Mayim Bialik's Breakdown - Brian C. Muraresku: Could Jesus Exist Without Psychedelics?

Episode Date: April 30, 2024

HIGH on GOD. The SHOCKING LINK between Stoned Greek witches, Christianity, early Civilization & Shrooms.   Best-selling Author, Brian C. Muraresku, (The Immortality Key) explores if Jesus might actually be the Greek God Dionysus.   He explains how ancient Greeks believed that experiencing your death “before you die” actually provides you the chance for immortality.   We go deep and learn about links between early Christianity and Ancient Greek mystical practices, including altered states as a way to be in touch with the spiritual realm, the true origins of Catholicism’s body and blood of Christ, and the pivotal role Greek witches played in shaping early Christianity.   Brian also breaks down:  - How the wine used today in church differs from the psychedelic-infused wine of Ancient Greece  - More than metaphor: What it actually means to ingest the body and blood of Christ - Sorcery vs Scripture  - Lay down and die: “Incubation” as a path to enlightenment - The dangers of psychedelic use without prep work and appropriate processing - Why he chooses not to use psychedelics himself   Join us as we explore these questions, backed by compelling historical evidence and expert insights that will challenge everything you thought you knew about religious history and Western Civilization as we understand it.    Brian C. Muraresku's book, THE IMMORTALITY KEY: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250207142   BialikBreakdown.com YouTube.com/mayimbialik Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dynices is not the god of wine. He's the god of delirium, ecstasy, frenzy. They went into fits of madness, not alcoholic stupor. That was the whole point of that religion is to be possessed by and become one with the god. It is not a metaphor. Brian Murawrescu is the author of the best-selling book, The Immortality Key, a groundbreaking dive into the role psychedelics have played in the origins of Christianity and Western civilization. We have the actual Greek text talking about vision.

hallucinogenic wine at the exact same time the Gospels are being written. Were there communities of paleo-Christians carrying over some of that intoxicating wine from Dionysus and using that in their version of the Holy Christian mystery? Wine was a drug in ancient Greece. Wine was routinely mixed with plants, herbs, spices, seeds of opium and cannabis, henbane, and black nightshade, which Diascordi is described as visionary and hallucinogenic. What do you think is real? If you experience a psychological death before your physical death, then upon your physical death,

something about the psyche may in fact survive. To confront God face to face in the Old Testament, no man shall see me and live. Humanity has been experimenting with these altered states of consciousness through all these archaic techniques for a very, very long time. The only lesson I've learned is life is a waking meditation. The things that we witness day to day are mere shadows of the reality of the cosmos that we inhabit. Once in a while, people poke their head above ground and see the world for what it is. It's break down.

She's going to break it down for you because you know she knows a thing or two. So now she's going to break. Hi, I'm I'm The Alec. And I'm Jonathan Cohen. And welcome to our breakdown. This is a place where we break things down. So you don't have to. Today we are extremely excited to welcome someone whose hobby has changed his life and ours.

Brian Murarescu is a lawyer. I mean, he's a lawyer. That's what he does by trade. However, he's a degree in Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit. Like we all do. Like we all do. And he lives in Washington, D.C., but he wrote this book called The Immortality Key in 2020.

And it became a New York Times bestseller, which is awesome. But this book has exploded. And he's been in a lot of, places. You've seen him around. You've seen him around. He introduced the book on the Gerobian experience, and he's been featured kind of literally everywhere. Notable publications such as Forbes, Rolling Stone. I mean, also he's spoken at Harvard Divinity School at Yale, lots of podcasts like Jordan Peterson, Gwyneth Paltrow's podcast. Everybody wants to talk to Brian and we finally get to. So, Brian, welcome to the breakdown. Thank you very much. Let's break it down, guys. Thank you for

Having me. We're very excited to have you. Me too. I mean, mostly me, because I'm obsessed with your book and it's right here. Thank you. I mean, we should explain why it is that this became so popular. We could explain why it became so popular. I would like to say because people are searching for meaning and people are searching for why we're here. And Brian... Here in the podcast or here in this room. In our existence.

And Brian, you have tapped into something. that begins as a very interesting historical journey, but really becomes a conversation not just about psychedelics, but about literally the nature of reality. So here are the things we want you to think about as we go forward. These are the questions that we want you to know

we would like answered today. Okay. Is Western civilization only here because a female sorceress is giving people psychedelics? One question. Off the top. Could Jesus exist without psychedelics? Could Christianity exist without psychedelics?

Is Jesus actually the Greek god Dionysus? And finally, why did they take away our drugs? This is all pretty easy stuff. There are some questions underneath, but, you know, just the basics for now. That's your primer. Why did you want to pursue the immortality key? You're a lawyer with a fun hobby, but this is a very elaborate hobby. So talk us through literally your origin story. How far back do we go? I mean, you know, wherever you like.

So I was a farm boy from Philadelphia. I grew up in Northeast Philadelphia, the middle son of three boys to a working class family. And never thought that I'd wind up in prep school. But thanks to a scholarship from the Jesuits. I found myself at 14 years old studying Latin and then studying Greek. So it wasn't my choice. Latin rarely is your choice. It wasn't my choice either in middle school. You studied Latin too? I did in real school, yes. For how long? What do they make this take like two years in my, I went to a strange junior high school. Oh, fantastic. I still remember some conjugations. But anyway. Any Greek? No Greek, but only, I studied ancient Hebrew, so some interesting overlap with origins of alphabets. We can talk

about that. So, yeah, Latin was mandatory, which I didn't know what to make of, and then Greek came along. And I just said, I really, I really liked it. And I sucked at math. And I like science, but when I sat down with a Latin or Greek text, it just became very, very easy for me. And that wind up becoming like my path to college. So I was awarded the something called the Bean scholarship, which is awarded by Holy Cross College every year, to two high school students who show some proficiency in Latin and or Greek or both. And then Brown University heard about that. And I got recruited by some dear friends to this day and some mentors to continue studying dead languages in Providence, Rhode Island, which won up becoming some of the best years in my life.

So that was the origin. Got it. And you ended up studying law because you like legal things? Because I didn't want to be broke the rest of my life. There were two options for me. the time I was like 21. I'd had, like, you know, eight years of Latin and seven years of Greek, and I should have done a PhD. So like one half of me wanted to be a classics professor the rest of my life, and the other half wanted to be a priest. And then I realized that I like, I like women, and I don't want to be broke. So neither was a good choice for me. Okay, so I wasn't going to ask

this to later, but I do want to ask now, were you raised religious? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Catholic. Yeah, I went to 12, well, if you count kindergarten, I went to 13 years of Catholic school. A lot of people go to Catholic school and they're not religious, nor do they have a belief in God. But this resonated with you. The Catholicism that I was given resonated because, like, nothing was ever dumped on me. I always say that, you know, I got lucky, I think. And then when the Jesuits came along, if you're not familiar, like, it's a very, like, intellectual pursuit. And so, you know, I learned about Catholicism and Christianity, like, through the lens of a rigorous scholarship, like, really rigorous scholarship and linguistics.

And it's funny. like they were teaching me Greek, not in an effort to teach me the New Testament, which was written in Greek, but like they were teaching me Greek so I could read Homer. And so there was this like, even at a young age, I noticed that this weird dichotomy between the pagan languages and then what would become the language of the church. But like the irony is the Jesuits were just trying to teach me language. And there was no expectation whatsoever that that, you know, foster an interest in Catholicism or the Bible or Jesus or anything else. It was just, you know, pursuing knowledge for the love of knowledge. What made you want to become a priest?

Like, at that age, what was, like, when you saw down that path, what was appealing about it for you? I'm an introvert, I guess. So I liked being surrounded by books. And I thought, oh, that could be a good opportunity. Maybe a monk instead of a priest to be more precise. I enjoy time. I enjoy time with books, or at least I thought I did when I was 20. And now I enjoy nothing more than spending time with mine.

with my daughters and my wife, which is a big, it's a big change when I was 20 and clueless. Did you feel like it would have access to like a spiritual awakening by spending that concentrated time studying? Like what did you see, you know, what would the books lead you to? Like, did you imagine that there were sort of some secrets to the universe that would be unlocked through that path for you? Oh, yeah. Definitely.

Yeah. Like that's, that's when I was reading Greek, that's the message that came through to me. So I'm picking up a text and you're, you're diving into. to the mind of somebody who lived, you know, 2,000 years ago, 2,500 years ago, and you're getting to actually see how they think and formulate thought. And so a lot of it's crazy. A lot of the pagan Greek stories are just crazy stories of gods and goddesses and heroes. But then, you know, you start to hear about different things like the ancient mysteries

and you hear about their philosophies. And you hear a little bit about Plato. And then you realize how deeply spiritual Plato was and how the ancient Greeks would approach philosophy as a spiritual path and as a way of life. And so, like, all these ideas are bubbling when I'm a, when I'm a teenager, and I thought, oh, well, there must be something in these books that we've forgotten because I was beginning to learn about an ancient Greece and even like an early Christianity that I think misses the radar for lots of people. And I thought, you know, the language might

be the key to figure out more about this. For sure. This is a good time for me to tell you that I was given your book along with Peter Kingsley's books. And I read him first, which I think is is good. It was a really beautiful entry point to then read your books. And I consider those not just because a mutual friend gave me both of those, but because they go together in ways that are interesting and complicated. And I want to bring it up now, and I think we'll probably circle back to Peter Kingsley because he's Peter Kingsley and everything circles back to Peter Kingsley. But, you know, your experience. and his arrive at a very similar place through two very different paths.

