HealthyGamerGG - PSYCHEDELICS: A Conversation With Rick Doblin

Episode Date: October 11, 2020

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Thanks a lot for coming, Rick. So we're live. So let me just introduce you again. So this is Rick Doblin. He's the founder and executive director of MAPS, which is the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. I know that a lot of our community has been very interested in psychedelics recently. There's been a lot of studies that have come out showing the potential benefits of using psychedelics as mental health treatments. And I know other will kind of get into how it has, additional uses. And so I think a lot of that, frankly, is due to you, Rick, because MAPS has been funding

studies and you've been a long-term proponent for decades. Well, since 1986 is when I started MAPS, but really since 1972, when I was 18, when I decided to focus on psychedelics. Yeah. So thank you so much for all of your hard work and dedication, because I do think that psychedelics are going to offer a really, wonderful opportunity in psychiatry. Just a quick disclaimer that, you know, psychedelics are currently not really medically approved treatments for anything. So, you know, we don't really, or I don't

recommend that you guys use them. We'll talk a little bit more about that. So, you know, in the studies, as I understand them, are done in relatively controlled environments with controlled dosing and sort of a certain amount of purity of like what people are using. So a lot of times things are contaminated. And so, you know, steer clear of that. But Rick, I know you may disagree. Well, I think our clinical studies are done in a highly controlled environment with pre-screen patients, with medical tests to make sure that they're fine to handle the experience. And then it's a two-person therapy team with them for eight hours. And there's been preparation and integration. So yeah, it's a highly controlled environment. But I do think that some of the most

important experiences I've had after I was quite familiar with psychedelics was doing them on my own in the woods and nature. Some ones actually on my own in a flotation tank for 17 hours. Oh, wow. With a big dose of LSD. So I do think that it's wise to have somebody that's not under the influence of psychedelics, kind of like a designated driver, because you can go deeper when you feel really safe and you're not worried about the interaction with the outside world, somebody at the door, the phone, or anything like that. And also, I do think that there is a lot to be gained from other things. context than therapeutic context. But the concern I have there is just that when people take them

in more of a what you would say recreational or celebratory context, if you're just doing it to have fun, one of the big dangers is that when difficult stuff comes up and psychedelics do kind of impact this membrane between the unconscious and the unconscious mind and things that are emotionally charged to come to the surface, if you're just trying to have fun and something difficult comes up, if you try to stuff it down and not focus on it, you could end up worse off for months or years later. So I think the attitude going into it is very important, regardless of whether it's a therapeutic setting or any kind of settings. Back in the 80s when MDMA was first being, well, it was middle 70s, actually, that MDMA under the code name Adam was first being used in therapy settings and then eventually escaped out of those therapies. therapeutic settings and was used recreationally under the name Ecstasy. There was still Sasha

Shulgin, who was the chemist that really helped pioneer this whole area and sort of rediscovered MDMA. He and his wife, Anne, had a several-page mimeographed information sheet that they handed out along with the drug. And it ended up with, remember, there is no such thing as a casual experiment. You do have to take it seriously, even though it may not be in a therapeutic or religious spiritual setting. You shouldn't underestimate these substances and just don't approach it casually. Yeah. So, Rick, just in that vein, I've actually had a lot of people reach out saying that they've had PTSD or anxiety to develop after using LSD or other psychedelics. What do you think about that?

I think that that's very, it's not uncommon. I mean, again, it's when you take these situate, LSD and psilocybin and the classic psychedelics operate by dissolving your sense of self, you know, which can lead to this sense of deeper unity and connection. But it also helps if people are not feeling safe in the way, it can contribute to people feeling like they're losing their mind or that often we are so identified with our ego, with our sense of who we are, that the ego dissolution is sometimes confused with physical death,

that ego death or ego dissolution is often confused with physical death. Stan Groff, who's sort of the world's leading LSD researcher and therapist, he started doing LSD research in the 50s in the Czech Republic. He's 89 now, and we just published his book Way of the Psychoanaut for Encyclopedia for Inner Journey. I highly recommend that for people. But he told a story about how he watched a bunch of people doing LSD before he ever did it himself. You know, now these are patients, and he was the psychiatrist and as part of his training. And he saw how this confusion between ego dissolution and ego death and physical death often manifests.

And so when he had his first LSD experience and he started going through that same thing, He, for temporarily, he persuaded himself that somehow or other, because he had had a special illness when he was like six years old, that that had altered his body chemistry such that even though he knew that other people when they started feeling that they were dying, it was actually not true. For him, he thought it was really true because he had this illness when he was six. And it only took him a while to work through that. But this just relates to your question, that people can, when difficult stuff comes up and you try to push it down or you don't feel safe in the context to explore it, you have now created a situation where these memories that have been unconscious are now sort of halfway conscious, halfway not. And you can have very difficult experiences. in therapeutic settings in the future and also underground settings, and I've done this back before MDMA was illegal.

But, you know, when people have difficult experiences with LSD or psilocybin, what you can do is give half a dose of MDMA. And what that does, it's not like a tranquilizer that sort of tries to take you out of it and freezes the conflict in place. but what it does is it reduces the fear of whatever it is that you're concerned about, the fear of dying, the fear of going crazy, or traumatic memories that are coming up, and then you can process it. So that, you know, that would be the, if people go to the emergency rooms or something,

because they've got a panic attack from LSD, the ideal solution, and I know emergency rooms aren't prepared to this, at least not yet, would be to give a half dose of MDMA, and then keep them processing it and provide that sort of support. Interesting. So, Rick, you mentioned that you've been doing kind of you've been interested in psychedelics for a long time. Can you just tell us a little bit about like what your upbringing was like? Yeah. Yeah, I'd be very glad. Yeah, so it was really, I was born in 1953. And I was born in Chicago. I feel like the sort of classic American story in that grandparents on one side, great-grandparents on the other side were immigrants.

They came fleeing anti-Semitism and violence against Jews in Russia and Poland to the United States. And then after a couple generations, they were successful. My great-grandfather was the classic rags to riches in the United States. the sense that he was actually a rag salesman, collected rags. And there was a family story about one time in the winter in Chicago, he's on his horse collecting rags and there was a little cart behind him, and he froze to the saddle. And my great grandmother had come out with hot water and pour it there so that he could unfreeze from the saddle and eventually build a paper company.

So I was, and then after in his sense, 60s, he sold the paper company, my great grandfather, moved to Palestine and built a house there in 1924 that is now a historical site on Roschell Boulevard. And it's kind of an iconic image of Israel and Tel Aviv because the house has been preserved, but in the backyard is a skyscraper. And right across the street is another skyscraper. So it's in the middle of this, you know, very commercial district, but it was when the house was built just less than 100 years. ago. It was just sand around it. It was.

So all that is to say is that I've been raised on stories of the Holocaust. And, you know, the foundation of the state of Israel, the sort of the response to the Holocaust. And my father was a doctor. So I, you know, my family was well off. And so I just was given, I'd say, the gift of security in order to look at more deeper risks. What do you mean by that?

What I mean is that, you know, prejudice, genocide, you know, those, you could, you could be financially secure as a lot of people were in Germany, you know, before Hitler, and then you still end up dying, you know, so that the deeper threat is this kind of problem of the human spirit. You could say humanity as a whole is a lot of people are willing to dehumanize others, to be racist, to think of us as separate from nature and trash nature. So, Rick, this is a deeply interesting and philosophical kind of take. I'm kind of curious, what was your act like, I mean, were you thinking this way when you were like 12? I was. Yeah. See, my father's hero was Saul Olinsky. And so Saul Olinsky wrote the book Rules for Radicals.

He's a community organizer in Chicago. Obama studied with Saul Olensky, you know, his approaches. So my family was very progressive, you could say. So you grew up in Chicago. Yeah, I grew up in Chicago. I grew up in a place called, well, first off, in Skokie. And sometimes people know of Skokie because it's heavily Jewish, a lot of survivors of the Holocaust. And at one point in time about, I guess it was even 30 or 40 years ago, the American Nazis wanted to march through Skokie and the American Civil Liberties Union defended them and as a right of free expression. And they lost a lot of support. But I do think they did the whole, the right thing. But in any case, I grew up surrounded by Jewish people. I was six years old. And my family tells this story. I thought the whole world was Jewish.

because that was the whole world that I knew. And my parents, when they realized that, they said, no, no, no, we're like a fraction of 1% of the whole world. And I got really scared. And I'm like, well, you know, what if they're right? You know, what if, you know, Christ is the Messiah were going to hell, you know. And they were just like, well, just, you know, we don't know about that, but we're a tiny, tiny minority.

