What I Learned From Psychedelics | A Doctor's Perspective

purple have I ever done drugs I went to Berkeley dude like yeah this is a thing I went in high school I never did anything I was super straight arrow like cuz literally I grew up in the era of Nancy Reagan saying don't do [ __ ] I forget was her catchphrase just say no just say no and I grew up in the Central Valley of California super conservative place my parents are both doctors are from India there's no drugs there's no drugs that they would admit to so so when was the first time you did draw so the first time I'm in a dorm room in Berkeley Putnam Hall right I'm on the fifth floor and this kid this kid was like the only weird libertarian conservative kid in at all of Berkeley right and he was like hey man Z dog have you ever smoked weed man cuz they're out long it and that's [ __ ] cuz liberty and I'm like no because Nancy Reagan says that shit's dangerous next thing I know I'm got my mouth around a bong and I was like all and I've never smoked a cigarette I'm like coughing it was like I remember this so vividly because of the first altered consciousness of my whole life and I looked down and I look up and I'd entered what the best I could describe it was it was a dream state like I'm like living in a dream walking in a dream and I could sense this weird distortion of space and time where where I was telling I was walking around like that [ __ ] that you see in the dorms like man I see the fourth dimension bro I see it and they're there there were people in that dorm who to this day they went through med school with me and they still will call me on the remember that time he saw the fourth dimension Isaac I was 18 and and but the thing is as an experience immediately I remember after I sobered up I was like oh I get I get like what the 60s even were about like I didn't understand these hippies and now I'm like oh this experience was so different than anything and it opened my mind to things that the mind could do which then they'd always say like weeds a gateway drug right and I'm like oh that's let more Nancy Reagan [ __ ] it's true because what it does is it says ok I didn't die I didn't go crazy and I had a really interesting experience that in some level was quite enjoyable so next thing I know I tried LSD and this is one of my roommates who was a real psycho not even in those days Poli Sci major and he's like oh yeah we got this from some guy on Telegraph Avenue like what could possibly go wrong ended up doing a tab of acid and sitting there 30 minutes go by and I think happens we're in our little rental place and I'm playing my guitar and it's just like Joe Satriani looking like multi-coloured guitar that I had until recently when I broke it gave it to the Salvation Army and I'm playing and the neck starts to bend and I'm like that doesn't happen in real life and I had enough meta awareness that I was like this no this is Oh Oh next thing you know I'm on a ride that that to describe it as like the sense of mind expansion like the whole universe seemed to connect it was really a borderline mystical experience and you get all the weird hallucinatory stuff and the strange visual stuff but that was just a side effect what I felt I looked up at the moon that night I remember on our back yard and I was like oh my god I'm one with everything that ever was ever is I'm eternal I will never die and that felt more true than anything in waking life and in really that was it I kind of dabbled in like you know little mushrooms little acid when I was in college and but that experience told me that the human mind is just a veil on something underneath and that's why I got interested in meditation because I said you know I bet you can access this without the medication and it really changed the direction of my life because I would have just kind of fallen into maybe research or reductionism and said I went into medicine because I found something something deeply mysterious about the human consciousness that I thought medicine could help me understand better and actually it didn't it only helped me to the extent that I got to know people better and I got to know that interaction better but the science can't quite get at it yet because I think we're still just moving icons and Desktop we need to get into the source code of it so we're just what would you say to the people who are like hey Z dot you're a doctor you stop doing drugs you know that's a great question it's taken me many years to be able to even admit that I dabbled in psychedelics in collagen that I would consider doing it again now in my elderly years and it's because there's so much stigma right from everything in the 60s and everything but the truth this is what this is what I really you want to know what I really think what I really think is if you haven't tried a psychedelic sometime in your life or had some sort of experience that's similar whether it's a meditation or treat or something you shouldn't touch patients that's I honestly believe that and a lot of people are gonna get pissed at me but the thing is the one thing that happens when you do that you have that psychedelic experience or mystical experience is you come back and you go I have missed something so central to the nature of what our minds are what we are our place in everything that I couldn't imagine not having had this experience and still being effective in the world now I may be deluded but that's what it feels like and I'm a stick with it take it far back it's like honestly that's what doctors used to be like when they were medicine man you know it's like I'm gonna do these drugs then you're gonna do these drugs I'm gonna be your