interested in it and and curious about it and and it's through that recognition through although the hair on the back of your head may be standing on end you know we would much rather have you approach it and in effect ask it what it's doing there what what what am i to learn from this and what the guarantee is is that what whatever the nature of that is and it can take any number of forms and it's not necessarily a monster or just visual but whatever it is is not is not going to be static i mean unless you reify it unless unless you make it static if you actually investigate it it's going to start changing and then initially it actually might become more terrifying but it can't it can't and won't continue to do that it's going to dissolve and it may dissolve into something disgusting or beautiful or transcendent or silly but it's going to change and and your job is just to stay with the experience and recognize that you're empowered in a way to approach whatever it is that emerges in consciousness and my my own sense i'd be and i'd be very curious about how you interpret this from a clinical psychological point of view but my my sense of that is that that's a hugely empowering experience for people to have that they have literally faced the dragon they have faced the greatest terror whatever form it's taken and they and they've come out recognizing that they're they're safe they're empowered and that and that that can be a a life-changing experience in and of itself because after you really have been there with the with the the demon the worst demon of your dreams and faced it down and and looked it in its eyes and realized it's actually nothing other than an object of consciousness nothing other than yourself then what is it in life that can put up an obstacle with that much uh fear uh for you it's it's very much like a classic initiation ceremony i mean the yeah i mean one thing that clinicians have agreed upon regardless of their school of thought let's say is that voluntary exposure to what to obstacles in your path that are threatening or disgusting is almost inevitably curative and it seems that the rule is that that which you approach voluntarily shrinks as you approach it and you grow and and if you run the reverse happens and you can play that out very straightforwardly if you're a behaviorist because if someone's afraid of an elevator then you have them stand ten feet from the elevator and then nine feet and then eight feet and not only do they learn that what they learn is that they can withstand the fear that's what generalizes and you don't get symptom substitution the way the psychoanalysts thought because you're probably not counter conditioning the fear what you're doing is showing the person that there's more to them than they thought and and there isn't anything more salutary than that and that is precisely why you're encouraged let's say in mythological stories to confront the dragon and get the gold um that that's the basic story and it's and the it's very interesting how that becomes portrayed in a psychedelic experience i mean what do you make okay there's two directions there i'd like to continue the discussion of the study okay so what happened to you as a consequence of running this study and how did that influence what you did and and then what happened culturally as a consequence of reporting this study so i i i think the the most interesting fi and unexpected finding for me uh was was i i was deeply interested in the nature of that initial experience but the most interesting thing to me occurred when people returned two months later so this first study we were giving sessions at two month intervals so people would come in they would have their session with you know they would the guides would meet with them intermittently beforehand and then they would come back for the second session they'd sit down in my office and and uh and this is just a vivid memory it was one of the very first volunteers and i asked him well so uh so you know what do you think of the first session i'm just curious as to what you're thinking and the person said you know i think about that uh every day uh that's you know that's among the most important experiences of my whole life [Laughter] and i thought what i mean now at this point in my career i've given uh you know dozens and dozens of different psychoactive drugs to people both healthy volunteers and drug abusers yet at high doses oh how high was the dose in like typically among street users two grams is a moderate dose for psilocybin of the actual mushroom four grams i think five grams is what terence mechanic called the heroic dose isn't it what kind of dose were you giving in this is equivalent to five gram dosage so this was not a trivial pharmacological experience like over the top well well it's an it's in it that's in the description where it's not it's not a beginner's experience in some sense it's it's the full-fledged thing yeah okay how did you settle on the dose well um well we we wanted to provide a strong test of of what it was that uh psilocybin could do that that is the same dose although we we met we did it on a a weight basis but it's the same dose uh that walter panky gave in the famous good friday experiment and given that this is good friday we can reference that that was the study done in harvard you know back in the very early 60s uh but that and and there were and there were some limitations to that study but uh in effect many of the things that we showed was were consistent with what they had ended up reporting but we knew from the literature that uh psilocybin at that dose had been given safely in in in various studies so we we thought that there wasn't any great value in uh studying a range of doses nor could we afford to do so because this uh study was supported partly through a a pre-existing grant but also through significantly through philanthropic support so okay so people came back two months later and they said this and you listened which is also extremely interesting because it did violate some of your presuppositions even though you were curious about this yeah so it just was hugely uh unprecedented in my experiences someone would say that experience i had two months ago i think about every day and it's among the most important experiences of my life and you know my first thought was what kind of life experiences do these people have this is this is seems absurd to me and when you quiz them about it they would say well you know when my first child my was born my whole life changed you know i you know i'll never forget that when my father died you know uh that's you know a huge life changer this is it's it's kind of like that and so so they're they're describing it in a metric you know across their life experience that actually makes a whole lot of intuitive sense of major existential episodes yeah and but but it's so different than any other psychoactive drug i had ever looked at so i was accustomed to measuring acute effects and describing those acute effects and and and so you know if you give cocaine or an opiate or a um you know or a dissociative anesthetic uh and asked someone a week later or much less uh than a couple months later well what was that like you know they'll tell you but they're drawing on memory you know oh yeah you know we got drunk and we had a good time and we laughed a lot uh you know but um but if you said well is is that important to you you know i it wouldn't be unless unless they've learned not to drink that much uh right right but this has this has embedded existential personal meaning of the of of kind of the deepest order and so after those interviews we put together another set of questionnaires that we have used since then and that's actually raiding these experiences with respect to your entire life experiences and so just replicated across now a variety of studies we can show that you know it's usually 80 to 90 percent of people rate these experiences in the top five of their life and in that first study i think 30 percent rated it as the single most spiritually significant experience of their entire life uh so so it's of that order of magnitude right so now you went in there with this this um some april skepticism but you'd also be gripped already at that point by some intuition that there was something in that domain of experience that was crucially important and so now people came back and said well look i've experienced that and you know it had a huge impact on me and so what happens next in your res where do you take that you develop this new questionnaire what's the next study and why well yes so it interfaced with my own experience because you know i'd been involved with meditation i appreciated aspects of the primary mystical experience and we can talk about that that those are the qualities of the acute experience that seem to predict these longer-term attributions of meaning and spiritual significance right so you you okay so were there people who took the psilocybin that didn't have the mystical experience and that didn't report the long-term effects or was it was everyone who was affect was everyone affected by this psilocybin regardless of of that no there's some there's some variation and some people will not have uh classic mystical experiences and some people won't have classic mythical experiences yet will describe them as meaningful but but overall the those people who have these experiences that we describe as classic mystical experiences are the ones that will report uh enduring positive changes and there's a good correlation there changes are they reporting sorry i also interrupted one of your points there yeah let's see so um so they're reporting you know in the in the most general terms uh you know positive changes and attitudes about themselves about life uh their uh their emotions uh uh behavioral changes spirituality are all are all changed in ways that are uh uh that are that are felt to be uh deeply meaningful and significant right so things are bad so they report that their lives are better but it's not hedonic better like cocaine better it's not psychomotor stimulant better it's philosophical better and and