HealthyGamerGG - The Link Between Psychedelics and Spiritual Experiences ft. Dr. Hsu

Episode Date: April 7, 2026

In this episode, Dr. K is joined by psychiatrist Dr. Michael Hsu to explore the intersection of faith, psychedelics, and mental health. They discuss whether our brains act as "antennas" for a non-material world and how spiritual experiences can be a profound catalyst for healingWhat to expect in this episode: A Journey from Skepticism: Dr. Hsu shares his personal story of growing up as an atheist and how a mystical experience at his lowest point saved him from suicide and led him toward a life of faith The Spiritual Antenna: A look at the theory that the brain is an organ of perception capable of "tuning in" to spiritual realms, and how psychedelics might artificially activate these receptors Psychedelics vs. Religious Visions: An analysis of whether drug-induced experiences and religious visions are phenomenologically the same, and the importance of neutrality and safety in psychedelic therapy Encountering "Machine Elves": Why DMT users globally report consistent encounters with the same mechanical beings, and what this suggests about the shared nature of human perception The Problem with Pathologizing: Why the field of psychiatry often incorrectly labels spiritual experiences as "psychosis" and how this can lead to missed opportunities for healing The Need for Meaning: Why science is excellent at explaining "how" things work but often fails to address the human need for "why" and the purpose of existence Embracing Mystery: An introduction to "negative capability"—the ability to remain in uncertainty and doubt without reaching for absolute, rigid answers The Value of Community: How the social connectedness found in religious traditions acts as a major protective factor against the modern epidemic of isolation Something sexy is coming to HG! Join the waitlist: https://bit.ly/3PGdmUAHG Coaching : https://bit.ly/46bIkdo Dr. K's Guide to Mental Health: https://bit.ly/44z3SztHG Memberships : https://bit.ly/3TNoMVf Products & Services : https://bit.ly/44kz7x0 HealthyGamer.GG: https://bit.ly/3ZOopgQ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, chat, welcome to the Healthy Gamer Gigi podcast. I'm Dr. Al-Alo Kanoja, but you can call me Dr. K. I'm a psychiatrist, gamer, and co-founder of Healthy Gamer. On this podcast, we explore mental health and life in the digital age, breaking down big ideas to help you better understand yourself and the world around you. So let's dive right in. All righty, chat. Let's get started.

Welcome to another Healthy Gamer Gigi stream. My name is Dr. Alok Kanoja. Just a reminder that even though I'm a medical, doctor, nothing we discuss on stream, is intended to be taken as medical advice. Everything is for educational or entertainment purposes only. If you all have a medical concern or question, please go see a licensed professional. I will also be joined by the illustrious Dr. Michael Schu today, who is also a medical doctor, but nothing he is going to say today will constitute medical advice. We're just going to be two psychiatrists talking about faith, mental health, and

psychedelics. So if you all have, you know, questions that are specific to your mental health or physical health needs, please go see a licensed professional. Yeah, so like Dr. Shue and I go back a couple years now. Y'all may have remembered, I think he came on to talk about maybe marijuana addiction a couple of years ago. And so he's like we were talking about this. We met up about a year ago and we were just like having your conversation about it. And I was like, oh, this would be like fantastic on stream.

So he's been kind enough to join us again. before we jump in, though, just wanted to let you all know. So not everyone is aware we have a coaching program. So I know it sounds kind of insane. So we talked about, like, you know, seeing a mental health professional or a health professional if you guys have physical or mental health problems, diagnoses, things like that. But one of the reasons that I sort of stepped away from full-time clinical work and started doing work like this is because I was seeing that a lot of my patients, like, needed help in ways

that are not necessarily therapy. We as therapists are not trained necessarily in like goal accomplishment. So there's a field of therapy called positive psychology, which then over time evolved into what we call coaching nowadays. And I think a lot of the challenges that people are facing nowadays, I think like really coaches can be helpful for. And that's why we started a coaching program, because there's a lot of stuff if we sort of think about

what mental health professionals do, we're trained in pathology and diagnosis. So things like mood disorders, anxiety disorders, but we're not necessarily trained in people helping people get promoted at their jobs. Like those are not formal courses we take. Not saying that therapists can't help with that. And especially with like, I don't know if this kind of makes sense. You know, one of the weird things that I see on the internet, I see two things. One is, you know, everyone will say like, oh, you should go see a therapist about that. And that can be incredibly frustrating for some people because therapy is not the answer to all problems. And what's even more frustrating is that some people will go see a therapist. I used to hear this story a lot. I hear it less so now, but mostly because I don't spend time with

those people. But like, you know, I went to a therapist and like it didn't help as much as I wanted to or it didn't help as much as people claimed it would. And so if y'all are someone who's really struggling with like how the world is changing incredibly rapidly, there's a lot of like uncertain in the world, around dating, around careers, like these kinds of topics. Then I strongly recommend y'all take a look at coaching, our coaching program, anyone else's coaching program. I like ours because ours has a lot of data behind it. So we've trained, you know, we've had several coaches go through, several batches of coaches go through our coaching curriculum. And each batch seems to get better and better and better. So, you know, I think our coaching program is actually, like, improving. I recently

heard some statistics about fewer people are, like, canceling than ever. So people are getting more and more value out of coaching. People are kind of sticking with it. I think we're learning what y'all need. So if y'all are interested in sort of figuring out how to really make progress in your goals in a finite amount of time, which I think is the real advantage of it, it's like 12 weeks from now, do you want to be noticeably further along in your journey? Because there's a lot of great stuff that we provide here. Like we do DIY kind of educational content and things like that. And that's all really awesome stuff.

But one of the, oh, one second. Hello? Okay, got it. Thanks. I just noticed. Bye. So if you all, you know, if you're, what was like? going to say, I lost my train of thought. Anyway, so if y'all are interested, check it out for sure.

So before, since I just realized I wasn't live, I wasn't actually dual streaming. Hello, people from Twitch. Welcome to another Healthy Gamer Gigi stream. My name is Dr. Alok Kanoja. Just a reminder that although I'm a psychiatrist, nothing we discussed on stream today is intended to be taken as medical advice. Everything is for educational and entertainment purposes only. If you all have a medical concern or question, please go see a licensed professional. Anyway, today we're going to be talking with Michael Shoe. So let me just mute this for just a hot second. And we're going to be talking about faith, psychedelics, and mental health.

So let me go ahead and this works. Hey, Michael, can you say something? Hey, okay, perfect. Count to 10 for me? One, two. Three, four, five. Okay, perfect. And then let me go ahead and see if I can fix this.

There we go. Okay. Oh, and this looks like it needs to be adjusted a little bit. I'm going to just fix this real quick. Perfect. Okay. Hey, what's up, dude? Hey, not much, man.

Good to see. Are we live right now? Yes, we're live. Oh, snap. All right. Good to see you. Good to see you, too. I'm doing well.

How are you doing? Doing well. You know, I'll be honest, a little terrified being on stream, you know, with with, with folks watching and stuff like that. I don't think I'll ever get over that. I mean, that aspect of it. But I'm also super excited, man. I'm excited to have this conversation with you. You know, one thing I really love about our friendship over the years is that, like, you know, we can talk a ton about the science of stuff and like mental health. and the research and get really into that stuff. But then we also are sort of deeply spiritual people. And we've sort of connected a lot around that over the years. And so, yeah, I think this, yeah, I'm excited to see where this will go. So that's actually, let's kind of just start there. So, you know, I think the topics that we've sort of floated today are psychedelics,

faith, and mental health. Is that right? Yeah, that sounds right to me. And I think, so you mentioned that we're spiritual people. So can you tell me a little bit about, you know, your flavor of spirituality? Sure. And by the way, do you go by Alec on streamer or should I call you like Dr. K, Sorcer, Supreme? I mean, whatever feels comfortable for you.

All right, Alec. So your question is like, where do I come from spiritually? Can you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, for sure. So I'll say that I spent most of my life sort of in, I would call it an atheist fool, atheist agnostic. I grew up. My father came from like the age of the cultural revolution, would talk about religion as sort of like rainwashing, just like, you know, sort of indoctrination based on that age of things. I had an uncle who got caught up in a cult

some kind of like, I don't know, Christian cult or something like that. Let's just say it was not pretty. And the only kind of personal sort of spiritual-esque thing that I had growing up was like I had grandparents who were Buddhist and I had a grandma who, we had a Buddhist statue like a little, look a little,

any Buddha in front of our door. And my mom would be like, you know, rub the Buddha's forehead. And it'll give you some good luck. So, you know, of course, like, I would like, you know, have an exam coming up, probably spent like 10 hours playing Diablo and like half an hour thinking about this exam. On my way, I'm like, okay, all right, let's let's rub this dude's forehead and see what we got here. And sometimes it'll pan out. Sometimes it wouldn't quite pan out.

but yeah that was kind of my my spiritual upbringing um i i got in trouble a lot growing up i i asked a ton of questions i was kind of a skeptic honestly would make fun of like people who were kind of spiritual in some sense or like christians and stuff like that um growing up i would ask a lot of questions in class i would be really disruptive i got in trouble a ton and at the end the day i yeah i yeah i feel like if there was like a character select screen, you know, and one of those characters, well, you know, they're like, good student, like, you know, athlete or whatever. There was like a troll character select. I think somehow, somehow that one got, got, got, got, got, um, sort of, yeah.

So I'll stop there because I feel like you have a question. Yeah, yeah. So two things. First is, are, are you sure that you're transmitting from your mic and not your, can you just check your Discord settings real quick? I just want to double check. That is a great question. Um, I think it is.

Okay, great. It sounds pretty clear. So it's, I was just, I'm getting a slight echo. Okay. Okay. If I need to go back to like my MacBook air. No, no, no, no. This is fine.

This is fine. As long as it's the right, it's not like your camera. But, um, so I was kind of curious. When you say you were like, like, kind of skeptical growing up, so were you skeptical about, and your parents were basically atheists, right? My parents are atheists. Yeah. I would say maybe nowadays my mom would say maybe agnostic, but growing up for sure, I think,

yeah, I remember having conversations with my dad to be like, don't waste your time with that stuff, you know, focus on your studies, A plus, get your A plus on their exam, stop failing, you know, that kind of thing. Okay. And so when you say you asked a lot of questions, like, do you mean you asked a lot of questions to your parents? Do you ask questions to people who are spiritual or just like in general at school? Like I was trying to fit that into, you know, your story. about atheism, skepticism. Yeah, that's a really good question.

I would say I probably didn't ask too many questions at home. You know, my parents had to work really long hours to provide for the family. Wouldn't come home until late. Hence, you know, I spent gongs of time playing like runescape, start craft, that kind of thing. Our conversations would not were pretty superficial. I would honestly just ask questions in class. A lot of times just to be like disruptive, I probably just like, was a little attention starved and very hyperactive too.