trips that are and walk you through what it feels like to be on these drugs you know I think the future of medicine I'm gonna take a lot of [ __ ] for this is more shamanic than it is giving medications and pushing this stuff that'll always be a part of it you're gonna take so much [ __ ] for that you need to clarify it people may be [ __ ] when I say shamanic I mean our role is almost as a guide we are a shepherd you're bringing your own healing with you right we're gonna help you with these tools we have from the armamentarium that we have you know whether it's lipitor or lasix or olanzapine or Zoloft but part of that trip may be a guided psychedelic experience with a guide who is medically trained may be a part of that is sitting and being present with you in a way that to conscious agents interact and the healing comes from what we used to call the placebo factor the mind-body effect but really is a transcending mind-body continuum and this is not to endorse you know kooky alternative medicine stuff it's to transcend and include the best of what we have with this higher understanding of what humans really are so I'm doubling down on that I will take a lot of [ __ ] from people like Gorsky and these other guys I'd be like see dog is an iconic laws too spouting garbage you might as well be dr. oz now dr. oz sells [ __ ] on TV I'm just telling you this is what I think the truth is about the universe you were also a pretty hardcore reductionist for a number of years right so like yeah I mean you you burn that out don't you feel like you've reached the end of the road with the reductionist so reductionism materialism this idea that we are only these chemical reactions right was how were conditioned in in Western science Western medicine and even when I had had that acid trip in Berkeley I'm a molecular biology major I'm studying genetics in a Drosophila lab my whole world is material science is reduction as I'm like every experience human experience it tastes a chocolate whatever it is love can be reduced to a chemical reaction and that's how I was trained and even while having this experience on LSD I was trying to shoehorn what my mind was doing in other words oh my gosh I've never had these connections this feeling of openness and connectedness it must be serotonin levels are rising or it's opening up different receptors and it took me years to realize that that reductionism wasn't the answer it's simply a correlation yeah those receptors change but what arises is conscious experience which I don't think is reducible and identical to a serotonin flux or a dopamine flux I think they're correlated but they're not the same there's something else going on and again I've done interviews with people that I think have the right idea but it's taken me years to kind of come to this so it's not something that I'm just making up I'm not trying to sell you anything this is just my experience here is interesting because it's like my think about like my mother they wanted me to put her in a legal mm right it's such a reductionist approach to medicine which is like you need to have the police kidnapped this woman put her in restraints and force these chemicals into her because we believe there's a chemical imbalance in her right I didn't do that she went back to being normal after two days like what her baseline is fine right if I had done it I would have made it worse for months it would have lingered cuz it's trauma this is the thing we do the best we can with the tools we have we speak the language of reductionism so we move those tools around our desktop and that's what they're trying to do with your mom well she's really you'll have to unfold the the my mom stuff you'll have to it because it's just too long yeah so like what cuz the thing I'm trying to get at maybe I can make it about my something better is like do you even believe there are chemical imbalances do you believe that's accurate I believe that when we when we see chemicals imbalanced in a mind and I think that happens right and you can see correlation between conscious experience and fMRI data things are correlated absolutely the question is where's the causality well it turns out if you mess with the interface and you move serotonin here and you do this with dopamine you have a different conscious experience because they're so tightly correlated it doesn't mean that that's causative it might mean that you can actually get a similar effect from some other intervention on a conscious experience whether that's serious psychotherapy cognitive behavioral therapy being present with someone in cases of severe mental illness like your mother it's probably so disjointed that you have to have all these approaches because we only have limited tools they're gonna look back on modern psychiatry and say it's barbarism but we look back on all of Medicine that way right so we have to be a little cold and compassion what we're trying to do in Western medicine but at the same time understand that we're missing a big part of this so what they tried to do with your mother when they said put her on an involuntarily involuntary hold take her out of her life put her in this that's the best that they know how to do because what out what are the other options you happen to get really lucky but she was very lucky cuz she has a son who's there who's withers keeping her safe keeping her from going out and hurting herself not everybody has that so they have to do the best they can it's really a struggle but if we're asking the wrong questions if this is all reduced to chemicals I don't think we're ever gonna we're gonna we're already hitting a wall haven't we been asking the wrong questions