And this is interesting to me because you are, you're taking this from an intellectual perspective, but it's interesting to also know that there is a little bit of religious sensibility to you, right? And Peter Kingsley comes at it from a completely, I mean, what I would say is like a dropped in experience of having access to something from another time and another plane that even he didn't understand as a child, right? So it's kind of interesting, though, that I'm just giving you a heads up that this may, you know, intersect again. You're exploring, I mean, do you want to say anything before, I mean to just like drop Peter Kingsley and then move on?

Only that I'm a huge fan, which I hope he knows. Yes, well, you know, I would hope prophets have fans. And if you're wondering, I would start with in the dark places of wisdom. Interesting. Feel free to Google that. And I think that'll take you on your fun first journey with Peter Kingsley. Right. And also, you know, my next question is I want you to start to explain to us a little bit what this, you know, what this specific and controversial corner of kind of like the intersection of Western civilization. And in particular, the worship of the Greek god Dionysus, right? And the striking overlap with the worship of a young Jew named Jesus. And, you know, there's, there's, there's a There's a real tendency, you know, when I was reading your book, it's very easy to keep trying

to dismiss everything because the rational mind keeps coming in. And I kept trying to, you know, and I'm an intellectual person. So I kept trying to do the math. I'm like, well, that time doesn't track. But you have to, you have to be able to sort of like pull back, change the lens, and be able to say, if this is how culture is transmitted through people and ideas over time and space, and this man, Brian, has literally traveled through those spaces. Where is this intersection? So I'd like you to start with the mysteries. And this is Mysteries with a capital M. This is a huge part of the first, basically half of the book in terms of understanding. What was going on in Greece when we talk about this transcendental experience called the mysteries? Right. So when

When we think about ancient Greece, or maybe the ancient world in general, I feel like for a lot of people, we think about mythology. We think about Greek mythology, for example, and the gods of Olympus. Like Zeus. Like Zeus. Who's like hurls thunderbolts at people when they act bad. And Poseidon, who throws waves at you. And we had this false impression that the Greeks were basically superstitious idiots.

And they believed in these fictitious gods who interfere in human affairs in a total whimsical way. And we often forget that, like, the Greeks were also the, the people who developed things like philosophy and the arts and sciences and the foundations for a lot of what we take for granted today. So like there's there's a lot to unpack there. The Greeks, you know, also came up with the word skeptical. The Greek verb, skeptomy means to look around. Don't take things on face value. So like these were intensely linear thinking, very rational, reasonable people who, you know, in the public forum, yeah, there were public sacrifices and there were formulaic prayers and there sacrifices to these invisible gods. But, you know, for the thinking Greek person who was just

as spiritually curious as the people in this room, where do you go for answers? And there were venues to search for those answers. And so, you know, the Greeks wanted to pull back the curtain and find out the mysteries of life for themselves. They had to see it to believe it. And for those who actually wanted to see and to experience something that was actually meaningful for them, they had the ancient mysteries. And that's a capital M. That's a capital A and a capital M. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So they had these mysteries, which comes from the Greek, so Mistez comes from the verb Muo, which means to close your eyes or keep your mouth shut. Because the number one rule about the mysteries is that they're all secret. So everything we're talking about is trying to unpack clues and leads that were left in the record and the literature and passing references from people like Plato and the best and brightest of the Greek and Roman worlds. So we're doing our best to reconstruct what was a very meaningful experience for these people.

And there were lots of different mysteries with the capital M. The most famous were the mysteries of Elusis, which to this day is a small town in mainland Greece, northwest of Athens. Every fall equinox, it would call to tens of thousands of pilgrims from around the Greek-speaking world. And they would show up in Athens make this march to Elusis. They would go to the doorstep of Demeter's temple. They'd drink a potion, a magical potion. and they would have, as they universally describe, as one of the most profound experiences of their life. They had a vision, and through that vision, they made contact with Demeter and Persephone,

and in some cases Dionysus later in the classical period. And they all claim that it erased their fear of death. Through this single experience, the culminating experience of a lifetime, only once in your life, you'd make this pilgrimage, have the potion, and basically become immortal. So that's where the title comes from. It was an immortality machine. My NBi Alex breakdown is supported by Superpower. We all know the feeling of leaving a doctor's office and kind of feeling like we didn't get anything out of the experience that was useful.

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Make sure to mention Myambiotics Breakdown to help support the show. Cheap. Okay, we have to stop here for a second. Because I first want to clarify, we know these things happened the way we know that Plato existed, right? This is not just like something that's like passed on in folklore or, you know, a lot of people dismiss things that happened in the Old Testament, for example, because like it's just fantasy and legend. These were things that we know people were going. Like there are many, I don't want to say

extra biblical sources, but that's how we describe it when it's things that are, you know, but these things historically, we know these events happened. Meaning this was not that long ago that we can't know that people wrote down, oh, when there's an equinox, we all got together. Like these things happen, we can translate them, you can translate them. These things happened. We don't know what happened inside the mystery. We don't know what happened inside the torchlit sanctuary of Demeter's Temple. But it happened.

We know it happened. It was very, very famous at the time. It's becoming well-known again. Like Alusis, this same town, it's called Elefina in Greece today. Last year, it became the European capital of culture. So even today, of all the towns in Europe, last year, it was highlighted as a particular place that received EU funding to celebrate the legacy of these mysteries. I went with the crew here and for a series of lectures and activities.

We had an amazing time on the site watching a recreation of the pageant between Demeter and Persephone as the full moon was rising in the hills and Greece. So, yeah, this is a very well-known historical fact. So the main points that you kind of hit on, just in this very brief start to a conversation about this, So something, there was an ingestion of something. And even a one-time experience was putting people in touch with, you fill in the blanks. Putting people in touch with the way they describe it, the secret to life after death. This is where...

No big. Nothing too extraordinary. So, I mean, again, it was illegal under penalty. of death to disclose what you witnessed inside Demeter's temple there in Alusis. However, Plato got away with saying that whatever he did witness, he did so in a state of perfection. And he called it a holy and blessed vision. And Pindar, for example, who's one of the most well-known lyric poets from the time, says that whoever sees, whoever sees these mysteries before they die understands the end of mortal life and the beginning of a new life given by God. So there's clearly

something about a vision. There's something about encountering death. Sophically says that only those who visit Alusus will have life after death, and for the rest, there's an evil lot. So it's not fun for those who aren't initiated. So you mentioned that people only get to go there once in their lifetime. Right. How do, how is it determined when they go? Right. So this is my favorite response to any question about the past. We don't know. We really don't know. I try and be as honest as I can when I'm talking in the book. But I can speculate. So the tradition that comes down to us is that typically, yeah, this was only once in your life.

Professor Ruck, Carl Ruck, who wrote The Road to Illusus in 1978, which inspired my own investigation. He calls this the culminating experience of a lifetime. And the sources that I've read, it's typically in the middle of life. Although it's open to everybody, it's open to men, it's open to women. I don't know when the middle is. That's the thing. We don't know when the middle is.

When's the middle for us? I don't know. Ten years ago for me. I mean, my role on this podcast is to speculate and for her to say, we don't know. But like, do you feel called? Is there a consultation? Once you go once, don't you want to go again if you've experienced this? Like, if there's, you know, is there a record?

Like, do people try to sneak in again? You're like, maybe. They put on a different house. Like, I'm ready for one. experience. I want another mystery. Here's what we do know. So you would make two visits. So whenever you felt called, whenever the spirit moved you, you would make a very long pilgrimage to Athens. And so some people came from nearby. Others came from any place in the Greek-speaking world, theoretically, which could be as far west as Iberia. I don't think they came from that far. And after

Alexander the Great, that could be as far east as what was then Persia or India. I doubt they came from that far away. But theoretically there was a very long pilgrimage and you showed up on your first visit to the temple, you became a Mistez in a sort of a stage one initiate. You didn't drink the kukyuan, the magical potion, and you didn't have the vision in Demeter's temple. Only on your second visit did you then become eligible to be an epauptes, which is Greek for like the one who has seen it all. So you made at least two visits, but like why you showed up in the first place is anyone's guess. And I think that, you know, this thing we're talking about survives for like 2,000 years, by the way. So it goes through all these different transformations from 1,500 BC

to the 4th century AD. It's a very long stretch of time, as long as Christianity itself has been around. So you can imagine the different permutations elusus experienced over the ages. And at some point, in the classical period, we're talking like after Plato, 5th, 4th centuries, BC, and Athens, there is an element of spontaneity and the secret begins to leak at some point. So there was hunger for this experience, and it does leak. This is where I was going to go next. I'm like, you've traveled for weeks. You go back to the place that you've come from.

And you're like, yeah, they told me not to say anything, but they're all the way over there. Like, what I experienced was pretty crazy. Like, how am I not going to go tell somebody about this? And that's where Dionysus comes in. So I think, you know, it was a sacrilege to experience that vision outside Demeter's temple at that very physical site in Ellusis. because that's where the mystery took place. It was supposed to live there.

Yeah, according to Demeter herself. In the hymn to Demeter, this Homeric hymn that survives from 2700 years ago, she instructs the royal family of Elusis to construct a temple in her honor there so that humans could become gods and goddesses. So it had to be there. But if the experience was that powerful, you have to figure at some point. Someone wants to franchise. Yeah, there's going to be a branch somewhere.

