Rev Left Radio - Psychedelics and the Self: Exploring Human Consciousness

Episode Date: May 3, 2020

Mexie returns to Rev Left, this time to have a wide-ranging discussion on Psychedelics, their history, the science behind them, and their interactions with human consciousness! Mexie's podcast, Vegan Vanguard, HERE Find Mexie's YT channel HERE   Check out Michael Pollan's book HERE Outro music 'Forgotten Eyes' by Big Thief  ------- LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com SUPPORT REV LEFT RADIO: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Our logo was made by BARB, a communist graphic design collective: @Barbaradical Intro music by DJ Captain Planet. --------------- This podcast is affiliated with: The Nebraska Left Coalition, Omaha Tenants United, FORGE, Socialist Rifle Association (SRA), Feed The People - Omaha, and the Marxist Center.

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. So for today's episode, we are going to talk to Mexie about psychedelics, about the psychedelic experience, about the ego, about meditation, about how capitalism and imperialism and colonialism are often rooted in and outgrowths of a certain Western idea of how to experience the world. We cover so much fascinating topics, including the science and neuroscience of psychedelics specifically. I could never possibly sum up the entire conversation. It's always an honor and a pleasure to talk and collab with Mexie. So we really hope listeners on both of our shows enjoy this conversation and find some value in it. So without further ado, let's get into this wonderful conversation with Mexie on the entire science and history and implications and philosophy of psychedelics. Enjoy.

Hi, I am Mexie. I am a YouTuber and I have a podcast called The Vegan Vanguard. I am a geographer by training. I have a PhD in geography and I study the interconnections between the economy and ecology. Basically, I look at political economy and environmental issues as well as social issues and I bring that onto my channel, which is Mexie, so check it out. Yeah, basically just talking about the contradictions of capitalism and how it relates to our ecology. Yeah, well, wonderful. I'm happy to have you back. Love whenever you come on the show and I know our listeners love when you come on the show as well. And for those that don't know, we had a conversation a few months ago about meditation and the outdoors called Mind and Nature. And in that conversation,

We touched a little bit on psychedelics, but we decided that we're going to have a more full-blown conversation about psychedelics in a few months, and this is that conversation. So people can listen to it in any order they want to, but there is that extra episode for those interested in, for those specifically who like this conversation. Just to start off sort of low-key, how are you doing with the whole coronavirus, the lockdown, and all of that? Well, you know, I'm doing all right. If people follow me on Twitter or follow my YouTube channel, I just made a video actually about

my chronic illness and what happened to me at the start of this pandemic, basically. So I broke out in a shingles attack all over my neck and face and head. And so it damaged the nerves in my head and face, so I had facial paralysis. And so this was happening basically right as the pandemic was erupted. And so, yeah, it was a bit stressful, obviously, at first, because I had to go to a merge and this was during the lockdown and I was obviously a very immunocompromised given the fact that I had broken out in a shingles attack. So, yeah, that was a bit stressful. And then having to, I guess, return to work online and kind of carry on my courses online as, you know, as I was dealing with this. and as the role was dealing with this was fairly stressful, but I'm doing a lot better now,

happy to say. And yeah, I mean, I'm fairly, you know, privileged in that I still have a job, you know. So, yeah, I feel fairly lucky about my situation. So I'm doing all right. I'm also probably one of the most introverted people ever. Like, I'm quite happy to be alone. So it's not that bad for me, I suppose. Yeah, that's basically me weathering things. How about you?

Yeah, I'm doing okay. I mean, I definitely relate to the introvert thing. It's not hard at all for me to be alone for long periods of time. So it's not totally, you know, outside of the realm of experiences I've had or I'm okay with. I do have a family, of course, so that kind of hedges against loneliness or isolation and whatnot. Did your shingles outbreak? Was it associated at all with like anxiety around the outbreak? Or is it just completely coincidental? It was really coincidental. So it was just associated with the fact that I was burning out physically at work. I had just taken on, well, I kind of was forced to take on or maybe it's a bit of both, but I just had way too much work and I have chronic illness. So yeah, that level of stress. Also, my family dog passed away and that led to additional emotional stress. So basically just all the stress that my body was under led to that. And then it was basically simultaneously. right so it's like i had just broken out in in the shingles um when the lockdown started so uh yeah well we're happy that you're at least feeling better now and i'm sorry you had to go through that yeah thank you well for today's episode like i said we're going to be talking about psychedelics um we're using a book as an anchor but this conversation is not going to be about the book it's going to go well beyond the book itself but the book that both mexie and i read at least parts of um was How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan, a really respected scientific journalist.

It's a New York bestseller, fascinating, engaging, entertaining, read. Before I get into my recent experience with psychedelics, kind of like, what are your overall thoughts on the book overall? Did you anything out of it that's particularly stood out to you or what's your overall feelings, I guess? Oh, my gosh. I love the book. I guess when I was first starting it, like I had previously watched some doctors.

documentaries about psychedelics and DMT and things like that after I had become interested in them and tried a few. And so I knew a bit about, you know, the medicinal uses of psychedelics or the potential of psychedelics to help with a lot of various emotional issues or emotional problems. So at first I was like, oh, yeah, yeah, you know, I know this stuff. But there was actually so much that stood out, so much that I didn't know. I loved hearing about all of these different people's, you know, stories and how they, you know, had such transformative experiences and how it helped them to basically, you know, cure their addictions, cure their depression, things like that. I loved just how open and, like, curious and inquisitive he was, right? And how he kind of

showed his transformation from somebody who used to think of themselves as purely, you know, 100% I'm a materialist to someone who understands that both the material and the spiritual or kind of the immaterial or connected. I loved, I think we'll get into it, but he talks about some of the brain science behind all of this and this default mode that our brains are usually in, which is really associated with ego and how psychedelics have the potential for dissolving people's egos, which is why it's so amazing for treating things like addiction or depression or things like that. And then also the evolutionary implications of it. So both why has it been advantageous for humans to partake in psychedelic experiences, but also why has it been

adventations for mushrooms to actually grow in this way and to have this effect on animals. I don't know. I just thought it was all super fascinating. For sure, yeah. I'm glad you enjoyed it so much. I loved it as well. It was a wonderful trip through just a bunch of history and a bunch of science and a bunch of personal anecdotes. The author himself does various psychedelics for the first time, really, throughout the book and talks about his personal experiences, which I found to be fascinating and interesting to see how different and how similar psychedelic experiences can be between people. He does have plenty of interviews.

This book came out like two years ago. So if you're interested in actually hearing more interviews, podcast style, Joe Rogan and Ezra Klein, both have interviews with him that I found really interesting and helpful and to get that firsthand perspective on why he wrote the book and his experiences while writing it. And then, of course, you can go check out the book itself. If you're interested at all in any of these subjects, you'll find a lot. of stuff in this book and in those interviews that you'll enjoy. I really enjoyed also the history and we'll maybe get into it a little bit more later, but just how far back, specifically psilocybin,

which is the active psychedelic sort of chemical in quote unquote magic mushrooms, how that goes back thousands and thousands of years and played integral roles in indigenous traditions and ceremonies for centuries and centuries. So that was fascinating as well. So there's so much packed into this book. I know. I also loved, I mean, I think maybe your listeners know that you're into Buddhist philosophy. I am also into Buddhist philosophy. I also loved a lot of the discussions around consciousness and ego and things like that that basically kind of confirmed to me what I already thought to be true through meditation and through, you know, studying Buddhist philosophy. So it was just really affirming in a lot of ways to read this book and to think about my own

experiences, both with meditation and psychedelics and kind of the realizations that it's brought me to. And like you said, realizing that a lot of these things are quite common for people who do partake in this. Yeah. Yeah, for me, like, of course, I totally agree, the Buddhism and the meditation dovetails perfectly with discussions of the spiritual experiences one can have on psychedelics. When I was in college getting my bachelor's degree in philosophy, I focused on philosophy of mind. And through that sort of sub-program, I did some work with the neuroscience department, ran some experiments. So I've always been fascinated with human consciousness, the human mind, how it relates to itself from the inside and from the outside, from the scientific and from

the experiential side of that coin. And so, you know, this is obviously well down my alley as well. let's go ahead and talk about my recent experience on mushrooms i think it might be a fun way to open up this overall discussion and might open up avenues of discussion for us i knew that we were going to have this conversation and so i reached out to some friends who shall remain unnamed and got myself a quarter which is two eighths right two eighth seven grams of of dried psilocybin mushrooms basically and i took um out of the seven grams i took one gram early Anytime I get something like this, I'll take a small amount a few days before a bigger amount to just sort of orient myself to it, make sure there's nothing, you know, a stray.

I don't have any negative physical or physiological symptoms, anything like that. It's a nice, I think, responsible way to engage as opposed to just going all in at once. So I took a gram and I walked around the closed-down golf course, sort of close to my house, which, you know, golf courses, we all have critiques of that entire thing, but they're really sort of aesthetically pleasing places. There's like the order of the fairways being mowed and these little ponds full of carp and stuff like that and frogs and turtles and stuff. So nobody was on the golf course. It was a beautiful day.