I couldn't sit still in my seat. I mean, I could give you examples of some of the random questions I would ask. I mean, some questions were truly asking myself, like, what is the meaning of life and the purpose, all this stuff? But I mean, other questions. No, to myself. I wouldn't ask my classmates. Yeah, no, they would, yeah. But yeah, like I remember in computer science class, for example, right?

There was there was like a we had to like develop a program in like seventh grade and you input two numbers in and if you press a it's supposed to you're supposed to program this like thing to add them together and then if you press B it's supposed to subtract them and then C it's supposed to multiply Ds to divide right and then E is like exit the program, right? right. And then, um, I don't know why, but I just like, I was like, okay, um, what happens if you press F? And the teacher was like, we're not talking about pressing F, man, just like focus. A to E. Focus, focus, man. And I was like, what happened is even on a keyboard? And then she just like kicked me out of class and sent me to the principal's office. I don't know, just like random things sometimes. but I mean

that but I think kind of on a deeper sense I also ask a lot of questions of myself too like you know is this is this all there is to life you know just like going to school being told to sit down listen to this teacher all day come home play risk gate mind cold

for like eight hours at a time I spent gobs time mining coal and iron looking back I'm like wow yeah every every kid's dream to might to be mining coal in a coal mine but um yeah so um yeah it's I mean I was I was I think I kind of developed a pretty deep depression to sometime in middle school yeah and and and what was that like are you comfortable talking about that oh yeah I'm happy to talk about yeah so what was that so I'm wondering first of all like do you think there's a connection between sort of like asking those big questions and developing depression?

I think so. I think so, yeah. Because that's a really good question. I think that, well, I think that one, I started developing all sorts of like feelings around like my life stage, right? And like looking at like the material world around me and what's adding up. right and so um you know i think what does i mean what the material world is like what's adding up yeah yeah yeah yeah um so i mean literally at one point i think when i was made 14 15 i was kind of like looking at life right as like okay there's a lot of suffering going on in life a lot of negative

experiences coming home being yelled at getting like sees and ds and report cards going to school getting in trouble a lot, right? And then I sort of just like started adding up like, okay, what are all these negative things going on in my life? And then what are the positives about life and living? Okay. I don't know. Like I mind Cole. Yeah. And iron. And that literally was like that or like winning a game in StarCraft or getting like a like a perfect Griffin or something like that in Diablo. Yeah, these things were like, like, positives. But I was like, man, is this really all life, all there was to life? And like, my parents would tell me it's all about getting straight age and going to college and stuff like that.

And I was like, really? Like, that's it. And so at some point, I started, I just did like this expected value, I guess, equation for my life. And I was like, dude, like the negatives far outweigh the positives of living. And so at a certain point, I was like, it's better to die. than to live like what is the point of living and so i i became i was i was suicidal at a at probably age like 13 and and yeah i think i think asking a lot of those questions um i mean i saw some definitely some of the kids around me who maybe were not really

thinking about these things a lot i guess they kind of you know got their straight days did well in school sat you know you know maybe went to church or like you know and stuff like that and you know they were kind of doing their thing um and they didn't yeah i don't know i just seemed like you know there'd be you know it just seemed like you know there weren't that many folks that i could look around who were asking these same questions and maybe like a handful but yeah all of us i felt like we're kind of in that like man this is yeah this is rough you know so it's so interesting Thank you so much for sharing that. I think what really like leaps out to me is how logical it is.

So, you know, when we talk about like, you know, what I think about a patient who's like 13 years old who's suicidal and depressed, I primarily think about like an emotional valence, right? I think about a kid who's like, who's predominant emotional experience is sadness, maybe has cognitive biases and that this is like a pathology. Like their life really isn't that bad. their mind just isn't able to see the good stuff in their life. But when I listen to you, it sounds incredibly like logical, right? Like you sat down.

I'm not hearing like a whole lot of like maybe there's sadness, but it's kind of like a logical sadness that comes from a conclusion. Like it's your lived experience of life is kind of like you said, you just kind of added things up. Okay, like I get yelled at at home. I don't do well at school. I get sent to the principal's office. and even like the fun stuff in life is like not that engaging.

There's really no sense of direction or meaning. And so it sounds like it kind of incredibly logical to me. Yeah, I think so. And yeah, it almost sounded like a math equation to me. Yeah. Like numbers was something I was very like, I enjoy. I was like comfortable. I don't know.

Like an invitation kid. I just like that. Yeah. So what happened? But there was an emotional part of it, too. I don't want to detract from as well. I mean, looking back and after going through therapy and working through my own sort of psychoanalysis and later spiritual life, you know, I did realize that there was a lot of this deep-seated kind of anger,

unexpressed feelings towards my parents for sort of this really restrictive environment at home. towards teachers and yeah i think there was a lot of anger there that i didn't really understand or really know how to express in the moment of that and um i didn't really know what to do with it so i realized like i started hating myself a lot and so that that anger i definitely had internalized that too and um and i would find reasons sometimes to like hate myself you know and like stuff like oh man I'm like, cheated on the test or like, oh, like, man, like I, I, I don't know, like, I dropped in my Starcraft rating or whatever, and just stuff like that and find kind of these reasons. And so there was definitely an emotional experience as well, but yeah, I think it's kind of,

it was kind of both. It just felt it felt like that was it. Like, I wasn't going to live till I was an adult at that point. So that's, yeah, that's really how I felt. Yeah, so I'm kind of throwing, throw back to, this conversation may be a bit meandering because we're both psychiatrists, but I'm, I don't know if you've ever like, I recently started reading Morning and Melancholia, which is like Freud's classic paper. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And just, you know, I've come to really appreciate this idea of like anger directed against the self is what the root of depression is. And so it's really interesting to kind of hear that you were like really.

like you're kind of like a textbook example, you know, of this principle of like when you can't be angry at your teachers and you can't be angry at your parents, you end up being like the anger only has one place to go, which is you direct it towards yourself. Yeah, 100%. And I thought it was beautiful how you said. I mean, it's also scary, but like you were looking for reasons to like be mad at yourself. And I think that's, it really reminds me of a lot of what I see. and people who struggle like you did. So what happened after that? Like what?

Yeah. So, and this is, I guess, where things kind of go in an interesting direction. But I, so I had a plan at that point, probably around 13 to 14 to end my life. There was a forest in the back of our place, and I had a knife and everything. and I won't go into too much detail or anything like that, but I was, I remember just one night just holding that, that knife and just like, waiting for my parents to go to bed. And I was sort of, you know, I was done.

I was done. Did they have a sense that something was wrong? I'm sorry? Do they have a sense that something was wrong? I think they had a sense in that, like, I wasn't getting good grades. I was acting out. But I just I think they're kind of thinking of it was like it was like weakness like you know you need to try harder you need to push you need to exercise more. And so I mean I've and you know they came from a different generation right and so they I felt like had to repress a lot of these feelings to survive and make it out of like a really. sort of

yeah a very difficult environment that was cultural revolution China to like make it out to America and there wasn't time to like sit with your emotions and process it was like you you either get out of here and you study your butt off or or you're done and so like that was kind of they brought that

sort of mindset over and I was it just we just didn't yeah it would just be a lot of shouting and like them being like Don't be a coward. Like you are, yeah, you need to like, yeah, if you keep getting bad grades, we'll send you to Afghanistan. And, like, I'm like, oh, Afghanistan, that's scary. I don't want to be in a boot camp in Afghanistan.

I better sit down and study for algebra for a bit. Obviously, that didn't, like, last too long. But that's the kind of conversations I would have with him. Oh, my God, dude, that sounds awful. Yeah. Yeah. I can't imagine talking to my kids that way. I can't imagine you doing that either.

I don't know. Maybe they disagree, but yeah. So you were saying like you would kind of, it was the moment you would sort of talk about that evening and you were ready. What happened? And so, yeah, I was sort of staring down at myself and thinking about this plan. And all of a sudden, I know this might sound crazy. but I heard like an audible voice coming from somewhere that was like, hey, this isn't the end of your life. There is some hope.

And I had no idea where this was coming from at the time because it really felt like, you know, something or someone. Like it wasn't just one of those like, hey man, like I'm let's eat some McDonald's today. It was like, it was like real for me. And so I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. what is going on here. And I didn't know what to make of it. I mean, I had no religious background or anything or like spiritual background. But, and I was still, you know, I ended up not going forward with that plan that day.

Still deeply depressed, but went into high school. Things got a lot better for me in high school on a circumstance perspective. Like, for some reason, I started to study a little bit more. I was like a, like a, I played a lot of tennis and I started doing better and I was like, doing really one on the tennis team. You know, a very attractive girl and stuff like that. I had all the, yeah, I had, you know, doing well in my games, you know, and what kind of like weird like way, you know, ego boosting way that was. And I was like, man, I have like everything.

Like, I'm good. Like, but then even as I was telling myself that going to school every day, like, hey, like, hey, you got these grades. you got like you're this good tennis and whatever I was like kind of boosting my own ego to make myself feel like there was like still this deep emptiness that that I just couldn't shake like there was something missing in my life still and I knew it had something to do with what I had heard that night and I just didn't know what and so for me I started sort of my own personal journey of just reflecting and reading and, you know, I found something truthful about some of the songs that, like, so, yeah, I just have friends who, like, I guess, like, went to church, you know, or, like, you know,

and they would send me these, like, worship songs of, like, you know, with Jesus and stuff like that. And there's something that about that, like, kind of tune my ear a little bit into. And this is kind of the interesting part that I like think about because like I know we'll get the psychedelics at some point, whatever. But like, you know, when Albert Hoffman, like this is a little bit of side, maybe a little meandering. But when he like discovered LSD, right, it was like kind of just random chemical thing that he was like doing as a chemist. Like the way he would describe it like later in life is that like he didn't discover LSD, but LSD found him. right and it's like I yeah I felt like throughout high school like as much as I could say that like I was trying to learn about God or like explore it on my own I I really felt like God found me in that so like I can go into that a little bit more but like I ended up you know obviously I was a huge skeptic and I still am sort of I still you know question things and stuff like that sure but I started reading stuff like that sure but I started reading stuff. on like that c s lewis wrote uh you know um like mere christianity it's just sort of like a critical

review of like of that i started reading you know richard dalkins on like you know god delusion i started reading like haste for christ i started just really asking like what is actually going on here like i'm not about to embark on some fantasy like belief here like if i'm gonna like but i'm gonna put my effort into it because this because i'm not gonna live my whole whole life all also pretending like, you know, that like I'm okay or that I'm fine. And like I refuse to do that. So I, yeah, I definitely did a lot of reading. And at the end of the day, I was intellectually satisfied with what I read about the person of Jesus about his dying on the cross, the resurrection, and that sort of thing. And then, but I don't think it was until this one moment when, I don't know if you know, like, Lifehouse. It was like a band in the 90th back in the day.