And branches there were. So obviously many of the aspects that you described of this experience and what people reported have a striking overlap with what many people report from significant, powerful psychedelic experiences. And, you know, in particular, and, you know, you're very, you're very clear about this in your book. You open. I mean, the book really opens with a conversation about so much of the expansion of our understanding of clinical assistance with trauma, with death anxiety, and how, you know, people like Rick Doblin are picking up where, you know, decades ago research was starting to go to try and find out, is there a way to understand, essentially, our purpose here in the ways that the mysteries was doing in a different way.

there are non-psychedelic ways that you talk about in the book that people also achieve phenomenal states, especially in Greek times. The dude who would lay in the darkness. Can you please? That's a much better title, by the way. The dude who would lay in the darkness. Talk about the dude who would lay in the darkness. And also what that meant in terms of the practicality of how you seek this mystery. Right.

So we're coming back now to our friend Peter Kingsley. I'm going to suggest the dude who lays in the darkness as a follow-up, a follow-up tone. So he introduced me to the concept of incubation. And incubation, probably the practice of incubation is a pre-Socratic method. So before Socrates played on Aristotle and all the thinkers that we're familiar with. So before them in the pre-Socratic world, this practice developed probably somewhere in what is today Asia Minor on the west coast of what is today, Turkey and you know it's it can be very complicated or very very simple I love I listen to

Peter's lectures as well and so he's trying to describe how to do this incubation method what it means to lie down and and to enter into the underworld and he says you know this is his prescription for for Greek Western meditation lie down and die and it's it's that simple there's no multi-part system there's no doctrine there's no complicated dogma the the practice of incubation was lying down in what he describes as a cataleptic state of trance and where time and space begin to disappear and the past and the future are as present as the present is to us that that's his formulation for what incubation is you're essentially

putting the body to sleep or killing the body temporarily so that the spirit can roam free no drugs no he and and Peter is not a fan of the psychedelic hypothesis many classical scholars are not I completely understand it news flash. I've never had a psychedelic experience myself. So this is all foreign territory to me as well. I have practice incubation in different contemplative exercises. So is there a, is there like a guided meditation script that I can like pull up on headspace for that? Yes, it's 17 hours of dead air. Yeah. Well, when you talk about the underworld, and I'm curious if there are descriptions of that because in the book, the way the shaman, which tries to bring shamanic journeying practices to

a layman's audience, they talk about the underworld and traveling to that to do soul retrieval. And there's like specific drumming that can help you get into that, that trance state. And there's a visualization exercise, which you are intentionally leaving this plane and traveling to other planes. I picked up that book at 19 when I was in undergrad and living in the dorms while everyone else was partying. It made for a great conversation starter. You would have been a good friend in college. So, yeah, what is, as much as you can talk about, what is that process? Or what is the underworld in this description?

So same question, same question. The point of the process, the whole point of incubation is to enter the underworld. And, you know, again, we call it the underworld. You can call it the other world. You can call it the beyond. In stranger things, they call it the upside down, which it will. which is my favorite reference. So I really like that, actually.

And so in the upside down, the whole point is to see, is to test the limits of consciousness. And so if consciousness does not, in fact, emerge from the physical brain, if consciousness precedes biology, if it was there before our incarnation, if it's there after our physical death, what are the limits of consciousness?

What can we do with this stuff? Outside waking consciousness and dreaming, are there other states to be experienced? And so it was Peter's interpretation, Peter Kingsley, of this incubation method, that you quiet the senses in order to descend. This is not an ascent of, this is not a technique of ascent. So you're not going to the heavens. You're going into the dark place, the dark places of wisdom. You're lying down and going into the underworld to meet she who shall not be named, which is Persephone.

The goal is to have a meeting with the goddess in Kingsley's terms who actually gave birth to Western civilization as we know it. Also, no biggie. Not a big deal that, like, Pythagoras, for example, did practice incubation. He had an incubation chamber in his basement in his home in Italy, where it's believed that in addition to his theorems, his mathematical theorem, which are also kind of a big deal. Which are kind of a big deal. For those of us who do like math.

For the math nerds, it's kind of a big deal. A little big deal. Well, he was pulling out theorems, but also, you know, apparently he was, he was being gifted these things by the goddess. And these gifts were bestowed on people like Pythagoras and others so that Western civilization could be born. And we can talk about what's happened to that lineage sense. Yeah, I mean, also, it's not just Persephone who's down there. You know, this appears in Kabbalistic texts. And it's something that, I mean, I feel like that's the next book I want you to write. I want to write, you know, what happens at the

intersection of Greece and, you know, ancient Judaism. Let's do it. Yeah. No, but this, you know, there's many, I mean, there are, there are Kabbalistic meditations that take days, literally days. And, you know, there are mantras and, you know, things and ways we get there. Most of them are formed around language and the alphabet. Right.

And the use in particular of vowels. And it's a whole thing, which I would love to talk to you about another time. But this, there is a universality to what you're talking about, right? And so for Peter and also for immortality, he, you know, it gets really, really specific. But I'm also very interested in this notion of that quieting is something that people talk about now a lot. Really? Obviously not at the level we're talking about. But even outside of psychedelic experiences, holotropic breathwork, I practice Kundalini yoga,

Some pretty bizarre things happen that as a scientist, I cannot explain, right? When I'm completely sober and just breathing, right? Your choices now are living in ancient Greece and being part of the mysteries, right? Or laying in a dark room and doing some sort of process, which, you know, did you get there? I want to know. I mean, I'm sure you got somewhere. Yeah, I've gotten to dark, shadowy places where I can lose sense of time and space. that sense of self. It's not all that complicated, which is kind of the point of this

tradition. I don't think it's supposed to be complicated. You can really overcomplicate this stuff and some of the yogic sciences. Who me? Overcomplicate something? Not you personally. Well, you'd be surprised, right. I studied Sanskrit, by the way, for many years and practice yoga. There's some complicated science. Oh, yeah. There's some very, very complicated science and dogmatic even in some cases. And then I was really intrigued. by this alternative tradition because the concept of the invitation to lie down and die, you know, it takes three seconds to say and zero seconds to do is a very like, it's a very alluring prospect that instead of, you know, days long Vapasana retreat, right, or a long pilgrimage

into the woods, which can also be fun, that you can simply just at any moment in time, just, just lay down, shut down the senses and see and see what happens. Now, the mind is going to trick you and the mind's going to play with you because it never goes silent and quiet. And that's ego and that's, you know. Yeah, but that's also the holy grail of practicing meditation for decades on end in the Buddhist discipline, the search for the quiet mind. And so you're going to, things are going to come up, thoughts and emotions. And I think the more you do it like any exercise, like a physical exercise, I think you begin to be able to, to witness those thoughts and emotions float merrily by and the deeper you go into that darkness. So in your

sessions, did you feel like you were given things? Like, Did you get Pythagorean type information? The Morrescu theorem, A squared plus B squared. Never anything so specific. I always walk away with stillness and peace of mind. And just one follow up to that because it's something you said about it not being that difficult. In my experience is when you are able to start to access it, it is something that you can then return back to more easily.

because you've found where it is a little bit. So it's like a practice that builds on itself. Was that similar to your experience? And if so, has it helped you interact with the normal world? Because I'm very curious about the, yes, we have these mystical experiences, but like what do we bring back? Yeah, I think that's one of the other grails of any contemplative practice, right? And it's sort of the inherent paradox in action and contemplation.

Anybody can disappear and contemplate in peace and quiet. When you're raising children and trying to be a member of society and doing podcasts with your friends in Los Angeles, you have to be alert and awake and carry some of what you do pick up and experience in the upside down. And so the only lesson I've learned doing this for maybe 15 or 20 years is that life is a waking meditation or a lucid dream in a way. the phenomenal world is a lot stranger than we often realize,

and that the more you can practice that stillness and enter into the underworld on a daily basis, the more you can bring that back into what seems like, you know, hardened reality, but which in essence is the same timeless sense of eternity that you find in those states of contemplation. And so bringing an awareness of the eternity of the present moment, like right here, right now,

I feel like, you know, we're engaging in a very contemplative conversation, a bit of a meditative practice just by slowing down and being aware of the eternity in between each syllable I'm saying right now. I'm having an out-of-body experience. That's what happens when you talk to Jonathan and he's not done asking questions.

I want to circle back to this, but I know because this opens up, and we'll just use this as a little foreshadowing for where this conversation is... I just want to talk about the body of Christ. I know you... I know you do, but I'm going to just lay a little foreshadowing because what Brian is talking about

introduces questions about the notion of reality. It introduces questions about the notion of our perception of any given moment versus, you know, what is concrete actuality? What are we co-creating? How is our perception impacting the way that we interact with the world around us? And can that be changed? And then, of course, that naturally leads to are we in a stimulation? But we're going to not go there yet and go to the body of Christ. Okay. So, there's there's many parts in the immortality key um where i really felt like you know you're you're you're i mean you're you're weaving this unbelievable tapestry right but sometimes you get to these points that are like yes i was waiting for him to get there and this is one of them

so you know i'm uh i'm a person who was raised you know in a traditional you know jewish faith and I also grew up around a lot of non-Jews and, you know, were a small part of the population. So most people I interacted with were actually, you know, Christian. And I would always ask people to explain to me what, like, what is, like, how are you eating someone's body? Like the body of Christ and the blood of Christ and how are you drinking? And not in a, in a critical or judgmental way, but like, conceptually I'm a very spiritually inclined person and I ended up, you know, studying Hebrew and Jewish studies.

and so like I ended up actually getting studies some about early Christian. And this was always a sticking point for me. And I would ask, whenever I would meet a Catholic, I was like, when can I be close enough to them to ask? What do you think it is? Because I was always very curious. And through no fault of their own, most people don't know how to answer it. Like when I would ask people, like, what is it?