i mean that's why i think your findings on this increase in trait openness are so absolutely well they're unbelievable first of all they're so powerful it's just and i have no idea in the final analysis what to make of them but it is really something stop me if i'm wrong but it's it's like a philosophical deepening and it is better conceptualized as an expansion of of the experience of significant meaning rather than on a generalized rise in positive emotion like you didn't get an increase in extroversion which is the positive emotion dimension you got an experience in openness which is the creativity dimension and it's also associated with revelatory thought right because openness looks like the trait that we would identify as creativity and creative people are generative in their ideas right they're intuitive they have these inside experiences that you were all also interested in they're able to make associations between distant thoughts and observe patterns and if you're high in openness you're also interested in ideas you tend to be philosophical in your outlook you have a strong affinity for fiction and narrative all of that clumps together and your research maybe we can go there next is you showed that after a single dose mystical experience on psilocybin people moved the equivalent of from the 50th percentile to the 85th percentile in trade openness one standard deviation and so that's and that was permanent okay so so talk about that and what the hell happened and what do you think's happening neurologically yeah well let me let me back up to uh the acute experience and describe components of that because it it that explains then i think how people are looking back at these experiences so the key features of this so-called primary mystical experience and we and we now have developed a very good uh questionnaire that's psychometrically solid and can measure this the key features of this are this sense of unity this sense of the interconnectedness of all people and all things and that can be experienced both introvertedly and that is that everything is within or it can be experienced extrovertedly in the in the whole you know the literature on mystical experiences you know outside of drugs uh you know was was laid out in the in and and set forth this kind of template so there's a sense of the interconnectedness of all people all things the unity yeah the meaningful interconnectedness right that that somehow that's all connected not just connected but also that the entire pattern of connection has some transcendent or ultimate significance that's hidden from us yeah let me go into the other quality so it's that unity that's accompanied by a sense of sacredness or reverence so there's something about this experience that's felt to be deeply precious if you don't want to use a word that's tinged with spiritual implications but there's something deeply precious about it and then there's the noetic sense not only is it precious it's absolutely true and and for most people they will endorse it's more real than everyday waking consciousness it's more real than real and and then there there are sub factors to the mystical experience and that's positive mood transcendence of time and space and ineffability one of the first things that people say in coming out of these experiences when i walk into the session room and ask them well you know tell me about your experience they'll they'll kind of look down and and maybe smile or look baffled and they say you know i can't even put this into words and and i'm thinking okay well that's one of the six criteria here so what i think is that this sense of unity the fact that there's some sense that we're all in this together this is all interconnected there's a wholeness there that's precious and it's absolutely true and and and with that it may be that noetic quality that it's absolutely true might account for why these experiences then are sustained they have enduring because people believe that there's some fundamental truth value in what they have learned it's not like getting drunk and saying yeah i had i had a great time but you don't learn anything you know important you know on how to conduct your life going forward other than maybe not drink so much uh you know but this is something at a at a very uh at a very personal level and and then i think that that explains a lot of of how it is that people then [Music] come to uh change so very often uh uh you know there's a level of meaning making i mean this right right down your your alley jordan there's a level of meaning making that comes out of these experiences that end up rewriting the personal narrative that the person has about themselves and about the play their place in the world and and that accounts for these uh enduring changes and the fact that people then become behaviorally much more flexible because if that if that narrative structure is changed then the analogy i think of is you're rewriting the underlying operating system and and with that everything can change people can change their life courses in ways that they were unimaginable okay so let me let me make a couple of comments about that and you tell me what you think about this okay so when i've looked at i think of the operating system as it has a narrative structure fundamentally and the reason for that is that we have to know how to behave and narratives are about behavior and so and narratives address the question of how we should behave there's a perceptual element too because you have to perceive in order to act and so your perceptions are very tightly linked to your behavioral aims and that's quite clear from the hardcore psychological literature okay so my sense of of the of the deep narrative because i think that the world is best construed and i do mean best construed as a place of order and chaos and that can be technically described the distinction between those two and that there's a battle between good and evil going on against that background now i want to talk about the good and evil background a bit because it pertains to this rewriting of the narrative so i look at stories like the story of cain and abel which is a very ancient story and it's clearly a story of good against evil and it's a it's a it's a foundational story because it's really in the western culture in the narrative tradition it's the story of the first two genuine human beings because adam and eve are made by god but cain and abel are born they're the first actual people and one of them is a murderous genocidal psychopath and the other is a hero and so you see that dichotomy there instantly and so cane is the adversary the dark narrative the dark force let's say and why well what happens to cain is that he struggles and sacrifices like we all do we make our sacrifices in the present and we assume that by doing so the benevolence of the world will manifest it to us that's why we're willing to forgo gratification and to work that's all sacrifice and so cain sacrifices but god rejects his sacrifice and the story is brilliantly ambivalent about why and the reason that's a brilliant ambivalence is because you can work diligently and make the proper sacrifices as far as you're concerned and yet fail which means that all that work all that foregone gratification that pact with god that that uh um what is it that god has with the israelites there's a name for that covenant the implicit covenant has been broken and cain responds to that with tremendous anger right he raises his fist against the sky and shakes it and says ah this should not be and then he takes revenge he says i will destroy what is most valuable to you and so he goes after abel who is an ideal person whose sacrifices are welcomed by god and he kills them and then all hell breaks loose in the aftermath of that in kane's relatives and like the more i just delved into that story the more it it it shocked me i couldn't believe that much information could be packed into what's essentially 12 lines okay so now imagine that imagine that in each of our souls we have this competing tendency you know we see the suffering and the horror of our lives the vulnerability and the mortality of everything that we love and cherish and and our failure and to and that turns us against being you talked about being at the beginning of this that turns us against being and and and then there's the other part of us that maintains faith and that strives forward but each of us is an intermingling of those and so the rewrite seems to me to be something like the revelation that the positive end of that prop set of propositions is actually true that things are interconnected that things are fundamentally good that love and truth can actually prevail and that gives some experiential weight that can be used as a counter position against that destructive cynicism and these the psychedelic the mystical experience seems to allow for that transformation that does that seem what do you think of that yeah that that that sounds right i mean there's something hugely curious about the nature of these experiences because they are they appear to be strongly biased toward this benevolent sense of of of wonder yeah and that's associated with that certainty of truth which is not what you'd expect right because it's not that easy to make a powerful credible case for benevolence and truth we're not even wired that way because we overestimate like we over experience the magnitude of negative of negative uh experiences we're more sensitive to them so it's surprising that that that would emerge it's unlikely yeah and well but isn't it interesting i mean you know the fact is you know that these experiences that occur with the psychedelics are you know are very much part of naturally occurring experiences of this type so there you know there can be conversion experiences or religious experiences that come out in you know under various conditions either spontaneously or in prayer practice uh you know in breath work so i mean to me uh you know i conclude that we're we're we're wired to have these kinds of experiences what yeah so that in itself is an absolute radical claim you know i mean i've gone after some of the