Yeah, they had a song called Everything. Okay. And there was like this skit that was like going on. And that's in like, and so in that skit, it's like this lady. And she is like hanging out with like, I guess Jesus or like this, a representative. And they were like, I guess, in the garden and like having a good time. And then like these like dark things started to like bring her out of that. Like depression.

Like she started to like cut herself. And then like she chased after money and like, like, you know, after like partying and glory. And I was like, dude, that's like me. Like this is I, I look into. I tried to make my life about the party, the money, the and like, deprecur. impression like this is this is like me and like at the end of the skit like yeah I guess the person of jesus would like came in and like took all these i guess people that represented these different dark like sinful beings i guess and just took that on the cross and died for that and how does that work

what does that mean how do you understand that yeah so my understanding of it is that um that because of like these sins. And so I see this also in like my own therapy and stuff like that and the ecology. But like the definition of sin is things that just separate us from God or like our relationship with with God. And so, you know, we pursue different things, I guess. Like it could be material things. I mean, it could be like defenses like avoidance or things like that too can can can prevent us from relating to people around us and that kind of thing.

And so my understanding is that in order to be, I guess, with this all holy or righteous God, there needed to be someone to help kind of like write this darkness in us, if that makes sense. And because God is good. And this is sort of like what separates us from God. how do you bridge this gap if we have all these like defenses and sins and things like that defense so and that's where jesus comes in he's like all this shame that you got all this shame about all this stuff you're going after all the times you cheated all the times whatever like that shame is put onto this person of jesus and the punishment for that shame is his death so he's like he's like main tank of the human race

He's too. That's a great. Great portrayal. Yeah. He's like one V, one V five main tanking and somehow healing self. Actually, no, he just dies, I guess. So he just straight up dies. But he's like good, good tank, good tank. That is, yeah. So he's he tanks it dies so that we don't have to carry that shame anymore. And that when God sees us, sees us in this sort of like more, this like positive light or righteousness that. represented Jesus, if that makes sense. Yeah. So I follow kind of I follow the parts of it and don't follow other parts, which is, I know, that's why I actually like, like talking to you because I think we'll kind of get there. So just to clarify a couple things.

So one is like, so what I'm basically hearing is that you are like literally, like literally saved by God. Like you're on the, like you're, you know, you're planning a suicidal act and you hear, you have like an auditory hallucination, right?

Or like that's one way to characterize it, right? And that's what's so like interesting about this conversation. So like you like literally heard a voice that somehow. So it's not, it wasn't a thought. Like your subjective experience of it was that it wasn't like a voice from within you. It was actually like a sensory input. Yeah, it was a sensory input. Yeah.

And so then that kind of started you on this journey. You've sort of felt an emptiness inside you prior to that that was not satisfied by material things. Even as you, you know, I'm kind of thinking about like the 13 year old who like made the calculation and decided, okay, life is not worth living. And then maybe there's 16 year olds, you, 17 year old you who made the calculation and decided life is worth living. Because now you're like, you're playing tennis. You're dating a hot girl. you're doing better in like a pre-calculus or whatever you're taking, right? So now the equation is in your favor, but still something is like missing.

Yes, yes. And so what I'm almost hearing, if I were to try to like make a model of your experience of this, it's like there's this void in you and connection with God is what fills up that void? Yes, yes. And sin is what separates the two of you. That's kind of how you're defining. Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. This person in Jesus bridges this gap. And yeah, this relationship, this personal relationship with God, you know, helps feel that. And so, yeah, I forgot what I was going to say. But that's, that's right. And, yeah, I think probably there's a term like noetic quality of it. But like, like, sort of like, yeah, there's like that voice.

And I've had mystical experiences since then that I just can't explain. I feel like I'm like, I think Carl Jung also describes this in his autobiography, too. But it's like there's these two parts of like this material world where like I've worked, I'm a researcher, right? And you know, we've done, we do research. And like, you know, I'm trained to think very critically in terms of my clinical work about research. You know, randomized control trials. I spend a lot of the day like thinking about that. like, that kind of thing, you know.

But then there's these mystical experiences that there's just like, you know, man, like there's nothing. It's like, you know, this spiritual or mystical quality of like certain experiences. And I'm like this, you can't explain this with like RCTs. It's like a different. It's like a personal thing, right? And so, yeah. So a couple questions.

One is like, like, so what do you think about some of these? So, I mean, I, you know, I can only imagine how people. are reacting to this because I think there's a very, there's a very tight association on the internet between religiosity and stupidity. So there's kind of this, like, you know, there's this assumption that, okay, like this guy's now talking about the person of Jesus, therefore I'm going to bucket him into someone who is illogical, does not understand science, etc., etc. So I can imagine there's a lot of all kinds of reactions. I'm sure that there are some people who are also religious or spiritual, who are not idiots,

I know it sounds crazy, who are listening to this and are hopefully very happy that we're engaging in this conversation. And hopefully you're a good representative of an intelligent, religious, spiritual person. So what I'm kind of curious about is like when you read things like the God delusion. right? And you read things like about, you know, atheistic arguments against the existence of God. How do you understand those arguments and how does your experience reconcile against those? Yeah. That is a really good and a really big question. Yeah. First of all, I would just say that, like, I think there is this huge, like, thinking of, like, science and spiritual. spirituality, like these things just don't mesh.

Either you're a man of science or a man of the spirit. And I feel like, you know, people in the scientific realm would say, like, anything spiritual is just like, eh. And then people, also in the spiritual realm, people go to church or religious people are, like, science is just nonsensical and conspiracy. I don't know. Like mistrust and that sort of thing. And so, yeah, I'm just like, you know, maybe I think it's important to have these conversations and to understand that, like science, you know, it provides like observations about the world, right? And so, you know, whether, whatever you believe about the world, how, how the Big Bang happened or, you know,

however it's created, like these are just like, or this, however science might explain it, you know, these are phenomena that we can observe. Spirituality, but what science doesn't do is, it doesn't, you know, answer questions about like why, right? Why, why are things happening or like, What is the purpose of these things and like, and aspects like love and experiences like love. And so, and certain things like spirituality, you know,

is an area where, you know, that might be like a place of explore exploration. But anyway, yeah, you're about to say something. Yeah, I was going to kind of challenge that view for a second,

if that's okay. Yeah. And I'm happy, like if you ever want to flip, sides on the argument. I'm pretty sure each of us can can live on either side. So, so, um, you know, when you say like science doesn't answer why, but like does why even exist is why just a human construction. So when I think about like the laws of physics, right? Like the force of gravitation is f equals gmm over r squared. And and f equals m a is like, you know, just a force is

mass times acceleration. Even the concept of work. Does that even exist? Yeah, it's a great question. And I think, yeah, at the end of the day, like, in terms of, like, spirituality, it's ultimately an experience, right? And so, you know, it would be like, you know, watching a great, like, I don't know, like playing an amazing game, but somebody else has never played it before, right? I don't know, like, Breath of the Wild, right? It's an amazing game. It's creative.

It's like an open world. But if someone has never played on a computer before, like just like Pong or something like that, right? You're trying to tell them like, this is the greatest thing ever. And they're like, how can it be the greatest thing ever? Games are just like, you know, games are just like, you know, things are moving around on the screen. And like, there's no purpose in it.

Like, how can you find joy or creativity on it? It's just like, whatever. Like, you can come up with, like, arguments about, like, explaining things and, like, why something might be better or not. But, like, unless someone's kind of experienced that, it's hard to, it's hard to, like, fully engage that person in what you're talking about sometimes, too. But I also understand what you mean, yeah, that even sort of, like, yeah, I love to ask you, too, like, what do you think is the answer to that question? Like, does why matter? Yeah, so I mean, let me first just see if I understood you, because I think it's a really great answer. So like, if we look at Breath of the Wild, Breath of the Wild is a series of, it's software, right?

So it's just a roadmap of electrons traveling through gates that then displays random pixels on a screen, produces random, or not random, but non-random pixels on a screen, non-random auditory vibrations through a speaker in a pattern. That's all Breath of the Wild is. That's like if we look at the literal like what is it, right? So if I were to ask a scientist, what is Breath of the Wild? Not philosophically. I mean the video game, right? So like you could argue that very technically.

And what I'm sort of hearing in your answer is that there is a dimension of human experience and existence that is not captured by a literal scientific representation of the world, the universe or video game. Yeah, I think that's, you put it nicely or nicer than I did. Yes, yes. That is. Right. So even if we were to say that, okay, the why doesn't exist, what I'm kind of hearing

you say is like, okay, fine, but then we see the evidence of. the importance of meaning for human beings if we play a video game. Because when you're observing a human existence, a human existence, for whatever reason, there's some weird component that makes it subjectively more than all of these pixels on a screen or auditory vibrations. Human beings, human beings live in an existence where we're able to extract something. Like reason with them in terms of like, oh, you're a deprecise. press, I mean, cognitive behavioral therapy is a lot about reasoning through things, right? But then I think we also understand that there is sort of this relational aspect of what we do,

right? That attachment and attachment trauma and how we carry ourselves as therapists or in psychodynamic psychotherapy, like, yeah, what that relationship is like and what those dynamics are like, there is, there is a quality there that. that in some sense is subjective in that experience. But it also is grounded in neuroscience and other senses too in the sense that like, you know, how we grew up with trauma and like caretakers, they really do rewire our brains and expression of genes in our brains. And being in a relationship with a positive, I guess like or, yeah,

like in a therapy environment or even God per se, you know, those things can can also rewire a neuroscience pathway, even though they're not, it's not the same kind of like, uh, sort of just like the reasoning through of things. I don't know if I'm making sense. Yeah. So I, I think I'm, I've got a question, which I wonder if it'll, I think I'm getting what you're saying. So let me just kind of ask in a couple of different ways. And I'm happy to answer questions that you have, too. I know you asked me what my answer was to that, but if it's okay, we'll follow this tangent for now. Sure.

So like, here's basically what I'm curious. Okay? So like, we're both psychiatrists, right? So I'm a psychiatrist. I come to you and I say, my homie, Dr. Shue, I have a patient who is depressed. How do I understand the therapeutic value of hearing the voice of God? Right. So if we've got a bunch of people in the world right now, depression is on the rise.

religiousity is also on the decline, right? So we have the most number of atheists. So like, people can attribute the worsening of mental illness to all kinds of factors. I think technology is a huge part of it. But you could also make, you could, you can definitely see an inverse correlation between religiosity and mental illness. Like I'm talking about across the population. So highest number of atheists exist on the planet today that, that have ever existed. And also, I think, and then also highest rate of mental illness. Now, I'm not, a lot of people will hear that statistic and say, this guy is saying God is necessary to be mentally healthy.