They'd say like, oh, it's like, I don't know. It's like a metaphor. Right. And your book. That's not Catholic doctor. That's the exact opposite. Correct. And again, this is not to disparage Catholicism

or the structure of how people are taught. The people that I interacted with believed in it, did it, participated in it. But I had never gotten really an explanation. And I don't mean an explanation that makes sense to me because I don't accept Christ as my savior. But I want to understand what other religious traditions do. So when we got to this part in your book,

I got very excited. Because you literally explain. I mean, and you, I mean, people need to read the book to go on this journey with you, but you get us from the mysteries. It takes a while to get there, but you get us to how and why people transformed this religious experience, this mystical experience, this experience that doesn't need a God or a dude telling you what to do. You are able to communicate how we arrive at what the actual purpose of sacraming.

is, what it means to ingest the body of Christ and the blood of Christ. I would like you to share with us as best as you can how we get there. Okay. So the next book will be a lot shorter, I promise. It'll be a highlights reel. So it's funny. Like when you were talking, you're sticking point about what does this mean as a Jewish person? Sure. So there is a line in the New Testament that, which I know you know this, that reflects the same sticking point because Jesus as a good young Jewish boy, You know, he was preaching to Jewish people. And in the Gospel of John, he's beginning to describe for the first time what it means to eat his flesh and what it means to drink his blood.

And very beautiful Greek, I would say poetry more than prose. And this beautiful Greek poetry, Jesus is introducing his Jewish neighbors to this concept. And I want everybody to go Google John 660. So the sixth chapter of John, where you can even look it up there in verse 60. In the six chapter of John... It's a lot of verses. It's a hell of a book. He used to shorten it too.

In John 660, the reaction from the Jewish folks around him is basically what the hell are you talking about. This is hard. That's what they say. This is hard. The sticking point, that's the Greek word for sticking point. That's the Greek word for sticking point. The Greek word for hard is scleros. It's where we get like a sclera.

Sclera dermin. Sclerotic, right? So the Jewish people literally said, this is a sclerotic idea. There's no way that we as Jewish people can accept. what the hell you're trying to describe here. And obviously there's a Jewish precedent for the Last Supper, the final meal before Jesus's crucifixion, right? However, the way that Jesus describes this cannibalistic meal would be the first instance in Jewish history of the consumption of human flesh at the dinner table. That was not a Jewish idea. It's a very, very pagan idea.

It's a very, very Greek idea. And it would not have been a surprise to any Greek speaker of the time anywhere in the world. When Jesus says in Greek in the sixth chapter of John, whoever munches on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, which is really important. The verb tense there instead of will have, we'll go to the afterlife, will be immortal. It's in the present tense. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life. Right here, right now, he says in the Gospel of Thomas, the kingdom of heaven is spread upon the earth, but no man can see it. And I think those two ideas go together very, very well. The invitation from Christ, the invitation to all Christians, and there's two and a half billion of them, by the way,

is that Christ is present in you. You become one with Christ. You become God. The Greek word for this is apotheosis. You literally become a God by literally consuming the flesh and blood of Jesus. It is not a metaphor. It is not a symbol, despite the fact, I include this in the book, that 69% of Catholic do not believe that the ordinary bread and wine becomes the flesh and blood of Jesus. And if I were Christian, if I were a cat, I would be so into it. I'd be like, this is it. Because that's how I practice my Judaism, right? Like, I get it. I mean, it's not my thing, but I get it. It's a cool idea. So, interestingly, my 10-year-old daughter is about to receive her first communion. And so- What's that like to be Brian Verresda's daughter, about to receive your

First Communion. That's why you're making a documentary. We have very interesting conversations on the way to and from church, and she's pretty excited about drinking blood. Did you tell her it's not a metaphor? We're explicit about the fact that... Did you incubate her and make her dive of where she can live? Yeah, times are weird in Bethesda right now.

But we have, I mean, it's funny to talk about this stuff because I learned I did it when I was eight, was my first communion. So it's wild to talk about this stuff to children. How do you talk about religion to children? Were you raised religious at a very young age? I was raised traditional. My mom was raised very religious, which means there was a bit of a ricochet.

I took on more observance in college, which is also, you know, its own, yeah. So, well, I find it very difficult to talk about this stuff with anybody under 40. Okay, so take us back to how we get there from the mysteries. So the through line is this figure of Dionysus.

And I'll try and be, I'll give you a condensed version. So you have the Mysteries of Elusis that we've been talking about, this once in a lifetime event where you drink this magical potion and you're absolutely convinced that you have cheated death

and that you will have an afterlife. Also, ladies ran that. Yeah, yeah. We should also, we'll get back to it. I'll just, as a quick footnote, the mysteries of Elusis was a right of initiation exclusively for females.

So by females, four females in the distant past. Men were only allowed in later in time in the classical period. They kind of ruin things sometimes. They always do. So to that point, the religion of Dionysus,

the mysteries, capital M of Dionysus, in some sense, totally distinct from the mysteries of Elusis. Although, when I was speaking with another classicist Fritz Graf, he's quick to point out that elements of Dionysian ecstasy were making their way into the mysteries of Elusis.

At some point, there's this figure, Yajos, a statue of him is carried by the pilgrims to Elusus, and Persephone herself resurrects from the underworld in the temple with this baby Yacos, this baby Dionysus. So she gives birth in the upside down and comes back with the god of theater, madness, and ecstasy. So Dionysus, despite that link, has his own completely separate mystery cult.

And it's run by women. It's run by Mynads. And the minads are the female devotees of Dionysus, who, in order to become one with the God, enthusiastically, the Greek word enthusiasm means to be filled with the essence of the God. In order to become one with not just Dionysus, but their fellow worshippers and the spirit of the earth herself. This is what ER Dodd says, one of the most conservative classicists, which is a really cool line. In order to do that, they drink his blood. Go figure. The blood...

This should be ringing bells for people who were listening two minutes ago. It's a familiar concept. So this was not an alien concept in ancient Greece. Timotheus of Miletus, who lives 400 years before the birth of Christ, refers to to wine as the blood of Bacchus, the blood of Dionysus, the Haimabachu. So we know for certain that the sacramental drinking of the wine would have been associated with the blood of Dionysus going back centuries and centuries before the world had ever heard about this young Jewish boy.

So it would not have come as a surprise to anybody when they hear. this story about the invitation to drink my blood. I'll give you one very specific example to tie the world together from the pagan Greek world to the Christian world. And so also in the Gospel of John, which the scholar Dennis McDonald has a great book called the Dionysian Gospel, which I referenced throughout my book. John's Gospel is awfully Dionysian because it makes these very explicit references to Dionysus. So explicit in fact that it's hard for me to walk away from John's gospel, not thinking that he really meant to communicate to Greek pagans. That was the audience of the New Testament, by the way, before there was a Christianity.

It's hard for me to think that John wasn't actively trying to recruit people who were familiar with these mysteries in Dionysus into this new, like not a reincarnation, but a reformulation of the Dionysian mystery. And how do you do that? And there's only one way to do that, which is through wine. wine is the single thing that connects the Greek world to the Christian world. And I should point out that, you know, our wine today is very different from the wine of yesterday. Tell us about the wine of yesterday, Brian. So the wine of yesterday, good question, Maya.

The wine of yesterday is not called wine. There's a word for wine. It's called Oinos. You see that word in the New Testament. There's another word for wine that's used from Homer down to the fall of the Roman Empire for a thousand years. And that word is Pharmacon, where we get the word pharmacy, obviously. So wine was a drug in ancient Greece and in other cultures around it, by the way. They inherited this idea from predecessor cultures. So wine is a drug.

Why is it a drug? Well, because the Greeks had no word for alcohol. The word alcohol, as you listen to it, Alcuhl. It comes from the Semitic, by the way. It means to enliven or refresh. It's connected with these distillation experiments that were happening far after Christ, 8th, 9th centuries, AD. So we don't have any hard liquor. as a species until that period of time. But before then, in order to account for the potency

of wine, it had to be something other than ethanol, what the fermentable sugars release to create the bubble and buzz of alcohol. So they called it a pharmacom because wine was routinely mixed with plants, herbs, spices, toxins, and occasionally... Think sangria. It was a party drink. It was a party drink with a, a, with some oranges. So again, this is not news and not a surprise to anybody. Wine is a mixed beverage. And sometimes you mix it in order to serve medicine. We have the writer Diascorities, for example, this Greek pharmacologist, he's called the father of drugs. I call him the father of drugs in the book, at least. I just call him Dad. I call him Dio. So Dio in the first

century, the same time the Gospels are being written, he has all these wine recipes. And sometimes it's to serve medicine, and he's throwing funky things like henbane and mandrake and black nightshade, very deadly plants into the wine. And in the case of black nightshade, he says, this plant causes not unpleasant visions. So we have the actual Greek text talking about visionary, hallucinogenic wine at the exact same time the gospels are being written. So again, this is not news to anybody who would have heard the gospels. And these are some of the things that inform the sacramental drinking of blood. So it raises the question. Maybe not. Maybe not. not at the Last Supper itself, and I don't go there with Jesus. But in some Greek-speaking communities,

in some places around the Mediterranean, at some time in the first, second or third centuries AD, were there communities of paleo-Christians who were, in fact, carrying over some of that intoxicating wine from Dionysus, even hallucinogenic wine from Dionysus, and using that in their version of the Holy Christian mystery? In other words, did the pagan sacrament of Dionysus, become what we now know as the Eucharist? Beautifully summarized, I still think you should have written the whole book because you have to go on the whole journey.

