Making Sense with Sam Harris - #306 — Psychedelics & Mortality

Episode Date: December 13, 2022

Sam Harris speaks with Roland Griffiths about psychedelics and mortality. They discuss the current state of psychedelic research, the timeline for FDA approvals, the risks to mental health posed by psychedelics in vulnerable populations, the use of psychedelics among the well, the relationship between psychedelics and meditation, advice for “bad” trips, microdosing, Roland’s stage-4 cancer diagnosis, reflections on death, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe. Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Today I'm speaking to Roland Griffiths. Roland is a professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Neurosciences at Johns Hopkins University and the founding director of the Johns Hopkins Center on Psychedelic and Consciousness Research. He has authored over 400 scientific publications, and he has been a consultant to the National Institutes of Health, the World Health Organization, and numerous pharmaceutical companies. Roland has also conducted extensive research with sedative hypnotics, caffeine, and other mood-altering drugs.

In 1994, Roland got very interested in meditation, and this made him curious about altered states of consciousness generally, which prompted him in 1999 to initiate the first study in decades on psilocybin. And since then, he's been at the forefront of renewed scientific interest in psychedelics. This research has looked at the utility of psilocybin and MDMA in particular in the treatment of anxiety in cancer patients, treatment-resistant depression, PTSD, as well as their utility for improving the lives of otherwise well people. As you'll hear, there have been big changes in Roland's life since we last spoke. We last spoke almost exactly three years ago. Since then, he's received a stage four cancer diagnosis, which appears to be untreatable,

and we talk about that. And as part of his end-of-life planning, Roland has created a major project at Johns Hopkins to endow a professorship that comes with research funds in perpetuity. And if you want more information about that, you can find it at griffithsfund.org. I'll read you Roland's quote from that webpage. The purpose of this endowment is to support a professorship and to establish a world-class, rigorous, empirical program of research with psychedelic substances to advance understanding of well-being and spirituality in the service of human flourishing for generations to come. The hallmark of this research shall be the scientific method.

Once again, you can find out more about this project on that webpage. The Waking Up Foundation will be supporting it. We're giving $250,000 over two years, and I am excited about that. If you want to join us, again, the website is griffithsfund.org. And Roland and I speak about psychedelics and mortality in today's episode. We discuss the current state of psychedelic research, the timeline for FDA approvals, the risks to mental health posed by psychedelics in vulnerable groups, the use of psychedelics by otherwise healthy people who are just seeking a deeper experience of life, the relationship between psychedelics and meditation, advice for, quote, bad trips, microdosing, Roland's experience

getting his cancer diagnosis, and our mutual reflections on death, and other topics. And now I bring you Roland Griffiths. I am here with Roland Griffiths. Roland, thanks for joining me again. How pleased to be there, Sam. Good to hear you. We spoke almost exactly three years ago about the work you're doing at Johns Hopkins on psychedelics. And it's really, it's not too much to say that you have been leading the resurgence of scientific interest in psychedelics. And we'll talk about that. But I just checked my calendar and soon after we spoke, I know you know this because I appended some audio on this topic to the podcast we released. But just almost right after we spoke,

I had the first psychedelic experience I'd had in, I think, over 25 years. And I just looked at my calendar, and as chance would have it, it was actually three years ago to the day that we're recording this, which causes me to reflect on how I've used the last thousand days or so. And we will talk about how you have used them. But, I mean, it's really, it's been a crazy three years. I mean, this was before COVID, really right before COVID. And so we've had a global pandemic and all the attendant disruption in our lives since then. And there have been some immense changes, I know, in your life.

So let's jump in. We can talk about anything you want and start anywhere you want, but what have the last three years been like for you? Well, let me first just comment that I was delighted that you tried to expose yourself once again to psychedelics, and your description of that was absolutely beautiful and harrowing. That's the nature of these experiences. So yeah, let's see what's happened since then. At the time we spoke, since then. At the time we spoke, I think our center was up and running. That happened in 2019. And as much as the tension of culture at large had already come to focus on psychedelics, it's just ramped up enormously since then. And so we now have a dramatically changing landscape. There are now a number of academic centers that have declared interest in psychedelics. And so that research is going apace. There's NIH that's just very recently stepped in to the fray here. They had been reluctant to fund human

studies on psychedelics, and they're still just beginning to do so. But they have now funded several out of several institutes, including one clinical trial of addiction to cigarette smoking done by my colleague Matt Johnson at Hopkins. So that's moving apace. And then I don't quite know how to think about it and wrap my head around the consequences of it. There's this huge groundswell of movements at state and local levels to decriminalize or legalize psychedelics. And I do have some concern about that, but a lot of sympathy for that. And I guess the other significant development is that clinical trials under FDA that are slotted for medical approval of compounds have been moving forward. It's medical approval pending results, but the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, MAPS, has some very promising data with MDMA and treatment of PTSD. And then there are two

companies, the USONA Institute out of Madison and Compass Pathways out of the UK, that have been given breakthrough therapy status designation by FDA for their trials in major depressive disorder and treatment-resistant depression, respectively. So that is moving forward. So it's an exciting time. And also the basic neuroscience. There's just a lot going on with basic neuroscience and understanding both at the molecular and network level what might be occurring with psychedelics. So it's enormously exciting and far outstrips anything that I could have imagined would happen

when we initiated our studies back in 2000. So are all the compounds moving in lockstep? What drugs are we talking about at this point? And in terms of approval and funding by the NIH and decriminalization, do you view everything that has clinical and therapeutic relevance moving into the end zone more or less at the same time, or are some of these compounds years ahead of others? Yeah, it appears that the MDMA for PTSD application will very likely cross over the threshold first. Of course, these are all unknowns. They could run into major problems. FDA could ask for additional studies. But the best guess would be that MDMA might be approved in anywhere from two to four years. And the work with depression is moving more slowly. I would put that at three to five years for approval. I don't know of any other compound right now. I think there are trials going on. I don't know what the FDA regulatory status is of those trials and whether they have been pitched to FDA for approval. But by and large, the focus has been on psilocybin because that's where we've generated the most data. There is one other group, BMOR, that is developing psilocybin for treatment

of alcohol use disorder. But I think most of the attention has been focused on psilocybin and these decriminalization and legalization efforts being done at state and county and city levels have focused largely on psilocybin, but not exclusively on psilocybin. So the different initiatives that have been passed differ with respect to precisely what they're attempting to legalize or decriminalize. However, all those initiatives come with the very significant problem that although you might be able to decriminalize or lower the priority for enforcement at the state level or the city level. That does not change the federal level. And so like what happened with marijuana before, it would remain a potentially federal crime. And then it's a question of whether that's

enforced or not. So there's a lot of unknowns here. And the other big thing that's happened in the area is that companies, individuals have awakened to the potential financial benefits of developing compounds. And so there are probably 100 or more startups, maybe 200 or more startups, all of which are grasping for intellectual property and patent and trying to patent different things with respect to psychedelics. And so there'll be a big shakeout in that. But that's drawn a lot of interest and money into the area that hadn't been there heretofore. But all of that work is focused on therapeutics and not my principal interest, and that would be the larger implications for healthy volunteers and the interaction with what I'm now calling secular spirituality. Right, right. Yeah, so let's jump into the research side of this first, and I'll just say up front, the big thing that's happened