And so this idea of sort of, you know, Yeah, security and the concerns of the world that I was really moved in this direction. And so when I was growing up, before I became 12 was the Cuban Missile Crisis. And so that was something else that was deeply, deeply traumatizing. You're a little kid in school. You know, today, sometimes the little kids in school have active shooter drills, which is terrifying. But this other idea that there could be a nuclear war between the Russia and the United States and we have all these weapons and it could blow up the whole world. And then you're saying, but how was that traumatizing in what way?

Well, you just think of how insane that is, you know, that we could be destroying the world, you know, for these political conflicts. and also that you're told, you know, duck in cover, you know, get under your, you know, duck under your desk and then you might survive. You know, and then you see all these movies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and what's going on there, what happened there. So it just was terrifying that this was beyond, like, genocide of the concentration camps. Now this was like we could lose the whole world and that this, could be poised. I remember reading. I love to read. You know, there was a book I read called

On the Beach, which people probably don't know much about today, but it was about people that were on the beach in Australia. And this was after a nuclear war. And they were waiting for the radioactive fallout to, you know, come to them in the wind. So it was like post-ap apocalypse, you know, post-nuclear war waiting for them all to die. So it just expanded my sense. that psychological factors, the way that we can dehumanize others, the way that we can make other people, the enemies, the way we lose our sense of common humanity, that that was a real critical problem. And I recall Einstein saying that our technology has exceeded our humanity. So Rick, which let, yeah. Yeah, I'm noticing. So sometimes I'll ask you about

kind of your experience of growing up. And I, for example, I asked, you know, what was traumatizing about that. And I noticed that a lot of your answers have to do with the world. Yeah. That like, you know, the world was a scary place that gender, that we had exceeded. So I'm, I'm kind of curious about, you know, your mind seems to have a focus on the outside. Mm. Mm-hmm. That you're sort of thinking about these like broad existential or cultural or societal or world the problems about like the nature of humanity losing our humanity that our humanity has been exceeded by our technology so i'm kind of so i'm sort of i'm just kind of noticing that

we don't seem to be talking about you like when i ask you about you talk about the world well my parents were married for 67 years before my father died um i had a big extended family of grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins. So my personal life was really secure and beautiful. You know, I had loving parents, loving grandparents, big extended family. I'll share something else about me personally. When I was 12, we moved from Chicago, from Skokie to Winnetka, which is a little bit further north suburb.

And my parents had a house that, that was, they had a house designed by a student of Franklin Wrights. And so I grew up in this incredibly beautiful structure that had an enormous impact on me personally and how I thought. You know, Franklin Lloyd Wright sort of blends inside and outside. The whole idea that the, you know, the inside flows to the nature outside. It was a Chinese pagoda with a big eight foot by eight foot square skylight at the top. It was a one-story house, but the roof went up 22 feet. So it wasn't a box.

I didn't grow up living in a box. I grew up with an indoor atrium where we had a tree that was like 15, 20 feet high inside the house. And I could see from my bed through the skylight the moon and the snow and the rain at night. And I could see the whole house had stained glass windows. Not sliding glass doors. I mean, sorry, it did have some stained glass windows too. but it had sliding glass doors between as the exterior walls. And we had a very private location.

So, you know, it just flowed from the inside and out. And one of the biggest influences on me as I was growing up was, you know, this house. The other part was that I feel now, in retrospect, that I had absolutely everything that could be done to give me a sense of self-efficacy, you could say, that I could impact the world. So I was born at the time of America, height of American power, you know, before we got into Vietnam and stuff. I was Jewish, the chosen people before I realized that everybody's the chosen people. I was white, male. I was the firstborn male child. And, you know, my family was well off.

So I had, you know, probably every advantage that you could have. So I guess when I started talking about the world, that's where my insecurities were not about my own life, but were about what the world could impinge on me in different ways. And, you know, when you're young Jewish, too, you're also taught about Jewish history. And there's just this constant theme of various people trying to scapegoat and kill the Jewish people. And, you know, we were, Jerusalem is a dangerous place. Yeah, that was the kind of thing. But I had that message from the utmost sense of security in America after World War II with, you know, just where we moved in Winnetka. I didn't know this at the time, but they weren't, a lot of people were unwilling to sell the Jewish people.

So there was four houses on a cul-de-sac that my parents got together with three of their Jewish friends, and they had a Christian person by the land. And then once the Christian person bought the land, then they separated it out into these four Jewish families. Wow. So the only way we got to live in Winnetka was to overcome these prejudices against Jews. Interesting. So that was a big part of my upbringing. And so I guess the other thing is that I really got to be very interested in the other. You know, and so I studied Russian in high school to learn about the Russian.

Russians and because my great grandparents came over from Russia. And my parents were very much open to educating me experiential learning. So after my junior year of high school, my parents sent me to Russia for the summer to study Russian. And we went to Samarkhan, Tashkan. There's about 60 other high school students from around America. We went to London to Paris all over Moscow. But my parents sent me on a mission as well. And they gave me, in my luggage, they gave me a bunch of prayer books to give to the people at the synagogue because prayer books were forbidden at this time in Soviet Russia, which was, you know, atheist. So as a 16-year-old boy, my parents are saying, here's this political mission I want you to do, bring these prayer books to the guys at the synagogue. Wow.

And because I spoke Russian not very well, but well enough to get by, on this. a group of 60 people, 60 high school students, me and two other guys were approached by some of Russian young people as well, but they were like black market people. And so this is now 1970. Summer of 1970, the psychedelic revolution is happening in America, didn't happen in Russia. So the Russians wanted to buy anything that smacked of freedom. So button shirts even, or books or albums. Somebody had Abby Road. And, you know, they bought the record for like two bucks. We sold it for 100 rubles, which was more than $100 worth.

Now, rubles at the time were not worth anything outside of Russia. So they didn't want anybody to be able to escape with money. But we made thousands and thousands of rubles by selling stuff from all of the people in our trip. You know, they're closed, they're this and that. And we took our cut, of course. And so in the end, you know, I just had a large amount of Russian rubles. and I went to the synagogue in Moscow to give these prayer books that my parents had sent me to deliver. And I said to this guy, hey, I got all this money for you, got these prayer books.

And the guy said, hey, we're being watched. Don't give me anything here. But I'll meet you at the subway station, underground subway at a certain time at a certain station, and bring the money in the books then. And I was like, okay. And I just thought, okay, you know, I'm a 16-year-old kid. if the Russians catch me, they'll just send me home. Can we just pause for a second, Rick? Can you tell me what on earth it's like to be given a covert political vision at the age of 16?

Like, what's going through your head when your parents are, like, what was your understanding of what you were getting yourself into? Well, my parents were like, each of us as individuals can make a difference. It was very empowering. It was like, look, we can't stop the prejudice against the Jews. We can't overturn everything in Russia. but you yourself can bring a few prayer books. And that is something to do. So it connected me with my small life and what an individual can do.

Maybe you can't solve the whole problem, but you can make a small contribution. So that's what I felt like. I thought, this is a really wonderful thing that my parents are thinking, that in this small way, with a few people now maybe getting a prayer book, I can make a difference.

And I think that was the main. education that I got from them is that you can't just stand idly by. You have to get involved. And even if it's way bigger than any of us, each of us individually can make a bit of a difference. So, yeah, I respected them for it. And also they were telling me that they wanted me to take certain risk. Not only that, that they didn't want me to find the safe path, that they wanted me to take certain risks. So when I was 18, two years later and after I'd been in college. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. We got to find out what happened with the, did you meet the dude in the

underground station? I did. I did. So what happened? Well, you know, we made the transfer and I got away safe and nobody and he got away safely and I gave him all these rubles and he was super happy and I just felt like, wow, you know, my first underground activities was against the Russians, against the communists in Russia. And it kind of prepared me for, for addressing the drug war too, which was also similar, you know, unjust in different ways. What do you mean if I prepared you for the drug war? Well, you know, this was illegal what I was doing in Russia. And so, you know, once I started wising up to the fact that the drug war was criminalizing tools

that could be used for personal growth, for spirituality, that, and if I wanted to use them, I would become a criminal myself, that that was how I was prepared, you know, that this first sort of law breaking was against the communists, and then this law breaking was against repressive drug war. Interesting. Okay. So you were saying 18. Yeah. So at 18, now, I'll also add that as I was growing up, my parents don't drink alcohol. They don't, they're both dead now, but they didn't smoke cigarettes. They were very rational. My grandparents, my father's parents had a bookstore.