Because also some of the, and this is just a fun thing for people to know, you literally go all these places. You take the journey, you take the physical journey, and you meet with incredible experts, but you also meet with some of my favorite kinds of scientists that exist, which is the scientists who look at old vessels to see what drugs and liquids were in them.

And basically you get to meet and talk to, you know, experts throughout all of these regions. And you literally, like, that's literally a job to be a scientist to look up like, there were lizards in here. There was this plant in here. And it's literally piecing together. I mean, it's like this field of, like, archa, like, botanic. Like, it's just this unbelievable journey that you go on. So I just want to be.

really clear that the notion that, you know, for Christianity and for Catholicism in particular, the notion that it is not metaphorical that when you ingest this wafer, right, which is what it is now, I have not, I've heard about it. I think it looks like a Trader Joe's Rice Cracker is what I'm picturing. Or like the thing they put in your gelato, but circle, like a little, it's like a thin waffle. That's what I'm picturing. I have no idea. I've seen it in movies. The thin waffle of Christ. It's the thin wobble of Christ. So there's this.

The Trader Joe's Island. That's right. It's like when they let you taste a dip, I think it's like that. So it's not, this is not metaphorical. There is some notion in Catholicism, right, that has entered Christianity. There is some notion that there is something you can put in your body that lets you experience divinity, meaning in the present. moment, you get to touch something bigger than yourself, right? And the overlap then is that notion of when we learn about the mysteries with a capital M, something is put in your body that allows you to access

something in the same way. And it's strikingly similar. And that's kind of where I want to go next. it is strikingly similar to what many people experience, even from one in particular. If we're going for one dosage, it's usually in a clinically regulated and, you know, supported environment. People are able to ingest things, and it is now, you know, becoming much more acceptable to talk about, to think about, especially for therapeutic reasons, that can put you in touch with something bigger than yourself in ways that can change your life, right? are we experiencing, you know, what you might say is an inevitable, you know, kind of revolution that is linking us back to the Greek mysteries? Right.

So, big question. So in the modern clinical experiments, I start the book this way, and I end it this way, too. Although I've changed my thinking a little bit. What I sense in the psychedelic experiments happening today is it, is a very, very faint echo of what was happening in the mysteries. But to be honest, I mean, that insight is what really propelled my investigation. It wasn't until 2007.

I didn't know anything about psilocybin or magic mushrooms. But when I read that article in The Economist called The God Pill, which was published in 2006, I read it a year later. That was my first introduction to these modern day experiments. And that statistic that like two-thirds of the volunteers would want to, you know, explaining their single experience, a single dose with psilocybin as one of the most meaningful experiences of

their entire lives, if not the most meaningful experience over the course of a single afternoon. It's a short article, but it hopped off the page at me in 2007, and I thought, like, if I had to come up with a modern day definition of the ancient mysteries, that would be it. Like a life transforming experience that often takes place in terms of death and rebirth, but happening seemingly in an instant. There's something miraculous about the magic of that experience. And so, like, it was that, like, that circumstantial link and that, like, that tangential link that sent me looking for evidence because if people can experience this today,

stands to reason our neuroanatomy hasn't changed, that this was happening not just 2,000 years ago, but maybe this is more interesting to me, 20,000 years ago, 200,000 years ago, and most probably precedes our species. Almost certainly this kind of experimentation precedes the, human species going back three, four hundred thousand years into archaic hominence. So I think this is a very, very long... Now we know what his next book will be. It'll be shorter.

It'll be one sentence. Lay down and die. You've talked about that psychedelics are helping us understand what's real. What do you think is real? Ah. That's good. I think... Yeah, and again, this is textbook Platonism, by the way.

So Plato, not unlike some of the Eastern disciplines, he's most famous for this idea of the archetypes and the allegory of the cave, that we're all sort of, we're trapped, shackled underground, staring at mere shadows of what is reality. There's a they might be a giant song that talks about it. Can we play that later? Yes, I would love to.

We can't license it. so that's that that's the idea um that they picked up on that um that we're you know we are the things that we witness day to day are mere shadows of uh of of of the reality of the cosmos that we inhabit and that once in a while uh people turn around uh poke their head above ground and see the world for what it is again this is this is textbook platonism um and would go on to influence a lot of judaism and christianity by the way um and neoplatonic thought uh so if that's what we're being told, and again, you know, Plato didn't invent that idea. I think that comes from experience, the shamanistic experience that have been passed down to the Greeks and through

all the high civilizations from Egypt to Sumer to Persian, India, China, places far beyond. I think that humanity has been experimenting with these altered states of consciousness through all these archaic techniques for a very, very long time. And I think bit by bit through trial and error, folks have begun to realize that there is something to this upside down. And I think when people experience the upside down, and often even today describe it in terms that are a bit shocking as something more real than real, that phrase pops up a lot in the transcendental literature.

It pops up a lot in psychedelic literature that you have an experience that it seems otherworldly on the one hand and supernatural, but it's also oddly familiar and more real than real. Well, I hate to step in as the way. neuroscientist. But, you know, we do know a bit about what that feeling is. Tell us. Well, it's in the prefrontal cortex. It's the default mode network. It's like all these, you know, it's the parts of you that literally know where you are, that you're connected to something else, that you're not connected. So I don't mean to say that it doesn't exist,

but I'm saying that there's, we do know that there are specific compartmentalizations that our brain creates, right? And there's all these incredible imaging studies that are mostly looking, I would say, in favor of understanding the positive impacts, right, of these kinds of experiences, not just from drugs, but from altered states in general. But, you know, this is one of my favorite things when people talk about, you know, especially like magic mushroom experiences. And I'm not talking about the clinical variety, but like, you know, as I call it, like, trip and balls in Joshua tree, which is great. Like for some people, if that's their thing, amazing. You know, but there's this, especially, you know, you hear it a lot from, often from teenagers or, you know, it's like,

everything seems so clear. Like, it was so, like, I could feel everything so clear. It's like, yeah, well, because all external inputs are being, you know, regulated. So, like, I can't, but I'm also the person who will explain love as just chemicals, you know, but I'm, I'm deeply spiritual, but there also is, there's, there's a, there's a substrate, right? And, and I do believe that that existed before Homo sapiens, right? Meaning this is all, you know, kind of developmental and evolutionary biologically. It's coded.

And, you know, much in the way that language is coded for us. Right. I would hold, and I think you would as well, that this kind of experience, the potential for this kind of experience, we have the substrate for it. These are all the different ways, right, that we can tap into it.

Jonathan would like to go back and talk about Jesus' blood and wine. And I don't want to stop him. So, sorry. Well, this is actually a great intersection point. Because... We're going to die before we die. That's next on my list. Next in my document.

I don't want to be overly simplistic. But I, you know, for people listening, sometimes you're listening to a podcast, you're doing a variety of other things. And it's easy to sort of maybe gloss over points that are there, but, you know, may need a little bit of highlighting. Yeah. So at the risk of being overly simplistic, what I hear or what I heard in the explanation is that there is evidence that the.

the blood of Christ ingesting that is really ingested and the flesh. I don't quite understand the flesh fully. So I'm going to talk about the blood. The flesh is weak. What I, what I heard is. He likes me more than you do-do. She's funny, man. Depends on the day. Really depends on the day. I'm hilarious. In Hebrew. Okay.

So there's evidence. You went and saw and met the researchers who are looking at the containers of the wine and the priests. And the priests. And there's evidence of some form of psychedelics in the containers of this wine that by drinking it,

we're not actually drinking Jesus' blood and want to make that clear. What we're saying is that drinking the wine, that has hallucinogenics in it is giving people access to a divine experience. Is this accurate in terms of like a general summary? That was a fair summation. I just want to be careful for those who are doing their dishes right now. But I'm not saying that Jesus was serving psychedelics, nor am I saying that Christianity

was founded on psychedelics. I think, you know, I wrote this book in search of actual evidence. And to date, to the best of my knowledge, there is no concrete, arco-botanical data to prove that the wine of Dionysus being consumed in Greece was traditionally hallucinogenic and spiked. Nor is there any evidence whatsoever, although I'm looking for it, that the chalices, the Eucharistic chalices of early Christianity were likewise spiked. What I did include in the second half of the book was actual data to prove that, yes, in the ancient world, there was spiked wine that you could, with a very straight face, call hallucinogenic.

I'll just take 10 seconds to explain that in the Vile Vesuvio, which the entire second half of my book, hangs on this discovery, which happened like more than 20 years ago and just kind of went unacknowledged and unnoticed. There was an Italian archaeobotanist. There's always one dude. In every chapter, there's like one dude who's like, why is no one listening? And Brian's like, I'll listen. This is one Italian, Marina, one Italian lady, who at the time was, but no longer is an archaeobotanist, which is another irony I try and explore in the book, is that like so few people are looking at this. And even those who did are no longer doing it. And so like the, It's crumbling before our face, all this data and evidence.

But Marina, Geraldi, she went to, just outside Pompeii, there was this excavation site, the Villa Vesuvio, the House of Vesuvius. It's called that because we know Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD. A lot of what we know about the ancient world was because of that eruption. It preserved lots of things in Pompeii and Herculaneum and elsewhere. Also a song about that. There's also. I want your Spotify playlist.

It's just in her head. She has all the lyrics. that have ever been written in there. So what they find are giant, not unlike this, giant wine jars, humongous wine jars, full of grape seeds. And as a trained archaeobotanist, it's so well preserved. The Dolea had been waterlog. It's so well preserved.