And I went out and did that. And then my wife had a one gram experience a day later watching stand-up comedy. And when you're taking a low dose like that, it's basically an aesthetic sort of experience. You're not having huge visual distortions. You're not having any hallucinations. You're not having huge anxiety or emotional. It's just like your mood is brightened. There's a general sense of well-being.

Colors and sound become more beautiful. And so that was a nice little introduction. And then a few days after that, I think three to five days after my little testing of it, I went full in. Basically, I don't have a scale or anything like that, but I'm doing basic math. I took somewhere around four grams, which is, you know, half a gram more than an eighth. So not a heroic dose, but still a very solid, a big, intense dose. I'm 6-2-215, and I looked it up on this little calculator you can find online,

and it says for somebody of my size, 4.5 grams would be considered a heavy dose. And so I was just below what is considered technically a heavy dose. But again, those are sort of arbitrary scales. Anyways, to talk about the trip itself, I like to, I sort of want to break it down into two main stages, disregarding the come up and the come down, which are separate and involved with any chemical you take. But the two main stages that I experience in this mushroom trip and past ones have been like what I call the challenging stage and then the revelatory stage. The challenging stage is really the peak of the intensity of the drug.

And you're going through some shit. This is the period of the experience where if you have a lot of repressed emotions or perhaps repressed trauma, those things bubble up and you're sort of for. to deal with them. For me, how that stage operated for me was intense visuals centered specifically around organic and insectile imagery. And I would love to get your thoughts after I lay this all out. If you have anything resembling this experience, and I talked in our last episode that we

did together about my experience as a 15-year-old trying mushrooms for the first time and the first part of my trip, the first stage, if you will, was that horrifying spiders and snakes crawling out. I was in a van. Spiders and snakes crawling out of the vents. And then when I vomited, I thought I was vomiting up blood and that there was a creature moving around in my vomit, my blood vomit.

So it was horrifying. I collapsed in the back seat of this van and just like curled up into a ball and waited for it to go away. I was not prepared at all for that. But this time, obviously, much more mature mindset, taking very seriously a respect for what was going on. I have my little basement setting, lit a bunch of candles, had Buddha statues, did a little meditation beforehand, really respecting the journey that I was going on and being

clear about what my intentions were. I did it completely alone. Also, I mean, I had my wife like upstairs and she knew it was going on in case anything went bad, but, you know, nothing did. But again, I saw spiders and snakes. I saw octopi, black, scary octopi. I saw cockroaches, millipedes when I would close my eyes I kept getting this visual of a frog's eye and a spider web I was it was dark it was nighttime out right so you just have candlelight and I was looking across my little basement room into into like a full body mirror that was on the other side probably like 15 feet away from me I would watch I was stare very intently at my face and I saw my face do like a Picasso thing where like the the eyes and the nose in the mouth became

weird and asymmetrical yeah and as I kept staring and my face turned into like a black void sort of Salvador Dali surreal melting feeling and then very intensely satanic imagery like staring at myself in a dark room lit only by candlelight I saw my face darken become very Satan-like I saw like horn sort of protruding from the tops of my head and again with with the constant flow of spiders and snakes and insect imagery on the periphery of my of my trip the entire time and so this and so this is very interesting because this first this first stage um what what how i interpreted it and how i dealt with it was that okay this trip is teaching me about fear it is my brain is producing a classically scary um unnerving creepy crawly imagery

and the last time you know a long time ago as as a kid when i did this i collapsed in on the fear and the fear dominated my trip and scared the fuck out of me. This time I wasn't going to let that happen. I have much more experience with meditation, much more experience with sitting with uncomfortable and negative emotions. And so that's what I did. I sat with my fear. And in fact, I embraced it.

I refused to collapse into fear. And so while the imagery was by any objective measure completely horrifying, I myself was like very internally calm and, in fact, loving the experience embracing it and looking deeper into the mirror when I saw the satanic imagery and seeing if I could cultivate it even more to sit and deal with that fear. And I also at this time had that feeling, when you eat this much, often nausea and possibly throwing up are very common. And so I felt that nausea as well.

So on top of all the scary imagery going on, there was also this nausea. It was like, will I throw up? Will I not throw up? It was sort of like flirting with that possibility the whole time, which is uncomfortable physiologically. But again, I didn't run from anything. I stayed with it. I sat with it. I embraced it. I loved it. And then after that first stage, the stage, the challenging stage, the stage where you go through shit, I had what I would call the revelatory stage. And this is when some of the spookier elements of the experience started subsiding a tad. I was still very much

under the influence, of course. And I started having revelation after revelation, revelation about personal friendships that I have, revelations about my niece, my family, my daughter, revelations about the suffering in the world. Again, and this is a very intense experience I had during the second stage, I basically fell down into the middle of my room by myself, weeping, crying, like literally unable to stand up, like crying as intensely as you would if you just learned that you lost a parent or a loved one. but I was crying for the suffering of everybody specifically the images popping in my head were images

of entire families who've been destroyed by coronavirus there's this weird asymmetry where sometimes coronavirus will plow through a singular family and I had read an article a few days prior that somebody had lost like their grandma their mother and their aunt all to the same COVID problem in the matter of a couple weeks and I a huge compassionate weeping about the suffering of other human beings and that was backed up of course towards the end of the trip with not a complete ego dissolution so i didn't have that experience we talked about last time where subject and object completely collapsed and there was no me there was just the stars falling into me i didn't have that full fledged ego dissolution but the the ego was stripped down it was

it was still there but it was revealed to be the myopic petulant self-exemptive obsessed illusion that it is. And I remember just like sitting there just like laughing out loud at times and shaking my head about just how fucking silly it is that I, but everybody, but especially, you know, I'm focusing on my own ego and I'm not judging others, how often I am controlled by the, the discursive, self-obsessed, self-referential ego and how much that acts as an obstacle in my life and how fucking silly it is. I was like, how can I articulate to other people?

how silly this is. And it wasn't coming from a place of self-loathing. It wasn't coming from a place of judgment. It was coming from a place of crystal clarity, of seeing it for really what it is and seeing how obnoxious and how utterly unnecessary it was. And so there's plenty of more things that happened, but maybe I'll, actually one more thing before I toss it back over to you, sorry.

I also noticed, and I pulled this out of the experience, closed-eye visuals when you're on a heavy dose of psychedelics and you close your eyes and you see, geometric patterns, morphing and melting into one another, it became very clear to me. And it's hard to explain just the clarity of realization and revelation that you get on these substances. But it became very clear to me that those closed eyes visuals were symbols or imagery that were true about the whole world, that instead of viewing the world as a set of discrete events

and individuals and things, that all the whole thing is, all the cosmos is, is this soup of atoms constantly morphing and melting and we only experience it as discrete individuals because of our ego and our evolutionary history and how our nervous systems were constructed through evolution but it was very clear to me that this closed eye visual morphing and melting was indicative of how reality at its fundamental levels are and what that means is that in permanence is absolutely the modest operandi of the entire cosmos and that everything is deeply in intellectually woven together and deeply interconnected and interdependent. There is no separation whatsoever from anything in the cosmos.

And that was something you understand intellectually, but to feel it viscerally is quite another experience. And there's a few words that can really get that experience to pin down other than some sort of spiritual or religious, mystical experience. So, yeah, I'll throw it back over to you and you can take that wherever you want. Oh, my, I want to take that everywhere. There's so many places that my mind is going right now. I guess I'll just start with, I'm really glad that you brought up this idea of the pattern,

kind of, that's what me and some of my friends who used to go and do mushrooms together in the park would call it. Because, yeah, when you close your eyes and you see those patterns, we would all see similar patterns. And then if we opened our eyes as well, you can kind of see those patterns faintly, mapped on to like trees or whatever, it's just faint. It's hard to describe. But we called it the pattern. And we kind of came to the same conclusion that, yes, like this was the pattern of the universe. This was the pattern of the cosmos. And that basically everything in life is just this universal energy that's manifesting in these different patterns, right? Like, yeah, these atoms of the trees and the plants and the animals and us, um, manifests.

in certain patterns, and that, you know, at the core of all of that, at the core of all of our beings is the cosmos, is the universal energy that animates us all, because really, like, what are we, if not this universal energy that's just animating these, like, sacks of skin and bones and whatever, you know what I mean? So, yeah, I'm really glad you brought that up. And, yeah, thank you for sharing your experience. I think, you know, it sounds really unique. And for me, so I also do about like, usually I'll do 3.5 or like maybe four grams, maybe three. And I'm a bit smaller. But I think in the book, he talks about the fact that SSRIs might, I guess, limit the effects of psychedelics a little bit. So I don't know if that's kind of happening because I don't tend to have, you know, a ton of really out there hallucinations. I'll have hallucinations. I'll have hallucinations.