in your life since we last spoke is that you have received a stage four cancer diagnosis, and I'm very eager to speak with you about that and about what that has done to you and your thoughts about mortality and the role that meditation and psychedelics play in moving through this chapter of life. And so that's, I really want to explore that as much as you want to. But let's leave that for the second half and just jump into the research and the cultural change that's being forced upon us by the change in the availability and attention paid to psychedelics at this point. as a caveat a few minutes ago, because I share them, notwithstanding the fact that psychedelics have been indispensable to me, and I obviously took them in a non-legal context. And so there's many of us who are the beneficiaries of the chaos of the 60s, and I didn't live through the 60s, but I consider

myself someone who, in their wake, became interested in psychedelics and other esoterica and had access to these drugs simply because of what the 60s did to our culture, many of us still notice that much of that came with a pretty significant downside. And the fact that research in psychedelics and scientific acceptance of that impulse to research took so long to resurrect was largely the result of some of the missteps from the 60s. And I think many of us are eager not to see us step in the same ditches this time around. So how are you thinking about the landscape that's ahead of us in terms of research and cultural adoption of psychedelics, legal and illegal, and ambiguously legal, as you just mentioned, with respect to federal and state laws being

different. What are you concerned about? And if you could just write the script, what do you think it should look like? What should we hope happens? So I've focused and our groups have focused on medical approval and getting that over the finish line. And for a couple of reasons, but the primary one is that medical approval fits within an institutional structure that is working and is regulated. And so it's the least controversial as far as I'm concerned. It's the least risky because there can be set and setting and screening conditions that are built into that approval process that are going to mitigate against people engaging in dangerous behavior or becoming harmed by exposure to psychedelics. And it's also a way of, the medicalization is a way of normalizing it within

culture because there was so much demonization of these compounds back in the 1960s. And there are many people who have still not gotten out of that concern and fear. So if I were going to write a script, I would have said, let's focus exclusively on medicalization first and then turn toward a broader application and treatment of well people. My concern about the decriminalization and legalization movements is that we run the risk of just moving too fast with the availability of these compounds to the population at large. There are real risks associated with psychedelics that are now getting swept under the rug by psychedelic enthusiasts. getting swept under the rug by psychedelic enthusiasts. But it is the case, and the most common problem is people will get disoriented or panicked or otherwise untethered and engage

in dangerous behavior. And that could involve simple panic where someone runs into traffic or believes that they're going to be harmed and will defend themselves or attack somebody. And people get killed under these circumstances. Most don't. It's low probability, but it can happen, particularly under conditions where the set and setting conditions aren't right and the experience isn't supported by individuals who can provide feedback to the person once they're going off in dangerous territory. The other kind of danger is that people need to be screened for vulnerability to particularly psychotic disorders, schizophrenia,

but also in the case of bipolar to mania. And there may be other psychiatric conditions for which psychedelics pose unique risks, but there are enough anecdotal case reports of new onset schizophrenia occurring after a single or a few doses of a psychedelic. And this normally occurs in individuals who are going to be most susceptible to the disorder. So if they have family histories, it usually occurs in the late teens and early 20s. It can occur later, but that coincides with the onset of schizophrenia. And that's a horrific outcome.

I mean, there's no coming back from a diagnosis of, from a disease onset of schizophrenia. That's a lifelong condition that you'd wish on no one. Let's linger on that topic for a moment, Roland, because I'm not close to that research, and I don't know how close you are to it, but it had always been thought that there was some possibility of a psychedelic trip. We're usually talking about psilocybin or LSD here rather than something like MDMA, if I'm not mistaken. But it had always been thought that there was the possibility of a trip provoking the onset of schizophrenia. But there's just the obvious confound that you have lots of people in their teens and 20s taking these drugs over the decades and that this is the period where people are going to present with schizophrenia if in fact they're going to take that turn and it's

really hard to establish causation just looking at these longitudinal changes in people's lives causation, just looking at these longitudinal changes in people's lives. Have we moved to a place where we can actually say that there is some causal role played by one or another drug in actually provoking schizophrenia that wouldn't otherwise have occurred? No, I don't think we have, but the very nature of how these cases are detected, you're not going to do a randomized trial with vulnerable people. And so I think we're left with these anecdotal case reports. But in my own thinking about this, we have seen a couple of cases of mania develop in our experimental situation, and increasingly there are reports of that. And when you read them, it's pretty convincing that the onset is correlated with the administration

of the psychedelic. And so it's a concern. I know it to be a concern of FDA. We have excluded in our studies people with family histories of schizophrenia and bipolar disorders. There may be variations of bipolar for which there's not a problem, but if it's associated with mania, that really could be a problem. And what does that exclusion look like if they have a first-order relative with the condition? Well, right now, we're probably overly conservative, but we've excluded people at Hopkins who have first or second degree relative of either schizophrenia or some psychotic disorder, enduring psychotic disorder or bipolar.

And I think we're being overly conservative. There are studies now going on that are starting to treat bipolar patients. And so we need to collect a lot more data on that. But I don't, you know, whether or not there's a causal relationship, there are going to be reports of this sort. And if stirred right in the media, that's going to create, you know, the precise conditions that we want to avoid. So there's every reason, in my mind, to be very conservative and not forge ahead too rapidly with respect to that. But again, they are very rare cases, and I think we just need to do more research with them. Yeah. Although, as far as I know, schizophrenia is still thought to be an ambient condition in virtually any population.

You could name something of the order of 1%. You just randomly select people in any culture, anywhere on earth, and something like 1% will present with what we consider to be the clinical disorder of schizophrenia. So this is not an infinitesimal number of people. This is something that is going to keep showing up. So it's interesting to consider how that background fact will interact with more widespread use of these compounds. And I would expect we would be able to see, I mean, you know, if we actually crossed over into, you know, markedly more psychedelic drug use, we would be able to detect an increase in schizophrenia if, in fact, there was a causative relationship. Yes. Yeah. I guess just coming back to it, there are cases, and we've seen them, in which the onset of not schizophrenia, but mania occurs the day following administration.