They were, you know, poor immigrants had a bookstore. They lived above the bookstore. They had only one child. But my dad and mother were very rational. And I think that part of that was about the fear of what happened in Nazi Germany, that the irrational gets out of control. And we see echoes of that in the United States right now where rationality and truth, you know, don't matter and it's to a lot of people. So it was just this, they were very rational. And so I didn't

have a history. I'm the oldest of four kids too. So there was no drug use going on in my house really. My dad, who was a doctor, realized also that a lot of what he learned in medical school was no longer true. So we had a drawer of drugs, medicines at our house. And whenever we get sick, my dad's attitude was, don't take a thing. You know, you're going to heal. on your own. It's going to be a little few difficult days. The downside of that is when I'd say, oh, I don't want to go to school. I feel bad. He's like, no, you better go to school. So, but I just believed the propaganda that I was receiving about psychedelics. So even though I knew better in other ways, I believe that if you took LSD five or six times, you were certifiably

insane. Okay. That was one of the stories. That your sanity is as a delicate balance and if you take LSD five or six times, you've permanently altered that balance. You're certifiably insane. I believed the idea that you had chromosome damage and that you would have deformed children from psychedelics. That was another big thing. You know, I believe that these drugs were something that caused hallucinations, delusions, there was nothing valid about them whatsoever.

And it was in my Russian class, actually, in my senior year when I was 17, that this sort of propaganda, I started cracking through the propaganda. A friend of mine in the Russian class gave me a book to read. And I just loved it. This was a phenomenal book. And when I gave it back to it, my friend, he said, do you realize that some of this book was written by the author when he was under the influence of L.S. And I was like, that's impossible. You know, there's nothing good comes from LSD. How could you possibly write this great piece of literature?

It can't be done. And he encouraged me to check into it further, which I did. And it turned out he was right. It was one floor over the cuckoo's nest by Ken Kese. And some of it indeed had been written under the influence of LSD. So that sort of made me think, here's all this propaganda that I've got. It can't all be true. The other part was that because I had thought so much about the Holocaust,

about the, you know, the human missile crisis and all that, now I was being confronted as I was getting closer to 18 about Vietnam. And I was in one of the last years of the lottery. And I was, you know, we had to face the fact, what am I going to do about Vietnam? And at the time, and still, if you want to be what's called a conscientious objector, and you can get a deferment for a conscientious objector, you have to be a pacifist. You have to be against all war. And I was not against all war.

I think that there are times when it makes sense to defend oneself. So I couldn't be a conscientious objector. And this was also at the time, you know, Martin Luther King was assassinated a little bit before that. And there was just so much that was going on about Vietnam. When I was actually 14, I was the precinct captain in my area for Eugene McCarthy, the peace candidate in 1968. And of course, he got hardly any votes. And so I wanted to be closer to the action. So I actually volunteered for Mayor Daly, who was the mayor of Chicago, and I was a runner for the delegates inside the convention of 1968.

And so I was traumatized there at one point where I was downstairs in the sort of outside of the where the main convention was taking place. And there was a media room. And I went in there and there was all these TVs and people were watching TVs. And it was TVs of the riots in downtown Chicago, the police riots against the demonstrators. And just this way in which the delegates were trying to pretend as if life was normal while there was these massive riots going on outside. It just really further radicalized me. So I decided that what I would do in terms of Vietnam is that I would not register for the draft, that I would not cooperate with the system at all, and that I would drain the system of the most energy by having them come after me and I would go to jail.

So I talked this over with my parents, and they were fine. They just said the problem is that if you do that, you're, going to be a felon and you're never going to be able to be a doctor or a lawyer or whatever is going to require a license. But they were not sympathetic with the war in Vietnam. And so, you know, what Martin Luther King had said that he said, for those who think a law is unjust and are willing to break the law and suffer the consequences as a way to send a message to everybody else about the unjust nature of the law, that they actually have the highest respect for the law. So that this kind of civil disobedience, you're really trying to make the system of laws better

by showing the injustice. Yeah. So I thought that since I was paying taxes, I had a Social Security number, I was in high school, you know, that I would be caught. But as it turned out, it was just this amazing loophole that I didn't register for the draft and around 60,000 other people never registered for the draft and nothing happened to us at all. Enough people were volunteering for the war that they had enough recruits. And somehow or other, from anticipating going to jail to then realizing nothing's going to happen.

So at a very early stage when I was 18, thinking that I was going to be caught any day, but I was in college and I started. I started doing LSD and psilocybin and mescaline. And I started getting this intimations of this deeper unity, beyond ego identification. I have a difficult time with my drug trips because I was insecure and not very emotionally adapt. And so it was very hard to let go. I got scared a lot, but I felt that this was very important.

important. It was also 1971, 1972. So the backlash against the 60s really took place in 1970 with the Controlled Substances Act and Nixon criminalizing all these drugs, saying Timothy Leary was the most dangerous man in America. And so it was after the backlash

that I started doing these psychedelics. And I started sensing something, which was that this... Why did you start? Well, because of that book, because of one floor over the cuckoo's nest. You know, I just thought, this is brilliant. And if LSD had something to do with this, then it's something that I should explore.

You know, that it's not just a hallucination. It's also that I was very interested in psychological factors and this repression, how people can be irrational. I had a great class in high school on Jung. It was, so my senior. year of high school, I had a Jungian psychology class. And the only thing we did for the entire semester was read Moby Dick from a Jungian perspective. And so, again, I started getting more and more interested in psychology. And that's around the time I started looking to psychedelics. And

it was really a political understanding that inspired me the most, that if you can identify as part of everything, you know, and that that's your core identity and that your other identities of your race or your gender, your nationality, or your religion, those are secondary built on top of this common humanity, which is also linked intimately connected with nature, that that's the antidote to genocide or the antidote to this irrational dehumanizing and otherizing others. And when I looked at what happened with the 60s and with all the psychedelics and how that motivated a lot of people to get involved with the anti-war movement and also with the environmental movement, the women's rights movement, civil rights movement, that it just felt like in a crazy world where we could blow up the whole world with nuclear weapons, or that could be another Hitler or that my own country was now doing these things that really seemed counterproductive and deadly and dangerous. and not helpful. It's just felt like here was a ray of hope.

Psychedelics and the psychedelic consciousness can not only do this connection to spirituality, but can also be used to help us with our own individual issues. And the fact that they were criminalized and wiped out, the research wiped out all over the world. And because at the time, I still thought I was going to go to jail any day and I couldn't have a normal career. I thought, ha, it all comes together.

I can potentially be a psychedelic therapist. I could be an underground psychedelic therapist. I don't need a license for that, and I need psychedelic therapy myself. And I'll just say what other thing would crystallize it for me was that I had a lot of difficult times with my trips. And so I went to the guidance counselor at college. What do you do?

Yeah, go, sorry. Well, what did I mean by difficult? Yeah. Yeah. Well, to give you one of the worst examples, resistance. I was scared to, so, you know, psychedelics are moving in you. They're opening you up. Your logical train of thought is inhibited and you're getting feelings and emotions and

different kind of visual images when your eyes are closed, sometimes when your eyes are open and the sense of being safe enough to surrender control. and I didn't feel safe enough to do that. So one time when I was, at the time also to put this in context, the standard dose of LSD was 250 micrograms, which was a major existential dose. Right now, a lot of the LSD tabs, water tabs are like 60 or 80 micrograms. So this is three or four hitset one time.

And that was just standard what people took. You'd be going through a period of a couple hours where you have a hard time to talk. For those people that love music, one of my absolute favorite albums was by David Crosby, came out during the 60s with people from all the other groups from San Francisco. But the title of the album was, if I could only remember my name. That was a classic psychedelic album. It's terrific. If I could only remember my name by David Crosby.

So that's what some of these experiences were like. And so I felt like I was scared. I couldn't let go. And I had the image of my brain heating up, like a light bulb. You know, there's like a current. And if you resist the current, you know, it lights up. And so I felt like my resistance to all this mental energy was such that my brain was actually melting. And I had this nasal drip at the time.

And I started like thinking, oh, my God, that's my brain coming out of my nose. And I would hear my brain sloshing around. And, you know, I exaggerated, obviously. My brain didn't have milk. But that was the feeling of, you know, one of the worst trips I ever had. That I was. And then what made it even harder is that it was my fault, you know, that I was bad, that I was resisting, that it wasn't from the LSD. LSD doesn't normally do that.

It was my own weaknesses that was causing this terrible situation. to happen. But I felt that I needed to do it. I felt like the 60s idealism had crashed and burned, that we needed to do this inner work to figure out how do we make a better world. And so I kept doing LSD and the experiences kept being more difficult, still with intimations of some beautiful moments. And that's where I went to the guidance counselor at college, at New College of Florida, in Sarasota, Florida. And I said, help me with my trip. And, you know, it was a different era then. and he took me seriously. And he said, this is important what you're doing.

And it's just as important as your class work, maybe even more important, that you really need to be seeing your own instrument. You are your own instrument. And you need to work on your own clarity as well. So that we see the world through our own blinders. The whole scientific method is about getting past our own biases. The beauty of the scientific method is methodologies,

to try to make it so that we can see more closely to what's really there compared to what we want to see. So this guidance counselor gave me a book to read, and this is what sort of sealed my future. Rare guidance counselor. It was so lucky. Well, beyond lucky. The book was Realms of the Human Unconscious Observations from LSD Research by Stan Groff. This was 1972. This is Stan's first book.