where it's um like it's the world that I'm living in but different and I'll see patterns and I'll see different things I mean one thing I will say is that um I don't tend to look in the mirror at myself too much until I'm past the first like uncomfortable stage so the so the fact that you did look in the mirror I was like oh damn that's brave and no like no wonder you saw yourself turning into you know a demon and whatever um because I always find it really um I don't know, confronting to look in the mirror when I'm on these things and kind of look into my eyes and kind of confront the being that I am, right? And sometimes it's beautiful and sometimes it's scary. And sometimes I, you know, I do see my face kind of, you know, maybe I'll see myself like

looking really old or looking really, you know, just my face changing in ways that feel uncomfortable to me because you're not used to seeing yourself that way, right? So anyway, I thought that was kind of brave. But usually when I do it, I haven't really, I don't think I've done it at night either. So I'm usually in a place where it's pretty sunny and things like that. So I haven't really experienced the, you know, looking at spiders or kind of cockroaches or things everywhere. And again, you know, bringing it back to the book, he talks about how a lot of people who are near the end of their life, like there's therapies for, like, for people who are kind of nearing the end of their life or maybe they're dying of cancer or things

like that. And that the psychedelic experience can make them actually lose their fear of death. And part of that is, you know, you're having this experience and, you know, like you said, you're, you're confronting these really horrifying, scary things that might be happening to you, kind of bubbling up from whatever's inside you. And a lot of people would maybe experience themselves dying or something that was really horrifying. But he would just tell us. them. I mean, those people would have a therapist in the room to kind of guide them and maybe if they're having a horrible experience, then they could be nudged in a different direction. But, you know, they would be told, you know, well-embraced death, you know, just surrender to whatever

the scary thing is, surrender to whatever it is that's happening to you. And in doing so, right, you undermine that fear and you turn it into love and you end up enjoying the experience no matter what it is. And then you come out of that. And, you know, for a lot of people after that, death didn't seem so scary. Or a lot of things didn't seem so scary, right? So I'm really glad that you were able to, you know, I guess, direct your experience that way. Another thing I was thinking is actually, actually, the other day I was like, damn, we should have done the like microdosing thing to record this episode. Right. I was thinking that too, actually. Yeah, it was like that would have like really got the creative juices flowing and maybe like loosened up our language. I feel like

you're really good at talking. You have a way with words, Brett. Honestly, you do. And I feel like you have such a way of talking about this stuff that sometimes I feel like I'm just stumbling through it. But yeah, I thought that was really, really interesting. So for me, I guess when I do psychedelics, I don't think I, I don't think I have the experience where it's really, you know, firmly broken up into stages. And there's like the, there is the stage of like the coming up and the nausea maybe and like where it is a bit more uncomfortable. But I think for me, the difficult stage and the revelation stage are really kind of mixed together a lot more.

Like I'll have uncomfortable stages throughout and I'll have revelations throughout as well. It just kind of made me think of, I guess some of my favorite experiences are when I was doing San Pedro and when I was doing mushrooms in Jasper. If people don't know where Jasper is, it's like Banff. Park. It's in Alberta. It's a beautiful, beautiful national park in the mountains. And I would go out and do mushrooms there all the time. And I mean, I'm a really introspective person anyway. So for me, when I'm on psychedelics, it's like the introspection is really like what I, it's really my jam. So I would just look out, you know, over the mountain and the trees. And, you know, they would just light up and they would look like they were moving and everything was alive and the mountain was alive and everything like that. And yeah, I really just. I would feel like I was just in the presence of this, like, greatness, right? And I would have really difficult moments in the sense that, yeah, I mean, I've been depressed a lot during my life. I had an eating disorder for a really long time. I was suicidal for a while. So, like, all of that

stuff kind of comes up all the time throughout the trips that I have. But then there's always kind of revelations mixed in with that, too. So, and I completely understand the, the idea of just weeping, like, I would sit up there and weep because I was like, this is so beautiful. And I felt so, you know, connected to the universe and all that there is. And so it was weeping of joy. I think we talked about this last time, like weeping of joy, but also of sadness, because then there's that opposite all the time, right? Like, the system that we've created is so antithetical to this pure love that you're feeling and this pure connection and this, like, pure. your reality of the cosmos or the pattern or things like that. And so, yeah, I would, I kind of

like move a bit back and forth, like kind of throughout my experiences. I completely relate also to this idea of just seeing your own ego and finding it hilarious. But yeah, I mean, I guess I'm just, I'm taken on a complete roller coaster emotion, you know, so I'll, I'll see my ego and I'll see that it's so absurd. and I'll see that I don't need it. But sometimes I'll feel kind of sadness in the fact that so much of my life, I've kind of like held myself underwater. Like I've held myself in that egoic state and I've held myself in that depressed state and

I've held myself in just non-powerful states, I guess. And so sometimes it's like you see this beauty and this grace and you feel that connection with the universe. And for me, sometimes I felt like, oh, I'm not worthy of this. You know what I mean? But then, you know, obviously, like that would be a difficult part. And then kind of the revelation would be like, well, of course I'm, of course I'm worthy because like if I'm not good enough, then that means that the air and the plants and everything

else is are not good enough either because we are all one. Like we're all connected, right? Anyway, I just went off on like a million tangents. I love you. Yeah. This whole conversation, there is a billion different roads we could take. Some things you said that just sparked some thoughts in mind about my trip and just more generally. In my trip, especially when the weeping happened, you're absolutely right. It wasn't

just a negative feeling. It's like compassion and wanting to end people suffering and loving people so deeply, even people that I've never met or known. And something that kept coming up in that stage. And, you know, perhaps I am sort of being arbitrary and going back and breaking it down into two stages. I do want to just make very clear that these are hyper, sort of individuated experiences. These chemicals don't produce the same exact effect in every person. It takes the raw material of your already existing psychology and expands it and explodes it and makes you make you see it from a million different angles. So it's incredibly possible and in fact very likely that two people taking the exact same amount of the exact same chemical can have two very different

experiences, especially if they do it alone and not together, which can sometimes intertwine the two experiences. But towards the end, after the, the weeping and the just loving other fucking people so goddamn much and wanting so deeply to end their suffering, the line kept coming. up in my head do more do more like um you know it was it was a challenge to myself is like yeah you know you organize you educate but there's still so many more people that you can help so much more that you can do in your own sphere in my own family i have several nieces and nephews and you know the day after this and sort of the afterglow i'm taking them fishing and um having talks with them and just like loving them and showing how much i love them and stuff like that and so you know

you can really take this stuff and do it in your own sphere of influence you don't have to be you know some saint and you know do anything spectacular or get recognition for it's just like do more in your everyday life to be a better person to help other people as much as possible and to not give a fuck about you and your desires and what you want out of life and it's constantly like it's just so sad that so many of us we spend so much of the day thinking about ourselves and thinking about how other people see us and that's just such a shitty myopic way to live life and so there's compassion for myself and others and that we know we sort of live that sort of half life and that's sad yeah as for the intense visions that i had you know doing it in the daytime out in nature is

certainly one experience and i specifically did it at evening as the sun was setting um in a in a very dark room lit only by candlelight specifically because i wanted to sort of put myself in that experience deeply and and have that darkness and it does sort of exacerbate the visions and the hallucinations that you have. I did do this thing we talked about last time. I talked about meditation practice that I engage in, and part of it is this looking back, right? This pointing back at yourself.

Some people call it looking for your head. Other people call it turning attention back on itself, turning consciousness back on itself. In Buddhism, it's called, you know, observing the observer, being aware of the awareness. It's sort of this metacognitive position where traditionally, let's say you're focusing on your breath, right? So there's a you up in your head behind your eyes,

focusing on the ups and downs of your breath. And when you have thoughts, you recognize them and you go back to your breath. You know, that's sort of a lower stage of development. You have to do it. You get good at concentration. And then at higher, more experience levels, you begin to turn that same attention that you were putting towards your breath or towards sounds or towards sensations in the body,

turning that attention back on attention itself. You know, what does that feel like? And that's something I've experimented with meditation, But in this very intense trip, I was doing that with sort of fascinating results of I would get these split seconds of being conscious without a center, without a self there. And I couldn't hold on to those. They were fleeting. And again, the ego was not dissolved, but certainly weakened enough for me to see through it. And that was in and of itself a lesson.

And then the last thing I want to say and maybe get your thoughts on this. And I certainly don't want to, anything I'm about to say, as Mexie alluded to, were. We're grasping for language that's not always there. And so I do not want any of this to come across as reifying gender categories. But I have this push in every psychedelic experience that I have towards the feminine, right? Away from machismo, away from classically masculine or toxic masculine traits, many of which exist in myself. But toward the feminine, toward women in my life, towards women music. So my acid trip I did last time I talked about

I listened to Nina Simone and I was thinking about my friend Zoe and having her on to have that conversation and this time I'm listening to Big Thief, a really great band with the female. Oh, I love Big Thief. Awesome. That was my soundtrack to my trip this time.