darwinians that i've the atheistic darwinians that i've talked to for failing to take into account what i regard as the the preponderance of scientific evidence indicating that the religious instinct is real and that it's biologically grounded it's like okay it's real it's biologically grounded what do you have to say about that from an evolutionary perspective then is that is that a spandrel it's like no because it looks like it's central to the development of human culture itself not only is it not a spend rule it's like the opposite of the spandrel and so what what are we supposed to conclude if we conclude that the religious instinct has actually evolved it's deeply biological and it speaks of like a benevolent and truth-oriented teleological reality that is not the way our culture is constructed well i was this was the question i was was kind of posed to you what what's going on here i it's now well that's exactly what we're trying to figure out isn't it just what the hell is going on here yeah what the hell is going on and and and and just to reflect it back on was it a good decision to follow this i mean what's more important than this jordan what's more important than finding out what's going on here no i can't believe like i actually can't believe how important this is you know i mean i've been studying the psychedelic literature for 20 years and and in as deep a manner as i can possibly manage and every time i think i have some grasp on how important it is i learned something else and i think oh it's way more important than i thought it was it's it's of crucial significance uh it's it's it's it's of central it's literally of central significance it's literally of central significance and so now it needs to it and you know partly why i was so interested in talking to you is i'm trying to figure out it's like okay well what happens if we take this seriously like if we start to actually take this seriously with dead seriousness what what's the consequence of that you know and so all right so so let's look at the let's look at the fear of death that's the place i want to go next and there's a couple of things i'm interested in about that the first is that there so you have this study showing that cancer sufferers take psilocybin and they show a marked reduction in the fear of death and and that gets stranger the more deeply you investigate it and that there's these ancient lucinian mysteries that seem to be associated with something like the experience of a voyage to the land of the dead an encounter with ancestral spirits a religious transformation and then and then the the the the eradication or at least the the diminution of of the fear of death but all of that mythological baggage so to speak went along with the experience so there's there's a a journey of some sort to a place of some sort that seems to have commonality across different event individuals strangely enough that results in this pronounced transformation of the existential consideration of mortality itself so it's again of sufficient significance so that there's no end to how deeply you can investigate it so tell me about that experiment and what you saw happening and what you've made of it so these were cancer patients who met diagnostic criteria for significant anxiety or depression secondary to their cancer diagnosis and you know as you as you well know and can appreciate when someone's facing a life-threatening illness that can be hugely uh disruptive to them uh so that the study was a simple study it was blinded and done very rigorously but people ended up getting a high dose of psilocybin at some point and after doing so their depression anxiety drops just precipitously it remains completely low out to the six-month point and another group that ran a parallel kind of study did a follow-up five years and it's and they're still reporting those kinds of effects so these are the those kind of enduring uh changes so you know what's going on there um well it it's it's a it's a mixture part of it is uh a different attitude about death and dying and we're actually analyzing data from a huge survey right now on changed attitudes about death and dying secondary to psychedelic exposure and comparing that to the kinds of changes that people have uh that that that occur naturalistically such as near-death experiences where you get that same kind of uh shift uh so that's that's certainly an element but that you know but there's also um related to that is this sense of benevolent unity that there's something about this mystery that we find ourselves in so like something cropped up let me tell you about it and tell so i've when i've so our life is dependent on death because our cells are constantly dying and if death isn't regulated properly within us we get cancer for example so the the fact of our healthy existence is actually paradoxically dependent on death itself the proper amount of death keeps us healthy and you know it's so interesting because that's also true psychologically is that you have to let old concepts die and and they don't like to die it's it's a painful experience to have the old you die in in the light of new experience it's painful enough so that people will resist it but there's a there's this benevolent death that's a reparative mechanism and when when i've allowed my intuitions to extend themselves as far as possible i think well that's that's true of of of being itself is that in the manner that we can't comprehend death plays a restorative role it's it's it's something like the precursor to resurrection and god only knows where that idea goes but but and i believe that these mystical experiences provide a window into that that there's this mechanism of death at work but it's a reparative and and creative mechanism all things considered it's building towards something that we that we have that we have an intuition of and want to participate in and and are tortured by our conscience for not participating in and and a glimpse of that a glimpse of that it at least shows you that there's more going on than you think that there's more going on than you want so so much of hopelessness is a consequence of prematurely if premature closure i am certain this is hopeless and pointless well that mystical experience can dispense with that certainty i'm not so sure that i know what's going on i'm not so inclined to to be uh what uh to be to not have doubt about my own skepticism so all right so back to the to the study let me just let me just pick up on that because one of the questions that i found myself asking people as they enrolled in the study is you know so you know what do you what do you think happens when when you die and it it's a very interesting question to ask ask people and you know it and they're those who say uh it's it's lights out it's unplugged that you know and that's it after these kinds of experiences there's a crack in that doorway there's less certainty about about that and that's and that is part of this uh part of the kinds of changes that come about uh with these uh experiences uh there's you know a shift in in world view uh a shift in the a sense of the nature of consciousness maybe having an eternal quality to it and that can be tinged with spirituality if someone uh interprets it within a in a religious framework there's something enduring about that and so the certainty that everything ends at the moment of death is uh it comes into more significant uh question very often with these kinds of experiences but i don't think it accounts for everything uh and there there are people who come out of these experiences still saying well yeah i don't i don't believe in uh you know and any kind of afterlife or anything existing you know but there is a sense that they may have of the elegance and the beauty and the benevolence of the entire process that just makes them feel filled with gratitude for the opportunity to be a sentient being and have this experience there's something celebratory about gratitude why that emotion in particular did you focus on i i think that's actually i i think that's the core to to what uh very often well at least what i uh believe comes out of these uh experiences there's a sense of wonder that comes out of the of the mystery of what it is that we don't know i mean you know there is this hard problem of consciousness but most people don't contemplate it very very seriously uh with a psychedelic it's it's almost impossible not to be astonished by how much and humbled by how much you don't understand about the nature of your own mind and the nature of reality and and so we're confronted with this mystery of what is this about how is it you know that we're these highly evolved beings you know who that have developed the capacity to sense things to walk to talk with developed societies we've developed you know science as a methodology we can communicate and on top of all that the astonishing fact is that we're aware that we're aware that if we and that wouldn't have to be the case and that's the hard problem of consciousness and well i think there's even a harder problem which which the mystical experiences seem to shed some light on which is to what degree is being itself dependent on consciousness because there is the problem of consciousness but there's the problem of being what does it mean that things are well it seems to mean or at least you can make the case that well things aren't unless they're experienced because what sort of being is there in the absence of any experience whatsoever it's it's all there is is all you can do is construct the hypothetical picture of what being would be like in the absence of consciousness as a conscious creature would formulate that that's the best you can do but that's still dependent on consciousness and so there's a real mystery there which is what you know i don't think it's a mystery that's properly addressed by i mean i'm an evolutionary biologist for all intents and purposes in my in my orientation but a reductive materialism doesn't address that problem and there's many other problems it doesn't address as well and it doesn't address them if you take them seriously it's like there is some