It wasn't published until 1975. So the guidance counselor had a manuscript copy directly from Stan. And reading that book is what put it all together for me. And I would still recommend that book, Realms of the Human Unconscious, to people who are looking to understand more about LST psychotherapy. But what Stan was talking about was sort of three basic areas. He could say, you know, your psychodynamics based on stuff that happened when you were alive,

then this birth trauma, this idea of, you know, going from this floating in your mother's womb to going through this traumatic situation of birth, that that kind of imprints things in consciousness. And then beyond that would be the Jungian era that he spoke about, which is sort of archetypes, spirituality, mysticism. things that went beyond our own individual life, but sort of about all humans. And all that he learned about these realms from LSD. And so it had that mystical, spiritual thing, which I thought was fundamental for political reasons, but it also had a scientific overlay because I had already learned to distrust

religious mythologies that, you know, a lot of them are, you know, they make things too concrete. They can be beautiful symbolically, but when they become concrete, then you have to be a little bit more suspicious of them. And then particularly when people say, this is the only one right way and all that. So this was science looking at mysticism and spirituality in a way I felt was trustworthy. But the ultimate thing was that it was about psychotherapy. So it was about a reality check, a practical thing. What do all of these mystical, what do all of these, experiences that you can have, what do they actually do to help people enjoy their lives more,

to have a deeper, richer sense of meaning and purpose? And that that was something, because I think you can get lost in spirituality and lost in mysticism, and where do you bring it back down to earth and to try to practically? So practically. So I thought this was something reliable.

So I wrote a letter to Stan Groff. Now, I'm just a confused 18-year-old, doing LSD and stands in his 40s and his premier MD PhD at Johns Hopkins doing LSD research that was just being shut down. And he wrote me back. That was the amazing thing. And he encouraged me. And he said he was doing a workshop that summer out in California with Joan Halifax,

who he had just been married to. And he invited me to attend, which I did. So I hitchhiked across America in summer of 72, back when people were hitchhiking. Some people have heard about the Rainbow Festival, which is a big gathering. It's kind of a hippie Native American gathering. And I saw signs about it the very first one as I was hitchhiking across America. And so I ended up going to the first Rainbow Festival in Granby, Colorado. I ended up, you know, making my way across the country.

And I took this workshop with Stan. I did a month-long encounter group in the mountains of California, again, trying to work on myself as an instrument. I heard about primal therapy, which was sort of the primal scream about this birth trauma. And so I did a three-week primal intensive. And in the end of all of it, I wasn't where I wanted to be. I wasn't evolved as much as I hoped. I still had all sorts of problems, worries, concerns. I dropped out of college.

You know, I told my parents that school no longer mattered to me, that this inner work mattered, and I wanted to study LSD, and I wanted to drop out of college, and I wanted them to pay for me to study LSD. And to give you a sense of how my parents were, it took him a while, but they eventually decided, yes, they would help me. And what my dad said was that he thought I was a stubborn guy, and that if he, you, didn't help me, I would still try to do that, and it would take me a longer amount of time to realize that it was a mistake. And if he helped me, I would realize it was a mistake sooner. And he said he had a shred of doubt, maybe I knew what I needed to do. So he also validated that. So my parents were willing to help me from age 18 to drop out of college and study LSD.

And so after I did all these things, I went home and lived with my siblings who were going to school, but I just sat around for a couple months. And that's where I realized that I had underestimated the importance of integration. And I think to sort of weave this back to some of your earlier comments about people who said that they had PTSD or depression or so after their LSD or psilocybin experiences, that you really need to spend time integrating it. That's the way that you can process these things. It's not just about the experience at all. In fact, that's a big part of it, but it's even more about what you learn from it,

what you bring back, how you integrate it. And I had had a delusion that the more drugs you take, the faster you take them, the more you'll evolve. And I just really didn't understand that you could end up digging yourself deeper into a hole that way. You really need to integrate what you've learned. And that's what we've totally put into practice in terms of our MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. Lots of emphasis on preparation and integration. The experiences are embedded in a larger psychedelic psychotherapy process, most of the sessions without drugs at all. So I just really didn't understand that.

And finally, I realized that I was so lost in my head about these spirituality, philosophical, worldly things. that I felt like I needed to get grounded. And so that's where I got back. I said, I need to build things, get in the physical world, which basically led to 10 years for me of building houses, building handball courts, of just building things to help me integrate my psychedelic experiences. And it wasn't until I was 28 that I was able to go back to college as a freshman to formally study to be a psychedelic therapist.

Wow. Interesting. Yeah. So that's very rare. You know, it's interesting, Rick, because I think in a sense, I think our story has, I have some interesting parallels with my life to what you describe. And I think this is part of the message that I think our community needs to hear. So, you know, I finished college at the age of 23 after failing a bunch of classes.

And then basically had my parents sort of support me with the goal of becoming a monk. Really? Well, I didn't know that. Yeah. And so I was lucky. because, you know, I didn't have to worry about how I was going to pay for a ticket to India. And I would, you know, fly to India and I'd stay at ashrums or monasteries and study different kinds of meditations. And I think a little bit more on the esoteric, mystical, or spiritual side, where I also had experiences that were, you know, far beyond mindfulness.

And then I sort of started, I started med school at the age of 27. And then it took me about four years to sort of get into med school. And I think a big thing that we hear a lot from this community is that like people feel like they're behind. You know, they're like 23, they're 24. Maybe they dropped out of college. Maybe they, you know, finished college and weren't able to get a job. And I've been trying to explain to them.

And I think your story is a wonderful example of, in my mind, karma, karma. Yeah. That it's such an interesting. confluence of events. You know, it's like, it's so interesting how your, your life, what I'm hearing is like a lot of threads that kind of get woven together. You went to some, you grew up in, in outside of Chicago, went to a school in Florida, it sounds like.

Yeah. Right? So like, like you wind up at a school and you wind up with a guidance counselor. I for the life of me cannot imagine a single guidance counselor I have ever met or ever heard of. When someone, when an 18-year-old comes into your office and says, hey, I'm having like bad trips, they send you straight to like university health services for addictions. No one says, hey, I have a pre-manuscript copy from Stan Groff, who's sort of the eminent researcher on LSD. And this is a book that's not going to be published for years. Take it and

read it. Like the statistical unlikliness of that confluence of events is just such an outlier. Well, I'll say one, yes, very much so. But the college that I chose was an experimental college that had started in the 60s. And it had been created by people who really wanted to do an alternative to traditional education. Interesting. And so what

they said was that the student's curiosity is the most important thing. And therefore, nothing should stand in the way of the student's curiosity. So they designed a school where there was no grades. It was all written evaluations. Heavy emphasis on independent study with professors. You could create your own classes. You get a few of your friends. You say, we want to study this. And you come up with a reading list or so. You talk to a professor. You can get a. credit for that. You had to do a contract for a semester and you passed or failed the whole semester and you negotiate what's in the contract. It can be some classes, some independent studies, some risk. Everybody had to do a senior thesis as well. Now the Honors College of the state of Florida.

But the other thing that I did not know when I applied there, I just was getting tired of being boxed in of requirements and this and that. So the freedom to explore my curiosity was really attracted to me to that school. They sent out stuff to people that did well on the National Merit scores. And so I just got something in the mail from them. I'd never heard about that. But the two things that they did not put in the brochure that I didn't notice when I visited the campus with my father until I got there was that they had a tradition of all-night dance parties with psychedelics until the sunrise. The building was designed by IAMPAY, the famous architect. And it had a courtyard,

pomp court in the middle of the dorms that IMPA had designed where the classrooms were off that he'd also designed somewhere else. And so we would have these all-night parties with psychedelics. And then in the morning, it would go till sunrise. Kind of like

prefiguring raves and things like that. But there was also this sense of the individual doing their own psychedelic experiences, you know, that that was valued. So it was both therapeutic, spiritual, and communal recreational celebratory with psychedelics. That's wild, dude.

Yeah, well, it gets even more. So the swimming pool, it didn't have a lot of facilities. It kind of was a school for the imagination because John Ringling, the Ringling Brothers Circus, was wintering in Sarasota. That was their long, their history there. And so John Ringling's house, which is this massive, beautiful, big party house, now a state of Florida museum, was right next to the campus. And his brother's house, Charles Ringling's house, that was donated to the campus to create the school.

So we had this like party theme, carnival theme, circus theme. But also there was a woman who actually had studied with Jung. Marion Hoppin was her name. And she taught Jungian psychology. And her husband was quite wealthy. and they donated this Olympic-sized swimming pool with a big deck around it, big fences all around it.