So clearly something that's happened there. Now, whether or not they would have become manic spontaneously or not, we don't know because it's not a controlled trial. But the coincidence is convincing enough to me that I don't want to push that, at least right now where our culture at large hasn't fully adapted to the potential value of psychedelics. And my own thought about this is that what we need to develop is cultural institutions that are going to be supportive of appropriate use of psychedelics. And I see it almost as a co-evolutionary process, that if we're going to reintroduce psychedelics into culture, we need some constraints and or some wisdom in how they're used. And I don't quite know what form that takes. I mean, certainly that takes. I mean, certainly medicalization is one form of that, but I think that rankles a lot of people thinking that it's going to be restricted only to medical use. And what I would imagine

over time, but this could be decades or generations, is that we're going to hopefully develop the cultural institutions that will incorporate these. I think our initial clinical study with these compounds were in, ironically enough, given my situation, in cancer patients who were depressed or anxious because of a cancer diagnosis. And there we saw big effects, immediate effects that lasted throughout our six-month follow-up. And in another study, people have been followed up for five-plus years. So quite a remarkable effect. And my hope had been that that would be the first medical approval. And the reason for that is that culturally, we have a lot of sympathy for people who are facing death. And within a few generations, if the results are what we think

they would be, virtually everyone would be exposed either personally or through friends or family members to the benefits of that. And that would go a long way to changing and making the culture interested in further pursuing that. So one of the things that happened when the companies approached regulatory bodies about approval for, say, depression and cancer, the FDA pushed back and said, you know, we're concerned about something called, you know, a pseudo-specificity. You know, if it's good for depression in cancer patients, how do we know that it's not good for depression in the general population, which is, of course, a much larger population. And so the companies became persuaded

that they needed to reach out. That's kind of grotesquely funny. I mean, there's the idea that they were concerned that these drugs might relieve too much suffering on the boundary of death, and therefore it would kind of back propagate into everyone's self-interest to want access to these drugs earlier in life. Yeah, yeah. Well, so, I mean, it's somewhat ironic here that we've started, obviously, on a very cautious, even deflationary note here. You know, if somebody listening to us in this part of the conversation could be forgiven

for wondering why anyone would want to take these drugs in the first place, given the risks we're discussing. And you have talked about wanting to explore their cultural introduction in a way that's narrowly focused on medicalization as the most circumspect and responsible way to do this. And yet, your real interest, your core interest, I know, is on the benefits of psychedelic use in well people, you know, having nothing to do with terminal illness in principle or in PTSD or any other clinical diagnosis, just the existential and spiritual needs of ordinary human beings at really any stage of adulthood. And that really has been my interest. And that is certainly the widest promise of these compounds.

We should be attentive to caveats and concerns, however they crop up in this conversation. But how do you differentiate the narrow focus of medicalization and the treatment of clinical disorders like, you know, treatment-resistant depression or PTSD or, I guess it's probably not clinical, but it's clinical in a different sense, you know, end-of-life anxiety. How do you differentiate that from this wider promise of these compounds? Yeah, well, I think that's just a specific application of these compounds. But as I see it, the much larger, more profound, most impactful impact is going to be in the general population and apart from that. So the focus on medicalization for me has been just a pragmatic way to proceed. So yeah, you mentioned my interest in spirituality and just, I know we talked about this a couple of years back. So I became interested in psychedelics only after starting a meditation

practice. Which is usually, I mean, my experience that the reverse is often true. I mean, certainly it was true in my case where you have an experience on psychedelics and that proves to you that there really is a there there and then meditation becomes the more easily governed path toward actualizing that possibility. But you have flipped the script here. I have, and I'm glad I did. Because as a curious scientist, I came into the field less biased. Now, I did have, in college, a couple of experiences, I'm guessing with LSD, but they were totally inconsequential to me. They were a little bit confusing. They were done under

really suboptimal conditions, and they didn't have any particular meaning to me. So I had had some earlier experience, but I certainly would not have characterized myself in any way, shape, or form as being a proponent of psychedelics. It was only after I got involved with meditation and just intrigued with the exploration of the nature of mind and the phenomenology of some experiences I had with grounding that had any meaning to me. I was curious about the nature of inner experience, but I came out of graduate school with a lot of training in the experimental analysis of behavior, which is essentially Skinnerian, saying that all the attention needs to be focused on behavior, and very suspicious of any subjective effects because they couldn't be validated by third person account. And so ironically, so I became interested in meditation just out of that recognition that I didn't know, that I really was not, I was poorly in touch with the nature of inner experience, the nature of mind. And so that opened up for me, got me really curious initially about different meditation traditions. And then I started

reading religious literature and realizing there was a rhyme in there, something that seemed compatible. And at that point in my career, I'd been at Hopkins for about 25 years. I was established with an international reputation in psychopharmacology of mood-altering drugs, mostly drugs of abuse, and found myself deeply curious about these other kinds of experiences. And it was that that got me curious about psychedelics, because I went back and read some of that older literature, and it really sounded like there could be something of interest there. But I was dedicated to my meditation practice, and I've continued it ever since.

would be an appropriate descriptor, from the psychedelic enthusiasts that seemed to think that this was the one and only way and the best, you know, God's gift to humankind. And I just, yeah, I didn't believe it. I'm born as a skeptic. That's what science is about. We want to see things for ourselves and prove things. But that first study we ran where people ended up having these experiences of deep meaning among the most meaningful experiences of their lives, and they continued to report them to have that kind of meaning. They continued to report them to have that kind of meaning. They attributed changes in attitudes, moods, and behavior to that experience, all in a very positive direction. And those experiences looked like naturally occurring awakening experiences or mystical type experiences that have been described by contemplatives and by religious figures,

or that spontaneously occurred over thousands of years. So there was something incredibly compelling about that. And I think that is the core and central finding. There's something reorganizational about one's sense of self and worldview that can occur with these experiences under appropriate conditions. And I think that's what's so interesting. And the features of that experience include this sense that we're all in this together, that there's interconnectedness to where we sit in this world. And that's accompanied by a sense that the experience is precious, precious beyond belief. Some people, if you wanted to put it in religious terminology, it would be a sacred experience. And then the third feature that I think is so interesting about it is that the experience is felt to be true,

absolutely true, more real and more true than everyday waking consciousness. Now, we don't know that that's the case, but that's the feeling that arises. But if you think about that, someone has an experience of this interconnectedness. It's precious. It's valuable, more valuable than anything they've had. And it's true. You know, you there have the basis for rewriting the operating system of the individual. Their whole self-narrative can change with that. And they're empowered to make different choices going forward. And I think that's part of

the therapeutic effects of these drugs, but as well for the healthy volunteer opportunities for growth. What I think is so important in the broadest sense in terms of spirituality is that sense of interconnectedness that we're all in this together, and that that's true, it's real, it's precious. That is a basis for That is a basis for rewriting morality or ethical understandings. It really boils down to the golden rule, doesn't it? And my contention would be that the most important thing is that we need to develop a world culture that embraces that. Because if we don't, we're looking at annihilation by climate change or AI risk or bioterrorism or any number of other options. So I see that there's something, my sense is that there's something fundamentally important about this project for us to understand the nature of these changes and then put them to good use in changing culture in a way that's going to lead to human flourishing. Remind me, what sort of meditation practice have you been doing?