And I was writing notes because I knew my episode with Mexie was coming up so I was thinking about you. And then my niece and my daughter, both who are entering their adolescent years and my wife, you know, feminine energies in myself and out. where in the world is something that I'm constantly, when I do any psychedelic, constantly pushing

towards. And in my last acid trip, I know I was going to get a hand tattoo coming up. And I had this design in my head for a lotus flower, but with traditionally maybe masculine colors of like, you know, black and gray and dark red or something. But in my last trip, because I had this urge to express perhaps the classical femininity within myself is like I'm doing this lotus in a more feminine way I'm going to use and again I hate this language because it tends to reify gender categories and I'm not trying to do that so please bear with me if this is sort of crude talking but I'm trying to express something you know I went with like pinks and magentas and purples and I wanted to cultivate that side of myself and inside the trip and outside of it so I just think it's

interesting and worth noting and perhaps maybe it's just unique to me personally, but I doubt it, of this urge and this push towards the feminine in general and how that is really a recurring theme, no matter the sort of psychedelic that I take. And so I don't really know what to make of that other than it's just constant and it recurs every single time and nothing is more repulsive to me. And perhaps these are manifestations of ego, nothing is more repulsive to me than machismo, then arrogance, then aggressiveness. You know, I can't, I can't stomach those things in myself or and others when I'm on these trips and when I come out of them. Absolutely. Yeah. So, yeah, I'm so glad that you brought that up. That's super interesting.

And I agree. It's really, I find it really difficult to talk about a lot of these things in ways that don't, you know, reify gendered categories or things like that. So I try, I mean, I try to talk about these things more in terms of like patriarchy or toxic masculinity. Because I think people understand what we're talking about when we say those words. And to me, ego, machismo, aggressiveness, that kind of thing. I mean, those are all hallmarks of the ego, right? To me, the ego is patriarchal. To me, the ego is, it's selfish, it's aggressive, right? It's fearful. The ego always wants to protect itself. And if it feels threatened in any way, it needs to destroy the other. And I think that ego is really behind.

othering. And I really, I've talked about this many times that I think othering is probably behind, I mean, I think it's behind a lot of our oppressive systems. And you don't other other people unless you're trapped in your ego. And once you other other people, right, if you're othering other people, then that is what can lead to violence, right? To patriarchal violence, to racist violence to oppression to exploitation. And so for me, I mean, I think it's probably, I mean, I think it makes perfect sense that if you're on these kinds of trips and or even if you're like meditating or whatever and you're kind of reaching these states, that the ego is diminished, then of course all things like toxicly masculine are going to seem completely repulsive to

you, right? And I think that a lot of this stuff gets gendered in our system. society anyway, right? Like I've talked about like Orientalism and how that, you know, it was kind of like white European men really would other, you know, other societies like, you know, Asian societies, indigenous societies, things like that. And they would think of themselves, the rational white, scientific Europeans in that sense. And they would, they would look at other societies and think, oh, you know, they're feminine, they're spiritual, they're exotic. They are, you know, there's just this real dichotomy between, I guess, science and this beyond, like the spiritual and thinking about this kind of stuff. And so I think that really came through in the book as well where Michael Pollan was talking a lot about, I guess, the limits of science, because science and rationality and all of that, like you can't actually really study the consciousness, right? Like, we don't have the tools to. to actually, I mean, it's getting better.

There are, I mean, he talks about brain science and things like that, but it is getting better. But I think that a lot of this is are already gendered, right? Like, it's, people are made to feel like they are emotional, you know, wussy, ridiculous, hysterical. I mean, I think that people who believe in, like, spirituality are feminized in a way, right? because it's the opposite of being, you know, white rational man who, you know, believes in materiality and that's it. And so, yeah, anyway, I just, yeah, I see a lot of that kind of like gendered, the gender nature of a lot of this stuff. And it makes perfect sense to me that you would kind of have that experience. Yeah. And you're discussing that and articulating it was

really helpful. I completely agree with your breakdown of it. And it does seem to be getting at the deeper thing that I was trying to express myself. And I think that makes 100% sense and coheres really well with my experience and what I was trying to express. And you're 100% right about science as well. And we've talked about it on previous episodes. But science is premised on the possibility, on the premise of being able to take a third person, objective, empirical stance towards an object of investigation. And so when you start out with an intent to experience or explore or scientifically examine consciousness, which is to say human subjectivity, the third person empirical objective position becomes, if not impossible, then deeply deteriorated.

And therefore, you can't really do science in the traditional way when you're trying to examine human subjectivity. In our episode about psychoanalysis, we talked about this exact thing where Freud thought he was doing science and in some ways he was employing the scientific method but because his objective study was the subconscious and human subjectivity it could never ever really be science in the way that we think of it now a hard science third person objective empirical science and so that's that's a challenge to science i think to try to find unique ways to grow and evolve that can at least to some extent attempt to encompass those parts of human experience

that are otherwise pushed outside the realms of quote-unquote proper scientific investigation. Or at least be able to be like self-reflexive and admit that, you know, we don't actually have the tools to determine if there is a universal consciousness, right? It's like we don't have the methods or the scientific, you know, processes to actually determine such a thing, right? And I love that, you know, he talks in the book about the scientists because he goes, into the history of, you know, the use of psychedelics in medicine and in therapy and things like that. And he's talking about the difference between kind of these more romantic

scientists, I guess, who view all of this stuff as completely plausible and useful and important. And then kind of like the hard scientists who say, you know, no, this is unscientific. Just kind of posit this strict dichotomy. And, you know, in the first group, group, I guess. Like, if you accept that we don't have the tools and that there's a lot more that is out there than we can actually determine scientifically, then when you think about nature, you know, nature is this, like, nature is either a tangled web of subjects acting upon one another in co-creation or co-evolution, or in like the strict scientific

sense, it's a collection of objects that we can separate into discrete parts and that we can study dispassionately at a distance, right? So those two worldviews are incredibly different. And I think that because I personally think that, you know, the first has been rather feminized. Like, it's not respected, right? It's like science is what's respected. And so if you try to put out these more, you know, connected ideas about the universe and, you know, maybe spirituality or the interconnectedness of all beings, It's not really respected as much as like the hard sciences, but, you know, I work with a lot of, I guess, indigenous nations and elders, and they will say that the reason that we have such a sick society right now, like, you know, capital is the result of this deeply disconnected worldview and this this worldview that thinks that we can be separate and that we can be objective and that other beings don't have subjectivity, that only we have subjectivity. Only we have consciousness and only we have the knowledge and the tools to know the truth about nature or whatever, right?

Because if nature is separate from us and we can look at it from a distance, then, yeah, it's outside of us. And that leads to it being able to be commodified. And then, like, if it can be commodified, if I can just pay for, I don't know, whatever, I can pay to dig up a bunch of reasons. resources or I can turn those resources into a commodity and then sell it. Like, Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about this in Braiding Sweetgrass that the money relation makes it so that we don't have reciprocity. Like, we don't see the interconnection of us and everything else, right? Because if I pay for something, then that's the end of the transaction.

We don't have, like, there's no relationship built. There's no responsibility that I have to the person that sold it to me or whatever. but otherwise you would have like reciprocity and connection so yeah and I think coming from a quote unquote western tradition where exactly what you're saying is lauded right science is lauded and other spiritual or ways of experiencing the world are feminized or downplayed or denigrated I can see sort of not maybe not reasons I don't know if they're causes or effects but like you know the the founder of modern philosophy Renee Descartes he he he has he had this idea that animals were automaton, that they were basically on the inside like clockwork,

and therefore only humans had conscious subjectivity, and animals, therefore, didn't really factor into any ethical or moral calculation precisely because they had no internal life. The lights on the inside were shut off, which is a very chauvinist way. And if you think about the role that Descartes played in the foundations of Western philosophy and science, you know, you can really trace back the origins, at least to some extent, to that view of the world and then also monotheism that came out of you know the catholic church in the west specifically this idea that everything sacred is up there we were created you know from a from a creature above and beyond the natural realm and we were put here to have dominion over the earth you know

you have puritanism protestantism you know science and philosophy all of these things are pushing in that same exact direction of denigrating those more indigenous ways of experiencing and being in the world. And we see what the logic of that is. You know, that's existed for a few hundred years. And look where we're at as a species. Look where our civilization is. It's on the brink of utter collapse and, you know, extinction level threats from climate change and pandemics and brutal inequality and unending, grinding violence. This is the logical outcome of so much of the quote unquote Western project. And capitalism can be seen as a cause, but it can also be seen as an effect of a deeper cause. And I think that's what we're kind of getting at. And perhaps it can be

both of those things at once, you know? Yeah, no, I fully, fully agree. And yeah, if you think about, I guess, ego and the Western worldview, you know, Michael Pollan brings up that, and you mentioned that obviously, you know, indigenous cultures around the world have been using psychedelics or psilocybin for, you know, at least 7,000 years. But, you know, in Mexico, when the Spanish came and colonized, they obviously suppress mushrooms, right? Because, you know, when you have these kind of mystical experiences, he says, there's so much authority that comes out of having a primal mystical experience that it can be really threatening to establish hierarchies, right? And if you think about, I just feel like the Western worldview is in itself so hyper egotistical, right? because it's all about fear and, you know, needing power and being fearful of anything that could

undermine that power and suppressing the shit out of it. And, you know, yeah, machismo, arrogance, othering. And so, yeah, it's really unsurprising that this kind of society that we're living in that is still, right, like these things, psychedelics are still like schedule one, you know, in a lot of places. So we're still so fearful of that. And it, I mean, it makes sense because, I mean, yeah, if you have these kind of experiences and you realize that, you know, realize these deep connections, you feel a strong connection to the universe, you feel like you are the universe, right? You feel powerful. You, you, it makes it abundantly clear that what we're doing is, you know, not only irrelevant, it's, it's, it's absurd and it's, I mean, it's sad. It's like the ego trying to protect itself.