And somehow or other, it evolved into a nudist colony. So I was a super shy guy in high school, could barely talk to girls. And now here I am at this nudist colony with all these naked men and women. And it just felt like the underground energies of sex and drugs were sort of brought

to the surface where we could try to deal with them. It felt like an oasis of sanity in a crazy world. And so it's not that unusual that there would be a guidance counselor there that would know about LSD research. What I think is wild is that you described the nudist colony with all night psychedelic parties as the oasis of sanity in a crazy world. Yeah. Well, it just felt that way. So much is repressed. And when you repress stuff, it comes out. warped and distorted. And when you bring that to the surface, you can work with it. You can see it's just, yeah, it did feel like this oasis of sanity that we, that we,

and the campus police, their job was to protect us from the real police, from the city police. And so, just to give you an example again, they had two lists of where people were, when, when parents would call or people would come and say, you know, where's this, where's my son or daughter? You know, what room are they in? So they had the list at the police, the cop shop we called it. They had the list of where the rooms were that people were assigned to live in. But then they had another list of where people were actually living. You know, you could move in with your girlfriend or you could do all these different kind of things on campus. It was just astonishing. So it, and there was this general sense. that, you know, the young people are leading the revolution.

We're doing this psychedelic stuff. And, you know, the older people are, you know, repressing. And so it did feel like an oasis of sanity. And so I just would not be who I am without that particular college experience. Wow. Dude, that's wild, man. Thank you so much for sharing that. Yeah.

Now, I also, I got a question for you, which is, how did you decide not to become a monk? So you go to meditate, you're doing all these things. What made you turn away from that path? So in a sense, I didn't turn away. So what I real, a couple of things. One is I met my wife and fell in love and was conflicted for a while. And so it's funny because I sort of talk about it like I met her at the end. I actually, so as soon as I tried to become a monk.

So when I was 21 years old, I went to my teachers after one summer. So I had had a pretty amazing summer where I started to practice some. pretty intensive meditation. And what I loved about it is that I had some spiritual experiences. And so I was always sort of a curious kid, was always a skeptical kid. But when you have experiences of, you know, connectedness or other, I mean, it's hard to describe, but you start to experience sensations and experiences that are different from your day-to-day existence. So a good example, of this is like, sometimes I'll ask people where their thoughts are localized in space. And I think if you really pay attention, you'll learn that your thoughts are localized, actually

somewhere around the space of your head. But we don't think about our thoughts as being around our head until you haven't like something like an out-of-body experience where your existence is outside of your physical being. And then once you step outside of your physical being, then you realize, oh, there's actually like a layer on top. So I had these kinds of experiences which were really fascinating and I loved them. But really a lot of my deciding to become a monk, so I went to my teachers and I said, hey, I want to take my vows. And at the age of 21, I want to become a monk.

And they said, we're thrilled that you want to do this fantastic. Go finish your education. Go get a doctoral degree. And then if you're still interested at the age of 30, we'll take you. And so I think they sort of recognized that I was passing. and that it was sort of a decision that was made from the wrong places. And what I realized is that my decision to become a monk was actually out of like ego. I had failed at life.

I sucked at it. I knew I was smart. I was the son of two doctors. And they had everyone expected so much from me. And I expected a lot for myself. And so I found myself underperforming compared to people who I was better than. And that was really hard for me. And so what I realized is that I'm going to devalue everything that I'm bad at.

And I'm going to become spiritual as opposed to materialistic. I'm not going to care about going and becoming a doctor. And I'm going to rise above all of that. I'm going to be better and all that. But really, it was like a very deep rooted spiritual ego, which I think is very present. Like in a lot of spirituality, there's so much underground ego. Look at how spiritual. I am. And it's really bizarre. And so I realized that I don't need to become a monk. That actually,

ultimately becoming a monk is not about wearing a particular thing or living in a particular place. It's all about the quality of your internal experience. And that being a monk is about attitude. It's about paying attention to what's within. Whether you're doing external things or not, it's completely irrelevant. And so, you know, I think it was strange for a while because I would do things like sleep on the floor and stuff because I didn't care. And then my wife cares about nice things. So she would get nice things. And I would learn to appreciate those and also learn that like it doesn't matter whether

you sleep in a nice bed or on the floor. And like you're just like being a monk is entirely internal. It's nothing on the outside. And so ultimately that's why I realized that it was it was kind of false. And then I was in love and I was conflicted. And then I realized actually that like, that was also a division that I didn't I could I could love her and be with her and that that was part of my karma and I could also continue my internal spiritual journey which is what I've done so that's kind of how I decided wow now I have a monk story I'd like to share it seems very probably now so this is one of the experiences that where I took MDMA by myself camping out in nature this was now in in 1985.

And I had gotten to know a Christian monk, Brother David Steindlerost. And I would encourage people to check him out. He's written one book was called The Gratitude is the Heart of Prayer. There's something from Brother David Steindlerost on YouTube. I think it's like a three-minute meditation about gratitude. Like today, it's a beautiful, beautiful thing. But he was also ecumenical. He was very much, even though he was Roman Catholic, he was very mystical.

He didn't see that in only those ways. And also, I met him in 1982 when I went to, when I first went back to college at age 28, but I started, my first semester was at Essela Institute in Big Sur with Stan Groff on a month-long workshop called The Mystical Quest. He was one of the teachers. That's where I also learned about MDMA. Later on, in 83 and 84, I had given him MDM. He expressed an interest in doing MDMA in half doses in the monastery as a tool to aid meditation.

And he found that it was very helpful. And when we sued the DEA in 84 to try to keep MDMA legal as a medicine, there started to be some publicity. And in the beginning of 85 Newsweek did an article, the first major media article on MDMA. And it quoted me, but it also quoted Brother David. And he said that he described his experience doing MDMA as a tool for meditation. And he said that it produced the same enlightened attitude that a monk had spent 30 years trying to meditate to achieve, which is an incredible statement, the quietness that you can get. So I took MDMA one time shortly after this article came out. I was camping out.

It was just this beautiful, beautiful spot right at the beach. beaches at the edge of the Pacific. The mountains came down right behind me. There was some boulders out in the ocean so that the high tide came around me, but I was protected from the high tide. There was a freshwater stream right nearby. And it was a safe protected spot that I knew really well. And so I decided that I would take MDMA there. And I was not in a relationship at the time. and I was thinking, I wonder why would somebody want to be a monk? You know, what's the, you know, and why would somebody want to be celibate? And I also was wondering, how do I do what I want to do and not get busted by the DEA as well?

So under the influence of MDMA, you know, it's not visual like LSD or psilocybin, but there's a big tree there. And I was sort of projecting images on the tree. And the tree was like the DEA looking at me. and how do I stay safe? And I came up with this strategy, basically, which has served me well, I think, which is that the DEA is always looking at what's under the rock, you know, what's hidden.

But a lot of times you just come straight at them, even if you're criticizing them, ironically, that can be safer. You know, you're just coming right at them. So then I started thinking about Brother David and why would somebody want to be celebrate and why would somebody want to be a monk? And I was thinking about that for a while.

And then I just felt like the roar, of the ocean, the waves of the ocean, the ocean was so enormous. And then the sky, the Milky Way, and the sky was just incredible. And it just felt like I was perched on the edge of the world, which I really was in a sense. And I started thinking, I might just disappear. You know, what is keeping me here? I mean, the universe is so vast. And I felt like I was dissolving into the universe and there was that beautiful aspect of that. But then after a while, I realized I'm still here. You know, what's keeping me here? And then I started thinking about gravity, that somehow or other, I had this image of gravity as the arms of a lover, that I was

cradled in the arms of gravity and that that was keeping me together. That's what, made things adhere instead of just dissipate into everything. And I felt gravity as warm as an embrace, as an embrace of a lover. And I thought, aha, this is what the monk and celibacy is about, that you're supposed to feel that kind of love for the universe. If you focus it on a specific person, maybe that makes it harder to transfer it to that same kind of warmth, the universe.

And so once I felt that, after that experience, I never have felt as lonely as I have before because I feel like there's this love woven into the universe. But then once I realized that I was cradled in the arms of gravity and that this was kind of what the monastic life was in part about, I said, great. Now I don't have to be a monk. Yeah. Now I can have a real lover as well as the gravity as a lover. Now, 30 years after that, I was at a conference and Brother David was one of the speakers.

And he was sitting next to me at dinner. I purposely went to sit next to him at dinner. And we kept in touch over the years. But I had never spoken to him about this experience. And I said, Brother David, I just want to share with you this experience, the most mystical experience really of my whole life. And you were connected to it. and I'm wondering just what you might think about it. And so I told him the story and I told him about, you know,

cradled in the arms of gravity. And he just was silent for a very short time. And he said, every day I think about gravity. Every day. I think about gravity every day. And he reaffirmed that sense that gravity and this kind of is a force of love. So I felt that it took. 30 years for me to kind of get that affirmation from him that that was the case. And so I feel

like that was one of the pivotal experiences of my life. Wow. That on the beach. Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing. Rick. This has been amazing. I think I know you have to get going in about 15 minutes. So I'm kind of curious. I think I've got a couple of questions or directions. One is, well, one thing I just want to reinforce this point. So the first thing is like for people who feel like they're behind, I think, Rick, you're a wonderful example of like, you know, don't compare yourself to someone else's journey.