Remind me, what sort of meditation practice have you been doing? Well, I started off with Siddha yoga, which is a guru-based Indian practice, but was confused by, put off by the guru nature of that and the projection that's put on the teacher. How far back did you go with that? Was this after Muktananda died, or did you meet Muktananda? I never met Muktananda. So when I was involved with Siddha Yoga, the baton had been passed to Guru Mai, Swami Chitlasonanda. Well, it was interesting because Siddha yoga was really focused on experience. And it comes out of a tradition of the tantric tradition of Shaktipat, that is,

the guru has said to confer awakening experiences. And there's some remarkable reports of that, but they were very focused on the emergent experience. I guess as my meditation practice deepened, I became more curious in the broader field of the nature of mind. And as I said, I was kind of put off by the reification of the guru principle. Yeah. There are also some very colorful ethical scandals in that organization. Oh, so yeah. Both the post-date and reach all the way back to Muktananda's tenure. So it's a mess. Oh, yeah. And that's true of many of these religious meditation traditions, right? If you empower the teacher, they end up going off the rails, as will happen with psychedelic therapists as well. They get empowered and inflated ego and start misbehaving. an inflated ego and start misbehaving. But I became interested in the nature of mind and drawn into Buddhism. And so I'd say for the last 15 years, my practice has been primarily

Buddhist-oriented. I've done some work with Alan Wallace, who comes out of the Tibetan tradition, work with Alan Wallace, who comes out of the Tibetan tradition. But it's really IMS and Vipassana, Tara Brach and Jonathan Faust and Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield. And they have elegantly stripped away the supernatural pieces of it. And I really respect that tradition. Yeah. So how do you view the connection or lack thereof between meditation and psychedelics? I guess you could bring in any relevant neuroscience here or just your own first-person experience, but how do you view them as complementary or discordant methods? And what is, yeah, I mean, just any thoughts you have about the connection or lack thereof would be interesting. Yeah. So of course, that was my initial interest. I got

involved with meditation and then curious about psychedelics. And let's see, I've come to believe that there's a lot of similarities between them, that they're both in principle ways to investigate the nature of mind. And so if we just step back and think about what psilocybin and meditation do, you know, so I'd say psilocybin is this pharmacological tool that helps people recognize how it feels to embody the present moment. And that's exactly what meditation does. Psilocybin, people can dispassionately observe and let go of pain, fear, and discomfort. And again, that's what meditation does.

Transform a conventional sense of self to something other, a recognition that you're not your mind, you're not that voice in your head. There's a sense of awareness that goes outside and beyond that. And then gaining this authoritative sense of interconnectedness of people and things. And I think those both come out of potentially the psilocybin and meditation experience. So we went on, because of my interest in meditation, just to study novice meditators with psilocybin, long-term meditators with psilocybin. And across the board, the exposure to psilocybin facilitates and resonates deeply with the meditation experiences. And so in one study where people did not have a meditation practice, but were willing to take one up, And then different groups of people got different

exposure to different doses of psilocybin. And what we showed is that the enduring changes in traits, which is very difficult to find any experimental work showing trait-level changes in people, but we were able to show trait-level changes in this dimension of psychological well-being and pro-social behavior at six months. And that was attributed to interaction between meditation and psilocybin. So psilocybin greatly potentiated that. In an unpublished study in long-term meditators, these were people who had, in many cases, tens of thousands of hours of meditation, but they weren't classic contemplatives, say, out of the Tibetan tradition. But they had long-term experience with meditation and either no or any experience they had had with psychedelics had occurred 20 or 30 years ago. So they certainly

weren't proponents of using psychedelics. And there, it was just very interesting. Those individuals took to the psilocybin, were able to navigate the psilocybin experience, I think, much more readily because of their understanding and experience with examining the nature of mind. And so in some ways, the effects were less profound in them, but across the board, most, I hesitate to say all because I need to go back and look at that data, most reported that,

if anything, it enlivened their meditation practice. Long-term meditators can very often fall into a habitual type of practice. They have a go-to practice of meditating on breath or visualization or whatever. And they can lock into that practice and it can become habitual. And the psychedelics, by and large, got them out of the rut of whatever single practice or single set of practices they were using. And so, if anything, increased their interest in meditation. Importantly, none of them would have said that psychedelics were any kind of replacement for meditation. Because it's really the meditation provides the foundation for these kinds of explorations.

And so there's all the difference in the world between awakening experience and leading an awakened life. And that's what meditation is absolutely designed for, right? It's practice, and it's practice for bringing that sense of awareness moment to moment into daily life. And psychedelics certainly are less likely to accomplish that. Then in terms of neurophysiology, of course, the default mode network, which has got a lot of attention, particularly early on with the psychedelics, is decreased under acute psychedelic administration. But that's exactly what happens in long-term meditators.

It's decreased. So there's a reason to think that at some kinds of network levels, at least acute psychedelics are producing something that looks akin to what long-term meditators might experience. Although, as you can well appreciate, our understanding about the nature of mind, consciousness, and these kinds of effects are really in their absolute infancy. And we just don't have the scientific tools to really pull them apart as yet. But I think there's a lot of interesting research to be done with meditation and psychedelics. One thing I might say is that if I think about how we prepare a meditation-naive and psychedelic naive individual for a session, we essentially talk about having them look at the nature of mind and look at the nature of objects of consciousness that will appear during the session.

And the one thing that we very often say, it's just kind of a metaphor, is it's unpredictable. You're going to get this compound. We really have people focus introvertively. So we have them put on eye shades and headphones. So they're really going inward. And we tell them all kinds of things can arise within that. And it can be beautiful, it can be transcendent, but it also can be ugly, and it can be really frightening. And so if, for instance, during the session, a demonic figure appears, and it would be as frightening as you could possibly imagine, because it's being created by you, for you, if that should appear, what you don't want to do is run from it, because it's being created by you, for you, if that should appear, what you

don't want to do is run from it, because if you try, you're never going to escape it. And you don't want to fight it, because either way, you're reifying it as something else. And the appropriate posture to take, although the hair on the back of your neck may be standing on end, is to approach it with curiosity, be deeply interested in what it is. And the guarantee, if you're able to do that, is that it's going to change. It's going to turn into something else because it's not real. It's just an object of consciousness. And so we're essentially giving people, I think, a mini course in mindfulness and inviting them to go into that. And it's, I think, for that reason that meditators have much less difficulty

navigating the psychedelic experience because they're accustomed to seeing the games their minds can play. You don't go on a long-term meditation retreat without being humbled by all kinds of thoughts or ideas that torture you until you realize once again that you've just been caught up in a story, in a narrative that seems silly once you can step back from it. psychedelics seems paradoxical to me and somewhat difficult to talk about, or at least it can seem paradoxical when talked about in its totality. One complication here is that these terms that we've been using again and again, meditation and psychedelics, mean many different things, and people have different associations with them. So there are many different types of meditation. There are many different philosophies around it. There are both explicit and implicit goals that can be different, and those differences can really matter in terms of

a person's experience. And with psychedelics, obviously, there are just different drugs on offer, and they have different consequences. Some differences are subtle, and some are quite extreme. And we've been talking about psilocybin in this context mostly, but obviously there's LSD and mescaline and ayahuasca and pure DMT and 5-MeO-DMT. There's a lot on the menu here that people associate with that term. And all of these differences matter. And then there's a drug like MDMA, which is not even technically a psychedelic, and we've been talking about that too.

And then there's just this fundamental difference in the plane of focus for anything like a mindfulness-based approach to meditation and the ordinary use of psychedelics. So we can distinguish between the contents of consciousness and consciousness itself as a starting point here. And the goal in many forms of meditation, and certainly in any sophisticated or mature approach to mindfulness, is to recognize something about consciousness itself that is liberating. It's not to change the contents of consciousness. It's to notice that one's relationship to the changing contents of consciousness is the problem. It's the problem of clinging.