She can see the seeds and plant material just sitting there. And she's able to identify like 50 species of plants, the vast majority of which are medicinal. Among them, she finds seeds of opium and cannabis and those witchy plants. plants we talked about Henbane and Black Nightshade, which Diascortes described as visionary and hallucinogenic. So like with a straight face, we can say there was something like psychotropic wine in antiquity. We don't know the context. We don't know if Christians would have availed themselves of this or the Diannesians or others, but, you know, I'm hunting for more evidence of this kind of wine. So what's interesting to me is that the description of what happens when you ingest something

and get to be one, right, and know the mysteries of the universe or feel connected or understand that notion is replicated conceptually when you think about the non-metaphorical nature of the sacrament, meaning you're not metaphorically ingesting. You are taking something in for the express purpose of being one with it because it opens a window to your understanding of reality. Yeah, I would say for the followers of Dionysus before Jesus, I mean, there's your proof that this was not a metaphor for them people. They went mad. Like Dionysus is not the God of wine. He's the God of delirium, madness, ecstasy, frenzy. They went into fits of madness, not alcoholic stupor. They went into fits of hallucinogenic madness, ecstasy, possession. They were totally

possessed by the God. That was the whole point of that religion is to be possessed by and become one with the God in a non-metaphorical fashion. again, potentially oversimplifying. But how is that happening in your, you know, either evidence or estimation? It has, I mean, the one thing that that jumps off the ancient sources is the wine, the blood, the blood of Dionysus. It has to do with the wine. In addition to the wine, Dionysus is often compared to the ivy. And so we don't know if ancient ivy is the same as our ivy, but there are sources. Poison ivy.

There's quite poisonous, quite spectacular ivy, that does weird things. It deranges the sentence, the senses, say the ancient sources. So there's something about their ivy and madness. They are consuming things to enter into wild states. I don't know what they were consuming, but they were consuming something. This brings us to the point that mine was saying that we are heartwired to change our perspective and have altered states of consciousness. And so what I'm hearing is that while we don't know that they're Christians,

were delivering this altered states of consciousness to their followers, that some version of that was intended to, like, it's just... Well, I mean, no, I think what I would say, and I obviously would defer to you on this, you know, when we sort of think about what a religious experience is, right? Why we have religion? You know, and I have an 18-year-old. We talk about this all the time.

What are we wired for? You know, are we wired, you know, and we were literally having this conversation last night. What is a rational experience? And can it include a mystical one? And do you need God? Do you need religion? I'm not asking you to answer this because that's my job because he's my kid, but you'll get to it with yours, I'm assuming. But this notion of, you know, my rabbi who's, you know, pretty high on the mystical scale, you know, would teach us like if we, if God didn't exist, we would just create God.

And there's a comfort for me in knowing that there's something bigger than me that I'm going to keep trying to name. I'm going to keep, I'm going to give it a ritual, I'm going to bow or I'll eat this or not eat that. I'll dress like this, I'll speak, I'll say, I'll go to this synagogue, whatever it is. I don't have any authority on a religious experience. And I don't believe Christians do or Muslims or Hindus or anyone, right? So you've talked about, you know, religions being less about sort of the symbols and more about the experience, right? The intuitive experience.

So I think that's kind of what we're circling, right? Everybody's trying to get there. We're all trying to get there. And at certain historical points in the existence of humanity, we group together for reasons. We have tribes. We eat this. They don't eat that. You know, we scar ourselves with tattoos.

They don't. Whatever it is. But it really is, if you pull back, it's about a singular experience and connection with something bigger than ourselves. So does that framework? It is that. And it's also the fact that the ability to. or the experience of getting into an altered state to find some form of divinity seems to come from

some sort of substance while also ingesting some sort of concept or story about the experience because people were told their entire lives that they're going to go have this experience. Correct. Yeah. And so it seems as though our modern day traditions are some sort of combination. Now we've removed the psychedelics for the most part from going to church or from other forms of mystical experience, yet we're seeing those pop back up now in the experimentation and the renewed interest in psychedelics, which I think we should talk about as a society. I'm not there yet. We're getting there.

Again, a little foreshadowing. But it seems to be a combination also of the myth, story, folklore around said experience and the fact that we can get there. You know, even in the terms of, you know, hearing about you can lay down and die, we have to first be introduced to the concept. before we can then take that concept, implement it for ourselves, and change our ordinary reality, because most of us are stuck in some form of, this is just all I know. And until we are introduced to the concept that there can be something else,

we have very hard time breaking out of that. Correct. Yeah, that's a very important point to make is that, and Joseph Campbell says this, that myth is the flip side of ritual. And so while today we might be seeing the resuscitation of all these archaic techniques, or classical techniques, psychedelic or otherwise, resuscitating the ritual in the absence of the story is not going to work. Say that again.

No, that's an important point. Resuscitating the ritual in the absence of the story. That's what the Greek word myth means. Muthos. It means story. Resuscitating a mere ritual in the absence of a story is not going to work. You put it perfectly. Like, in the ancient world, pagan, Jewish, Christian, you were born into a world where this

stuff was real. You asked about what is reality. Reality is what we make of it. And I totally take your point. on the neuroanatomical substrate of this experience. I get it. It's, but it's how we attribute meaning to things through life experience. And a big part of that is through stories, right?

A lot of what you do is storytelling, right? I'm a storyteller. And the way that we tell stories very much informs the way that we interpret this experience. And so in ancient elusus, you grew up in a world where your relatives had this experience. And they wouldn't tell you the details, but they basically say, that was the most incredible thing I've ever seen. It was in the water. It was in the water.

It was in the water. It was just like it floated everywhere. It was in the event. Same with Dionysus. And same for the early Christians where even in the absence of psychedelics. They were dealing with a lot. There was a lot going on. It was a tough, tough time.

So like they were having meaningful experiences, prophetic experiences, visionary experiences. I mean, you know, Paul in his letters talks about being caught up in the third heaven. Peter is described as being in a trance. Like these guys were having meaningful experiences. They could not explain. But they lived in a world where that. was real. It was expected. It was not anomalous phenomena. This was, this was real stuff.

Well, it's, it was, it was to the point of you can't reenact the ritual without the narrative. So the question for me is, is there a narrative that is applicable in modern day society that can be reenacted? Or are, I think people are trying to find it. Are we so fractured that, you know, we can't have overarching narrative that will then allow us to, experience a mythological or mystical experience that we seem to be fundamentally hardwired to need. Right. Yeah, we don't have it. I don't see evidence of it. I mean, the fact that, you know, 69% of American Catholics interpret something as symbolic, that is core to the faith. That is the central defining feature of the faith points to the fact that the story isn't working, that the story

is out of odds with the ritual. And so, I mean, how that story comes back, I'm not really sure. They should ask your daughter. She's got stories. Well, can you bring it back without the psychedelics? Because if people are not experiencing the mystical, you know, visions and feeling. Right. The psychedelics are a tool, like any other tool.

And I think a rather ambiguous tool, depending, because it's so much dependent on the set and setting, which folks have heard, your mindset and the circumstances under which that experience happens. And so in order to derive benefit from that kind of tool, you know, let's not forget the set. Let's not forget the mindset. So how do you prep the mindset? Growing up in a materialistic world where magical things don't happen and we're all neurotic suffering from anxiety and depression is not the best way to go into an experience. And for someone who's never explored their psyches, right? Psychedelics are that which make manifest the contents of the psyche. And psyche is the Greek word for soul. So those who've done no soul work,

never gone to therapy, never thought about their dreams, never looked into the dark, never lied down and died. I don't think you're going to have a very pleasant psychedelic experience, nor should you even think about it. So can you talk a little bit about that? You know, the, I don't want to say like, Brian, tell us the dangers of psychedelics. Because like I don't, and I think I think there's people, you know, far more qualified than you or I, let's say, to speak to that. But I would like you to speak to the dangers of psychazalex kind of from this perspective, right? What are the things that we're trying to have access to that needs more of a story around it? Right. I mean, I can speak from the ancient record.

Like, there were dangers in elusis and the rights of Dionysus. I can say that for sure. you know that wasn't always a pleasant experience you know the the experience of god it can be an experience of of bliss often it's an experience of all which which which which which includes some fear and trembling and i think that that often gets overlooked in the psychedelic literature or in religious literature that you know to confront god face to face in the old testament no man shall shall see me and live uh is pronounced to moses so like what does that mean we can't so if if we are looking for God through these entheogens that make the God rise within you, what are you actually looking for

when the sources tell us that you shall not look at the face of God? And if you do, it will obliterate you. You can consume. That's the whole point, is this is self-annihilation. And there's a Greek concept around this called kinosis. Is that self-emptying. As you empty the self, you begin to discover things not just about the small self, but the capital S-self. And that is my definition of God. I think that when I look through the ancient sources, they all describe God as not something to be learned about, not something you read about, not something you debate about, like increasing levels of knowledge that you attain in order to achieve that godhood by emptying the self and by deconditioning the self, by returning to a state of infancy, almost, thereby you find that God within, you find that divine spark that's talked about in esoteric Judaism and gnostic Christianity and the Sufism of Islam and all the world's traditions, by emptying the self, you have that that God experience. And that can be, that can happen spontaneously or it can happen over the course of many, many years.