relationship between consciousness and being and and i don't see how that can it's that's not easily explained by making consciousness an epiphenomenon of matter that just makes matter more mysterious as far as i'm concerned it doesn't get rid of the problem but there therein comes the gratitude right the very the the very fact that we are are gifted with this experience of experience well i ended my last book with with with a chapter be grateful in spite of your suffering and that was the end of a two-book cycle of thinking and i put it at the end as the culmination like what's a final moral rule well that's it because that's the ant that's the antidote to kane you know and and i take kane's argument seriously it's a serious argument are things so terrible that they shouldn't exist at all well you know you can accrue a fair bit of evidence in favor of that hypothesis it doesn't lead to the right place it makes everything worse as far as i can tell and i haven't encountered a situation personally where gratitude wasn't better than its alternative and the alternative seems unbelievably destructive resentment i think is the opposite of gratitude and resentment can be a salutary emotion in that if you notice its emergence in your life it signifies something that you should pay attention to but i have seen nothing about it that's positive as something to be cultivated you certainly don't teach your children to be you know if you sit down and have a discussion with your wife about what sort of children you want you never say resentful everybody agrees that that's toxic beyond tolerability and so we know there's something wrong with it and it is extraordinarily well i think it's extraordinarily interesting that you focus on that particular experience and and i think and that's humbling as well that gratitude oh it's hugely humbling i mean yeah i mean the thing i mean the first experience you're looking into the existential mystery right of of being and and and it's a it's a mind-boggling proposition that an initially is uh uh is unfathomable um and and then and then from that uh emerges this gratitude for that opportunity and and if we want to circle back to the the cancer patients it's that gratitude you know for the opportunity to live whether or not they they they believe that something occurs after death there's a there's a celebration of life and and uh very often a joy it's it's really quite remarkable to see how people who have been so transformed how they interact with uh family members who are you know turn out at that point to be more distraught than they are very often and so how do what sort of transformations do you see in their actions with their family members oh they're reassuring i mean they'll say you know there's a realism to the seriousness of their condition uh so you know they'll say this is this is very sad i'm dying i'm gonna leave but it's okay uh it's it's it's okay everything is all right yeah so so the transformation is so radical that not only do they suffer less with regards to their own mortality but they're transformed sufficiently so that they can now attend to others despite the fact that they are the people that have the fatal illness yeah that they become the caretakers in the in the family unit and it also has the potential for totally shifting end-of-life care because if you're not if you're no longer grasping to every shred of every minute of life you know there's a a deep interest in connecting and staying connected and so you're much less likely to elect to go in the hospital and uh and and under uh incredibly uh brutal conditions uh you know to achieve those last days or weeks um so so it the potential actually in terms of large kind of cultural change to change death and dying and how we handle that as a culture is is very significant why psilocybin why did you pick psilocybin uh well a couple couple reasons one its duration of action is clinically manageable so it's not too short if you if you if you did intravenous dmt that's a matter of 15 or 20 minutes and this gives you a longer period of time to have an experience and then to reintegrate that experience but it's not nearly as long as something like lsd uh which is like a 12-hour time course which is just taxing for everybody and and pretty clinically unmanageable uh there's uh there's a sense but but i don't think we have good data on this that um that psilocybin can be gentler than lsd uh psychologically i and i'm i'm not positive about that but you know the most important piece of it is that um most people can't spell psilocybin and it and it simply didn't have uh the cultural baggage that lsd did uh so uh and i think it it turns out to be a really good pick for a model system but there are literally thousands of other compounds that could be synthesized that are going to have a different influence on the nature of consciousness that should be and will be explored over time i've been reading this book recently the immortality key by brian mararescu and he's making a case that has been made up by other people although he makes it in a very interesting way in a very original way it's reminiscent to me of john allegro's work from the early late 60s late 60s which sort of got pilloried at the time because well that was just when lsd and all the psychedelics were being made illegal and allegro was sort of dumped jumped lumped in with the hippie types and ignored i read the sacred mushroom and the cross years ago and i thought he's a linguist and he claims to have gathered an immense amount of linguistic data suggesting that early christianity was a mushroom cult and i couldn't assess his claims because i'm not a linguist but it certainly looked to me at the time like it was an extraordinarily serious book and i read it and i thought i have no idea what to do with this information i i can't tell if it's credible or not and if it is credible well well then what like what in the world are we supposed to do with this and then rescue he's making a strong case that the elusionian mysteries were which upon in which the greek greek society that gave rise to the west let's say was embedded was deeply embedded within a psychedelic religious tradition that was actually an integral part of the culture not some peripheral element but a central element that that was also the case with the cult of dionysius the god of the wine and that christianity took many of the mysteries including the sacrament from the dionysian cult and so i think and i certainly think that the book of revelation bears all the hallmarks of a classic psychedelic experience um so then i'm thinking well what are you supposed to think about that exactly i mean i take the fact that our society is judeo-christian and it's underlying narrative structure extremely seriously i i think that's true as a fact whether it's the right way for things to be is a different question but but oh and also an important question but i have no idea how to conceptualize our relationship with psychedelics let me let me tell you my most paranoid thought about this okay you tell me what you think about this yeah so on the one hand you have this the most extreme idea on the one hand is that psychedelic experience is a gateway to something that's actually divine and and god only knows what the significance of that is but but here's another thought um there's this you know that parasites can hijack nervous systems so there's this one example of of a i may not get this story exactly right but there's this parasite that hijacks ants nervous systems and the insects it makes them climb up a like a stalk and they pincer themselves to a leaf and then their body fills up with the parasite spores and they explode and the parasites go everywhere and so the parasite has evolved to hijack the ants nervous system and there's plenty of examples of parasites doing that sort of complex thing over time there's a cat a parasite that lives in cats that makes rats more less fearful and they're more likely to be caught by cats which is quite interesting and so then i'm thinking about psilocybin and it's this mushroom and it produces this chemical and nobody really knows what good the chemical is to the mushroom and it has this immense effect on us and like have we been using psilocybin for 500 000 years and have we been distributing its spores everywhere and is it a parasite that's hijacked our nervous system and the way it's done that is by producing this religious experience that we value i mean that's the most devastating materialistic critique of this psychedelic idea that i've been able to formulate and i mean one piece of counter evidence to that i think is the fact that i think the evidence seems to suggest that the the psychedelic experience is salutary from the perspective of mental and physical health rather than destructive but it looks like we've been using mushrooms for god only knows how long i mean it's certainly tens of thousands of years it's certainly at least as far back as the last ice age and god only knows how far back it is before that as what as a biological thinker say what what d what are your thoughts about that [Laughter] yeah yeah i don't know if i can take that uh take that on i i don't i don't understand i mean it's a yeah it's a huge mystery uh and yeah what yeah and what role do these experiences play in the evolution of culture so you know let's start with that one well and so yeah what roles do religions play in the evolution of culture and you know a really important and central role right uh yeah well that central role like it looks to me like integrated cultures there's no distinction between their ritual and their dance and their music and their stories and their religion that's all one thing it's and it's it's the central source of meaning that enables them to live as individuals and that unites them as a people so that that seems clear so you can't just push the religious idea off to the side that that's a mistake and i think the data for that are in and so it's central well now it seems shaped by these psychedelic experiences so what the hell are we supposed to make of that i i don't even know how to what to make of that either