for far too long like wouldn't you think of something like an SSRI is just like a super mild lobotomy is an SSRI a super mild lobotomy I don't think so I think this is my this is a great but it's just an overall dulling you know it doesn't cause permanent damage so many versatile lobotomy many people describe psychiatric drugs is a kind of a dulling experience for them and they won't want to take because they're blunt tools they're blunt tools it's it's it's like you only have certain symbols to work with they're dumbed down you don't see the underlying reality so you move those symbols around and one of those symbols is the serotonin molecule and you move it around you change its concentration and you change its receptor upregulation and something changes in conscious experience but something else changes that isn't desirable so we're still very blunt could it be that we could design better drugs to do that yes but to do that you have to release the reductionist approach and understand what those drugs actually represent and that will be I think the next phase of science true science do me and you share the same reality to me and you share the same reality I think we interact with the same matrix of consciousness that everybody does but we interpret it differently we construct it differently and it affects our own awareness differently but the same enough that we share an intersubjective truth so you and I share certain understandings English certain norms like if we're in an airport we don't run around yelling bomb well maybe some of us do and that comes from our shared conditioning of within that matrix but yes we each construct our own experience of reality a thousand percent that's without doubt but how do I know that the color blue that I sitting is same color blue that you see you don't you don't and you can't but I will say this I think humans evolved our interface with reality in a similar mostly similar way the exception is the mutations that happen that cause synesthesia where you may smell colors or see sounds and those are people that prove the rule that our interface is constantly evolving and it's it may be that in the future it might be beneficial to us to survive to see a sound right to see a sound of a siren as the color red and we share that red actually that experience have read probably as a quality as an experience is the same because it has been selected for through natural selection whatever that is in reality in the reality do the mentally ill see less of reality or more of reality I think the mentally ill some of them see more of the underlying source code and it makes it unstable because remember the proposition that Hoffman and others have said is that seeing the underlying source code of reality the complexity of it is untenable in terms of survival it's too much information and it doesn't help you survive so when I look at a glass of water it may represent it may point to the deepest most complex conscious agent having experiences but our mind reduces it to a glass of water because we don't need to see that in order to survive someone who's mentally ill might actually see something in that glass of water that is vastly different than you and I have access to but it's maladaptive to live in a society of humans it's just not good we call that crazy right so I actually think when we understand mental illness at its root it's going to be something along those lines it's not going to be oh there's a serotonin flux that's out of you know jiggering what do you think we could do with if if it turns out to be true the consciousness is it the underpinning of everything right what could we do with that in terms of medical structures so if it turns out that like say Hoffman's theory that everything is consciousness interacting with itself in mathematically predictable ways the way that helps medicine is you create a science that's based on the underlying source code instead of on the icons in other words right now all of science if this is true is the science of our desktop oh I move the trashcan here it does this I move this document here it does that but it doesn't tell us if we actually want to transform things how do we get into the underlying program in the old days the idealist it's a school of philosophy that said well we can't really know reality because it's unknowable it's just God or whatever that's not very helpful it's not very scientifically precise and it doesn't help us actually do things in the world but but a theory where you have mathematically predictable models of conscious agents and are interacting with themselves can actually predict what happens in our interface that means you can start to manipulate it at the source code level with the right technology what's a psychedelic a manipulation of our interface it's a gross crude manipulation of our interface maybe it's a plant consciousness maybe you're seeing fungal consciousness who knows right people who've done it feel this is true they'll tell you you know that's what it felt like when was the first moment that you question reality how early how far back I think I started questioning reality when I was I went through the bar mitzva equivalent in Zoroastrianism which is a priest to priest come to your house and you're 11 and they you have to learn these prayers and you go through the ceremony and I started going okay so there's a God of course right and it's a mythic magic God that you have to pray to because it can punish you and this and that and I started going that doesn't really jibe with any of this that I'm having this experience in this world that how does that have anything and and the facade of reality started to