I'm not saying that. Remember that these are correlations that can be completely coincidental. Correlations do not imply causation. So it's not that loss of God means that people are mentally ill. But when I hear your story, like what I'm really curious about, because like you're a psychiatrist, right? So how do you understand? So you've been through therapy, you go through treatment.

I don't think you're like a religious nut. How do you understand the therapeutic value of like God talking to you when you're deeply suicidal? It's a great question. And I think one thing that, you know, we as a field don't do a great job about explaining is that like voices, inner voices, you know, is not all pathology. I think we sometimes over psychopathologize voices. And so as like delusions. And that can cause all sorts of like mishaps and very unfortunate. I have a story I could share about that.

That was kind of unfortunate where I was working with this lady. I'll, you know, obviously de-identify as needed. But like I was working with a lady who was seen praying in the emergency room. Right? And it felt like they were talking to God. And a nurse saw that, told one of the doctors, hey, this person is responding to internal stimuli. I think she's probably psychotic. And this is someone who did not speak English all that well. And, you know, had, you know, communication was challenging.

The mental health professional came in, you know, told her that she had psychosis. She got really upset and started to argue about it. Kind of got loud, and it got a little bit, you know, heated, ended up getting restrained, got admitted to the inpatient floor. And then child protective services was called in to question whether, or not this person should have custody of her kids going forward. Yeah, I think things like that are kind of missed opportunities if we think about any spiritual thing like voices or spiritual experiences as delusion per se and or as like a psychotic experience.

and I think that, you know, I think we over psychopathologize that aspect of it, and that can cause, yeah, that can cause danger. And I think, I think you also have to understand, like, what is mental health or mental illness, right? Like, these are symptoms that we talk about, depression, anxiety, psychosis. These are all symptoms we talk about to try to understand what's going on in someone's brains. that's causing dysfunction, right, in their lives. So, I mean, I've got, I work with a lot with schizophrenia, bipolar, all sorts of things. Oh, by the way, I should have said this earlier. All these opinions are mine.

Do not represent anyone's, any institution that I work for obviously. But these are all mine. But what was I saying? You know, we have symptoms that sort of correlate with what we think is going on in brains. We make diagnosis based on that. And we kind of think about what causes dysfunction, right? And so, you know, you think about delusions that happen in schizophrenia are bipolar. You know, delusions like, oh, like, the FBI is after me and wanting to kill me and things like that.

What you see is that as people engage more with these delusional content, they become more and more isolated. You also see in neuroimaging, like more brain inflammation. And literally people with schizophrenia die earlier than other. And there's all sorts of factors. I'm not saying that this is purely because of their disease. There's all sorts of socioeconomic factors and cardiac and all this sorts of stuff. All to say is having a delusion is not just not mentally healthy, but unhealthy. But physically, too.

Like being in a psychotic illness is physically and mentally, just not good for the human body, right? And so we think about like, when we think about these symptoms in that light, like, what is mental illness? Like, how do we frame these things? Then that, I feel like that kind of helps us understand some of these symptoms better, too. Like, is this a voice that someone has that's telling them to go kill themselves or go, like, jump off the roof? Hey, that, that seems problematic. Like, that's in line with, like, what we would say is a mental illness.

So we call it an MDD, major depressive disorder with psychotic features, right? If somebody comes in and it's like, I just had this experience where I feel just really loved by this God of the universe. And oftentimes that's a psychedelic experience, right? And so. Or we'd call that mania with psychotic features. Yes, yes, we could call it. Ah, yes, true, true, yes. Right?

Because if it's like, oh, yeah, God is talking to me, and I feel great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have another story about just that, that one, too. If we, I don't know how we are. Finish your broader point. So you were saying, like, you know, if someone comes in and has a positive hallucination or delusional experience, like, you were talking about. Yeah, so if somebody has, like, if somebody comes up to you and it's like, hey, like,

I had this experience with God where I just feel loved. Or, hey, I just took some LSD, and I just feel really connected. And if a doctor tells them, bro, you got to be on Haldol, injectable monthly, we're really missing something here in our field. If we're treating these things as just purely psychosis. And I definitely have talked to folks. Having gone to a school, you know, attending Johns Hopkins where there was all sorts of buzz around psychedelics, a lot of like the forefront folks, but then also a lot of people who were very against it at the time when I was there.

Yeah, I know folks who would call these experiences delusional toxicosis, like the experience of like being with God and Freud himself too, you know, would talk about some of these like maladaptive response, negative coping responses or for like certain faith beliefs or like escapism for, you know, stuff like that for other kind of Eastern practices. And so I think we are missing something here. If as a society, we are just going to, we're just slapping every, everything that is beyond the observable world as psychotic, not thinking about like what is actually good for our patients, what is actually good for our society. And like what is in the realm of like reason and experience?

I don't know. Yeah. So let me take a second to respond. And then I still want to go back to the earlier question. of like, how do you understand the therapeutic value of, like, hearing the voice of God, right? And because I think that that begs other questions of, like, if we say that hearing the voice of God has a lot of therapeutic value, does that mean that we as mental health professionals? Right? So if we say that, I guess we're going here now.

So, like, here's kind of what I'm thinking. So you're, you were a 13-year-old suicidal kid and you heard the voice of God. I'm noticing that that, at least in terms of your narrative, and maybe that's retrospective, maybe you've kind of reconstructed, that's probably what happened, right? So you reconstructed a narrative of your life where that really does seem like a tipping point, though. You started to have functional improvement from 13 to 16. You're more social, more successful in terms of extracurriculars.

Your grades are getting better, right? You wound up, it sounds like going to med school at Johns Hopkins and doing residency at Harvard. so like you did pretty well, right? And the turning point was like hearing the voice of God. And so like I'm still kind of curious like, you know, how like as a mental health professional, when you look back on your life, like what is the therapeutic value? How did how did hearing the voice of God alter? So when we talk about schizophrenia, we talk about they die earlier because the trajectory

of their life changes, right? So you were going like this, and the second you get diagnosed the schizophrenia, like things level off, you start to do poorly. How did hearing the voice of God, as a clinician, how do you look at how that altered the course of your life? Are we talking significant alteration, small alteration, no alteration, are these two things independent? Or was this really like, okay, you heard the voice of God, you were transformed and it significantly altered your, the outcomes and the trajectory of your diagnosis and pathological process. Yeah. It's a good question.

And what I would say is that I don't think hearing the voice of God that experience itself, I don't think it significantly altered a lot of parts of my life. Like, I still felt depressed. I still, you know, I still had, I don't think it was like an ego dissolving experience by any means. But I think what it did is it gave me some openness and curiosity into something that I previously was not open and curious about, in that there was maybe a spiritual experience or something going on in that realm of things that I was just, I just was completely against or closed off to or fearful of, I don't know, whatever it was. whatever the heck you, yeah, call it. So I'm trying to make things binary, but what I'm basically hearing from you is that,

I mean, I'm not hearing that God saved your life or that God cured your depression or anything near that. I'm actually hearing that if anything may be induced, you said curiosity and openness makes me think about, you know, the phrase neuroplasticity or the term neuroplasticity. And that is a mechanism of action. So like curiosity and neuroplasticity and openness, I think those three things go together. Yeah. And so, okay, that helps. So I'm kind of hearing that what it really did is just created openness.

That moment, that experience created openness, that there could be an existence of a spiritual realm or a being. I think later in life, not later life, but like when I was like 18 about to go to college, and when I had decided, you know, to accept Jesus into my life as Lord and Savior, I felt like that was a huge experience for me. And again, it didn't solve all my problems, but a personal relationship with God did, for me, have a therapeutic effect. And that, and I've definitely worked with many folks.

Obviously, I draw a clear ethical line in my clinical practice, but I definitely have talked to folks who, where faith or spirituality was a positive thing for them as well. And I think we see, yeah, we see that a lot as well. You know, in sort of the risk factors for suicide and that sort of screening that we do. Spirituality is maybe a protective factor there too. And I can imagine why. I don't know if this is making sense. Yeah.

So how do you imagine that spirituality is a protective factor? So like let's say that the data says that, which I, I mean, I'm not familiar with that, but let's just assume that that's true for a moment. I think I wouldn't be surprised. If I had to, this is a multiple choice test and I had a circle an answer, I'd say that it is a protective factor, but not for everybody, whatever. So I'm curious, how do you think that spirituality, what do you think is the mechanism of action through which spirituality, and you said that when you accepted Jesus is your Lord and Savior in your life, that did have a therapeutic benefit? So explain to me the mechanism of action of accepting Jesus is your Lord. and Savior and what that does to you therapeutically.

Like, how does that work? Like, what does that do, bro? Excellent. Excellent questions. Okay. So, I think, if you look at just like, let's talk about the study, the studies for a moment, you know, like, if you look at just like mental health outcomes across like religion versus secularism, they're not different, you know.

There's the incidence of depression, you know, is similar across, like, spiritual practices versus, like, if you don't have any at all atheism. What does seem to be therapeutic is engaging in community. You know, like, for example, like, when they does surveys of folks, like, you know, and trying to tease out if there was any sort of, like, positive effect of, like, their religious practice. It seemed to be, like, going out, singing together. going out to church, community groups, some kind of like connectedness, this social connectedness aspect can be therapeutic in and of itself. And I think in a world where we are

sort of very isolated, I think Jonathan, oh God, what's this last term? How he wrote like Anxious Generation or like and calling of the American mind. You know, he would kind of argue that like we kind of have this like whole that in humanity, this isolation and that we need to go out and like you know touch grass or like but really just like connect sing songs together like you know do things that are like yeah um sort of on this like deeper spiritual sense obviously he's i don't think he's like a religious person but just like this kind of like communal aspect i think is really part of the importance of it and then i don't know if you were going to think about also just um yeah therapeutic

I mean, imagine, okay, imagine this, okay, Alec. Okay. Imagine, like, you grew up with, like, the most perfect parents. Okay. And had a completely positive and loving relationship. Okay. Everything was just perfect. Would that, would that have changed your life versus, like, what, how things were otherwise? Absolutely.