epistemologically you know as a theory of knowledge or ontologically i don't know what that says about the structure of reality itself [Laughter] well let's see it it provides an evolutionary explanation for why uh yeah why that might have been conserved right that there's there's something super adaptive about the religious experience in terms of evolution of culture and or an organization of culture well i think look when i've tried to reduce this i mean that experience of awe so we went to a co we went to a whole conference on that so if you see someone that you really admire that shades into awe and you can see that in in the effect that celebrities have on the on the public it's a peril it can be paralyzing so the admiration there's a continuum between admiration and awe and then you can easily make the case i think that admiration is the felt sense of the instinct to imitate so you see children maybe they'll hear or worship someone and then they they'll imitate them they'll copy them they find someone who's in that zone of proximal development and they start to copy them or they'll take on the identity of a hero or heroine in a movie my little granddaughter who's three for a year now literally a year she has two names scarlett and and and ellie elizabeth and we kind of call her one or the other and if you ask her is she scarlet she'll say yes is she ellie yes is she pocahontas yes is she scarlet ellie or pocahontas pocahontas one year now she watched that disney movie over and over and she has a pocahontas doll but and but she's picked that figure and that's quasi-mythological figure obviously not a historical figure she's picked that as her identity and i see that as we can we can imitate people we talked about and hyper reality before well you can find someone you admire and they're real or you can find someone who's a mythological figure and they're hyper real and the hyper reality is so adaptive that imitating the hyper reel is more adaptive than imitating the real and that's to me the that's the essence of the religious instinct it's to derive the hyper real and then to imitate that and i think that's what worship means essentially all with everything stripped away and so that's a profound instinct because human beings are unbelievable mimics i mean that that's a very underappreciated element of our cognitive architecture a fundamental element and that that instinct to admire and experience off facilitates that mimicry and that increases the probability of the manifestation of complex adaptive behavior okay so and then what does what that makes of the religious domain something real as far as i'm concerned even real from the biological sense but that deepens the mystery of the involvement of the psychedelics in that like are they are they parasitizing that are they like cocaine hyper stimulates the psychomotor stimulant system well does psychedelics hyper stimulate the imitation aw system and and is that an illusion or is it in fact a revelation of something deeper yet yeah just circle back to the ontological question so just recently i listened to a lecture that francis collins gave now so francis collins you may recognize is director of the national institutes on health and he was also the director of the human uh genome project you know so so he's as strongly credentialed a scientist as one can have and yet he's uh uh absolutely confirmed christian uh and so he was giving a lecture on the reconciliation of i think he called it harmonization of a scientific and religious worldview uh but he was he was laying out his arguments for the existence of of god and one of them is what it would be his claim and it's an interesting claim and you could argue it but the existence of moral law that there is an absolute moral law look you know you i looked at jack pancep's work you know and he shows that you see complex morality emerging rats in play play iterated play which is a crucial issue right what pattern of behavior is sustainably optimal across repeated social interactions well you know you hear all these post-modern critiques say of more of of hierarchical structure because of its its predication on power i think no no corrupt hierarchies are predicated on power functional hierarchies are predicated on reciprocal uh on reciprocity on productive reciprocity you know i was talking to this this joker willink who was the commander of fallujah in in in in in the 20 years ago and he's a real warrior type you know like a real intimidating person physically and mentally for that matter um he talked about his navy seal training and you know he said well we were taught it was pounded into us to have the back of the guy next to us it wasn't like every powerful clambering ape for himself not at all in these intensely competitive hierarchies which would be you'd think as pure a manifestation of the power motive as would be possible power is not the guiding ethos and he said quite clearly no your men won't attend to you unless it's reciprocal you they have to know you have their backs and he and so and he made also a very sophisticated case for the development of verbal intelligence and the ability to communicate in strategizing and also in taking care of your team and so i don't believe that um so what am i getting at in relationship to your to your last point this this religious this emergent ethic this natural law okay so imagine now hierarchies are organized around an ethical principle if they're to be stable and productive across long spans of time and a pattern that pattern emerges across culturally it's reciprocal productivity it's something like that it's more there's more to it than that okay now you're selected for your success in those hierarchies based on your ability to manifest that pattern because that'll push you up the hierarchy that increases as far as i can tell that increases your attractiveness as a potential mate substantially and so i think you can make a very deep biological case for the even for the emergent evolution of an ethical sense and and i think that does speak to people in the voice of their conscience and that that is part of but then you think well if that's part of existence how deep a part is it how built in is it you know and i i don't i and that i suppose depends to some degree on how crucial consciousness is to being okay so back to back to the gentleman that you were discussing he was talking about a natural ethic yeah uh well i think as as a pointer to god something absolute about the nature of what moral law is and from that standpoint uh if if you're willing to go that route then maybe these experiences are actually pointing to something that is absolute and true and informative do you think that's true i'm a scientist it's fine to be investigating it you know what yeah no i'm going to pin you down no let's see you know my i'm trained as a scientist my default is uh to be deeply curious and to be deeply skeptical so right which is the right right attitude towards yeah and so my my response always is that i believe in the data and so and so that remains an open question but it's certainly fun to toy with as uh uh as an all as an alternative framing of what's going on i mean we're in the middle of this huge huge mystery so historical significance what do you think of the theories associating early christianity and the sacrament with with the with the ingestion of psychedelic substances i don't i don't know certainly it's quite plausible i mean the very the if you if you read the accounts of the uh illusion mysteries uh and and the kinds of experiences people had it sure sounds like a psychedelic experience at least some of those accounts but we also know that those kinds of experiences can be engendered naturally as well uh and so i yeah i i don't want to discount that you know that is a a possibility there's actually some you know some the the psychedelic proponents the enthusiasts you know think that what we're laying down is the you know the future this is the most valuable tool there is you know to open up to these kind of experiences and i see it actually quite differently is is you know we're learning about the capacity of the of the human species of the organism to have these experiences and what i would suspect is that in you know 10 20 50 years uh psychedelics are going to be very considered very crude tools to engender these things we're going to have you know much better ways and more precise ways to intervene in in this process to occasion experiences of of this uh of this sort but to go back to your question so what yeah is this plausible that it has played a role uh it's certainly plausible it seems quite unlikely that it accounts for you the entirety of uh of these kinds of transformations it still leaves all sorts of things unsolved like i mean why did the worship of dionysius transform into the worship of christ for example i mean we even if there's psychedelic con continuity there that that's a question that we can hardly pose let alone answer and it it i'm also extremely curious i mean this place do you think it's reasonable to conceptualize the the destination place of a trip as a place i mean that's what myth that's what greek mythology appears to do that's what the mythology of the underworld appears to be about as far as i can tell what what do you think about we've talked about how psychedelics shed a different light on the structure of reality as we perceive it but people also report going places that aren't here exactly they're el and that the idea the shamanic idea that the the universe is a tree i i believe that that's the tree of of of size essentially that that's the realm from the subatomic to the cosmic that's how that's portrayed in the in the primordial human imagination and the shaman report traveling up and down those levels and that's not out of keeping with the experiences that people report on psychedelics unsurprisingly because hypothetically they're derived from the same domain and then there's the entity problem as well especially with dmt i know rick strassman who studied dmt so intently and i have never met rick but my impression from reading him is that he was a pretty button-down