That's powerful. I want to specifically talk about one aspect that is featured really prominently in the book. And also is something that Peter Kingsley talks about. You know, the way I sort of sum it up is if you die before you die, you'll never die. Right? And this was a huge component of the,

the mystical experience, specifically in, you know, ancient Greece or in, you know, that you talk about in the book. It's also a key component of many transcendental experiences. And, you know, you hear people talk about ego death. You know, you also hear people just not talking about ego death, but just it feels like death, right? And it's terrifying. And it doesn't feel like the tripping balls in Joshua tree variety. Talk about what it means. And what the Greeks meant when we talk about if you die before you die, you'll never die. And what does that mean for us? Yeah, I mean, we're harping on the same point again and again. Like, like death. I mean, if I had a nickel for every time I heard that, Brian, like, what are you my therapist?

That'd be a fun experience. So like the, so death, death is not pleasant for a lot of people. Like, how you think about death, for example, might inform the kind of experience you have on psychedelics, ready or not for it. It might inform the kind of experience you have through a Kundalini yoga meditate, which can also be very deep. dangerous, by the way. It's described as a dangerous discipline in the yogic sciences, Kundalini in particular. You can have trippy-ass horrible experiences. You can also have nightmares and bad dreams every single night when you enter into altered states of consciousness. What are your nightmares trying to tell you, right? What is your relationship with mortality

and death? And what are your neuroses and psychoses you struggle with every day? Like, these are things that need to be brought to the surface in order to figure out what's going on here. So I think that dying before dying is this, I mean, I know. I know. it doesn't make sense on the surface, but if you experience a psychological death before your physical death, then upon your physical death, something about the psyche may in fact survive. So the survival of the spirit or the soul in the absence of a body. So that phrase comes from a Greek Orthodox monastery at Mount Athos in Greece, St. Paul's monastery. But I think it harkens back to like a very living tradition that goes through the entire Greek world deeply into ancient

Greece. And you find this concept of death and rebirth dying before dying in like all the world's traditions. It's probably a prehistoric tradition. We've talked about this a few times already. I think it goes back probably tens hundreds of thousands of years. Those who have gone to a near death experience and returned from that. This is prototypical shamanistic journey. You died to the body to be reborn as a new human being. What we're talking about is that that's resurrection. Well, okay, so we arrived at resurrection, which is also linking back to this notion of what do you bring down from the mountain, right? When you open your eyes and you open your mouth, what are you going to say, right? And so for me, that connected so beautifully with this, right?

Let's just call if you die before you die, let's just call that whatever this experience is, right? And it could be the mysteries, it could be drugs, it could be holotropic brother, whatever. that if you die before you die. What does it mean to never die, right? It means that you have... Stay in the matrix. For me, what I hear when we talk about never dying is that whatever you experienced when you did die, right? Whatever you experienced has transformed you so deeply, changed you so completely that every interaction you have, and Peter Kingsley lives this way, right? every interaction that you have is always touched by that.

You don't have fear. There's no more fear because you've done it, right? And you get to then exist with that knowledge. So when we talk about having these transcendental experiences, it's like, you know, as my yoga teacher says, I don't care what you do for an hour on the mat. I care what you do for the other 23, right? It's so, it's beautiful to have these experiences.

But what is the rest of your life look? like. To me, that's what never dying means, right? And normalizing it, I think, and making it even more accessible. We recently gave a talk on the intersection of science and spirituality, and we got feedback about people who have had what they call spiritual awakenings, small spiritual awakenings. And what that means to me is you begin to have slightly altered perception from what your ordinary reality is. And you begin to see sort of some people call it behind the veil. Some people call it extrasensory. Some people, life start to fall apart and you're like, I'm not on the right track. There's some sort of other thing for me. And they begin to shift out of one state of being into another state. And some of that comes,

like, as you said, with an enormous amount of panic because that's all they know is this thing over here that is their reality. And then they start hearing what is intuition, for example. And they start hearing guidance like, hey, by the way, you're going to, you know, your life is going to slowly fall apart. and you shouldn't be terrified because there's something else waiting for you, but until you experience that other thing waiting for you, you begin to be quite terrified. And I think there's overlap there in the psychedelic experience and the transcendental experience without psychedelics

in that if you're going and journeying into some unknown place, you have to sort of give up, give over, similar to a death, where I'm no longer going to be in control and I'm going to look outside of myself for some other experience that I will hopefully be held in. and that can create a larger sense of trust in a God, in a universe, in some sort of other experience. Whatever that may be. That's why I start the book with Dinah Beezer, who grew up as an otherwise secular Jewish woman,

describes herself as a staunch atheist, and at a loss of words to describe her transcendental experience on psilocybin, said it felt like she was bathed in God's love. And the one lesson she came back with, what she came down from the mountain with, was this idea that she won't die, at least not the way we typically understand it. It has to do with time, reorienting our sense of time and space and Newtonian physics. She says that, you know, basically she encountered this sense of always being, like now and forever, this timeless sense of eternity in the now, which, you know, sounds like mumbo-jumbo, but to her was... Maybe not to some listeners either. To her, it felt very, very real. Back to your question about what is reality.

Reality is the things that make us feel like it's true. To her, it feels true that she misunderstood time before her experience. Afterwards, she reorients herself under an entirely new worldview, an entirely new physics, an entirely new way of understanding the world. We don't understand time very well. And so this dying before dying, that could actually be a daily practice. It could live in the infinitesimal distance of one moment to the next. So we have direct experience with talking to someone who had this experience because we spoke

to Elizabeth Crone with Jeffrey Criple. Oh, nice. And so we spoke to someone who had a near-death experience. She was struck by lightning. She was struck by lightning. Previously not a religious person, not a person who believed in that there even are oras or that there are ghosts or extracensory perception. She had a series of physiological changes that happened to her,

which some of which we can attribute to what happens when you're struck by lightning and your shoes are literally blown clear off your feet. However, she acquired synesthesia. She acquired a lot of, again, a lot of interesting physiological things that we can perhaps explain. But this near-death experience had a tremendous amount of overlap with a transcendental experience, right? She believes she spoke to God for two weeks and was, you know, out for, just a couple minutes, you know, on the pavement. But this notion, you know, rings very true in terms of that experience, you know, as we were talking about the overlapping Venn diagram of DMT,

you know, of the drug DMT and near-death experiences. There's a tremendous amount of overlap, right? And so, again, my question is, okay, that means chemically we can figure out, right? What's DMT acting on? What are the receptors? What's the downregulation? What's the upregulation, right? But in terms of the psychology, in terms of the human experience of it, right? That, that to me is what is so fascinating, right? And for me, it's all about just we're all going, we're trying to get to the same thing, and these are all the ways that we can get there. Can you talk a little bit more about resurrection in particular?

Do you see that as metaphorical? Do you see that as, you know, is there a literal resurrection that we can imagine? the same way that we can imagine that you can ingest the body and the blood of Christ to be one, what role then does the resurrection play in this narrative for early Christians? Right. So, oh, that's a big topic. In Judaism, too. I mean, so I was taught that the resurrection was a real, a physical event. Correct. And that is the traditional understanding in Judaism as well. The dead will rise. The dead will rise. And that you, as you accept Christ, and as you consume his flesh and blood

and become one with him as a good Catholic, that you too will experience a corporeal, a physical resurrection at the end of time with all the others who have been invited to heaven. We put dirt from Jerusalem into, like my grandparents who were Orthodox, you put dirt from Jerusalem into their grave if they're not buried in Jerusalem

so that when they rise, they will be closer to the land where they will need to be. Like, for real, we put it in the coffins. Go on. So there's physical resurrection. Right.

So I'm not sure what to make of that. But that's what I was taught. I believe in the power of, yeah, not just resuscitation, which is different. But yeah, the resurrection of the spirit. And I think that it's of the spirit. Of the spirit. I think it feeds into this notion of death and rebirth into something.

I think our bodies are wonderful vehicles. They're fun to play around with. I wouldn't want to be trapped in a body for all of eternity. And again, this has to go back to tie. I answer this way because it goes back to time. So if you're thinking about heaven or the afterlife, again, there's all these concepts of time and space, even in just in that taxonomy, right? So like one notion of everlasting time is just that everlasting, that heaven is just like this,

and time goes on and on and on forever. And yes, you would need a physical. vehicle for that. Maybe that's the case. In some of these mystical and transcendental experiences, the message that comes back time and again is that, well, time is a bit different than we understand it, and that you may not need a physical vehicle if, in fact, you're breaking the confines of space and time. And in a timeless sense, how does consciousness, what is the vehicle that consciousness inhabits in timeless eternity, which is not just a really long time, but it's it's the sense of awareness that exists outside of time. And so eternity is the thing that we miss

from day to day because thinking and time cut out our perception of that now, which is why you can go to sleep at night. If you're very, very tired, wake up the next morning. And seemingly, no time has gone by because the mind isn't there to interpret time the way it usually does. So I think that's how I think about everlasting versus eternity. So the way that you just solved the issue of a physical resurrection, is the way Elizabeth Crone would say it, that you can slice into time like it's a seven-layer cake. We always exist, we always have existed, we always will exist.

Any time that you choose to have a conscious experience or are having a conscious experience, you can place it on an X, Y, and Z plane, if you'd like. But that's not a requirement for your existence, as it were. This leads to the Akashic Records, right? There are people who believe that there's a collective consciousness, right? that simply exists that you can slice into. And if you learn the proper mental state

and you can get there in a transcendental state, you can access all information that is, has been, and ever will be. He believes in the Akashik records. I just proved it. That's what it means in Sanskrit, by the way, Akashik. Akasha. It means outside time, outside space.