Right. And what therapeutic sense would that have given, you if like you were to say be in the presence of like the most loving and perfect parents growing up would be like a therapeutic value. So I think at the to begin with the the answer is broad. To begin with, I think it would have improved my attachment style. So I think I was somewhat avoidantly attached growing up. Yeah. So I think I would have had a secure attachment style caused me all kinds of problems when I was in college and tried to date. And and so. I think that's the probably like if we're talking about, you know, if I had a different set of parents, how would that have changed that? That's a big one. But I think there's a lot of other stuff like emotional regulation skills, EQ, much like yourself. You know, I was the first child of immigrant parents. So I was second generation. And so there was a lot of stuff about emotions, self-understanding, pressure, lack of acceptance, very conditional acceptance.

a lot of comparison, a lot of like, don't be you, be someone else. And I had, for the most part, pretty loving parents. So I had on balance, I think, a relatively healthy upbringing. Sure. Yeah. But I think that those are like two or three really big things. And then I do wonder if I actually had perfect parents, if that would also be harmful in some ways, because I think that there are kind of like what you alluded to, you know, your parents were the way that they were, because that was the adaptation they needed to survive in their environment. Now, when your environment changed, the environment that you grew up in and changed, some of the lessons that they learned started to become maladaptive and harmful

when they were applied to you, caused a lot of suffering. So I think if I had the perfect parents, I wonder if I would not be as successful, because on some deep level, even though it took me a roundabout way to get there, I think I strive for excellence in what I do, not for the status that I think was quite as important as it was to my parents. So I also wonder if having the perfect parents would be harmful in a different way. And we take for granted what flawed parents are able to give us. But I'd say EQ skills and attachment style are probably the first two things. And then maybe with some amount of self-regulation and really teaching me to like to study instead of just telling me that I

needed to do it. Like all that kind of stuff I think would have been very different. Yeah. Yeah. And maybe arguably you wouldn't be where you are right now. I don't think I wouldn't. I think it would be an author or a physicist, one of the two. Author or a physicist. Or maybe something else in the artistic field. An artistic. Okay.

I'm pretty, very curious to see what that outlook would come up with you. Yeah. But yeah, I think I relate a lot to that in a sense that like, yeah, obviously I didn't have perfect parents. and I'm very glad, sort of, I'm very grateful for how I grew up. But the therapeutic value of having a relationship with a loving father or loving parents or whatever is, I agree with everything you said. And so, like, empathy, right? I did not know what empathy was. And I realized this was actually pretty normal to feel.

For me, I thought like, oh, growing up, I was like, I can only prove I exist. Maybe I'm God. Or, like, how do I know that people's emotions or feelings exist? Maybe my goal in life is just to troll people and to, like, find amusement in it. And, I don't know, play video games. And, like, that was, like, my mindset. And I think at that time, I thought I was like, oh, like, I'm like, this is such a cool realization.

Looking back, I feel like it is something actually pretty common to, like, have this kind of viewpoint early on that like you're yeah that you that you that you that you that you know not having sort of like that empathy but that uh in developing sort of sense of others and empathy later on in life i probably was i probably developed it later and uh sort of later than you know if again we we posited that perfect parents but but empathy is something that I developed through having a relationship with God um how does that work because like I now I'm confused because and I mean I I I have a answer that if you ask me the question I'm about asked you I would have an answer for it but yeah like so when I think about the development of

empathy and why they think about so you're analogizing God to perfect parents is that right like so you asked me that question about perfect I think it's imperfect I think it's I think it's kind of weird to anthropomorphize like this being as God or this God of the universe and to like something, but this is like the only kind of like, yeah, I think it's just an analogy and it's a very imperfect. So I'm confused because like, okay, let's say that like I can understand learning empathy from something that bluntly interacts with you, right? So what I'm really curious about is like how can a relationship with God like literally like how does that teach you empathy because, I mean, to my knowledge, and maybe I'm wrong here, maybe, I mean, you said

you've had mystical experiences. So, like, I mean, is, like, God relating to you in a way that is somewhat analogous to parents teaching their children the capacity of empathy? Like, how does, like, what's, what's the, like, how does that work, man? Yeah, it's a lot of these questions, I'm going to start with, like, I don't know fully. You know, and, you know, even empathy as a construct and, like, how that gets developed. Yeah. And the neuroscience behind it, I think. I would still say, like, I don't know fully the answers around all these things.

But I think one, obviously, like, being part of a community and feeling and a consciousness to that, that's going to teach, you know, unless, you know, your goal is to go into that community and start trolling. Like, that, being part of a community and wanting to, like, bond with people will teach some sense of, like, emotional regulation. Sure. And empathy, sure. But another part of my kind of, I guess you could call this mystical experience with God is that like when I pray or when I get into sort of like this sort of this like more mystical prayer or like a presence of God, like I truly experience what I call like the heart of God or like the Holy Spirit.

And like I truly experience like the nature around me, the people around me and how they feel and the world and the universe. I can't really explain it fully. It's like I just, I don't know. But I make sense. Just feel this like connectedness. And so how and so it's an experience, right? And like it comes down to an experience. And like, you know, once you experience empathy, it doesn't mean I'm necessarily an empathic person just right then and there.

like I'm going to start like empathizing left and right. But once I've experienced what empathy is like and like the feelings of like a hurting person of those people that are like oppressed or like, you know, by society or even the church or whatever it is like then I kind of know like, wow, this is like the heart of God. And like this is an experience now that like I experience more and more in my life where, yeah, whatever yeah I don't know if this makes sense so let me tell you what I what I heard or how I understood what you said so what I'm hearing is that there is part of your spiritual or religious experience you do have moments or maybe longer I'm what I mean to say is that it is not a

necessarily a permanent state you have times where you feel something called the heart of God And then that heart of God is expansive, loving, non-judgmental. Now I'm injecting stuff, right? So I'm adding on modern interpretations. But so you have this experience of like unconditional love. Let's call it that, right? You get this like sense of divine love. And then even if you grew up in an environment where like you did not receive unconditional love,

in these mystical states, you received this unconditional love. And then I think it makes perfect sense how this would model for. you what empathy is like, right? So then it's like, okay, this is in me on some level. I'm receiving this on some level. So someone else is being kind to me. And then now I've learned this skill. There's probably also a component of, and I think empathy is a really great example on your part because I think it's like, you know, a lot of these transcendental mystical experiences, whether we're talking about psychedelics or spirituality induced, our ego death is a big part of them. dissolution of the ego, right? And you talk about connectedness. And so as our ego kind of dissolves,

I think one of the things that we found from studies on meditation is that as we become more egoless, our compassion, which is sort of the term that's used more in the Eastern karmic traditions, our compassion for other beings exist. So we feel more connected. So I could totally see how, and it makes me really think about object relations, actually, where like, Like, you know, is it the parent itself that is creating the mental health improvement, the sense of empathy, or is it the way that we relate to this external object? That the way we interact with it, the way that we face it is actually more responsible for the change within us than what the thing itself is doing. I know we're getting a little bit abstract. But if we look at object relations, it's like,

it's not technically what your mom does. It's the way that you perceive, interact, and relate to your mom that ultimately has the biggest effect. 100%. And so if we really take things pretty far, what we could even presume then is that the object doesn't even need to exist,

you're not thinking about one of my psychoanalytic supervisors, who is like, you know, explaining to me that the basic problem is that we form all these conclusions on things that don't really exist. Right? These are all like fictions in our, mind, their interpretations, they are, you know, we remember this one moment from our upbringing. That's the object. So it doesn't even have to be real. And most of the time, it's not, is what you

learn in. Yeah. Or not real in a tangible sense, which sort of then makes sense. Okay. So like God is maybe some, you know, you could interpret a relationship with God through object relations theory, which would make a lot of sense. I'm sure that's been done a ton. Yeah, I'm sure it is. And yeah, I think, yeah, you're kind of getting at like this sort of default mode network, these series of like identity statements and these rules and the things that we kind of live by. And a lot of this, yeah, a lot of that has to do with how we perceive the world and how we interpret that and how and that can develop into sometimes an overactivity of that can develop into depression and anxiety and that sort of thing. And these, yeah, I guess like when you're in the place where you're in, I guess, in the awe of like, I guess, a god of the universe, like these things just, they dissolve in some sense. But then, you know, in therapy too, we also work a lot towards, like, you know, I do some work with like internal family systems as well and things like that. What we see is that when you work towards sort of unhinging some of these overactive managers are like default mode kind of things.

They're not quite synonymous, but I feel like I kind of in my mind kind of see a lot of similarities between them. Yeah, overactive managers you work through like exiles and these things. What you have is not just like a blank slate inside of you after you do that. And then now you just have to reprogram everything. but there seems to be like this level of curiosity, compassion, like love and these things that start kind of emerging. Like once these defenses and once these like things sort of and these like these rigid thought patterns start to dissolve, there seems to be like more of this openness and curiosity. I wonder if there is some like relationship with what goes on there with what goes on in the mystical spiritual experience.

know, but, um, yeah, so I, I get, I mean, I guess what I'm hearing there is like, so as we remove all of the layers of conditioning, we aren't, as we remove layers of conditioning, there's some positive valence stuff that starts to float to the surface, right? So as we like remove the overactive manager, we're not left with neutrality. We're left with more compassion, like some goodness kind of directional stuff. Yeah. Yeah, that's, yeah. And, you know, I think I was hearing somewhat, I forgot, I wish psychologist was talking about this. But, like, I think you talked on stream about, like, the abyss, right? Like, this sort of, like, once you strip, once you start examining what's deep inside, right? And you just kind of sit there. And I'm maybe in meditation, like, this happens.