sort of guy when he got into the psychedelic field he he wasn't driven in there from the hippy end of things it was more from the you know skeptical intellect type or direction but he he appears to have been so shocked by what the dmt experience produced in terms of reports from people that you know it well it was shocking to him to say the least and no wonder because it seems that everyone who takes dmt reports going somewhere very fast and encountering all sorts of alien entities and but they also describe that as hyper real and if you object that those are figures of the imagination or even union archetypes among those who would know of that sort of thing that that's not an acceptable explanation appear apparently so what do you make of that yeah and well this story with rick straussman is interesting because it it was literally so disquieting to him that he ended up stopping his research because he had such a uh a high rate of his participants uh you know talking about encountering uh entities within that that he uh he didn't know how to manage that so one of the surveys but who does right because it's it's just what do you do with it what do you do with data like you know you said you go where the data drives you and fair enough but sometimes the data itself is you don't know what to do with it and and the dmt experiences certainly seem to fall in that category yeah so so we've run a number of interesting survey studies and you mentioned them at the outset one about god encounter experiences and the other about entity encounters with uh with dmt and uh and and we did it this is a survey study we we actually ended up getting data on 2500 people who had had a dmt entity encounter experience and and we gave them detailed uh questionnaires about the nature of those experiences most of them ended up feeling that they had encountered a sentient and and very in a conscious benevolent often sacred other in these experiences which was surprising to us because we based on the literature i had thought that these and in the encounter experiences might be something different than that but importantly most of the people claim to come out of the experience with a with a different sense of of reality uh they can they uh the majority of them continue to think that the entity existed after the experience continues to exist so what so they're not mere figments of the imagination no absolutely not their yeah their conception of reality has been shifted in a in a really fundamental and primary way and so that's that's that's haunting now one of the curiosities is that in a different survey when we asked people about god encounter experiences and we did that naturally occurring god encounters and psychedelic occasion god encounters it actually was much of the same story people felt that they were in the presence of a conscious intelligent benevolent entity caring entity and their worldview shifted but these were people who went into this framing it in terms of a spiritual religious experience the dmt people you know very often didn't have a religious orientation to begin with you know yet they come out with these beliefs it's um and we should point out to everyone who's listening that dmt is the active ingredient in the brazilian in the amazonian ayahuasca which is also a complete mystery in and of itself because nobody can figure out how those shaman figured out how to make that stuff so yeah uh and with in the ayahuasca dmt is ingested along with a compound that that slows its elimination so it changes the entire time course and in my sense although entity encounters can occur with psychedelics generally my impression is that the intensity of these kinds of entity encounter experiences and the probability are much greater with this is smoked dmt uh or in the case of rick straussman it was intravenous dmt but it's a very fast onset right well and that's pharmacologically relevant because one of the one of the determinants of the effect of a drug is maximum blood level say or brain level but another is the rate at which that level is attained so which is why injected cocaine is so much more potent and also dangerous than than say orally administered cocaine same with most drugs so that rapidity of onset is relevant so i mean do you have any ontological sense of what's happening in the dmt experience well before i do before we go to the on logical sense the dmt experience maps onto naturally occurring entity encounter experiences so you know we have a whole history of of people reporting alien encounter experiences or alien abduction experiences and right and if you really look at that those descriptions they're much more similar than different to what we're seeing with the the dmt so i i would come yes which makes things even weirder i would say well weirder and and maybe not the in the same sense that we're biologically wired or predisposed to have these kinds of experiences but then ontologically what what do you what do you make of make of them and you know when you know certainly when i had read alien encounter literature i you know just a priori i was entirely dismissive of it who was that was mac right at harvard a very well credentialed psychiatrist he was he had his tail put in a complete knot by his investigations of the alien encounters because what he showed was that he figured that people who were reporting this would have an extensive history of psychopathology of one form or another but when he did the analysis there was no evidence for that and so mac ended up believing that that well that something real had happened to these people and of course that did his career no favor and but which is also i would say an indication of how strongly he came to believe that yeah and and there have been other other studies uh done uh uh since then so i you know i think we're we're talking about the same kind of process now you know what's going on and what does it mean why that i don't know i mean it sure seems un unlikely apriori well i i don't know i don't know what to make of it one of the striking features of the dmt encounters was that the attributions made to the entity really mapped on to the same kinds of attributions that people described in their god encounter experiences so those are more similar than uh than different now if you if you read that dmt literature you get you know other wild descriptions of you know alligators and insectoids and mechanical clowns and yeah yeah it's really it it it just makes things weirder the more you read about the experiences it is but you know having 2500 cases you know we were looking at is is there a modal description you know are these going to look like the alien grays or something like that well no not at all it's just a smear of um you know of uh descriptors uh of of what they think they uh encountered and and you know and i you know what i wonder with the god encounters i mean if that's not the same kind of mechanism at work and uh and maybe there's less visualization maybe it's less likely that there's going to be a um you know uh um you know a sense of uh encountering an embodied other uh but there's something ineffable more ineffable about uh some of those experiences uh okay so i'm gonna i'm gonna pull us in another direction because there's definitely there's other things i really want to get your opinion about um many things let's start with your studies in religious leaders like what are you doing what what motivated you to do that why yeah i really want to know why you're doing that what you think will happen what the cultural significance is such a wild thing to do like you've got you've already established the fact that these mystical experiences are reliably inducible and now you're pulling in figures of of significance in religious communities so it's another thing i can't believe you've managed to do but why and and what are you seeing and and what do you think is going to happen well let's see so i'm a little bit handicapped in how much i can say about that specific study but let me describe that line of investigation so that came it you know it just comes out of my own deep curiosity about the nature of these experience and their uh and their spiritual religious significance so we started out with healthy volunteers and we've done a whole bunch of stuff with patient populations so you know the where the rubber meets the road here and our culture immediately is these drugs as therapeutics and they're going to be very powerful yes because you've had amazing success with smoking cessation for example smoking and depression and end of life uh and there's good evidence for alcoholism and and there are variety of other targets now and that an excitement is that we may have trans diagnostic efficacy because the very nature of these experiences are so fundamental to rewriting the operating system if you will that the kinds of changes that can come about can cut across a variety of psychiatric diagnostic categories but so there that that work is going on so a psychiatric drug that's not hampered by diagnostic diversity essentially yeah i mean it's not going to work with everything obviously but uh you know but i think its application is going to be much broader than any psychiatric well and as you already pointed out we're not very good at this yet like right we've been investigating this for how long well 20 years now right right so you know all things considered a drop in the bucket yeah um so this other line of investigation uh you know grew out of my interest in meditation so we started with healthy volunteers we then we did some just parametric work just uh figuring out dose effects and replicability and stuff like that and then we went on and we did a study in beginning meditators people who were interested in taking on a meditation practice and who were uh psychedelic naive and what we showed is again the mystical experience drives long long term trait level changes of the type that you mentioned in terms of openness but there's a number of other trait level changes that occur very often in a pro-social direction you know gratitude and altruism and that sort of thing we then did a study in long-term meditators