Well, instead of going down into the underworld, you go up. I mean, you go out also. Out and up. Yeah. Or maybe you go in to the upside down. Also very possible. I will, I just want to footnote this. I mean, this stuff is really hard to talk about. I think we're all experiencing.

You're doing great, Brian. We're very proud of you. We would recommend you for other podcasts. Likewise. We should do this again. But like, you know, we're having trouble, like, talking about this stuff. And the folks around us, I think, are having, like, a tough time following because it's really tough to language this stuff. And that's a really important point to bring into any concept of religion, philosophy, or God. I did this video on YouTube with a friend of mine who has a channel called Afterschool. It's called The God Paradox. And it's about this notion that's really hard to talk about God. And I quote, like, St. Augustin, who says that I see Comprehendis, nonest de If you understand anything we're talking right now, you're nowhere near to what God is. If you think you understand, you're really, really far. That's actually Talmud also. Exactly right. It's literally directly from the Talmud.

Exactly right. As soon as you think you're right, you're wrong. And I think we're all simultaneously right and wrong about all this stuff because it's really hard to language. We're talking about non-rational processes, exactly what Elizabeth experienced, where you've both experienced throughout your life, what listeners have experienced. It's hard to language this stuff. So just at the risk of being overly simplistic and languaging things, summing up the conversation on resurrection, you know, what I heard is we can be outside of time and space and that may be

the safest explanation for it. But I can't help but wondering if it is also about this, the awakening and the resurrection we have in these mini deaths that we have before we actually die and give up the body and that it's small versions of recreating ourselves away from a stuck paradigm, stuck perspective, starting to expand consciousness, etc. Correct. Yeah. I mean, this is why I sometimes say that, like, absent an acute crisis for all the reasons that we've talked about, like, I really don't think people should consider a powerful psychedelic experience before the age of 35 or 40 or older because there's so much dying to be done before then.

That is the age that you are allowed to start studying the mystical traditions in Judaism. That's why I borrow that. And I think it's very, very wise because from 0 to 35, you have lots of dying to go through. You need to have your heart broken at least a few times. You have to have two kids, what? You'd have a couple of kids at least. That was my biggest death experience so far has been having two daughters. Try actually giving birth to that Brian.

On the floor. Try squeezing a watermelon through a garden hose with no drugs. right in the floor, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Very spiritual experience. You know what? I love talking about birth.

But a very spiritual experience, which, you know, involves self-hypnosis. If you choose to, I mean, I chose to do it this way. This is not an accident. But, yeah, that's a spiritual experience to also reinterpret pain. And human existence is pain, right? It's, we're suffering. We're in a state of suffering. You know, we're trying to escape that loop.

But, you know, satanama. Like that's, you know, as a woman, this brings me back to what I wanted to ask. As a woman, we get to experience it in a different way, even if you don't have children. I would hold that, you know, there's a tremendous amount that women hold that is different. And even if you choose not to have children, your body has a rhythm that is echoing life and death monthly, right? I wonder if you can touch on, and then we'll, I'm trying to be mindful of time, I wonder if you can touch a little bit on the specificity of the female aspect of these traditions, why you think women were responsible and meaning could be responsible for this,

what was special about that. And besides just the march of the march of culture leading in the direction of stronger bigger, better, you know, faster being perceived as male, what happened in terms of the female experience when we talk about these mysteries? Right. So everything we've discussed about the ancient mysteries, we sort of buried the lead. Well, we sort of mentioned that they were initially female mysteries. But when it comes to the mysteries of Dionysus and even early Christianity, too, like these were heavily female-led ceremonies. The women were the driving force of these experiences, despite the fact that the church would step into the shoes of the patriarchal Roman Empire

and kind of keep marching forward in the 4th century, that all happens in the 4th century AD. This is when the church becomes bigger and more bureaucratized, administrative, and it takes on a lot of the power structure of the very male-heavy Roman Empire. It became institutionalized. But before then, there is no institution. There's no Bible. There's no widely accepted canonical version of the New Testament. there are no physical churches.

There's no basilicas until Constantine, famously converts in 312. So, you know, the earliest Christians are meeting in private homes, just like this. They're going into necropolis and catacombs underground to commune with the dead. Like that was the early Eucharistic experience, and that was almost to a fault, I mean, it was led by women. So women as the heads of households were the early patrons of the early house churches. They were called house churches. in which the meal was served.

And a lot of that probably had to do with also medicine, because that's what a lot of women historically, that's what you do when you tend home, right? You're cooking. You're taking care of because men are out doing the things that they're doing, right? Right. So there has to be this overlap. Well, in order to feed people, by the way, not just 2,000 years ago,

but think about 20,000 years ago. So there's this very blurred line between, like, diet and cuisine and medicine and pharmacology and drugs and these sacraments. Like, you're essentially talking about, our relationship with the earth, right? And the ecosystem by which we're surrounded. Like to have no knowledge of that before pharmacies came into existence was to spell certain death for people. And it was typically the domain of women who carried a lot of this plant knowledge and this herbal lore, folk medicine from prehistory all the way into the classical

civilization. So it's not a surprise to me that that women were involved in receiving and storing and distributing the ingredients that would go into the Eucharistic meal in these houses. churches. It's no surprise to me that it was female minnads who kept Dionysus alive for centuries, or that it was female pre-suses through these noble families who kept that alive as well, because they were inheriting traditions from deep prehistory where it was women who would typically brew these magical potions, mix these magical wines for millennia, untold millennia. It was all about women. And also you think about, you know, historically how women who have visions are treated, right? I mean, you can you can take it all the way through. You know, women now

reclaim the term witch. A lot of people are still practicing various forms of witchery, as it were. But that was a really powerful part of this book to realize also how many aspects of our experience also get institutionalized and taken over when patriarchal structures in particular.

And in many cases, religious patriarchal structures come into play. Also, if you look nowadays at the resurrection for, should use a different word, but the resurgence is more accurate of the healing arts and people who are doing somatic release and finding trapped emotions in the body and helping guide that through.

Predominantly, that's a female focused. It was women. It's all, you know, 95%, 90% women who are. And men find the formulas and the, you know, the things and they publish the books. But yeah, Peter Levine we had on said, you know, he owes it to the women before him and the female traditions of somatic healing

and, you know, the healing arts that allowed that. Last question. And, you know, you talk about this in the book, but I'd love to hear your perspective, and I don't mean to ask it in a sensationalistic way. You've chosen not to partake of psychedelics, you know, partly to sort of maintain some sort of academic legitimacy,

meaning so that you're not seen as an advocate, you know, like, I'm doing this so that you will, do this. And my my hunch would be, if you ever did it, I hope that you never tell anyone. Meaning, no, because I hope that if you were to have that experience, that it would be one that wouldn't have to be broadcast. Except for us. You should tell us. We won't be exclusive. No, but I am curious, you know, if your decision to not partake, you know, which I think makes a lot of sense, has that shifted? Or as you hear more about, you know, research and especially you know, these sort of clinically controlled and really beautiful experiences that people have

in facilitated ways that really are, in a sense, customized, you know, in terms of what your needs, desires, and, you know, goals are. Is that something that's changed for you? Yeah, I mean, what I should do some day is just auction off my psychedelic virginity to a charitable cause. I think that's the best use of my virginity, which is still the case. I would take a lie detector on that. But yeah, it may not be broadcast at some point. But yeah, at first, it was a great desire just to be objective. And also, like, all the books I was reading was, you know, a lot of white men talking about their relationship with God on drugs. And there's a lot of literature there. I don't want to write another one of those. So, but now, like, you know, it's been a few years.

And I don't know, my, like, my views are like shifting a lot when it comes to this stuff. I think I've tried to describe to the best of my ability how I feel about it. it now, which is I find psychedelics deeply ambiguous because of the lack of the story. I think that's it. So like my ideal scenario would not be in a lab in Baltimore or any way. You want trip balls to Joshua Tree? Yeah, maybe Joshua Tree. Well, nature. I mean, nature's a huge component of it and I think that's part of the story. I think that's how we experience these states is typically in nature. So how do you do that safely? How do you do that with the right story with which compound, by the way? Like, you know, I've, I find, you know, dozens of compounds throughout

the book, none of which are very safe. Just eat a lot of eggplant together and see what happens. I'm down for that. Eggplant-a-holic. Sign up for Maim's retreat to Joshua Tree. No, but as I say, like in Los Angeles, you can't swing a dead cat without finding an ayahuasca, you know, ceremony and experience.

And I also know people who go to South America and have a very different kind of experience. But yeah, it's very, yeah. Well, to that point, I don't know, like, you know, as a white kid from Northeast Philly who grew up Catholicly, I don't know what my story is. I don't know like what my container is. It's not in the Amazon.

It's, it might be in Joshua Tree. I don't know. I don't know where. So I'm kind of looking for it. And, you know, in fits and starts, the pictures coming together. But I still, I'm looking for the story. I'm looking for the container. And as a culture, I think we definitely do not have that at the moment.

But I'm looking. What do you think in terms of culture and society that the resurgence of psychedelics and the interest in it says, about us as a culture or points to? Well, it could have disastrous consequences, but however... But there's a need there, right? Yeah, there's a clear need for transcendence. I think the need for transcendence is built into who we are.

There was a psychologist Siegel who talked about it as the fourth drive after food and drink and sex, is that there's this need for transcendence, sometimes through drugs. but I think that we all have that that urge to step outside ourselves, step inside ourselves into the upside down to try and figure out what this is. And I think like the common, you know, you know, perception is that like this ain't it. Whatever it is from day.