And, like, but, like, there's this sort of existential abyss or this emptiness or sometimes fear and anxiety and things like that. Like, there is a lot of, like, sort of this. resistance to want to sit with that. The abyss is a kind of scary place. But then, you know, what this psychologist was arguing, I think it was his name was Dan Allender or something like that. What he was arguing was that, like, what people are actually more scared of

than being sitting with the abyss is what happens after. Like, the human potential. Like, and, like, what, you know, what can be unlocked in us to, you know, in terms of, like, how we can, I don't, thrive in society and love and compassion. passion like there's yeah that there after you do work through that sit through that that there is some potential to really work towards a flourishing a society or something like that you know so

yeah I thought that was kind of interesting um I'm kind of curious do you so so I'm not hearing so even though you've had a profound set of religious experiences it sounds like you've accepted Jesus as your lord and savior when I when I really ask you about mechanisms and stuff, what I'm really hearing you kind of say is that there are some very discernible concrete mechanisms about social connectedness, social support that are associated with religiosity or, you know, like community basically, social capital, things like that. And so do you, would you recommend to your patients that they engage with the dimension of religiousness or spirituality as a form of, as a part?

of their therapeutic process are you pretty like agnostic there um i think you know i really let my patients kind of guide things like that you know if they you know i always ask my like patients like patients like hey would you have any spiritual experience or religious background and whatever they say i respect that if it's someone who i think you know who is really isolated right and just like not willing to connect with anything but they're highly on the kind of spiritual you know stat but very low on the connect the relational stat i guess of things like then i'd be like hey like do you want to find people who think and believe like you like you know would that be helpful and so like yeah let's explore that a bit like what you know what would that be like to be around people who think and believe like you

who worship like you, you know. And so I definitely think that, yeah, social connectedness is definitely something that, and community integration, we call it as well, in terms of like seeing people thrive beyond the sort of like the DSM-5 that we think about. Like, I feel like these are important things to bring up that we don't always think about as clinicians, but I know. Yeah. So I'm not hearing you ask.

advocate for a particular religious or spiritual tradition at all and also not even that they should do something, right? So it's more that for some people, it's well suited for them. It does sound like there are some really interesting mechanisms at play. And maybe we can kind of dive more into that because I'm kind of curious. You know, for all these mystical experiences that you are describing, there's a lot of interest in psychedelics now. So what do you think is the relationship between psychedelic experience, religious experience? Are these two things interchangeable? What do you think about that? It's an excellent question. I think the big answer is I don't know. I don't, I think there's a lot, I've been thinking a lot about this too, and I look, and I love to hear kind of your your thoughts on it. But I think I see a lot of similarities between the spiritual experience that I've had or other people of different other religious experiences have and that other. psychedelic experience and I think at the very least the experience itself there seems to be like a huge amount of overlap with that and you know I think one of the guys I think he was also at

Hopkins Bill Richards he would kind of talk about this idea of like how our mind is kind of like this antenna right or we have this antenna to like interact with the spiritual beyond beyond like our sort of physical world. And that that like what psychedelics maybe does is it kind of like through the serotonin mechanism

and a whole sorts of cascades of things that we're still trying to understand somehow turns this on that like, you know, it turns us on to experience something in the beyond or in the spiritual that we maybe were closed off to otherwise. When I hear things like that,

I do think a lot about the experience that I've had in sort of like yeah that sort of that turning on moment or like that openness moment and I'm like that's pretty that is pretty darn interesting and I think one of the first papers that came out about psychedelics at Hopkins was on like it wasn't about like oh let's do psychedelics to cured PTSD and there's been a lot of awesome stuff with that or more with MDMA than classical but like yeah but more like but it was like about like how can psychedelics create these mystical experiences and that was like the the like the title of the paper or something like that and it was just like I think I think there is like sort of this like this realm of things

I guess this mystical experience that we kind of are closed off to as like a mental health field that there can be a lot of maybe this this potential I don't know but I think we also have to be really careful ethically you know if one as we're doing psychedelics you know to be sort of not partial. I already forgot your original one. I'm kind of just meandering on. What do I mean by that? What do we need to be careful about ethically with psychedelics?

I think a number of things. I think one thing is to, you know, the neutrality of the approach. I think Matthew Johnson, who was really a forefront and great think think think thinker in psychedelics. And he talks a lot about sort of this neutrality of as you're doing psychedelic assisted psychotherapy.

Like, you know, there's folks who like have a Buddha statue in the room or tell people like, hey, this is going to be the most important thing that you'll experience. Like, you don't meet God or the Holy Spirit will fill you and you'll like meet Jesus here. Okay, let's go into this psychedelic experience. I think like one thing that we know for sure about the psychedelic experience, especially like a psilocybin, you know, things like that, is that like, there is a lot of this sort of like suggestibility aspect of it, which is why set in setting is so important, creating the safe environment and sort of this neutral space. And so I think we have to be very careful because these are

real, I mean, yeah, these are really powerful tools and I think it's going to absolutely revolution our field. But these are really powerful tools. And like we, I think we have to be sort of very careful with what we're willing to say or do that could change someone's course of their life or like their thinking. And like how what we do can affect that. So and letting that be a patient centered experience too that they kind of get to come and drive that. What do you mean by, so when you say we need to be careful, like careful in what way? Like what's an example of not careful and what's an example of careful? It's a good question.

I think not careful would be to impress our religious experience onto the patient while they're going through it. We're not supposed to do that as they're all this. Sorry. Oh, yeah, actually, surprise, surprise, yeah. But believe or not, I think there is like this subtlety around, you know, how folks might be doing it. And so, yes, you're not supposed to do it. Other things you're not supposed to do is take advantage of your patients in front of you,

but there's been some problems with, I mean, this is minimal, right? I mean, yeah. But there is, I mean, if we're just talking, if we're just focusing on sort of like what the things to be careful of, I think set in setting, staying neutral and not impressing, sort of letting the, letting the patient sort of like guide sort of like also like where they're going to go with it while you give an open space and like a safe space for it. I think, you know, I'm sure other folks who, who, you know, work a lot closer with, uh, with like MDMA and PTSD or psilocybin depression, um, you know, could talk even more about sort of the phases around it.

And, uh, I'd be close to the studies, but I haven't been the one doing it at this point. But, um, so, yeah. Um, that's sort of part of partly. Yeah, I sort of part of the challenges of it. So, so what do you, what do you think? I, I'm going to share what I think in a minute if that's okay. I'm going to, I'm going to go back and answer all the questions you've asked. But I have a couple more questions for you if that's cool. Yeah.

So like, so this is going to sound. So like when people have psychedelic experiences, like do you think, so first of all, what do you think is the overlap? lap with, like, do you think that this is basically, like, are these similar things? Like, if I take, let's say, psilocybin, am I connecting to God in the same way or a similar way or in the same ballpark way as when you have, you know, a mystical experience? Like, do you think that that religious experiences, spiritual experiences, and psychedelic experiences are phenomenologically, like, similar? Like, do you think, like, the same thing is happening? The answer is I don't know, but I'm very curious about that.

And I think they could very well be the same experience. And I certainly have talked to a lot of folks who described the experience to me after coming back from doing this in therapy or from aal-waska trip. And to me, it does seem like the same kind of spiritual experience that they are in sort of this place. but yeah I think I just it's I don't know yeah I can't say for sure but yes I think there's a lot of you know I've yeah people you know they did us they did a good the good Friday experiment like Mars Chapel like in Boston where they gave like books who have like a religion like divinity students at the time like religious experiences like psychedelics and like a lot of them described that their spiritual experiences deepened obviously it's not a controlled study and stuff like that. But they felt like, you know, when they did take the psychedelic, that it was congruent to their spiritual experience going into it is my understanding, and that it enhanced it. And then there was a guy who I think when, was, had like a psychotic experience or something like that. But, but yeah, but then I also wonder, I don't know. There's the answer is I don't know.

So, so like you're, you're familiar with machine elves? Yes, machine elves Can we talk about machine elves for a second? Can you tell us what machine elves are? Oh, man, machine elves. Okay. How I imagine machine elves is like, you know, and say you like kind of land, let's say you're, you know,

we're talking right now, right? Human and human, you know, stuff like that. Let's say we like, we're to land in Super Mario World. And Toad Temptsul comes up to you and you're like, welcome to Mushroom Kingdom. It starts kind of like, you know, kind of showing you compassion and, you know, maybe like even not necessarily talking to you, but like surrounding you with love and, you know, they don't look like Toad from Mario, but they really look like, you know, machine nose. These are stepping back up back. These are sort of shared experiences that folks who have used DMT seem to have across different independent sort of experience.

experiences with it, right? And what's what it seems to be is that like people experience sort of like compassion, love. It's kind of like this telekinetic communication with these machine elves. Sometimes these machine elves sort of take people onto this like journey where it like opens up their realm of, I don't know, consciousness or I I'm probably not using that word correctly in that sense. But like, yeah, like showing them something about the universe that is really difficult to explain after you step out of it. And kind of, I've heard one person say, like, they have, they kind of talk like a, I don't know, like, thou, like using like thee and thou and like that kind of like, I shall show you the mushroom kingdom. Yeah.

But yeah, I, that's what, that's, you know, there seems to be a shared experience, which is really fascinating. It really, it's really interesting. So, so what I kind of understand is, is like, so basically when people do DMT, right? So, so on the one hand, you kind of mentioned that when, when you used to mention that study with divinity students in Boston, when you use psychedelic, sometimes they give you experiences that are congruent with your experience of life. So if I'm like Christian and maybe I use something like psilocybin, I'm going to hear from Jesus. If I am Hindu and I use psilocybin, I'm going to hear from Krishna. So I actually would push back on that. Okay. Yeah. I don't think that's necessarily true. I think that there are definitely, there's definitely can be instances of incongruence.

There is more randomness than it. For example, okay. There was an interview with someone who came in with sort of Eastern psychology, Buddhist, more on the sort of atheist side and saw Jesus on the cross while using, I forgot was LSD or Silosyman, and felt like he was the one who put him there. That would say, that's pretty incongruent, I would say. Because the person was not, yeah, not into that stuff. But then after that happened was like, dude, who's this dude that I put on the cross?

and then ended up believing. Yeah. So I, but then there's all their folks who are Christian and they go into it and they might experience something completely dark or different. Or maybe they end up not being Christian after. Not necessarily not being Christian, but losing. If I had to ask, okay, so that's interesting. So I would, okay, let me, so then let's forget about that.

I think it's because what I was about to say is then we also have some of these experiences with things like DMT. I think DM, yeah, I think it's DMT. So, where people who use DMT have a common experience, right? So irrespective of what your background is, what your religious background is. So you're saying that there's more incongruence than people may think than I was suggesting, fair enough. But then we also know, on the flip side, there is actually, has nothing to do with what you believe or what your background is, that human beings will have

very similar experiences. So you use DMT and you will encounter, or a lot of humans will encounter what they describe as machine elves, right? And we call it that because their capacity to put into language what they experience, there's like a drop off. Like we can't adequately describe. And so they'll use the term elf because it kind of is like sort of like an elf. But it's also like this little robotic.

creature, right? Like, it's like a robotic, it's not a toad. It's like a, it's like an elf, but it's like a mechanical elf. And that these mechanical elves are generally speaking, like positive, right? They like like you. They're friendly. They'll take you on journeys, which also are, you know, mind bending and whatnot. And then you kind of come back. But people will consistently describe encounters with machine elves. And DMT, I remember looking at one small study that looked at, you know, like something like 34 patients and found that like over 90% of them are very common experience with DMT is encountering some kind of otherworldly being. So you encounter something that's like not human, not God, but just other things out there

that or whatever. So I'm kind of curious like when you, you know, so you've had mystical experiences yourself. You've studied at Hopkins at Harvard. You understand neuroscience. You understand RCTs. You you understand neurochemistry, you're a clinician, you've dealt with psychosis, right? You know what delusions look like. You know what psychosis kind of looks like symptomatically. Like, what do you think is going on here? Are these things, do they like actually exist? Is this a spiritual antenna that we're tuning things into?