It's the problem of incessantly plunging into greed and hatred and delusion, into grasping at what's pleasant and pushing what's unpleasant away, and not recognizing what's neutral. The practice at that point is to keep falling back into this mere witnessing of experience, i.e. the consense of consciousness, and to relax one's reactivity to the point that you can recognize that consciousness itself, that the mere light by which everything is appearing, has an intrinsic quality of freedom to it. And most importantly, it's free of the sense of self, that what you're calling yourself is among the appearances before the

floodlights of consciousness. And consciousness is a prior condition to its arising. And that can be noticed regardless of what the contents of consciousness are. So it could just be the most ordinary sights and sounds and sensations and thoughts without any of the remarkable disclosures that are more or less synonymous with the psychedelic experience. And so that's meditation. And yet, somewhat paradoxically, many of us, not you, but me and many others, wouldn't have recognized that meditation was or even could be a thing, but for the pyrotechnic experience of psychedelics. And there's also just the fact that, quite related to that claim,

which is that if you give a hundred naive people a meditation instruction, I don't know what percentage will find anything of interest there, but some considerable number of people, if you're selecting randomly, will close their eyes and look within and attempt to follow whatever instruction you give them and very likely find nothing of interest, right?

Nothing will happen, and they'll walk away perplexed and perhaps grateful not to have to waste their time on that project for even a minute longer. Whereas 100 naive people given the sufficient dose of psilocybin or LSD or any other psychedelic, sufficient dose of psilocybin or LSD or any other psychedelic, something like 100% of those people will have a radical change in their experience. And as we've already discussed, some of those changes could be starkly unpleasant, and they'll come away feeling like that was not a good experience. But for a very high percentage of people, with the appropriate set and setting, they will have one of the most important and transformative experiences of their lives. Yet that transformation and the associated importance will be the result of radical changes in the contents of consciousness.

You know, all of their neurotic, normal thoughts will be blown away, and what will be left is something like the classic beatific vision that one encounters in spiritual and mystical and religious literature. I mean, there'll be vast perceptual changes, and if their eyes are open, the connection with the natural world will be extraordinary. And if their eyes are closed, and they've taken something like a high dose of psilocybin,

the landscape of mind will open up into this vast territory of visual experience, and visual and synesthetic experience, where one's emotional body is brought forward across this landscape of immense visual implication. visual implication. And in some ways, the center of the bullseye meditatively is orthogonal to all of the extraordinary changes that can happen for a person taking psychedelics. And yet, they're quite complementary and supportive in ways that we have discussed. I mean, one is, you know, many people just can't even get started with meditation but for first having had a psychedelic experience. And conversely, many people have a much better psychedelic experience based on their meditative experiences and the

training they've had in just letting go of thought and conceptualization and negative emotion and not clinging to experience itself as a basic orientation. So it's sort of hard to talk about, I think, but there's a, at least for me personally, meditation and psychedelics have been kind of two wings of the bird of having a first-person mode of inquiry into the nature of mind. And I can't view either as dispensable, and yet they're quite different when taken separately at any point in one's journey and for a significant period of time. and for a significant period of time. Yeah. Let's see, a couple of things. One, when you were prescribing what it is you learn in meditation, I think what was occurring to me as you were rolling through the list of how that changes your experience is that's available within

the psychedelic experience. But I will grant you that intermittent use, there's very little stability. But that actually leads me to propose what I think will be a really interesting future direction for research, and that is integration of intermittent and perhaps low-dose psychedelic use with meditation. So with a foundation of a meditation practice and then low-dose psychedelics imposed on that. And I will confess to having done a week-long meditation retreat, and three days into the retreat, taking a microdose of LSD on the order of 10 micrograms, which is sometimes said to be sub-perceptual, but that's not right. It's barely perceptible. But what my experience of that was, was that it just supercharged the retreat experience. I mean, we were going through cycles of meditation

and walking, and that all was just beautifully intensified. But there's nothing discontinuous from straight out meditation retreat experience. And so I think there's a lot to be done there. You also commented on the differences among the psychedelics. And there we can, we're on in our infancy, you know, we talk in pharmacological terms that there are these classic psychedelics and they're essentially the same. They all bind serotonin 2A receptor. They're producing similar kinds of acute effects. But yeah, indeed, if you really start experiencing some of those differences, I mean, LSD is similar to, but way different from psilocybin, and those are different from mescaline and different from DMT.

You know, there's a lot of interesting work to be done with that. And then let me just finally comment on, you know, your observation that you expose 100 people to meditation, and a good number are just not going to find anything there. And that was my experience. I initially got interested in meditation when I was in graduate school, and this was 25 years before I really got involved. And there, I thought, geez, this sounds like it'd be interesting. I'm going to give this a try. I realized that the teacher is talking stuff that doesn't converge with my understanding of science at all, but I'll take it metaphorically. And so, I gave it a try, but it was torture. You bounced off.

Three minutes felt like three hours. And I very quickly decided this wasn't for me. And it was only subsequently that for whatever set of reasons, I tried again. And then something opened up for me. Yeah. Yeah. I can't remember if this came out of your lab or not, but there was at least one paper I read integrating a, I think it was a five-day meditation retreat, or it might've been a seven-day retreat with, I don't recall it being low doses of psilocybin. I thought it was an actual psychedelic dose, but are you aware of that study? Yes. Yes. That came out of the Switzerland group led by Franz Vollenbeiter.

And they did a meditation retreat. This is a Buddhist retreat. And then on one day, they gave a rather high dose of psilocybin and reported positive effects of the type that we've seen and not yet reported. But I think there's real room for further exploration of lower doses. And if you give a high dose of psilocybin, it's hard for me to imagine what that would be like in a retreat situation. But yeah, it wouldn't lend itself well to normal retreat experience, that's for sure. Yeah. Well, it's also hard to picture how it scales. I mean, if you have 100 people on a retreat together, how you give 100 people high doses of psilocybin and keep everyone

comfortable, that's hard to picture. Insane, yeah. You give 100 people high doses of psilocybin and keep everyone comfortable. That's hard to picture. Insane, yeah. So what are your thoughts about microdosing? Because you've just mentioned it, and this is obviously all the rage in certain parts of culture now. What are your thoughts there? Well, I have yet to see persuasive evidence that it's useful clinically for, you know, it's being purported as a great intervention for depression and other things. I have yet to see data that make that convincing.

And there's so much room for placebo effects in there driven by expectancy. And so I think we have insufficient data on it. But I can say from personal experience that at least microdosing with LSD is certainly a thing. And I think that there's something fundamentally interesting there. And it's very subtle. And so someone who has no meditation experience and is not finely tuned to their inner experience may miss it entirely. And that's why they say it's sub-perceptual. But for those of us who have paid a lot of attention and attended to subtle changes in consciousness. There's nothing subtle about it at all. Okay, well, let's talk about your experience of getting

your cancer diagnosis. I would love to explore anything you want to share on this topic. When did you find out, and what was that like? Yeah, so this was just a year ago, and I went in for a routine screening colonoscopy to come out of anesthesia and being told that I had a significant colon tumor. How old are you, and how long had it been since you'd had your previous colonoscopy? Well, good question. So I'm mid-70s and it had been just over five years. And so that was, in my view, a medical mistake. I had had polyps detected in earlier colonoscopies, and a five-year follow-up was too long. And I was just slightly over five years because of COVID. So I don't recommend it.