and of course that came right out of my interest so the question there was well what about people who have spent decades exploring the nature of their mind and and have developed some capacity for sustained uh investigation of that sort what do they make of these experiences uh and that study we're writing up but i can i can say that um most of those long-term meditators found those experiences to be astonishing just as everyone else has so that's very crucial right because they've they're all they're initiates already in some sense but this is pushing them past where they've already gone and radically yeah and they've and they attribute positive changes to their sitting meditation practice and to their uh sense of of uh awareness in daily life which is really the core of what meditation practices is cultivating so all the same kinds of positive attributions and and saying that it's facilitates their engagement none of them would say that it's a psychedelics or a substitute for what the the meditation practice because meditation results in the stability of of awareness that psychedelics certainly do not so then the next step was religious professionals and we are uh collecting the last data on that it was a study that was run jointly at hopkins and nyu and we've made a pact in the study team not to talk about any results until we're ready to uh publish but but i can tell you i can give you a broad brush stroke of what we're thinking there uh of course and and hoping perhaps maybe because we we maybe we can close this off with a little bit of discussion about you know the potential impact of this i mean i'm very interested for example in the decline of religious belief across the west and there's a there's a necessity for revitalization and and well back to back to the religious leaders yeah so that's the question what so among people who have made career commitments to uh to ministry and and and to supporting people's spiritual growth what what happens with them with a with a psychedelic experience and and how does that fit with their ministry uh their engagement in that and uh and their bleep do you plan to do long-term efficacy studies like i'd be really curious if your your psychedelic enhanced ministers let's say were then more credible proponents for their community and their congregations were disproportionately for example or perhaps not likely to grow we probably don't have the power to uh address that question we'll certainly follow these people up and the initial study we have follow up to uh 12 months and and uh and we're doing a lot of qualitative uh work on this um i think i think what i can say without without saying anything specific about the data is uh uh that the results are not inconsistent with that that we have seen in healthy volunteers and beginning meditators and long-term meditators uh that that is there's something astonishing about these experiences and i'll i'll have to uh leave it at that but but i think the implications are are are important i mean so the question is yeah how does this uh interact with faith uh traditions and um and that that's going to be an interesting story to tell and and to have unfold but i don't think i can say anything further about it yeah well yeah fair enough fair enough um i guess i'm i'm sorry i can backing off the study per se i mean you know there's something about these experiences that speak to the ineffable uh and uh and and this whole project of organizing community around um around investigation and cultivation of of the um fruits of those kinds of experiences and i think that's hugely consequential so one of the one of the features of the you know that i've already discussed of the primary mystical experience is this sense of the interconnectedness of all people and it's sacred and it's true and and and from that arises this sense of a pro-social sense of altruism a sense that we're all in this together well if that isn't the golden rule and if that doesn't you know speak to the nature of you know most ethical and moral traditions okay so i want to unpack that for a minute because it's so surprising like you can go over that quickly and it doesn't sound surprising it's so the drugs are producing an expansion of human experience that's meaningful and positive but it's not hedonic precisely it that isn't the system it's affecting so that's unbelievably crucial it's something other than cocaine it's something other than incentive reward okay so now it's lasting and it's it's and then there's the pro-social element and the and the uniting elements so it's philosophical but it's also ethical and all of those things are radical surprises right it could be philosophical without being ethical and and it could be positive without being philosophical and then the the fourth thing is is the that that feeling of truth that is associated with it too so it's got this deep cognitive element that's also surprising these are these aren't things that you would suspect or predict there and they do differentiate these drugs substantially from other drugs of abuse completely qualitatively and so people come out they're more pro-social and so you think that's a that's a exaggeration or a strengthening of of our of our inbuilt reciprocal ethic like the so you see you see an expansion of the philosophical with the radical increase in openness and and hypothetically associated neural transformations well now you see a on a strengthening of that ethic that's associated with this profound underlying narrative readjustment it tilts people to the positive it tilts them to the reciprocal and the interactive it gives them a deeper faith it's hard to see how all that couldn't be of significance to religious communities and then the question is well what should be what do you talk how do you talk to religious people about this especially if they're more on the conservative end of things because a less conservative hypothesis could hardly be imagined right it's the psychedelic origin of the deep judeo-christian ethic that's that's a radical idea and it it brings up this question well we lost this technology essentially something like 2 000 years ago in the west except in underground places do we reincorporate it how do we reincorporate it and what does that mean on the religious front like the conservative religious front with regards to say practice well but again i would say it doesn't have to be psychedelics we're gonna we're gonna learn more about the nature of these experiences and who knows i mean there may be a way to do this with uh you know electro uh cranial stimulation you know or or you know other kinds of of manipulations i'm going to object to that just for a second well and i have a specific reason you know because i i think that's uh uh a careful argument and an appropriate one but i don't think your data support it because you just told me that even the experienced meditators for them it's a qualitative transformation and so you think i'm and so you you've already got a population that have been using disciplined technology right and good and good for them you know eliade believed that the shamanic transformation in its pure form wasn't drug mediated but i think it looks to me like i have great respect for iliad i learned a tremendous amount from him i think i don't think the evidence supports that claim i think the psychedelics are doing something that is in addition to what discipline practice i mean who knows what happens if you practice for 35 years let's say and that's all you do but but i'm it isn't obvious to me that this can be duplicated on the non-chemical front oh let's see i i don't disagree agree with you i mean this is the most powerful intervention we have for uh for creating at high probability these kinds of ex experiences we don't nothing comes close to it well there's an intensity issue too right it's not just probability but also intensity yeah no absolutely but that doesn't mean that we're not going to refine this further and that there might not be another way to do it right it also doesn't mean that disciplined practice is not advisable and that caution isn't the appropriate byword yeah yeah but there you know there could be other physiological interventions you know that aren't aren't psychedelic uh drugs aren't you know serotonin 2a uh agonists so all i'm all i'm scoping out is that this is going to continue to unfold uh scientifically just but to to get back to the the implications so so these experiences are hugely pro-social and ethical uh or speak to you know basic ethics and so you know i've concluded it it sounds to some like an overstatement but i don't think it is that actually unpacking this this whole situation is crucial to the survival of our species because that impulse well that's what the masters of the illusionian mysteries proclaimed that what they're doing that we would all die without that we couldn't live without it and and so if we can understand this the kinds of experiences that give rise to mutual care taking then we we have the ability to solve all kinds of horrors that you know our cultures have uh imposed on us uh and you know there you could imagine uh uh interfaith dialogues that could uh uh come out of exploration of these kinds of experiences across faith traditions when and i and my guess will be uh and that the discovery is going to be well wait a second the bedrock core and this is the kind of perennial philosophy the bedrock core of most of these traditions is really quite similar uh and uh and so so whether whether the future is integrating this into existing religious institutions you know or or seeing a evolution of our cultural institutions you know that can incorporate this sort of thing is uh you know is i think a question one of the things uh that is disquieting to me is that the ability of these experiences to shift worldview is potentially really cult destabilizing to existing cultural institutions yeah well that's what happened in the 60s and it's no wonder there was like we underestimate the magnitude of these processes at our apparel god only knows what's happening at the bottom of them yeah so it is a genie that we maybe can't do without but