And even this last story that you told is like, even, you know, the ending to this particular experience happens 30 years later. Yes, exactly. You know, and so what I'm really hearing from you and what I want people to really take away is like what I've experienced in my life, which is that you're not living, anyone else's life, you're living your own. So don't judge your life by what other people are doing

or things like that because it sounds like you started college at the age of 28 and then built up this organization where now, you know, I mean, MAPS is really an amazing organization. Yeah. Well, I started college at 17 and then dropped out at 18 for 10 years. And then went back as a college freshman at age 28. Yeah. Yeah, it's crazy. So I just wanted to kind of- I've not wanted to do it any differently. I mean, it was really the right thing for me. And I think the lesson you're trying to pull out of it is really right, is that you're on your own timetable and you don't have to compare with, you know,

what's right for somebody else might not be what's right for you. And, you know, the other sort of aspect of this is, and I'm not quite sure where you were and your wife are with children. But, you know, my wife and I, we've had three children, but they've all two, of them are on their own. One of them is still in college. But when you have little kids, you end up, you know, it just seems like it's going to go on forever. Looking forward, you know, it's like it's never going to change. You're always going to have your kids at home. But when they're gone and you look back, it's like a heartbeat. Where did those 18, 20 years go? Yeah. So what I want to say from

that is that to have a 20-year plan or a 30-year plan is not really that long. You know, before you know it, the future will have arrived. So also chart your own way, don't feel that you're behind others, but also you can have a very long-term plan. And I think a lot of people don't do that. And then you don't plant the seeds that can later blossom all these years later. So that's the mistake people make as, oh, you know, I've got to think in a more short-term chunks. Rick, you may not understand what I'm about to say, but I think it's illustrative. So what I'm

hearing from you is that you're a late game carry. Yeah. And so I don't know exactly how you mean that, but the, yeah, late bloomer is sort of how I see myself. Yeah. Right. So I love the way that you kind of think about it. And I think the problem is that everyone wants to be like early game focused. And they don't recognize that you can sow all these seeds and these, you know, nudist colony all night parties are soda foundation. along with, you know, an incredible work ethic and parents who sort of acknowledge that you're probably wrong, but still held enough faith and enough humility to kind of give you a chance. And then also that I sort of see the forces of karma kind of supporting you.

It's not quite as active as I'm making it sound. Well, I would say in karma to the sense, so I'll just share that I had a dream. This is what I think is my karma. The dream was, many people have seen 2001 space ice. The movie by Stanley Kubrick. And near the end of the movie, there's the scene where the astronaut is in an all-white room. He's on his deathbed. This is right before the birth of the star child.

So in the dream, and this is in my middle 20s, so this is after I decided to focus my life on psychedelics. But I remember this dream like it was just last night. So there's a person on a deathbed. The room is all white. And the fellow tells me a story. The story is that he was. miraculously saved. He almost was killed, but he was miraculously saved, and he knew he was saved for a purpose,

but he didn't know what the purpose was. And then he says to me, let me show you how I almost died. And it turned out that the scene now, all of a sudden, we're out of this all white room. We're at the edge of town. It's somewhere Russia, Poland, something like that. There's thousands of Jews that are lined up in front of this big mass grave, a bunch of Germans, they machine gun them all. They're pushed into this mass grave.

They throw some dirt over it. And this guy is wounded but not killed. And then it sort of switched a little bit into like a Jesus story where he was buried for three days and then he was resurrected sort of. So he sort of climbs his and I'm with him in the dirt underground seeing this whole thing. And then he kind of comes to and he claws his way up and he gets end up somehow or they knew where the up was. And he gets onto the dirt out of that. And there's nobody there. it was at the edge of town. He runs into the woods. He works with the partisans until the end of the war. And then he said, that's how I was almost safe. So now we're back in the all white room. He's on his deathbed. And he said, now I know what my purpose was. I know why I was saved from that. I know what my purpose is. And I'm like, oh, what did you learn? He said, my purpose is to tell you to study psychedelics. And that that's going to be the sense of mystical connection is going to be the antidote to genocide.

And in my head, I'm thinking, oh, okay, I've already decided that. This is a heavy thing. You're trying to lay on me, you know, that you want to pass this thing on so you can die in peace. And in my mind, I'm saying, okay, I already did decide that. So I will accept that. I said, okay, you can lay that on me. I will do that. And then he died.

And then I walk out of this white room. I watched him die. I walk out of the right room. And all of a sudden, I'm in the middle of a forest. And then I go down, there's a little stream. And so I'm sitting in front of the stream. I'd read a lot of Herman Hessa and this, Sadartha. So I'm like watching the stream go by.

And all of a sudden I realize there's a young boy sitting next to me, and about 10 years old or so. And then I realize I know this boy. I know his father. And his father is a friend of mine. And at the time, I had a large stash of LSD that I was scared to getting busted. So I'd asked his father if he would store my LSD stash at his house in his freezer. And his father had said yes. So once I connected this little boy in the dream to LSD,

then it all made sense. Then I woke up. So I feel that the karma for me is this, all these people that died because they were dehumanized, because people were motivated by fears and anxieties, that one of the many strategies that can be helpful for that is this kind of helping people understand how we're all connected and helping people work through their own fears and anxiety so that they're not so easily manipulated by them. Yeah. So, Rick, that's a great segue. I think to an important question is that we get a lot of people in our community who are

wondering, okay, so they've heard your amazing story, right? And I think a lot of people, you know, feel directionless, feel a little bit broken, have insecurities and anxieties of their own. and want to partake in what you're describing. So, and I struggle with this too. It's interesting. I actually have a patient who has treatment refractory depression, who I'm trying to figure out how can I help this person?

Because I do think that it's not like a neurochemical imbalance or something. I really do think that their depression is more spiritual in nature. So what do people do who are interested in this kind of healing? Because as a medical doctor, you know, I certainly. won't and really can't recommend it right now. And so, but what do people do? Like, so we do get questions about, you know, I want to, like, figure out what my purpose is. I want to feel less insecure.

I want to heal on a spiritual level. What should they do? Well, first off, you can recommend ketamine to people. Ketamine is a medicine for refractory depression. Sometimes it does help people have spiritual experiences. I think the first thing, and we sort of talked about this earlier, is that what's legal and what's moral are two different things. So everybody has to decide for themselves. To what extent are you going to respect certain laws and to what extent are you not going to?

So, you know, that's for each person to decide for themselves. What risks are you willing to take? One of the incredible things about Stan that I think, Stan Graff, that was so remarkable, when psychedelics were criminalized. A lot of people who had been psychedelic research said, okay, it's taken out of our hands. Let's explore meditation. Let's explore other things. And some of even like, we don't need psychedelics anymore. You know, there's other ways to get there, which is true. There are other ways to get there. But what Stan did was to see that that kind of non-ordinary state of consciousness that was produced by psychedelics was very valuable.

And he developed an approach called the holotropic breathwork, which is hyperventive. ventilation with support in groups to let these deeper experiences come out. So anybody legally, anywhere, can look for holotropic breathwork practitioners. And there's quite a few hundreds that have been trained around the country and around the world even more that practice holotropic breathwork or other kinds of therapies. So people can go to therapies. I think that there's, it's a very small place, but it's called peyote way Church of God. And you can go on an individual vision quest with peyote. You know, they're part of the Native American church.

They've got a legal context for it. You know, you know, it's not that big, but they have a set up for people to take peyote and wander off, you know, in a special place where they're camping. You can also look for ayahuasca churches in America. There's quite a lot of ayahuasca experiences that the two churches, Uynao de Vegetal and Santo Dami are legal, but, you know, most of the Iwaska circles are not exactly in those kind of settings, but you could try those. But I also think that there are a lot that can be done with close friends, you know, a lot of peer support. So because, you know, at college,

we had this all-night dance parties, what MAPS is doing, on the one hand, it's mostly drug development, MDMA assisted psychotherapy for PTSD through the FDA, but we also have what we call the Zendo project, which is psychedelic harm reduction for people who have difficult trips that take it outside of medical context. How do we help them? So we train all sorts of people in this. So people could look at the Maps.org website and we have training materials about Zendo, how you help somebody with difficult trips. We also have what's called the treatment manual for our MDMA assisted psychotherapy for PTSD. So, you know, you You go to the research menu bar, MDMA, near the bottom of it.

It's called treatment manual. That explains how our therapeutic approach is done, and you can practice it on your own with your friends sitting for you. Or you can sit for your friends. I think that it's difficult, you know, to find ways to channel that interest at a time where we still are living under prohibition. You know, Denver has made the mushrooms the lowest enforcement priority. So now has Oakland.