Yeah, I recommend being conservative about that because it came as a disruptive and unhappy surprise. So the initial experience was one, frankly, of disorientation and confusion, like, this really can't be happening. And then I went on to get a CT scan, and lo and behold, I have metastases to liver, which that then makes it stage four. But there can be stage fours that are curable and stage fours that are not. And as it turns out, and over the course of the year, mine turns out not to be among the curable versions. So the initial response was just disbelief. It was like a dream.

And I could remember waking up at times and I come online and I start thinking about something I want to do. And then this thought comes up, oh, yeah, you have stage four cancer. And so initially, it was something that I really, bringing it into focus as something real just was not on hand. But then very, very quickly after that, when I embraced that, okay, this is a real thing. And very quickly after that, I started running through all the psychological postures that were on offer for someone with a stage four cancer diagnosis. So there's fear, with a stage four cancer diagnosis. So there's fear, anxiety, resentment, anger, denial, belief in some sort of afterlife or something of that sort. And fighting the cancer. My first cancer chemotherapy session, my daughter wrote me,

dad kicked cancer's ass, the John Wayne approach. And I thought, I don't want to go to war with anything. I'm not going to roll over, but that doesn't feel right. And so as I contemplated that, it actually quickly became apparent to me that the only appropriate response was to lean into what's real and the gratitude that we feel, can feel for the privilege of being these conscious sentient beings and the preciousness of that. And so immediately when the cancer diagnosis came into focus, I started reprioritizing things. So that came up, but there was this sense that the wisest way to hold this would be one, to just acknowledge it to be true and to then lean into gratitude for the preciousness of life. And then something, frankly, Sam, occurred that I would not have expected, but there was this sense of joy and wonder. And of course, being a meditator, invariably we've practiced loving kindness and

gratitude, and we've done some contemplations on death and dying. And so I thought I had been through that, but somehow that whole framing became supercharged with the diagnosis. And there was a sense of incredible well-being and equipoise that emerged in the face of what normally would have looked like challenging situations, getting the port, my intravenous port inserted, and then it became infected. I ended up in the hospital for five days over Christmas. And, you know, yeah, multiple discomforts with chemotherapy and different surgeries. as one would with an object of consciousness that emerged in a psychedelic session that was potentially disconcerting. And so far, and I'm now a year into this, it's just been maintained. I really felt in some sense initially that I was in a psychedelic experience. There was something kind of vivid about this. And I think what I found myself doing and doing in a way I didn't imagine to be possible was that whenever a negative framing of what my experience was came to mind, I essentially just

what my experience was came to mind. I essentially just said, no, I'm not going to go there. I'm leaning into gratitude and wonder and appreciation for whatever it is, whatever the appearance is. And that's worked in an amazing way. What do I attribute that to? I think foundationally, my meditation practice, because practicing meditation, we're accustomed to, at least on occasion, watching objects of mind emerge, seeing narratives emerge, and being able to step back from those narratives and recognize that they're just part of the larger field of consciousness. that they're just part of the larger field of consciousness. I also think that my experience with psychedelics, although it's not extensive, it's limited, but I think that's played a role as well because psychedelic experiences can be incredibly harrowing. And invariably,

there are rabbit holes that one can go down that are just very, very difficult. And I'd had enough of those experiences to recognize as they came on that I had some agency about whether or not I was going to go there. And I think that came to play because I was playing with, you know, hardball with the potential challenges facing the diagnosis. So I think the meditation, it was really important, whatever worldview I have with respect to that. And then some psychedelic experiences may have played into this. But I think what's moving to me is, and the reason I'm happy to talk about this, is because in principle, we needn't have a terminal diagnosis to experience what I'm experiencing and to have some jumpstart or supercharge to the appreciation for what I can only describe as the mystery verging on a miracle, that we are these highly evolved, sentient creatures that have become

aware that we're aware, and we have have no clue deep clue about how to solve that mystery and whether it's ever going to be solvable as you well know and so so that's it leaning into that and in principle trying to figure out and whether there are studies that can be done to help people awaken to that in the course of their lives in the absence of having a terminal diagnosis. When you look back on the experience of getting your diagnosis and the changes in your attitude that followed, and you reflect on what you were like before, how much of a mismatch is there? I mean, as you said, you were someone who had been a long-term meditator. You were interested in, obviously, in these existential questions. You had reflected on the preciousness of life and its finitude. I have to imagine you weren't someone who was

taking your immortality for granted and wasting your time in ways that you now retrospectively consider totally insane and obscene. But insofar as there is a mismatch there, what is it like to reflect on? I mean, if you could give your former self some advice, what would you have said to the 60-year-old Roland, apart from getting screened more frequently? Yeah. I mean, it's your project, Sam. It's my project. It's waking up. I considered myself to be reasonably awake prior to this experience, and that just went up a whole magnitude of intensity. magnitude of intensity. And I guess I didn't know that that kind of jump could even occur. I thought I was doing well with respect to my practices. And so I think what I would say is push more deeply into this. And I don't know what the manipulation would have been.

Should I be meditating more? Should I be doing that? I do breathwork practices. I'm interested in a variety of kinds of changes. So I don't know, other than to report that there is this huge magnitude of change. Yeah, I mean, I suspect doubling down on meditation and careful use of psychedelics, and certainly not narrowly focusing on just that. I mean, there are all kinds of other kinds of practices that bring that sense of gratitude and awareness into being. I think that's what's needed. That's the focus of the project that I've come up with as a gift, as something that came up when I started revising my will, was to create a program of research that does just that, that focuses in on psychedelics and the development of what I would call secular spirituality, that is spirituality stripped of paranormal and supernatural causes.

spirituality stripped of paranormal and supernatural causes. But it has to be hard empirical research. I believe fundamentally in science as the way we can come to true understanding of reputable phenomena. And so I think there's so much to be done. And I'm so excited about the prospect that I won't be doing that, but we're going to set in motion an engine of research that would grind this out in perpetuity, and that's incredibly exciting to me. Yeah, I want to close on a discussion of specifically what the project is and how people can support it. But before we land there, I'm just curious, have you done a high dose of psSD since the diagnosis. Now, let me say that for the first six or eight months, I had zero interest in psychedelics. As I described, I felt like I was already in a psychedelic experience and I felt that it couldn't get any better and why would I want to mess with it? And then, yeah, a number of acquaintances suggested that, yeah, how did I know I didn't have something more to explore with respect to psychedelics and the disease? So I did. I did a pretty significant dose of LSD and did some inquiry into that.

And it turned out to be really affirming of where I am. I really went into the experience with the query of whether I was masking over some deep fear or anxiety about death and dying. Was I somehow psychologically papering this over? And were there skeletons in the closet that I needed to know about? And at least within this experience, there were absolutely none. That I was doing the right thing. The way I was managing it was good. And then the other, I'm not giving to using psychedelics in this fashion, but I did in this one case. I addressed the cancer as something other and said, okay, what can you tell me? something other and said, okay, what can you tell me? What's going on here? And is this inevitable that I'm going to die? And there was no response at all, which I didn't know how to make of that.