Yeah. And exactly. And the same way that the ego becomes absurd. and myopic and petulant, the entire society, the entire structure of capitalism, the entire idea of wage labor. I mean, we know these things intellectually to be vacuous and harmful and all of this. What these insights allow is for that visceral experience and to see the absurdity of it, to see how just grotesque and unnecessary the entire system is, which really can be understood

on some level as a projection of the ego, dominating others, dominating nature, the underside of machismo and aggression and violence is always insecurity, is always fear, you know, and you've got to repress that side of things and dominate and attack. And it's just the whole system, the entire society that Western capitalism has built is just a house of cards, and it is not anywhere close to the best ways to live life or the most wise ways to build a human civilization. It is just grotesque on every single level. And having these experiences helps you viscerally as opposed to simply intellectually understand that reality. I do want to talk about ego because we've referenced it a lot.

And I want to read a little bit from the book where Michael Pollan, the author is sort of breaking down, talk about the ego and bringing in science and whatnot. And it's only, let's see here, a page and a half. So I'll read it and then I'll toss it back over to you and you can give me your thoughts on that. and we can maybe dive a little deeper into the specific topic of ego and the self that we've been touching on. Sounds good. Michael Pollan writes, Of all the phenomenological effects that people on psychedelics report, the disillusion

of the ego seems to me by far the most important and the most therapeutic. I found a little consensus on terminology among the researchers I interviewed, but when I unpack their metaphors and vocabularies, whether spiritual, humanistic, psychoanalytic, or neurological, it is finally the loss of ego, or what Jung called psychic death, they're suggesting is the key psychological driver of the experience. It is this that gives us the mystical experience, the death rehearsal process, the overview effect, the notion of a mental reboot, the making of new meanings, and the experience of awe. Consider the case of the mystical experience. The sense of transcendence, sacredness, unitive consciousness, infinitude, and blissfulness

people report, can all be explained as what it can feel like to a mind when its sense of being or having a separate self is suddenly no more. Is it any wonder we would feel one with the universe when the boundaries between self and world that the ego patrols suddenly fall away? Because we are meaning-making creatures, our minds strive to come up with new stories to explain what is happening to them during the experience. Some of these stories are bound to be supernatural or quote-unquote spiritual, if only because the phenomena are so extraordinary

they can't be easily explained in terms of our usual conceptual categories. The predictive brain is getting so many error signals that it is forced to develop extravagant new interpretations of an experience that transcends its capacity for understanding. Whether the most magnificent

of these stories represent a regression to magical thinking, as Freud believed, or access to trans-personal realms such as the mind at large as Aldous Huxley believed, is itself a matter of interpretation. who can say for certain. Yet it seems to me very likely that losing or shrinking the self would make anyone feel more spiritual,

however you choose to define that word, and that this is apt to make one feel better. The usual antonym for the word spiritual is material. That at least is what I believed when I began this inquiry, that the whole issue with spirituality turned on a question of metaphysics. Now I'm inclined to think a much better and certainly more useful antonym for spiritual might be egotistical. self and spirit define the opposite ends of a spectrum, but that spectrum needn't reach clear to the heavens to have meaning for us. It can stay right here on earth. When the ego dissolves, so does a bounded conception, not only of our self, but of our self-interest. What emerges in its place is invariably a broader, more open-hearted and altruistic, that is, more spiritual, idea of what actually matters in life, one in which a new sense of connection or love, however defined, seems to figure prominently. psychedelic journey may not give you what you want, as more than one guide memorably warned me, but it will give you what you need. I guess that's been true for me. It might have been nothing like

the one I signed up for, but I can see now that the journey has been a spiritual education after all. And that's him sort of coming full circle with his initial materialist scientific skepticism of these experiences to at the end of the book having had these experiences and sort of trying to understand and interpret them. What stands out for you there? Anything there that you want to riff on? Yeah, I mean, I feel like I could take this or we could take this in one of two ways, either kind of talking more about like the spiritual and that feeling of, you know, connectedness to the universe, which I think is where I will take it. The other is, of course, looking more at like the ego and depression and why, you know,

why people feel depressed when they get so trapped in their ego. But yeah, I mean, I absolutely love that passage. And for people who haven't really experienced it, you know, words definitely fail. And, you know, words don't teach either, right? Experience teaches. I think it's really, really interesting that so many of the people that have had these psychedelic experiences, they'll come away with really, really banal takeaways. Like, oh, love is the core of everything or, like, love is all, right?

Just these, like, really mundane things, right? Platitudes almost, right? Plotitudes, yeah. So he's like, you know, psychedelics make us ecstatic evangelists of the obvious, right? They're called like, duh moments, right? But, you know, love is all, right? See, a lot of people don't know what universal love feels like, right? Like, and it's so hard to talk about. I mean, I've heard some people talk about it. This is more kind of like, I guess people who talk about manifestation, which I, you know, I have my critiques of. But this idea of like, vibrant. vibration and alignment, right? This idea that there is a universal consciousness out there that we can discover, right? He says, if you go far enough out into consciousness, you will encounter the sacred, you will encounter the mystical. And this seems to be true for believers and non-believers alike, right?

So it's out there, it's waiting to be discovered. And many people hypothesize that that is actually what is behind all of the religious experiences that people have had in the world is this kind of connection to the universe and to our source, right? So I kind of talked a bit about what are we, if not universal energy that's kind of animating this like meat sack, right? Because, you know, all of the cells of our body coming together, like we can understand all of that, but it's still a mystery why it is that like each of us are animated with our breath and with our own thoughts and things like that, right? That's that's always going to be, well, maybe not always, but it's so far still a mystery, right?

And so I think when you meditate or when you're on psychedelics, yeah, all of that kind of fades away. And you kind of realize that like at the core of your being, I mean, you talked about trying to find yourself, right? Like trying to have that kind of metacognitive, you know, where is the self and not being able to find it, right? There's nothing there. So when you strip that a way, you kind of realize that, like, at your source is just universal energy, right? And so, you know, Carl Sagan talks about this, like the cosmos is within us. We are a way for the universe to know itself. Albert Einstein. Yep. We are the universe experiencing itself. I love the roomy quote, actually. I think it's like, stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.

But, you know, of course, all of these revelations, they sound really banal if people haven't actually experienced it, right? So, like, this idea of love is all or love is at the center of all, right? It's really difficult for me to talk with a lot of people, because I talk a lot about this kind of stuff, like empathy and compassion and loving kindness on the left. And, you know, you'll get a lot of people who pipe up with things that are so really, like, off the mark that it's clear to be that we're not really having the same conversation because, like, our idea of love is different, right? Because they'll say things like, oh, so you love Richard Spencer? Or like, oh, should we just love our oppressors into submission or, you know, or like things like that, right?

And I'm like, okay, we're not, we're not having the same conversation because like, you know, I don't love the other because the other deserves it or because I think I'll get something in return or I'm like, expect, you know what I mean? Like, none of those reasons are why I love. Like, I love universally because I am love. And like, that, is the core of my being. And like, you can dislike someone or feel disgust at what they're doing, but still have universal love for them because, like, at your core, you are the universe and you are love and, like, so are they. But, like, if you don't really have any experience feeling what universal loves feels like, like at the core of your being, then, you know, we're just going

to be speaking past one another. Right. So it's like, we can talk about this, but it's like people need to have people need to have the experience right um and i think that it's important maybe to note that like a set and setting obviously really really matter and um the mindset that you bring to it really matters as well um so it's not to say that like you know if a nazi like there are Nazis who have done psychedelics and not really come out with this idea of like universal love or things like that you know what i mean um so it's like you do kind of have to bring that energy i don't think it's necessarily like, oh, you'll take psilocybin and then you'll come out of it, like, a loving, compassionate, spiritual being who, like, feels connected to the universe.

So, yeah, I mean, you do have to kind of, like, bring some of this to the experience to really fully realize it or kind of understand and interpret, I guess, what you're feeling. But, yeah, I mean, I do think that the experience of this stuff is really, really important. you know, a lot of the researchers were trying to take this out of just medicine or psychology or whatever and kind of apply it more widely to, you know, help society, help heal society at large. Because, yeah, I mean, I think that if people can have these experiences where they become like fully awake to the love that's inside them, then, I mean, like we talked about, the authority of capital, the authority of oppressive systems, you know, they lose sway.

and a lot of the machismo and the aggression and that kind of thing becomes absolutely repulsive and actually kind of hilarious because you realize that it's just part of this, this sad little ego. Exactly. It's pathetic, really. But what you said about, you know, Nazis doing acid or whatever, you know, there's an analogy. They're also in meditation. There have been many instances in meditation where, you know, there are people that by all measures have reached significant heights in the meditative journey that become gurus and teachers, but because they are so untethered for one reason or another from the ethical foundations of the meditative practice from maybe the experiences of universal love, they become very predatory. You know, you can have, you know, these gurus that

have widespread sexual assault or like Osho, the guru who, I've read many of Osho's book as a young man and Osho had genuine deep insight into these exact matters. But he, he, was also an absolute cretan and would take advantage of his authority and own 19 rolls royces and weird shit like that and so you know whether you're engaging in psychedelics or you're engaging in meditation i think it is really important to reiterate that you that you have to bring to it um some level of ethical understanding and intention that you know i'm engaging in this practice or in these substances not just to you know hit the gong of my mind and have it vibrate for a while and then like, oh, that was cool. I saw weird shit.