So as Ann Arbor. There's the Oregon psilocybin initiative that's going to be on the ballot. So there are more opportunities for people to go to certain areas and have these experiences. You can go to the Netherlands, Amsterdam for mushroom experiences. There are all sorts of people that bring groups there. There's going to South America for ayahuasca. Personally, I prefer things in my own cultural context. But, you know, some people really like going into these other contexts.

I think that what you can do, is study humanistic and transpersonal psychology. Transpersonal psychology is sort of beyond the person. It's what we share in common. And it does have a lot to do with these kind of spiritual, mystical states. But it also has a lot to do with, you know, just regular psychodynamics and what's the root of a lot of the problems. And I think that there are going to be over the next couple of years. We're hoping now, we anticipate that if our research continues to go well, sometime in early 2023, we should have MDMA assisted psychotherapy approved for PTSD as a prescription drug. The people working with psilocybin are thinking maybe the end of 20203,

2024, they'll have psilocybin approved. We'll be setting up all these psychedelic clinics, and the therapists all want to be cross-trained. They don't want to be an MDMA therapist or a psilocybin therapist or ketamine therapists, they want to be a therapist that knows all these different modalities. We're really trying to bring in a new field of psychedelic psychotherapy, where the psychedelic psychotherapists have the range of psychedelics available to them, and they customize the treatments according to the individual. I think people who are struggling now, it's difficult. One way to look at it is clinical trials.gov. If you go to clinical trials.gov, If you go to clinical trials.gov,

pharmaceutical companies, sponsors have to list their studies there. And you can put in drug and condition. And you can see what studies are available that you could maybe volunteer for. There are even studies, some of them that need healthy volunteers, where you can volunteer and get psilocybin or MDMA, you know, as part of the control groups or something. Interesting. So I think there's opportunities for people,

but many of them, if they are involving psychedelics, are going to be against the law. And so that's really up to each individual's moral compass, what they feel about that. But also I would say to people, don't give up hope. You know, the things are coming around. The things are changing and there will be increasing opportunities. And the other big thing, I'll say, is dreams.

You know, we tend to undervalue dreams. Dreams are incredible tools. Freud called them the Royal Road to the Unconscious. You know, Jung did all sorts of stuff about his. dreams. You know, I just described to you one of the most important dreams in my whole life that's really influenced me, my sense of karma, what I've been passed on through my forebears in a sense. So I think people can spend a lot of time just focus on your dreams. And if you don't remember them in the morning, just have a dream journal. You write that down. And even if you write

down, I dream nothing. You know, over time, you'll get better and better. You'll remember more. and that can be a powerful tool for you to work on psychodynamic issues. Yeah, thank you so much for kind of offering that perspective. I think, you know, just one or two thoughts that I kind of have. One is that I think holotropic breathwork is pretty interesting. I think it has a lot of roots actually in Kundalini Browniam. And so I actually sort of steer clear of holotropic breathwork because I think sometimes it can have, I think it needs to be done with the right kind of setting.

It can bring stuff to the surface the same way that's like that teleg experiences. Yep. Yeah. And so when I was studying Kundalini yoga myself, I mean, it was done in isolation, actually, precisely for that reason. So like you're done, it's done with a guru and like it's very intensive. And what my teachers told me is that it's kind of playing with fire and it can be powerful and transformative. And it can also really kind of mess you up if you, until you learn how to integrate it. I mean, the interesting thing is in either case, the experience.

is powerful. It's really, I really like your emphasis on integration afterward. It's, it's when you kind of talk it through or work it through with a, with a guru that really, I think you can really change. One other thought that, that I kind of just want to share is that, you know, I had some realization, I don't know if this is entirely true of psychedelics, but I think it's sort of theoretically true, that if you think about chemical substances, they don't really change our brain. Really, what they do is activate it. Right. So you look at, any compound and what it serves as an activator. Like, if you think about marijuana, there are endogenous cannabinoids.

They're endogenous opioids. I don't know necessarily that there are what we would call endogenous psychedelic compounds. But it's been my understanding and what my teachers have told me is that essentially, you know, if you take, if you use something like MDMA, like this monk that you mentioned sort of said that 30 years of dedication, you can achieve that in one moment with MDMA. And I think that that's true. I think that the interesting thing about meditation is that, you know, you sort of learn how to cultivate a particular branch of spiritual experience.

And my experience or my understanding has been that in psychedelics, you know, different compounds will lead to generally speaking different kinds of experiences. But when you take a substance, you don't really know what you're signing up for. Exactly. Well, Stan Groff has talked. about LSD as a non-specific amplifier of the unconscious, which means that you don't know what's going to come up and your conscious mind can't predict it. You could even have a list of all the things that you want to deal with during this session and what emerges may be completely different.

Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, so I know you've got to run. Well, I do have a bit more time. So I think, you know, another 10, 15 minutes. I mean, I think, Rick, the richest, the best part of this, I think has been your stories, bro. Like, I think, I think hearing your stories has been, has been eye opening, man. It's such an interesting background, and it's so interesting because I, you know, I had envisioned you as, you know, this PhD who had done research and, and just to hear a little bit about your life has been amazing. Okay.

Well, I have, too, another story, I think that. Yeah. And so this comes up with Maps of Strategies. So this is where I really, so this is a story of two days, one day where I did DMT, the next day, ketamine. And so, again, back in 1985. So this is, you know, 35 years ago, but really maps a strategy evolved from that, in a sense, from those experiences. And what I mean by our strategy is, on the one hand is drug development. On the other hand, is drug policy reform and trying to work on what's called mass mental health.

that we want to help people that are suffering first. That's the doorway into a frightened culture that's been scared about psychedelics, that has a lot of misinformation, that that is the opening wedge, you could say, medicalizing, but that we all need this kind of mission, purpose, meaning, and healing and growth, even if we don't have a clinical diagnosis. So masses had this parallel strategy. And so where that sort of came from was these two experiences also took place at Esselin. And this was with the groups of people that were gathering to try to figure out how to protect the use of MDMA as a therapeutic drug.

So one day we did DMT. This was with Terrence McKenna, Ralph Metzner, a bunch of other people that were very experienced. I had never done DMT. And so the way we did it was there was about eight of us sitting in a room. And one person would smoke the DMT. It takes around 10 minutes. You just lie back and you have this experience. And then you come back and you share a little bit with the other people about what happened.

So this is the integration part. And then you pass the pipe to the next person. And then they do it. And then each person in sequence will have this DMT experience. And so for me, the DMT, which I'd never taken before, it's very powerful. Now, it's the main active ingredient in ayahuasca, but when you take it in oral form,

it comes on slower, it lasts longer. When you smoke it, it's about a 10-minute experience. And so the first thing that I experienced was just you smoke it, you sort of fall back. I just felt there's a line. There was just like a horizontal line. And then there was a vertical line. and then it turned red.

It was a color. And then it started assembling in cubes. So it became kind of three-dimensional. And then it rapidly turned into like an MC Escher kind of drawing where the dimensions didn't quite work. And then I was blasted into sort of the universe. And all of that is like fraction of a second. But, you know, this was the progression of it.

And so then I felt like I was part of creation, part of this big bang. And at one point I had this thought, which is amazing in a way that you can still be thinking, even though your normal orientation is not there, that in the most inner parts of myself, and you talk to this about where are your thoughts located, you know, and you're saying it's around your head,

but I thought inside my head where I talk to myself, where I think, I'm using words, and I didn't invent these words. You know, in the most private part of me, It's from millions of people that have developed the English language, that have developed language, that all of this might. So the part that I think is the most private in a way is not actually the most private. It's intimately connected with everything that's come before. And so I felt like more and more, it was just this beautiful thought of this whole long stream

of evolution. I'm part of everything. And it just felt great. But then I had this thought, which, you know, I've learned not to disregard these thoughts. But the thought I had was if you're part of everything and everything's part of you, then Hitler is part of you too. It's not Hitler out there. I'm all good. The bad is out there.