it's still fire to mix it and and i think that accounts for the history of psychedelics having been discovered in some cultures and then forgotten or suppressed i mean look what happened in uh you know when the spanish came over to mexico i mean they actively stamped out the use of psychedelics and and and i think i think at the core if we're not careful they can be destabilizing the culture and then culture is going to come come back and demonize them as is exactly what happened in the 60s so i'm i am concerned about the excited movement toward decriminalization and legalization and before the before the the well there's a let's say an ecstatic spiritual domain of religiosity and there's a dogmatic disciplined traditional end of religion and you know the spiritual types and they have the personality for this are always opposed to the dogmatic types but you know those two things have to exist together carl jung said was one of the most brilliant things he ever said was that the purpose of religious structures is to stop people from having religious experiences and he was he was he was referring to this destabilizing effect that a uh an untrammeled mystical experience can have psychologically and sociologically it's you just can't have a million separate religions pop up without everything disintegrating and so we have to figure out how to place the genie inside the bottle and and i mean this is why what you've done is part of the reason it's so fascinating to me because for some reason you've been able to get the balance between tradition and discipline and empirical reasoning and careful rationality and skepticism you balance that with this intense focus on your own curiosity your sense of meaning and brought those together and managed it institutionally so something that you did worked it's right and taking that apart and figuring out how that can be replicated let's say that's a that's a crucial future task and the decriminalization i understand that but you know one thing we can encourage anyone who's listening to this uh to consider is none of this should be done lightly it should be done within an ethical framework you should do it with the highest possible intent and reverence and yeah and they're in their real risks uh so you know our people are are carefully uh screened you know we're really concerned about precipitation of enduring uh uh psychotic illness schizophrenia uh you know we have avoided uh administering to anyone with a bipolar disorder that remains to be investigated maybe it'll work maybe it won't uh probably uh and um uh and and certainly uh the the risk of uh of people uh engaging in dangerous behavior if it's not if they're not in a sufficient container and that's where you do get people you know running into traffic or or committing suicides or homicides so so this isn't to be taken lightly but jordan if i can just come back to kind of culturally and how do we integrate this i'm almost thinking of this now in terms of an evolutionary sense that we you know are our we have to evolve the cultural institutions that can that can create the containers around these experiences such that they don't threaten our existing institutions which are going to become reactive and demonize them and shut it down and and figure out the intelligent use of these compounds and so so and you're doing that as a scientist and now you're inviting religious leaders to participate in that process which seems to me to be i mean are they so just out of curiosity for example you'll have this group of religious leaders this assembly of religious leaders who've now undergone this experience so will they commune and will they discuss collectively the implications of this like you know because it's necessary to start thinking about how those social structures might might be evolved you you have this first batch of people who already have made an ethical commitment and a disciplined choice it would be fascinating to it seems to put them together for three or four days and say well look now what do we do with this you're an e they're in a unique position and and to see what the what answers might arise from that yeah um harvard school of divinity is uh uh initiating a psychedelic chaplaincy program i'm and i'm not sure of all the domains of that but that's unbelievable that's unbelievable yeah wow so so pl do you have any of you know when that's going to be launched let's see i think they i think they have declared that i you'd have to go online but uh they're actually that should that should solve some of their enrollment problems well yeah but that's also relevant right it's like look okay now you've you've gotten on to something here that that attracts people well that's to be paid attention to because the church is having a terrible time attracting people especially young people and so that can't be ignored especially if those institutions are necessary but right now we have no path forward within our culture for approval of administration of psychedelic to uh to well persons we're we're capable of doing these studies as research projects but but uh we don't and we have our our fda that approves drugs but they're approving them uh to treat conditions of either psychological or or physical suffering uh right and and so so this is part of the co-evolution where that needs to happen and existential insufficiency isn't enough of a psychiatric diagnostic category to to to qualify but i'm not really quite serious about that i mean you know lots of it's it's the sense of futility meaningless and nihilism that's not rare and it's it's not harmless by any stretch of the imagination at minimum it's staggeringly demoralizing at maximum it's it motivates all sorts of terrible acts of commission not just omission and it it it warps and and and hurts our our our entire society it's not a trivial problem that we don't know how to deal with our own mortality for example and no bloody wonder it's a complicated problem yeah so so that you know so that's that's one pathway forward is application in uh in death and dying right and and and initially to get approval for people who have some psychological distress but you could imagine that actually changing the culture you know it's not going to happen overnight you know we're probably talking about a multi-generational process but you know we can move pretty quick when we're motivated now you know let me ask you one more thing about this integration issue like so you've given these drugs to spiritual leaders so then i would think okay here's a question you situate your neck your research project in a cathedral and you administer the psilocybin as a sacrament with the music with with with the entire transformation mass apparatus because you know if it's reasonable to administer to spiritual leaders at least hypothetically it's reasonable to investigate what happens when you put it in an intense i mean a lot of work went into a cathedral a lot of work went into that music the entire ritual and the idea of the of what's actually happening being made explicit you know i mean those experiences are already powerful god only knows how you might multiply them with the power of of all of that imagery and pageantry and tradition and layers and layers of meaning yeah so going back to the original good friday experiment conducted it at harvard it was done in a good friday service uh with seminary students uh a number of whom had mystical experiences not all of whom whom did but that's that's what you're talking about i mean those are kind of sudden setting conditions uh that you know would be really interesting we've looked at this under such a narrow range of conditions i mean you know we're putting people on a couch with the eye shape well you do you to make it sterile except the music right yeah yeah yeah well and we're cr we're creating the introverted experience but we yet yet to be explored as the extroverted and and just experimentally as you can appreciate there's you know a whole lot more going on there so it's it's a rougher experimental paradigm to control yeah yeah you could you could carve that in stone [Laughter] thank you well thank you jordan this is uh delightful to uh to speak with you about this yeah well there's so many more things i would like to ask you about but that was pretty good for two hours so i'm uh i'm so much looking forward to reading the results of this spiritual leader study and um well maybe we can uh circle back once we've published where the long-term meditator study is uh on its way out and we'll have the religious professional study hopefully out within the next i would hope a year maybe we can circle back and talk a little bit further that would be that would be great that would be great so all right well um happy good friday if that's the thing that can be said thank you thank you jordan yeah yeah i really appreciated that the discussion and uh i'm well i think your work is of what's of of what would you say incalculable import i mean that technically i don't really know what to make of it it's great that it happened and hopefully it'll be for the good let's hope that yeah yeah i mean if it fits so closely with many of the themes that you have uh that you have developed and advocated for that it's just really exciting to be able to talk to you about it so thank you [Music] you

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 467,869

Rating: 4.9344225 out of 5

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, Jung, existentialism

Id: NGIP-3Q-p_s

Length: 145min 49sec (8749 seconds)

Published: Mon May 10 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Avpersonals]

Was listening to this just this evening. One of the better conversations he has had as of recently

[u/tomski1981]

important podcast, considering the conservative-leaning audience. thx for post

edit: noticed in his comments one perceptive person noticed this was season 4 episode 20.. lol

[u/gazzthompson]

Some real depth and passion in this podcast, one of the best i've heard on the psychedelic experience

[u/ElChaka-DeLaCuadra]

This is awesome!

[u/xonigx]

JORDAN PETERSON IS THE MAN

[u/Im_The_Squishy]

I love Jordan Peterson