And so then I addressed it again. I said, so you do know that I'm really grateful. I consider you a blessing. My life has been changed remarkably because of this experience. And as I've said on any number of occasions, it would have been a tragedy had I just walked out to that medical appointment and been run over by a bus. I would have missed the best part of life, my wife and I are saying, since the diagnosis, we've never been happier, more content. So then I addressed the cancer, saying, you know, I really respect you. I consider you a blessing, but do I have to die? And he had to come back, yes, yeah, this is the way it should be. You're doing it right, and you should keep doing it. And furthermore, there was a sense in that interaction that I had something to say about it.

that interaction that I had something to say about it. And that's why I'm talking to you publicly in a way that I would have never spoken about personal use before. I mean, there's something mysterious going on here that needs to be unpacked. And then when I got that back from cancer that, no, you're doing fine and it is as it should be, I then said, well, how about giving me more time if I have something to communicate? So I started bargaining and I got nothing back. But it was, and like I said, I'm not accustomed to using psychedelics like that, to kind of reify some object as other and go into dialogue. As a matter of fact, I have some aversion to using psychedelics in that way. But in this case, it came out in a way that was very clear with what I was doing and what I should be doing. And it emboldens me to speak publicly about this. It also emboldens me to try to stay on this path of awakened awareness in the presence

of this. And yet, I'm deeply humbled by what still may lay ahead for me and whether I have the capacity to keep the train on the rails. And by no means do I think I have this completely handled. But what does occur to me is that I'm really interested in trying. I'm interested in leaning into whatever challenges emerge and see where it goes. I think I emailed you when I saw the video that you released describing that you had gotten this diagnosis and how it had changed your relationship to your own mortality. There's a 10-minute video that people can see on your website. My first thought was obviously I was very sorry to hear about the cancer, but I was so happy to see the state you're in with respect to your relationship to it. I mean, it was just,

it was really, it was so infectious. And, you know, again, I'm somebody who thinks about death a lot, and I'm somebody who really tries to make use of that thought to enhance my focus on my real priorities in normal life, all the while knowing that actually getting a terminal diagnosis must sharpen up that point considerably in a way that is hard to manufacture for oneself prior to such a diagnosis, hence my question to you. And it was just seeing you as an older brother have this experience before me, Just seeing you as an older brother have this experience before me, it was quite the wisdom that was leaking out of your pores and is leaking out of your pores on this topic is contagious.

And it's really, it's wonderful to see how you're navigating this. It's quite inspiring. Yeah, your email to me was really nice because you acknowledged that there was some challenge to what I was going through, but you were recognizing the upside of it. And so one thing that I've found is so many people want to come and just say how sorry they are or how awful that must be. And that is completely contrary to how I'm holding the experience. And I find myself pushing back on that immediately because I'm just not going to embrace that there's challenge here. And people will write me, I hope you're feeling better.

And I'll say, better than what? I've been doing great. And so the assumption is that you're talking about changes in the contents of consciousness, all of these changes are by definition temporary, right? And so it's not ultimately having that experience. It lands in the storehouse of memory to whatever degree. And very much like dreams, psychedelic experiences can be hard to remember. I mean, you're having them in a state that is fairly discontinuous with one's normal waking consciousness, and it can be very hard to hold on to any of it. But the thing I feel that I took away, perhaps more than anything else,

was a sense that I actually don't have a fear of death itself. And that was kind of surprising. I would separate death and the actual experience of dying from all of the attendant chaos and pain that may be associated with any specific mode of dying. that may be associated with any specific mode of dying. I mean, obviously somebody getting hit by a bus is very quick, but in a situation of long-term illness, there's all of the experience of what it's like to be ill and all of the treatments and all the medical adventures and misadventures. And so I can't say I'm looking forward to any of that.

And I'm sure even in your state of, you know, real gratitude, there are ups and downs medically. But when I think about the actual experience of having one's mind lose any reference point to the details of one's life, I mean, there's the really prosaic version of that. I mean, we all happily go to sleep each night and lose our experience of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and thinking completely, and we're very grateful for it, right? So there's that. But when I think about the intensity of, or the possible intensity of dying, whatever that experience is or could be, of dying, whatever that experience is or could be, I came away from the five grams of mushrooms while blindfolded, feeling like whatever death is, there's no way it's more intense than that.

That thing I just went through, there's just no way to turn up the volume on experience beyond that. Obviously, that's an empirical claim, which I could be wrong about. But I came away feeling like when you're shot out of a nuclear cannon, it's all fine, really. There was just so much love and gratitude that was along for the ride when there was no longer a reference point to me in my life. If there is a residue in my life, it's that, where I just feel like death itself is not a problem. Again, separating it from all of the other transitory experiences one can have on the way to that final one. I don't know if that resonates with you at all from your experiences. Yeah, yeah it does.

So the contemplation about death is certainly a really interesting one. So when we were running our cancer trial, and I ended up asking all of our volunteers prior to, upon admission, just to try to understand where they were coming. So I'd say, well, what do you think happens when we die? And, you know, any number of them had wonderful thoughts about meeting relatives

and going into new lives or whatever. But a number said, no, it's like computer down, power's off, that's it. And for those people, I'd say, well, so what's the probability that you put on that, that there's absolutely nothing after death? And they say, oh, yeah, it's what I believe. So, well, give me a percentage. Oh,

it's a 95%. And I would go, what? 95% chance? So, you actually don't need much of a percentage there to make one curious about the very nature of what death is. And for me, it's as close to zero as it can get, but it can't be zero because I can't know. And I think that's all I need to remain deeply curious and wanting to be awake to the experience of dying because it's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. So there's a funny sense, at least right now, that I'm deeply interested in that. Although, again, I come out of a deep skeptical and scientific reductionistic viewpoint that would put the probability of that at not zero, because I don't think that's humble, but something pretty close to zero. The other thing I just want to share with you is over the course of some of the treatment where things became increasingly clear

that there were no good response options and cure was out of the question. I'd come back from getting a second opinion at Sloan Kettering for some radical intervention. And the next day I woke to the image of the hourglass, which I think is a lovely image. And it's the finitude of life. And that just came up really clearly for me. So the hourglass has been turned and you can see the sand running out of the top chamber into the bottom chamber, you're not quite sure how quickly it's running out, but you do know that at some point that last grain of sand is going to drop. And there's something lovely about that image. And it leads me to think that we should all have hourglasses, big hourglasses in our living rooms or bedrooms to remind us about the finitude. Because to me, that's what's brought this into such clear focus.

And there's even a paradox here, though, because from the point of view of consciousness, there really can't be an experience of the end of anything. This is something I talk about. There's a section on The Waking Up App called, I think, The Paradox of Death, where I explore this essay from the philosopher Tom Clark on this very point, which is interesting because he's a physicalist. He's a Western-trained analytic philosopher who very much draws the lesson from science that the mind, on some level, is what the brain is doing and consciousness is likewise. And so if consciousness is arising in the physical brain, well then when the physical

brain dies, consciousness must cease. But he explores this fact that consciousness for itself is always present, right? And there is no, so many materialists irrationally expect that, well, if death is the end of consciousness, well, then there's some sort of positive oblivion that awaits us. But there really can be no experience of oblivion. In the same way that the time before your birth wasn't in some sort of abyss from which you emerged, there's no experience of having emerged from nothing. After you die, there really can be no positive oblivion that you'll experience.