Are these figments of our imagination? Or these random, you know, firings of our serotonergic system that then get interpreted by like other parts of our cortices? like what do you think is going on here? And I know that your first answer is going to be, I don't know. So what do you think? So you already know my first answer. And I think just metting a bit, I think one good stance to just have in mind across all these things is what's I think Roland Griffiths, who's other Hopkins dude, rest and peace.

And was a huge psychedelics researcher. You know, he would talk about this idea of a negative capability, right? where it's like, we really want to see things in absolutes. And like, this is how it is. And this is why, you know, this is how the way works. This is how God is this or like, you know, this is what, yeah. And so like we want to see, we are like these are what machine elves are. And I feel like we want to see things in the absolutes.

And I think absolutely having sort of, it's important to have like absolutes as well in life and like seeking. truth and stuff like that. But I think it's also important to have like openness around like we just don't know. There's so much uncertainty and mystery. We may not ever as humans maybe one day, but we may not ever have the technology to understand out of the universe, machine elves and things like that. It may not have a definitive answer. And so I think having a sort of like negative capability around it and like me like i question you know i i wrestle with doubt all the time about like what do i believe do i believe in this or that or what what this pastor says or what this political whatever anyway we won't come to that but um yeah so anyway i'm just going to start with that

um but what what do i think is going on with the machine else i i'm straddling between two things right one is like the this sort of biological phenomenon sort of like this this chemical interaction with the brain, creating sort of the dreamlike state, and that folks are, you know, just for some reason, that chemical produces, like, a visual, like enhances this visual cortex and sort of amygdala in certain ways that this is just the human genetics experience of crashing with DMT and bam, machine else, here we go. And we're going to, they're going to communicate and talk certain ways. That's how it is. Sure. Then there's a field, and I think we talked about this outlook where, like, is there, this is where it might sound quack, but can it be more quack than around hinge than we've already been?

I don't know. But, like, yeah, we believe in, like, a spiritual space in an around. I think we talked about that there isn't just, like, material. And so could this be our spiritual realm? Could there be angels? Could there be machine elves or whatever? What do those represent? And, you know, I know there's, I think there's all sorts of ways people are exploring the consciousness or like, these like, I don't know, psychonauts in different ways that they're exploring.

But there is a subset of psychonauts who are exploring these machine elves. I've never talked to one who's doing this, but I kind of imagine like an astronaut going out to space and going like, oh, what's, you know, what's this? Like, like, dirt on the moon, like going into and like experiencing these things. Could it be spiritual? I'm definitely open to that idea as well. And so I don't know. Could it be spiritual? What do you mean by spiritual there?

Oh, like, okay. So one of the things that comes, one kind of unique-ish property, and I don't want to draw like rigid lines across these different psychedelics, but one thing that people kind of experience with like awaska or DMT is sort of this like, I don't know. I forgot if a word is like hyperdimensional or like they feel you know you kind of get transported into a different dimension, right? And it goes back to this idea of like, is there another spiritual realm or dimension that we just can't experience with our eyes, our nose, our mouth, right? And like this material. Is there some kind of realm another dimension, right? Obviously Marvel will tell us yes. But like,

Yeah, is there another realm? And so, like, could this be another dimension or a realm? We just can't sense when we're in our current conscious state or using our olfactory neurons and our ocular, yeah, muscles and whatever. Like, you know, is there more, yeah. So I'm open to that idea. I, yeah. So, and I wouldn't call myself a conspiracy theorist or anything like that. but I yeah I sure yeah yeah so what do you think what do you think I'm I think I'm I think

I think what I want to tell you what I do you giving me held all at this point or no I don't think you need held all air epipers all my dude um let me I'm going to go grab my iPad and then I will tell you what I think because I think you've asked a ton of questions so let me let me just grab something and then you can just you keep everyone entertained oh boy oh boy i don't even see the chat um greetings all earthlings welcome to the mystical world of dr k or as we humans call it healthy gamer i'm going to have to need a second to figure this out um can you say something Hello. Okay, great.

Okay. So what do I think? So first of all, thank you so much, Michael, for coming on today and sharing your perspectives with us. Like I said, I just, I really love how, dude, you're just so knowledgeable, right? So you've had like, you've gone through these trials and tribulations yourself, like you've, you've, like, like studied at some of the best institutions in the world. I think you're, I imagine you're a good clinician. Like, you know, it sounds like you really try hard. I know you've worked with a ton of

different patient populations, people who are really successful, people who are veterans. You know, you just bring so many different perspectives and like you've done philosophical studies and RCTs and all this kind of stuff. So like you've done studies in basically every way that you can do a study. So I really just love and appreciate that about you. So let me see if I can get this going. Okay. Oh, wow. This works. Hell yeah. Okay. So now what I need to do, hold on. I'm going to have to screen share with you so that you can see this. Okay, so you should be able to see that. And then now you're going to disappear over here. Hold on. Let me see if I can figure out something else over here. So I'm screen sharing with you. But can I? There. You can still see mine, right?

Yeah. You can see the iPad? Yeah, it's just a dark screen. Yeah, dark screen with iPad icons. Okay. There we go. Okay. So, wow.

Props to our overlay people for finally making this work where everyone can see everything and we can still see your face. Okay. So what do I think? Like, what do I think is going on? So I think let's start with pathology, right? So you started off with this point, or not start. You mentioned this point that like human beings, we tend to pathologize a lot of things in psychiatry. So it's reached the point where if you hallucinate of any kind or if you have any sort of delusion or if you have any kind of non-sensory based experience, we're quick to pathologize it.

So I think that human beings have the capacity to experience things that are not based in a material reality. So we have the capacity to hear voices that don't exist. Now, this is a capacity that we have. So this could be a manifestation of grief. It could be adaptive in terms of like, you know, inner voice. And so just like anything else, like we are capable of being sad and we're capable. So if we kind of think about, you know, sadness, this is a normal range of sadness. and if experience, people experience a lot of sadness, we call this depression.

We call this mourning. Right? If you are mourning someone you've lost, and this is like normal. And then if you're over here, maybe you're manic. So human beings have a normal range of things that we experience. And I think a non-sensory based awareness or subjective experience of things that don't exist. is within the realm of what humans can experience. So William James talked about this a lot.

I think it's a really great book called The Varieties of Religious Experience, where he talks about, like, you know, what is mental illness, what is psychosis? So we have, like, human beings have this potential to have, let's call them weird, subjective experiences. Now the question, so the first thing is, I think pathology is, is when this weird subjective experience becomes hyperactive or becomes abnormally active. So I'll give you just a simple example of this. So if we look at like people with schizophrenia, right?

So people specifically with paranoid delusions. And I'm sure you know this, right? So like if we look at paranoid delusions, what separates people with paranoid delusions from other kinds of people. who are hallucinating or being delusional, it's because the parts of their brain that form associations are hyperactive. So what do we mean by this? This means that, so if I'm walking down the street,

I see Michael walking down the street, and I'm like, that's just a random dude. And then I see a car drive by, there's all kinds of random stimuli in our environment. When the part of my brain that generates patterns out of random stimuli, This is the same part of our brain that can see an animal when we look at clouds. There's no animal there, but there's a part of our brain that generates patterns.

When this part of our brain becomes hyperactive, we see this in paranoid delusions, they start taking all kinds of random things. Like this person stopped at this traffic light, even though it was yellow and they could have gone through. That means that they're watching me. This other person was walking behind me. I stopped and I pulled out my phone and then they sat at a park bench. right? These could be all random things. People sit down at park benches. People don't always run through yellow lights. But when this hyper association happens in a certain part of our brain, plus I have a weird subjective experience, this is what I think of is schizophrenia. Okay? So it's like we all have the capability to see God or whatever, but then when it gets combined with some amount of hyperactivity, abnormal activity in our brain with a pathologic process, it gets hijacked pathologically. just like the immune system does if we have autoimmune disease, right?

Normal part of the human body can get inappropriately activated. So that's what I think is going on with people who are like hallucinating, paranoid delusions, whatever. It's like the psychosis, we have these weird subjective experiences, and it can get taken over by mental illness. Now the question becomes, what is this? So there's the biological, the hard biological explanation, which is like pretty simple. It's just that, you know, like our brain sometimes does things. So I'll give you all a simple example. So let's say I have my eyes and then I have my occipital cortex and then I have my visual association cortex.

So this is where I have a signal. the signal, I have an actual signal, and then that gets processed in a very primitive way in our visual cortex. Actually, maybe that's a better way to put it. This may all happen in the occipital cortex, not that I think about it. Rusty. Do you know if the visual cortex is in the occipital cortex? Probably, right? And then what happens is we form associations.

So when I like, like, the way that this works neuroscientifically is if I look at a painting, I get light entering my eyes, and then I have a part of my brain that processes the visual stimulus, right? So it takes light, and it generates an image for me. So this is kind of like the monitor. Like a monitor takes electrons and generates an image. But then the image is not the painting. The painting is our subjective experience. So if I say beauty, this painting is beautiful, that doesn't come from the visual cortex.

That comes from the visual association cortex. So we have a separate part of our brain that shows, gives meaning to things. So like, you know, like if I walk, if I come in the door and I see roses, roses are just random flowers. They're random-ass flowers just like any other flower that exists on the planet. But we attach associations with it. So I think sometimes what could be going on with these weird subjective experiences, if we get activation of this part of the brain, without this part of the brain and this part of the brain, we could get some profound spiritual experience, possibly. Right? And this is also mediated by serotonin receptors and like whatever psychedelics activate, like whatever.

So I think that there's an argument to be made that all of these weird subjective experiences are essentially false. They're artifacts and can be reduced to parts of the brain activating. And there's good arguments to this because we can sort of say, you know, if I artificially, if I take an electrode and I implant it over here and I start activating it or someone has a seizure over here. So I think like the best example of this is like temporal lobe syndrome. I don't know if you like are familiar with that. yeah, nay. Back in neurology days. Yeah.

You start seeing visual hallucinations when you have an overactive temporal lobe. Absolutely, right? And people with temporal lobe syndrome are also hyper-religious and hypergraphic. So people have hypothesized that Dostoevsky had some temporal lobe, like, neurological activity. Because they write a ton, like literally. Like, there's this pattern of seeing things, being spiritual, and just being fucking vomiting out books and books and books.

and books and books. So you can make this argument. Okay. Oh, oops. Now, but what I think is actually going on, I fall into the spiritual antenna camp. So I think that if we really look at the brain, what's happening is our brain is ultimately an organ of perception.