But to have a profound, introspective, intentional experience where you're trying to push beyond the normal boundaries of your egocentric understanding of the world and experience of that world. And so, you know, you really, really can't help, you can't overstate how important it is to have that ethical orientation when you go into a lot of these things because in and of themselves,

they are not necessarily, in every instance, compassion and love generating things, you know, detached from that more ethical foundation. And then, you know, the set and setting is so very important, too. We really want to be responsible with how we use them personally and how we talk about them to our, to our listeners, because it really is important. I talked about my terrible mushroom trip on our last episode together with Mexie, where I talked about, you know, being 15, taking way too much mushrooms, having a terrible sort of experience, and that was because what was I doing?

I was 15 running around in a parking lot to a packed movie theater with a friend who was driving his mom's van and the setting nor the set, my mindset, neither of those two things were conducive to having a good time. They were both almost made, ready made to create a terrible experience. So if you do engage with these things, taking these shit seriously, responsibly, having respect for what you're doing, I talked about lighting candles and bringing Buddhist statues down and doing a meditation before I went into it, thinking deeply and consciously about what my mind. intentions were as I went into this experience, that's incredibly important. And if you do it right, you can have not only the wonderful revelations of the high itself, but ones that last. And, you know, they talk about a lot of the specialists and medical scientists who are doing this work in academia. They talk about integration where you have this experience and then after the experience, you need, you know, you don't run back and do it again. You need plenty of time

to process what happened to you. Think through its implications. and then integrate its lessons into your life. And then you can go back to the substance and have an experience. When you don't do that, you know, you really can be playing with fire. And there are plenty of people, some of which perhaps some of our listeners know in person, and I've known these people in my life, who got really into psychedelics, who would do acid and mushrooms and, you know, even like stuff like ketamine, way too much, never integrated the lessons into their lives,

never had an introspective or respectful way of going about it. It really was just to get fun. up and those people eventually sort of become untethered from reality they lose the interesting parts of their personality they become a a doler more confined version of who they once were and so there are real dangers with treating these substances and these chemicals and without the respect and the reverence that they really do and so anybody who's thinking about doing this whether you've done it or not in the past take seriously this idea of respecting and being responsible with how go about engaging with these substances and talking about, you know, integrating these lessons into

my life, you know, there's no hangover when I come off a psilocybe, and there's only what is known as an afterglow. A very good mood. I come up and I'm laughing with my wife. I'm cracking her up, you know, after the trip is done, we're having a great time, just laughing our asses off. I'm in a wonderful mood in every sense of the word. And then the next day when I had my daughter and my niece together, my niece had been talking to me recently about she's 13, right? So she's entering this crazy time in her life. And she was telling me a few days ago how she thinks she might have a brain tumor because she feels just normal feelings of, you know, hormonal transitions in adolescence, but because she's so anxious and sort of is, is so nervous about

this period of her life and her responsibilities, it manifests as anybody that struggle with anxiety knows well, these anxious symptoms can manifest into thinking that you have physical ailments. I've convinced myself many times in my life with anxiety being the underlying cause that I've had, you know, AIDS, that I've had cancer, that I've had ALS, that I've had every terrible thing you can imagine on WebMD, that I've had those things. And, you know, in retrospect, I see that they were all simply manifestations of anxiety. I went to the ER once thinking I was having a heart attack at like age 20 and it was nothing but a panic attack or it was nothing but low level generalized anxiety giving me this feeling in my heart in my in my left arm that it was stiff or

something and then I catastrophized that basic feeling into having a heart attack or I must have heart cancer or something like this so I see this precious beautiful funny hilarious little girl who has so much ahead of her crippled by anxiety to the point where she's asking me if she has a brain tumor and it breaks my heart and so you know in the afterglow of this experience trying to integrate and take what I've learned I sat down in front of my wife and my daughter and really talked to my niece and just like I started tearing like tears flowing down my eyes like telling her that she's going to be okay giving her like you know I've been through what you're what you're going through the world is on your shoulders um you know and had this thing and by

the end of it me my daughter my wife all of us just soaking in tears um bawling and I walked away from that experience though having connected with my niece in a much deeper way and hopefully having effectively alleviated some of that anxiety that's crushing this beautiful little girl you know and so if if you're able to integrate these lessons into your life carry them into your personal life they can be extremely rewarding and foster deep connection between you and your loved ones that in the rush of everyday life sometimes gets overlooked yeah absolutely that's just a beautiful story I'm glad you had those moments together um but yeah i mean i think it's so important to have the

integration it's so important to really set your intentions before you go into this and really treat it like a ceremony and treat it like i'm going into this to learn from a plant teacher or a plant healer right like this is going to be a healing thing um because you know and there was a whole section in the book as well about how you know all these like silicon valley yahus are out there like taking all these whatever psychedelics are microdosing so that they can get really creative and, you know, come up with a new app and whatever. And, you know, like he kind of credits a lot of the like innovation happening in Silicon Valley to psychedelics. And so as well, like if you don't really have, I mean, you can experience universal love and things like that. But I think also

if you don't really have the understanding of, you know, capitalism and how that works and oppression, and things like that, then it can easily lead you into places where, yeah, I mean, you're using that creativity or you're using these experiences to further capital, which is oppressive, but a lot of people don't realize that it is, right? So I don't think these things are necessarily, you know, a lot of people can have different experiences on them and maybe not come away with many good lessons that they're integrating. But I do think there is like an enormous potential in them and then just kind of speaking on the the anxiety idea I did want to talk about you know he goes into the whole idea of the default mode of our brains so there's actually like a default mode

network in our brains and our default mode is basically what happens in our brains when we're at rest or it's like most of the time most of the time our minds when we're in our egoic state are wandering, like we're in thought, we're worrying, we're anticipating about the future and worrying about that, we're going over some past event over and over and over and like agonizing about it. We're self-reflecting. Like in Buddhist philosophy, it would be called the monkey mind. And this is what they say is where the area of our mind where like the ego rests, where our ego is most present and where we have that sense of I and the sense of self. And I know, I mean, when I'm in that mode for too long, you know, where your mind is just flooded with thoughts and all the time and

a lot of them are self-critical or anxiety-inducing. Yeah, I mean, I feel it in my body, right? Like, my chest gets tight. My heart feels like it's pounding and palpitating. I feel like I can't catch my breath. Yeah, I'm having panic attacks. I'm feeling claustrophobic. I'm feeling like the walls of my life and my job and the walls of capitalism and our whole society are just closing in around me. And that happens to me fairly frequently because I'm so overworked and I have chronic illness. So, you know, it's very easy to just drop into that. And then I'll have to like go out for a walk to go sit in nature, potentially have a psychedelic experience, although I found it harder to come by as I've gotten older. But, you know, I'll need to do these things to

feel grounded again, to feel like I'm powerful and connected and I have space to breathe. And I just, I think it's really interesting that he really talked about how, you know, most of our unhappy moments are due to us being in this default mode. And the default mode is a mode also where our minds basically, you know, because we've had so much prior experience being out in the world and whatnot, our minds have come to various conclusions about, you know, certain things. Like, if I do this, this is going to happen. If I do that, this is going to happen. And so the default mode just, it's all about cutting to the chase and just kind of, your mind isn't really open at that point.

Like it's not open to new possibility or it's not really, it becomes a lot more difficult for you to think outside the box because your ego is kind of driving you to maintain or to stay inside the box, right? The ego basically wants us to, you know, focus on just very menial things like survival, eating, reproducing, whatever. It wants to keep the gift of subjectivity for itself, right? Because it's egoic. So that's also why we can't see the subjectivities of like other beings. But yeah. So and this is what they say that, you know, when people are depressed, when they have addiction, it's they're, they're really, really trapped in this kind of default mode network of the

brain. And then psychedelists can can really help you get out of that because it increases the entropy in your brain, it increases the openness in your brain and kind of dissolves this feeling of ego. And I thought that was so incredible because I mean, I feel that all the time. Like I said, like when I experience anxiety, when I experience, you know, depressive thoughts or I get into cycles of really negative self-talk and things like that, which I'm very used to because I had an eating disorder for so long, you know, you feel that. And then it feels so completely different to be in that other state of being, either through meditation or nature or psychedelics, that it does have the capacity to heal, right?