crack of N and then psychedelic experience in college and I said oh oh no no reality is much deeper more complex and we're able to perceive and it's not just that we're not perceiving all of reality it's that we've taken reality and we've turned it into symbols that have nothing to do with reality there's simply ways for us to survive reality itself is far more beautiful complex and terrifying then then we have access to or should have access to maybe that's a valid question if we want to survive in society should we have access to that these are valid questions there's something here about like how the data allows to do terrible things you know what I mean like because it's reductionism on top of reductionism so it's like not the world is true it's this way it's all you know it's hard I can knock on things there's the desk right and then we have measures for things so these are our measures and we're gonna improve things this way and here's look here's the data that backs the data so it's all endogenous right it's like same thing with reductionism it's like this is the thing that does the thing yeah is the icon that right right those are connected I can't figure out it so this idea that most of modern science has been so successful because it works if we move this icon this happens if we this atom does this quantum mechanics one of the most successful theories of all times predicts reality makes no sense that things we need conscious observers to settle down or happens above but it works it's absolutely predictable so we have fallen into what Kaufman calls a rookie mistake of going okay so this interface must be reality because we can manipulate it and make things happen it's true up to a point and science has been really good at getting to that point everything in our current model was true until it starts to push up against where it's not where we're failing we're now getting the point where no we're in the 21st century we haven't figured out cancer yet we haven't figured out mental illness we haven't figured out why people are conscious at all MB it's because the reduction as a materialism is gonna fail it really is now some people say we're just not smart enough we don't have a powerful enough computer I don't think so I think it's because the next layer of science is understanding the source code which is that it isn't atoms really emerging consciousness it's consciousness that emerges an icon of atoms and it's predictable we can have scientific formulas that are mathematically based as Hofmann said math is the bones of consciousness it's the flesh and bones of consciousness that's science in its purest form science isn't a Dogma it's an approach so the next layer of science is going to be that I am convinced of this dude like it gives you a feeling both intellectually and emotionally that that is absolutely correct and that's why I talk about this stuff at great risk to my own personal reputation because I think it's true and I think a lot of people that don't admit this publicly think it's true so I'm excited the future is gonna be insane like absolutely amazing but we have to transcend this reductionism wasn't one last question would you agree with the statement all significant advances in science are conscious perceptual shifts all significant advances in science are conscious perceptual shifts I will say this I wouldn't reduce it just to science I would say all significant advances in humanity collectively are due to conscious perceptual shifts this leads into the you know why a better computer a faster computer isn't gonna solve it like we have to change ourselves the whole model of our minds have to change the whole model of society has to change that's why you know I hate this high this idea that the only Democrats are progressives only conservatives are trying to pull you back no we all need to transcend and include what has come before but transcend to that next level use this all as building it's all true but partial what's the next emergent we're there because we're running up on the failures of the current paradigm and it used to be the current paradigm couldn't be beat we went to the moon we harnessed the atom for to power electricity we cured you know infectious diseases oh my god it gives you goosebumps when you think about it what have we done lately and the reason is that now we're at the end of that paradigm what's next so don't resist it we need to start to go okay okay this is what's been successful let's build on it and this is what's failed let's transcend it and that next rung on the ladder is this realization it is a huge perceptual shift and the New Age people talk about it everybody's gonna get well that's not what it is it's a slow fits and starts wave and then the wave recedes but it's got to happen and that's why we have conversations like this if five people in the audience get this and they send me a message I know that we're on the right track because it's going to have to start at the Changez and then open up so the punchline is hey hey hey hey smoke weed everyday

Channel: ZDoggMD

Views: 34,739

Keywords: consciousness and medicine, doctors try psychedelics, should doctors try drugs, doctor reacts to mystical experiences, zdoggmd consciousness, zdoggmd meditation, a doctor reacts to psychedelics, donald hoffman zubin damania, A Doctor Tries LSD, the nature of reality, medical school drug experimentation, mental illness and spiritual awakening, meditation and psychedelic drugs, health care drug use, mental health awareness, mental health nursing, the nature of reality buddhism

Id: jD2ycyMN4xs

Length: 22min 25sec (1345 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 26 2019