So what Clark does in this essay is, and this is something that isn't quite original to him, there are people who have launched a similar argument, I think Alan Watts said something along these lines and Erwin Schrodinger did as well, but if you follow the logic of this, you can come up with a fairly mystical view of what consciousness is for itself without, you know, violating any physicalist or materialist assumptions, because consciousness is always simply impersonally present for itself. Even our sense that it's interrupted in the course of our lives by deep sleep or anesthesia or anything else, when you look closely at it, that tends to be just the sense that there's a lapse in memory, right? Like there's a period in your life, you know, the eight hours previously to waking up that you don't remember clearly, and you sort of extrapolate from that that consciousness was interrupted. But there really is no experience of the absence of consciousness. There's just the character of experience and the implications

we draw from it in each moment. And you can listen to that section where I talk about what Clark draws from this, but there really is a very interesting and fairly mystical view of continuity that you can draw based on just a couple of assumptions. Just one, that the consciousness is in itself impersonal, and all the personal stuff comes at the level of its contents, and the fact that it never really experiences its own absence, almost by definition. From the side of consciousness, there really is this kind of eternal condition of simply experiencing its own being and is not experiencing its own non-being. But anyway, Clark has more to say on that, which is pretty interesting, which awaits you if you want to

look at it. I can also send you his essay. It's really well done. Oh, yeah. Well, thank you. So I do subscribe to your waking up app. Thank you. But I haven't listened to that. So I certainly will. Yeah, there's so much mystery, right? Our limitations to what we understand are just incredible. And so that's kind of what I lean into with the gratitude is that we're living in the middle of this mystery. We really don't know

how it came about and where it's going. We don't have a coherent physics. We certainly don't have an understanding of consciousness. But isn't that to be celebrated, that there is this mystery? And somehow we've been privileged to be granted this sentience and awareness. And if we just can decouple from that narrative story that's driving us to aversion or clinging, if we can just let that subside, then it's just incredibly beautiful to be celebrated. You know, that's what I've found myself saying to people who ask me about my experience. I said, you know, this is just an experience for celebration. And I invite you to join me in that celebration. And there's no reason not to. It's something we all know, I think,

that resonates so deeply with our experience as sentient beings and this kind of mystery in which we live. So yeah, it's to be celebrated. Well, on that point, please tell me more about the endowment project that you're launching. Yeah, well, thank you. So as I mentioned, there have been any number of changes in my life because of the diagnosis. It's actually been shockingly wonderful and beautiful. So I got married to my long-term partner, Marla, and we hadn't thought marriage was particularly important. And we did some contemplation about that and had this just joyful ceremony. And I'm just so delighted to call her my wife now. My relationship with my children has changed. Relationships in general have changed.

So there've been many, many gifts that have opened up. And so one of them came about in revising my will and I got to charitable contributions. And my initial thought was, oh, that's easy. Give well. Of course, you know so well. It's the effective altruism movement. And for some years, I've just defaulted to GiveWell because they're such a great organization that have really looked at the impact of different charities. And then the next day, I woke and thought, what would I really want to give? And what came up for me is, you know, what I want to give is exactly what I want for myself and I want for the research that I've been doing. And that's to continue to explore and support this broader awakening

project. And there's something fundamentally important about that, as I mentioned to you earlier, that I think actually has existential importance to the survival of our species, that there's this ability to unpack these kinds of experiences and explore their applications in a way that may indeed be critical to the survival of our species, given that we have other alternative technologies that are being developed that could be species-determinating. And so I thought, that's what I really want. I want people to awaken to that. And I thought at first, you know, I could, I could, I don't have a big estate, so I thought I could give some money to Johns Hopkins and that

have a reoccurring lectureship on spirituality and psychedelics. And the reason that psychedelics are key to that, the science of it, is because we can now study these experiences prospectively, these life-changing experiences. And heretofore, we haven't been able to do that. We've been able to look at spontaneously occurring experiences, but not studying them prospectively. So my belief that empirical research is critical to that. And so then what occurred to me is, you know, I probably have some goodwill in the field, given that I just happened to be one of the people who opened up the latest psychedelic renaissance. And so I ended up establishing, seeking an endowment

to establish a professorship. And it's in my name, but that's irrelevant. It's the Roland Griffiths Professorship of Psychedelic Research on Secular Spirituality and Well-being. And it's focused on studies, rigorous empirical investigations of this relationship of psychedelics to these transformative experiences and then the consequential effects on well-being. And so I created this endowment. It's audacious. I'm trying to raise $20 million for it. And the reason for that is that what I want to cover is the full salary for a full professor doing research in this area, but I also want to generate enough income so that there are research funds available to conduct a program of research in this area. It's an endowment given to Johns Hopkins. And the downside of endowments is that they generate maybe 4% of their worth over time each year. But the upside is that they're managed in perpetuity. And an institution like Hopkins has every reason to attend to their endowments and manage them carefully because endowments are their lifeblood. And so this engine will create an enduring program of research

in this area for which there's no funding currently available short of straight out philanthropy to do this kind of research. All of the funding and the attention of the psychedelic research right now is going into therapeutics. And so I think it's, in principle, a really, really important project. I'm really excited about it. We've actually got $14 million in pledges so far. So we're trying to close our $6 million gap. And by the time this podcast airs, I think we're going to have opened it up

to the general public. But I'm really excited about it. I love the idea that it continues in perpetuity because I think ultimately there's actually no answer to the core question of the mystery that we face. And so indeed, I see this churning on for decades, generations, millennia, as long as Hopkins continues to survive as a viable institution. Yeah, well, it's wonderful that you've made as much progress as you've made toward your goal, and I really have no doubt you'll meet it. There's just a tremendous amount of goodwill toward you and your whole project here, and the Waking Up Foundation will give as well, because it's certainly well within our remit to support a cause like yours, so I look forward to that, and I certainly hope our audience will donate as well and we'll give them the necessary

information to do that. Six million dollars is a lot, but I'm confident that there is an immense amount of interest in creating a durable legacy for you on this point, because this really is beyond the narrow therapeutic case for psychedelics. This is answering that larger, truly universal existential case, which is we need a 21st century scientific, non-delusional approach to these deepest spiritual and ethical concerns. spiritual and ethical concerns. And we really are on the cusp of that within the narrow circle of an institution like Johns Hopkins. And I share your view that making it a wider cultural conversation ultimately is what we need to inoculate ourselves against the most injurious and profligate wastages of

human time and attention, to which we're so obviously prone. This is a hope that was articulated several generations ago when psychedelics made their first appearance, but I think it's more urgent now in the presence of increasingly powerful technology and cultural changes that seem to be shattering our world as much as they're bringing diverse cultures together. So I share the view that this century is some kind of crucial bottleneck for our species,

and getting our heads right on a deadline here seems quite important. Whether I'm around to see the crucial changes or not, I really have no expectation there, but when I think about the lives of our children and grandchildren, the work we do now seems incredibly important, and you have been so crucial to that work. So, Roland, I really want to thank you for your time on this podcast, but even more, thank you for the work you've done for decades now to advance our understanding of our own minds and what's possible. Thank you. Thank you very much, Sam. I really appreciate that and really appreciate your comments that you just made. So with great gratitude to you.