Like I said, I was very depressed, very suicidal, had a very serious eating disorder. And a lot of my experiences on psychedelics really helped me to change the story that I was telling myself about myself and to, and that changes like how you are, right? And I did a lot of CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy as well when I was younger. And I found that useful. And it's kind of the same idea, right, that who we are is basically just a story that we tell ourselves. And if we can change that story, then we can change our behaviors and our emotions and things like that. So I just found all of this super, super interesting that this actually had.

you know, scientific basis in the brain and that it seems to be so predictable that, you know, these kind of things can be such a healing, such healing things for people because if you experience that connection, that awe, if you change the story, like if the story that you tell yourself about yourself moves and you are now just part of this much larger, beautifully connected, miraculous hole that is, you know, at its core is pure love, then, like, you know, you know, feel powerful, you know what I mean? You feel like, I call it coming into my power because you know, when you feel like you're part of the universe, it makes you want to stop acting so small and so petty and so afraid and so envious and so anxious. And so anyway, I just, I really

thought that was interesting. Yeah. And it's a powerful feeling that is the antithesis of maybe feeling powerful on an ego, right? Because the power you feel on an ego was always, as I said earlier undergirded by insecurity and fear and trembling. But the power that comes with these sorts of insights is the power rooted really in connection without that negative underbelly that's driving those feelings, that neuroticism, that pathology. And, you know, neuroscientifically, neurochemically, the default mode network, which you were talking about, I was reading this book and I have an interest in neuroscience. One of my best friends actually doing his postdoctoral work in neuroscience. So I have these conversations with an expert in the field, really,

somebody working to be one. The key brain structure for the default mode network is called the posterior cingulate cortex. And it evolves, it sort of mediates the prefrontal cortex where you do your planning, you know, a lot of your personality, long-term planning and stuff like that with your more emotional centers. And it really is involved in, as he says in this book, the self-referential mental processes. It's the locus of the narrative self. And it's in layman's terms, and I've talked about this on the show plenty of times, the inner dialogue, the constant inner chattering, the fact that you are constantly talking to yourself in your head. Some people say they don't think linguistically, they think in images predominantly, and that's fine. But I think about 80% of people,

including myself, report, thinking primarily in linguistic structure. So you are literally talking to yourself in your head. And if through meditation or some other practice, you can become aware of those patterns of thoughts of how you talk to yourself what you're actually saying being aware that you're thinking and not just swept up in the thoughts themselves you can get some distance from that inner chatter and when we say the ego is an illusion the self is an illusion we're saying that these sort of surperfluous constant self-referentiality in the mind is is an obstacle it doesn't really exist it's it's a it's an evolutionary hangover and when you displace it as the locus of how you experience the world, you do have a much more enjoyable,

calm, centered experience of the world, one that is not driven, as you say, by negative self-talk, by constant inner dialogue, by shorthand references. So when you're driving to work every day, you drive that same path every day, the mind knows it. And you can, we have all had this experience of driving to work and forgetting that we were even driving, like looking back and be like, damn I went a long time without even thinking of where I was and that's a one way to think about it and another way to think about it is like you're no longer looking at the trees you're no longer looking at the clouds the moon your mind's seen it all before and so in place of that childlike wonder that we all used to have as children where everything is new and exciting and profound

and filled with awe the ego the mind and this obviously has evolutionary advantages though it can become overwrought it does shorthands and so you've seen a million trees you don't need to go look and touch the bark of that tree and look closely at the patterns and the leaves been there done that what's next what's next what's next and you're constantly living for the next moment for the next satisfaction of whatever discrete subtle desire bubbled up into your to your consciousness at that time and that is why people feel like they're never quite satisfied that they've never completed the task that the the good things in life the time in life when you'll finally be able to say, okay, I've done it. Everything is good as always in the future. And when you get there,

because you're always talking about, thinking about the future, always talking in your head about what's next, you can't even enjoy that moment. And so we've all had those experiences where you're really looking forward to, let's say, a vacation and you go on vacation and you find yourself kind of unable to fully enjoy the moment. You're thinking about going back to work. You're thinking about what you're going to do when you get back to the hotel, what you're going to do tomorrow and you're constantly sort of leaning into the next moment never ever ever being fully satisfied with the present and living an entire life like that some people can do it and come out more or less okay but for a lot of people including myself it is the cause of so much unnecessary

suffering and anxiety and depression and to be able to take breaks from that whether through meditation or through the use of psychedelics can at least in its early stages point you in the direction of the absurdity of having to live that way and the possibility of living in a new way. And for that alone, these things are worth engaging with, I think. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I mean, for me, especially, you know, again, with my chronic illness and with, like, all the work that I have to do every week, I feel like so many times I'll just get into these modes where, yeah, I'm never really in the present moment. I'm only ever thinking about what is next on my to-do list.

And just having so much anxiety about getting it done. And so my entire life is just, you know, waiting for the next task to be done and rushing to complete it and feeling like I'm always behind. I'm never doing enough. I'm never actually, you know, I'm just always, I'm always like running on this treadmill, but like I can't keep up with it, you know. And then I'll get to the weekend and I'm trying to relax, but I'm in so much pain from all all the stress and all the work and everything that I'm just kind of I'm upset right I'm frustrated

and in Buddhism they kind of call this the second era right so you have the first area of the thing like you're being shot by something that is that is harming you so I'm being shot by like all the work I'm doing and the pain and the chronic illness but then I'm shooting myself with a second arrow by being frustrated by it and by obsessing over it and agonizing over it and um you know just telling myself that I shouldn't have done this and I'm wasting my time and now I can't relax and all this stuff. And in that kind of state, I feel really powerless, right? I feel like I'm trapped by my own life. And I feel claustrophobic with all my obligations and things. And I'm obviously a lot better now. I kind of kind of coming back into

my power through various means and kind of realizing that, you know, none of these deadlines, you know, like this whole thing is constructed. And I don't need to, I don't need to torture myself over this i don't need to live i don't need to live as though um i'm always just in the future and thinking about all the worst you know things that i have to do that i don't want to do you know there's this there's this there's this schopenhauer quote that i always think of that really gets at this and i heard it as a young as a younger man in it it's always sort of stuck with me it's he says a man is never happy but spends his entire life in striving after something that he thinks will make him so he seldom attains his goal and when he does it is only to be disappointed

He is mostly shipwrecked in the end and comes into harbor with mast and rigging gone. And then it is all one, whether he is happy or miserable, for his life was never anything more than a present moment, always vanishing. And now it is over. And, you know, Schopenhauer is really getting at that idea of constantly living for the next moment and never quite being comfortable and content in the present moment. I think we should maybe steer in towards the close, so it's not a overwhelming episode. Is there anything else that you wanted to touch on or gesture towards before we sort of zoom in towards the end here? So I just wanted to briefly talk about this idea that, you know, awe or whatever, these psychedelic experiences could actually be evolutionarily advantageous, right? So in the book, he suggests that it's advantageous for us to have these awe-inspiring experiences, both, I think, to treat depression and addiction and things like that.

but also to reconnect us to nature and to our environment and to get us out of our own egos and self-interested desires and kind of do that reconnect, right? So move from a disconnected society that is sick to a reconnected society where we have more humility and maybe we feel more of a sense of responsibility to live in reciprocity. So I just thought that was really interesting because, I mean, if you think about like the contradictions of capitalism, this idea that we, we are destroying what we need for our own survival. So, you know, it could be actually evolutionarily advantageous for us to have these kind of awe-inspiring psychedelic experiences that make us feel like we are part of our universe and part of our world to make us maybe act differently. And then I also thought kind of on the flip side because he was talking about like, well, you know, what about the mushrooms themselves? why would it be evolutionarily advantageous for them to create this compound or whatever that

when eaten by many different animals, you know, produces these psychedelic experiences? And I thought it was really interesting that he was talking, he went mushroom hunting with this myceliologist or mycelogist who said that it's because the mushrooms want us to care for the environment. And so they speak to us in certain ways. it's advantageous for them as well for us to actually care about the forest and the environment. And since there, you know, he talks about how, you know, the mushroom, the mycelial networks are really what's kind of the consciousness of forests, right? Because they run and they connect all these

different disparate parts of forests and things like that. So it could actually be advantageous for them to produce this and produce these, these experiences in different animals. And I thought it was really cool, but different animals also are really into having, like, psilocybin experiences for different reasons. So, yeah, that was kind of the last bit of really interesting stuff I wanted to throw out. Yeah, he said, I think it was indigenous communities. I don't remember which one, but he said there's evidence that they would give their hunting dogs low doses of psilocybin mushrooms. And because at those low doses, like I was talking earlier, you have an aesthetic experience where sound, smells, and sights become just more beautiful and more enjoyable and sort of honed in

even more, they give them to hunting dogs and that would increase their ability to smell and would increase the success of the hunt. So I don't really know if that's completely scientifically proven or not, but it's an interesting sort of idea that gets at what you're getting at. And then, yeah, I think that guy's name was Paul Stamance. And, you know, he's really interesting. He's sort of a rogue scientist in his own way, has lots of wonderful things to contribute. Some things even Michael Pollan talks about.