So, for example, so a lot of people will say like, okay, like these subjective experiences aren't real. They're created by the brain. So if I look at my, if I take my eye, eyes. I have visual cortex, visual association cortex. And I do a study where I stimulate some part of my brain. I administer a psychedelic. And then I see that I'm activating parts of my brain gets activated. Brain turns on. So if my brain turns on, people will say like, okay,

this means that since I can induce it with a psychedelic, that means that it's not real. It's created by the brain. But let's use a different analogy. So if I activate the visual cortex, if I turn this on and I turn this on, even without an actual thing, I will have a subjective experience of seeing something. Make sense? Yeah. But just because I can artificially activate neurons and see things or mess with neurons and not see things. So if we look at like, you know,

you know, unilateral like hemianopia and things like that, like, you know, all these weird like neuro conditions where we have brain damage and we have left-sided heming neglect and all that kind of stuff. Just because I can tamper with the brain and create subjective

experiences does not mean that light doesn't exist and that the real world doesn't exist, right? Like, duh. Like, I can artificially stimulate this part of my brain and have a human being create a subjective experience, that doesn't mean that the world is false.

This just means that our brain is capable of perceiving the world. Now, there's one big difference between the psychedelic experiences, the spiritual experiences, and the rest of the world, which is that the rest of the world has material evidence of its existence, whereas machine elves do not. We have no evidence of God or, machine elves or whatever. Maybe you can argue that we do. So I think this is kind of where the rub is. But if we kind of look at it, like some people will say like, okay, they'll sort of tip into that

direction. Well, they say it's not real because we can't observe it externally. And that's where I think, you know, we've talked about this before. I just did a whole lecture about it on Monday, actually, where on the membership side, I did something called the weird stuff part two. So these are like in our membership community, also twice. I've said, hey, y'all, I want to teach something that I just want to teach y'all, which is just weird. There's no point to it. There's no value in it. It's just, and people don't even know how to ask about it.

So usually people will vote on topics. And I prepare lectures on like attachment or emotions or whatever they want to do. Kind of like this conversation, just like weird, weird stuff. Yeah. So I was talking about like the nature of consciousness and like meditation and this kind of stuff. Yeah. So what I think is basically going on is that our brain. is capable of, like you said, there's an antenna,

and we have one kind of perception that, or I say one kind of perception. I think goes a little bit deeper than that. We have non-sensory perception. Let's put it that way. So we are capable of perceiving things that are not of the material world, right? So this is like, this is where we get into like,

Qualia and phenomenology, where it's like there's stuff out there that is not reducible to like material detection. At this point, we can't materially detect it. But our brains can detect it, right? So we just have a perception that is beyond our five senses. And so when people use psychedelics or when they meditate or when they become psychotic, we start to perceive things that are just non-material.

And that there are particular techniques that you can do that will evoke certain kinds of spiritual experiences, you can pray. And I mean, I'm going to go ahead and say, like, I'm with you, Michael, that we don't know from an objective sense. But subjectively, like, I'm pretty sure that shit is real, man. Like, I think that there are, like, just bluntly. Right? So, like, I think this stuff like machine elves, like people, and I think there's a good,

in a sense, scientific argument for it, which is that, see, if a hundred human beings look through a telescope and they see Mars, like, that concerns. Like, that consistency of human perception using a tool that enhances perception tells us about reality. It doesn't indicate falsity. Consistency of human perception, I think, tells us something. And if we really think about it, like, this is where we get even deeper. If we sort of think about, we think about perception, how can I say this? So I think there's one fundamental problem, potentially.

I am a human and I have the quality of perception. I think it's actually the other way around. I think perception is the most basic quality of who we are. So if you think about how do you know you're you and you don't know you're me, it's because your perception is different. What ends when you die, your ability to perceive ends. right so like like the perception i think is the most basic aspect so you always experience your life like you're you can and and there's a perception that is even beyond the senses because

you can perceive your perception of the senses right so you are aware you can observe your capacity for sight you can observe your capacity for for sound so the capacity for perception is ultimately like our most basic attribute of existence, this is entirely subjective. So I know this sounds kind of bizarre, but like who you and I are are fundamentally subjective. It's not defined by our objective qualities. It's defined by our subjective qualities. And so I think what's going on is that when we use some of these tools, we're like amplifying some of our basic perception and we're detecting like all this weird crap that is just not material. Yeah. This is really fascinating. What if, you know, what do people come and say like, okay, so, you know, consistent perception that's sort of as a data point. But, you know, what if our, the perception itself is a right? How do we know that this is the right that we're, what we're perceiving is like, how do we know this is like a reality that we're experiencing in this kind of spirit?

realm or if that's just my mind playing tricks on me, like a sexotic illness or like something. I'd push that question right back to you for anything else in existence. How do human beings know that what they're perceiving is real? I mean, just back to the perception aspect, our own senses, our own critical thinking, our executive control. I would say, how do we know that a rose is red? We see it and we associate red with what other people have taught us. and that we perceive it as read through our... So I think the key thing there is we... Right? So consensus of perception is what human beings use as a basis of reality.

Consensus of perception. So when my perception and your perception are shared, that's what we call scientific truth. So if I look, if I run a study and I have one result and you run a study and you have a different result and there's a lack of consensus, then we say that, we don't know which one is real. The moment that both of us agree, it moves closer to reality. So I think consensus of human observation is the basis of our reality.

Yeah, that's really interesting. I think in some sense, I agree because especially in this realm of things, you just cannot test it using like any evidence-based methods. And this is probably the best we've got. But I also, I don't know, part of my research brain is like,

well, then, you know, we have all sorts of, consensus trials going on, like different people thinking different things or different conspiracies, but like is it really, you know, have we eliminated the biases and like things like that? I'm not asking a question. It's just, I'm just telling you my, what's coming to mind. I think like that. So consensus observation is the foundation of science. And I think what we say, what we say. And like, we know that in medicine, right? So let's like, okay, like, you know, Are we going to prescribe SSRIs?

Why? So we are very sophisticated scientists in medicine. And the pillars of the practical application of medicine is consensus observation. That's literally what a randomized controlled trial is. Can we detect a consistent effect? Is there a consistent observation that can be made if we give someone olanzapine versus aeropiprizo? Right?

Yeah. And then we have instrumentation, and this is where things get really fun, because there are some experiments that we can run so consistently that the observations are 100%. So gravity, for example, I think is like a really good example of like an experiment that you can run a million times and you will find consistent observation. And that is what we say is reality. Right? What's our threshold? I mean, our threshold is like P less than point. 0.05, right? That's what it is in science because we, we need a certain level of statistical

probability, which is like, that's literally consistency. It's consistency that makes, is the foundation of science. Yeah, no, that is true. And there's imperfect science, even in the science of it. Like, with what we know in medical field, a lot of what we, there's a lot of issues, sort of, even in sort of research and things, papers that get retracted or ideas that we thought were evidence-based that end up getting adjusted as we keep learning. So, yeah. What? Thalidomide.

You remember thalidomide before our day. Oh, oh, yes. Yes. Okay. Anti-cancer drug, really terrible for fetuses. So, right? So we learn from our mistakes. Did that answer your question?

I know you asked me a couple times, like, what do I think? That's what I think about this stuff. So I think. Oh, 100%. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's fascinating. I think the first half, I'm like, yeah, this makes sense.

The second half of like, whoa, this is something I have to chew on for a bit. Because it's like, yeah, no, that's really fascinating. Cool. But yeah. Yeah, thanks for coming on. Any last questions before we wrap up? No, no questions. But I, yeah, I appreciate the conversation.

Like that, man. I felt like we were just hanging out at a cafe somewhere. Yeah, and I remember. So the people who, you know, Michael alluded to one or two conversations. So Michael and I went to dinner maybe like about a year ago. And like we were just having a great conversation. I was just thinking like, man, this should be streamed. And that's what, you know, because it was just, you're just so broadly studied.

You know, like you just have so many different perspectives. And I tend to, I think you guys, you kind of, what, what do you call it the? something about negativity, the capability of negative capability. A negative capability? Yeah. Right? So like I, you know, I tend to put my money down. I'm like, yeah, I think it's real.

You got to kind of have to put a stance somewhere. Yeah. Right. And Michael is like one of those guys that's like, oh, like, I'm a psychiatrist. Like, oh, it's like all the meaning and the interpretation. You can never know what reality is. It's all just part of our human experience. But, I mean, I think it's interesting.

So I think some of the stuff that may, I'm not saying machine elves are real. But I do think that the, the, I think that there's enough conserved human experience, which I think the instrumentation is what's lacking. Right? So human beings, sciences, the scientific process always starts with consistency. human observation. And then we develop the tools for experimentation that verify what is correct and what is not correct.

But I think there's enough conserved human experience of non-material things that I think that that's real. It's just we have no way. And it's so simple because if you kind of think about it, do thoughts exist? I mean, yes. Right? So it's a shared illusion from every human on the planet. And yet we have zero proof of the existence of a thought.

So that speaks to me of like a fundamental gap between what is science is capable of detecting and verifying and what exists in the world. And you can make the argument, which I think is a fair one, that if science, if we don't have an instrument to detect it, it doesn't exist. But I think that that's a problematic argument. Yeah, it's a little bit of a prideful kind of. statement to make that it there's a lot of arrogance within science too. Yeah, but but I could also see like, you know, why people want to see sort of the evidence. And because I am that way also naturally. Yeah.

Yeah. I could not believe, yeah, I could not believe or think the way I do unless it got hammered into me by experience and unless my prefrontal cortex was fully satisfied in it. And so with it. And so, yeah, I'm glad. I'm glad we're having this conversation. I would love to see how this conversation would be different or not in like five years, maybe. No, I mean, I think that's what's so exciting.

So I think hopefully we'll learn a lot more about, you know, the therapeutic value. I'm sure we'll learn stuff about the therapeutic value. I don't think we're going to have discovered any major mechanisms or have any scientific breakthroughs about the realness of psychedelic experiences. I would be surprised if that changes in five years. But I think, yeah. So thanks a lot. I don't remember, Michael, do you have, like, socials and stuff that you want to send people to if they want more info?

You know, see, that would be really smart for me to capitalize on this. But, yeah, no. Yeah, that's okay, dude. We'll, you know, we can talk about that more later. But so thanks a lot, Michael, for coming. We had a bunch of questions, which we didn't get a chance to get to. But we'll maybe have, like, I don't know, we'll see. We'll see what questions people have and stuff like that.

So thanks a lot, man. Take care, buddy. Yeah. too. See you soon. Adios. Thanks for joining us today. We're here to help you understand your mind and live a better life. If you enjoy the conversation, be sure to subscribe. Until next time, take care of yourselves and each other.