Hitler is part of me too. I have to own that. And that was just such a shattering thought that it just really brought me down. And I felt like there's a logic to it. I can't deny it, this inner Hitler. And so it just deprecate. press me, you could say. And the whole rest of the day, you know, we went through, I told my story, we went through the rest of the other people's stories. But the whole rest of the day, I was just

really wrestling with this thought that there's this touchpoint where a part of me is Hitler too, that I can't really disown that. It was very kind of a somber day. So the next evening, we decided that we would do ketamine. And this was intramuscular, 100 milligrams, ketamine, this lasts differently. It lasts about an hour. So we didn't, we all did it more simultaneously. We, we didn't want to, you know, one person sit there while they would go out for an hour and come back. All right. So during this experience of ketamine, somehow or other, I was into a different space. I was above and behind Hitler as he was giving a speech to a mass race. rally. And I'm thinking, okay, Hitler's part of me. I'm Potter of Hitler. How do I get inside

this part of my head or how do I get inside his head to see about healing this murderous nature of what he's doing? How do I, you know, do this? And so that got me really scared. Like, I have to psych this guy out. I have to figure out what's going on. And the more than I saw him do these speeches, this particular speech. And then I got this sense, a whole different sense I'd never thought of about the Heil Hitler salute, the way it was Heil Hitler,

and then everybody would do it back to him. And it felt like this power from the one to the many, so that he was doing this salute, and then they would all do it back to him. So it was like, he would push out this energy, and then they would all give their energy back to him. And then he would do it again, and then they would do it again.

And it felt like this vibration that was getting stronger and stronger, that was increasing this kind of connection between, you know, they're all giving his power to him. And I start thinking, this is terrifying. And I felt like I might freak out. And I had this image then of bubbles that were like air bubbles that were coming to the surface, but these were fear bubbles. And if these fear bubbles broke the surface, then I would panic and I wouldn't be able to really deal with it.

And one of the good things about ketamine is that it doesn't interfere with your respiration. That's why it's such a good anesthetic drug. So I had that thought, breathe, breathe. If you just breathe, maybe you'll be able to not panic so much. So I was able to breathe and I didn't panic. And then I got this thought that there is no way to get inside of Hitler's head. He's getting so much out of it. you know, that the same way for psychedelic therapy is that people have to be willing to face things, that they're the ones that are doing the healing.

They're the ones that are doing the hard work. You create a safe and supportive setting and you prepare them. But in the end, the therapist is not the magician that's making everything happen. It's the person healing themselves and they have to be willing. And so I realized that he wasn't willing. There was no way that I, from the outside, you know, he ended up committing suicide, not having any kind of change even after all of Germany was, you know, destroyed and so many people were died. So I realized, though, that the long-term strategy has to be all of those people that were giving away their power to Hiller.

They get a lot less out of it. So that that's why we need mass mental health. that the strategy for maps, the strategy that I'm trying to put forward is how do we help all these people who are giving away their power to dictators or authoritarian or, you know, we see this a lot in America to, people that are giving away their rationality and their power. We have to, it's going to be easier to help each one of them work through their traumas and fears so that they don't give away their power. So ironically, rather than changing one person, it's changing 50 million people.

or more. And so that's where MAPS's strategy has been that the medicalization is a tool for a larger change in consciousness that can only come from embedding this kind of new awareness in millions and billions of people, which then need drug policy reform as well as drug development. So most of the nonprofit or for-profit psychedelic companies, are about drug development. They're about training other therapists, treating people, and doing research. And so the difference between MAPS and them is that we are really about mass mental health

and going beyond just working with people that have a diagnosis to try to spiritualize humanity as a whole. Yeah, that's great. You know, it's funny. So someone a couple months ago mentioned that what we do at Healthy Game, is something called AOE healing. And AOE means area of effect. And so the implication is it's actually, I think it aligns perfectly with mass mental health.

So I mean, a big part of our mission and what we do is exactly what you described. It's sort of the idea that, you know, we think that we can try to understand ourselves better as individuals. And the reason that we have these interviews is so that one person can share their experience, right? and then that your experience goes out and affects a ton of people. And then those people create changes in their life, which I think definitely does feedback to you, or at least to me.

We had a pretty traumatic suicide in our community a couple of months ago. And, you know, I think it was hard on me, but I think it was really interesting to feel everyone's energy and support. and how at the end of the day, it's like we're all on the same team. And we have to support each other. And I'm with you 100% about sort of fixing each individual person kind of one at a time. But that's how you create a mass.

You sort of, I mean, it's a beautiful way to put it. I think it aligns perfectly with what we've evolved into because that's what Healthy Gamer has become. It's become a community of somewhere between 30 and 20, 250,000 people, depending on which metric you use. And, you know, we really try to support each other. And we try to work on ourselves. And we work on ourselves together.

Even the way that you kind of described the DMT process, like we have a, you know, a community like our Discord server where people come and sort of share their individual take on things. And then we kind of go around and people will share their own take on a particular subject. We had like this particular channel that was devoted to ego So people come in and they talk about okay What's my ego telling me to do? How do I understand my ego? How does my ego interfere with things? And one of the things that I love about Hearing these communities and in our groups is that it's really hard to see your problems in you

Because of cognitive bias. It's way easier to see your problem in someone else And you can learn so much when somebody else is talking about the same thing that you can, that you struggle with. And you're like, oh, wow, that's exactly what I do. And it's so much clearer when you're kind of working together with a group of people and when you kind of integrate different people's perspectives, you can learn so much more. So it's amazing. And I don't want to say one thing about ego, too, which is a couple of times I've used

the word ego death, but I've mostly used ego dissolution. But I think ego death gives people the very wrong impression. And so we need our ego. We just need our ego to be in the proper place. So the metaphor is that, well, Stan Graf has said that the psychedelics are to the study of the mind, what the microscope is to biology and the telescope is to astronomy. And so, you know, at times the telescope has produced knowledge that was very dangerous. And this was for the status quo. So this was in the time of Copernicus, Galileo, and all.

And so what we thought at the time or what people thought at the time that the earth was the center of the universe and that everything revolved around that. And as it turned out, that's not the case. That we revolve, the earth revolves around the sun. The sun is just the minor part of this galaxy. There's billions of galaxies. And I think the same thing is true of the ego is that we think everything revolves around us, but that actually there's the bigger self, the bigger world.

we need to put the ego in its place. But we need to pay attention to our own ego. We are bounded by life and death. We are individuals. To be egos, to not pay attention to that is also not paying attention to a key part of reality, which is that we are real human beings and we have to take care of ourselves and to take care of each other. So what Stan has also said is that the ego becomes transparent to the transcendent.

it's like cleaning the window, but the window doesn't go away. The window protects from various things. So I just think that you could get very punitive in this idea that I got to have no ego. Yeah, that's really important, too. That's where I think you get that spiritual ego that you see a lot in spiritual circles, the ego of having no ego. Look at how egoless I am. Yeah. And so I'm with you, and I think sort of there's so much that I could kind of relate to what you've said in Sanskrit and sort of yogic traditions. You know, and I'll just leave you with two or three, like, I think, the most relevant things. The first is that, you know, the yogis also say ego is a

function of mind just like emotions or intellect. It's just about who's in control. Is the ego in control of you or are you in control of the ego? The second thing that I kind of, it's interesting. So there's, there are four maha vacayas, which are like great phrases. And, And I think these are sort of the essence of what a lot of yogis understood. And one of them is Ahambramasmi, which means I am the universe. And I think this is very poorly understood because I think people sort of assume that this is kind of like a yoga calendar sort of concept. It's like I am like, you know, we're all connected. Like it's not an intellectual or philosophical concept.

Ahambramasmi is the experience that you are Hitler and Hitler is you. and that like is is terrifying as that is that is essentially there is some kind of underlying unity which Carl Jung talks about which you know people who have psychedelic experiences talk about and the yogis talk about which is that the self and the other that there is Atman which is individual soul and baramatman which is universal soul and that essentially like there's one ocean and you can pull a drop out and is the drop no longer the ocean is it a separate thing what happens to the drop? as it goes back into the ocean, you know, and so like Ahambramasmi is like the main thing that when I sort of do meditative practices on Ahambramasmi, I think I have experiences somewhat like

what you describe. But it's interesting that there's so much overlap between like Eastern mysticism and a lot of what you're describing. Yeah, I guess I'd like to go back just for a second and then I do have to go, which is to the sadness that you said about the person that committed suicide that was part of the community. And this isn't just about that person, but, but I think a lot of times what happens is people lose the connection to the whole. They feel so isolated and alone that life is unbearable. But, but they, they have somehow lost that touch with the bigger, like, you know, cradled in the arms of gravity or that kind of love that permeates the universe, or even being part of something bigger, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, I think,

think that experience can help people as an antidote to suicide. Yeah, that's been my experience that a lot of people who feel suicidal, ultimately what they feel the most profoundly is alone. Yes. Isolated. And it's interesting as a mental health provider to see what works for suicide and what doesn't. And I mean, I think that's a conversation maybe for a different day. But Rick, I know you've got to get going. Thank you so much for coming. Thank you for having. It's been a wonderful discussion. Yeah, thanks a lot.

I did not know that you wanted to be a monk. Yeah. And so it's interesting. Thanks to the wise monks and your wife that talked to you out of it. Well, take care, Rick. And best of luck with everything. And thank you so much for all the work that you're doing and all the wonderful work that Maps is doing.

Take care. If people want to participate, just learn more atmaps.org. Yeah, perfect. We'll send that out. Take care. Bye.