he might be he might go a little overboard and it might veer into the poetic and away from the scientific at times but it's just really interesting because his idea which mexy was talking about is like you know underneath the the surface when you see a mushroom in like the forest you're seeing a a minor little exterior bump of what is underground can be up to two and a half miles of a single organism connecting all the different plants in that area and so he talks about it and this could be poetic right talks about it as a a sort of neural network of a forest and there's this reciprocosity between the the mushroom and its ability to help trees and plants and then the nutrients that trees and plants give in return

to the mushroom and so it's just interesting to highly speculative sort of woo-woo shit but to think about the possibility of ecosystems having some sort of generative consciousness like that individual plant or that tree might not be conscious but as a whole consciousness or some version of it might sort of emerge out of the the collectivity underpinned by the neural network of what is it called mycelium or that if you dig in the dirt you'll often find these little tiny white strands and they're so fragile and so fickle but those are what we're talking about and those when they're connected and undisturbed because you can't really dig into the dirt without ripping them and disturbing them but they operate under the ground and they connect everything and sort of act as a as a hub between nutrients and and whatnot in the soil, which is just fascinating. And then since we're on the conversation of being highly speculative, and I want to sort of reiterate that, I wanted to toss out this idea that I've sort of been wrestling with

and I talked to Mexie about before we started recording, which is to think about how some of these lessons specifically around the diminishing of the ego, which so much of this research on meditation and psychedelics really converge on the ego being the center of a lot of human dissatisfaction and a lot of the pathologies of our overall civilization and societies. And I kind of think about it

as, you know, what if the next stage of human evolution is to diminish and move beyond the domination of the ego in a same or similar way that in the past we've gone beyond the mere dictates of our animalistic instincts,

our urge to have sex, to eat, to be violent, to be hyper territorial, right? There's so many things that we've been able to transcend through cultural and biological evolution that separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom here on earth. And one of those big things is being able on some level to bypass those more base instincts and impulses, oftentimes through the use of the ego, right, which is kind of an interesting irony. But could there be a possibility in the future where through a plethora of

different mechanisms and techniques and just the maturing of civilization overall, human beings become more and more interested in these egoless states and through institutions, perhaps, in a future society where you could engage with psychedelics in a really meaningful way with guides or, you know, meditation becomes more of a practice where whatever your religious background, you can implement meditation into your life and have these spiritual breakthroughs, perhaps the future of humanity is geared toward or perhaps necessitates the getting beyond the ego-centered way of experiencing the world. world and moving to this more transcendent, more interconnected way, and perhaps if there are alien intelligences in the cosmos that have survived past a lot of the obstacles that we're struggling with right now, that was a part of their success. Again, highly speculative, but at least I think it helps think about these issues with relation to how humans are evolving biologically and culturally and at least points in the direction of a new way of human beings interacting with the cosmos that they find themselves in. And at least it's a good thought experiment.

Yeah, no, I mean, I think that's pretty compelling. I certainly would be evolutionarily advantageous for us to ditch our egos and, you know, change our behavior. So I think there's definitely something to that. And I mean, I think that maybe humanity as a whole, right, I think there's definitely been certain cultures who probably already achieved that, but they were just conquered by, you know, Western forces that were. you know, Western societies that were more dominated by ego. So I definitely think that that would be, you know, an advantageous stage and our evolution would be to really move beyond that through all these different mechanisms.

I think that one thing maybe holding us back, I thought it was really interesting that, you know, when talking about the default mode network, that this part of the brain lights up when we get likes on social media, which I think is really telling. right? It's obviously just feeds our ego. And I personally think that if we're going to destroy oppressive structures, we need to destroy our egos. I think that if we don't destroy what it is within us that needs to other other people, then even if we destroy capital, like if we still have othering and we still have ego, obviously things are going to be way better. And probably the destruction of capital will better facilitate people, you know, freeing themselves of ego. But,

know, you never know. And I think that if those things are still happening, then it will still lead to othering and violence, right? But how do we do that, right? Like, that would be advantageous for us in an evolutionary sense, but there's so many things blocking us. And I think that in this age where we're all addicted to social media and social media is such a powerful disciplinary tool that kind of keeps us trapped in our egoic states of being. It keeps us distracted. It keeps us in our default mode network where we're more often than not unhappy and closed off from our relations and our spirit and our compassion, right? And for like creators like me, like it takes up a lot of mental space. Like I'm thinking about what am I going to post next? How am I going to get a viral

tweet to promote my content and all this shit, right? So I think that, you know, now maybe more than ever, like with the rise of all this stuff, like, you know, we're increasingly disconnected from from each other, even though we're more connected. And I think this is definitely a pivotal moment in our history, especially with the ecological crisis and everything like that. So I definitely think that with all these distractions and with these things that keep us in our egoic states, maybe now more than ever, these kind of things are really important so that we can have a chance at kind of transcending this kind of stuff. Could not agree more. Wonderfully said, there is a dialectical relationship between the objective material world and the empirical political struggle for a better world and the subjective internal world where people who want a better world need to take active steps to root out the elements of that old world that they find in themselves because we've all been conditioned into a brutal violent egoic society and so no matter how enlightened we think we are or how often we try to move beyond it there's still that resident

do within us. And so I'm always skeptical of the sort of, you know, the communists who might be like, you know, this is all bullshit talk. It's about the only, only thing that it's about is the political objective struggle. And, you know, once we, once we do the revolution, all these other things will fall into place and will be fine. That is the error on the other side of the liberal, be the change you want to see in the world, where it's just imploring you to do internal work and become a better, more ethical consumer and, you know, to be more productive in your own personal life and to have personal solutions to collect the problems, right? Both of those errors are on each side of the spectrum, one over-emphasizing the objective to the denigration

of the subjective and one over-emphasizing liberal subjectivity over the objective political fight and the change and the means of production that need to occur in order to move towards a better world. And so I think a more healthy, rational way to think, about it is that we must organize, we must agitate, we must go out and change the conditions of the objective world and throw our entire hearts and souls into it to create a better world and to reduce unnecessary suffering and to build a world that we'd be happy to live in. And at the same time, a way that we get there is by doing necessary internal work, trying to be a better person in your personal life, in your collective life, in your neighborhood,

in your community, having high standards that you yourself need to live up to, to be a constantly growing, developing, maturing human being alongside the objective political fight. And I think that will make better comrades and organizers out of all of us and push away some of the more grotesque behavior that we see in left-wing spaces, especially and specifically as Mexie said, online, because it really does pull the worst out of us. And anybody that spent a day going through Twitter or Facebook and all of a sudden you look up and your whole day is gone and you've been scrolling the entire time. When you put that phone down, you don't feel good.

Never do you walk away from a day of social media where you've wasted hours and hours of a day scrolling on social media and come out the other end feeling good. Even if the content that you were interacting with was like funny memes or whatever it may be, you walk out of that experience, always feeling sort of empty, hollow inside. And that really gestures towards the reality of what Mexie said, that these online platforms,

they may be able to be used sort of for good things on the fringes, but overall they really hyper tap into the worst parts of ourselves and of our egos. And so insofar as we can subordinate our online usage to real-life engagements, I think that would also be a healthier step that people can take. Hell yeah. All right. Well, with that, thank you so much, Mexie, for coming on. This has been awesome.

Our last conversation, Mind and Nature was absolutely a fan favorite. and people were messaging me incredibly excited for this next episode where we just talked about psychedelics. And here it is. Again, this conversation could have been 10 times longer than it is, but I hope that Mexie and I offer something of insight and of value for people to take and do what they will with it. And if you have any other questions, you can always reach out to me. And for those who want to reach out to Mexie, Mexie, can you let us know where people can find you and your work online? Absolutely.

So as I said, I have a YouTube channel, which is just my name, Maxi, M-E-X-X-I-E. I'm on Twitter at Mexie YT, and I'm also on Facebook at Mexie YT, and then I co-host a podcast called The Vegan Vanguard.com. It's veganvanguardpodcast.com, and we are also on Twitter and Facebook at The Vegan Vanguard. Or, no, at Vegan Vanguard. Wonderful. I'll link to that in the show notes. I'll also link to this book for people who want to read it and dive deeper into this subject. Thank you so much, Maxi. Without a doubt, we will absolutely work together again on something. It's not even a not even a question in my mind. I cannot wait. I always love talking you, Brett. This was awesome.

Thanks so much for having me on. To let go of But it is No less the bruise On the collective arm Keeping us hiding gone Forgotten dance is the one Lefted purse

Forgotten plants In the fossils of earth And they've long passed But they are No less the dirt of earth. coffee common soil keeping us stride and warm

the wound has no direction everybody needs a home and deserves protection mm-hmm Mm-hmm Although On any street

No sirens to hear Just trash and soiled needles Clawing the veneer And no crying But it is no less a tear On the combing cheek With which we smile Oh, I don't Eddie

Is it they or is it I Is it me who is more hollow As I'm quickly passing by And the poison is killing them But then so am I as I turn away Your wound has no direction Everybody needs some And deserves protection

Forgotten tongue is the language of love. Forgotten tongue is the language of love. Forgotten tongue is the language of love. Forgotten tongue is the language of love. Forgotten tongue. You know what I'm going to be. Thank you.