The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 167. The Psychology of the Psychedelics | Roland Griffiths

Episode Date: May 10, 2021

Dr. Roland Griffiths, Ph.D., is a professor of neuroscience, psychiatry, and behavioral science and director of the Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He is the author of over 400 scientific research publications and has trained more than 50 postdoctoral research fellows. He has been a consultant to the National Institutes of Health and numerous pharmaceutical companies in the development of new psychotropic drugs.Dr. Roland Griffiths and I discuss the research with John Hopkins University. We spoke about how he got into psychedelics and convinced ethic committees to approve such research, why he chose the scientific path, specifics about his studies with psilocybin, transformations of cancer patients with family members, the impact of psilocybin in existing institutions, the ongoing studies he is performing with long-time meditators and religious leaders, how the integration of psilocybin into society may look and more.Find more information about the center for psychedelic and consciousness research at https://hopkinspsychedelic.org, and read Roland’s publications at https://hopkinspsychedelic.org/publicationsThis episode was recorded on March 2nd, 2021FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE CENTER FOR PSYCHEDELIC AND CONSCIOUSNESS RESEARCH:http://hopkinspsychedelic.orgONGOING STUDIES:Depression Study Websitehttps://hopkinspsychedelic.org/depressionstudyCigarette Smoking-Psilocybin Study Websitehttps://www.quitsmokingbaltimore.org/Alzheimer’s Disease-Psilocybin Study Websitehttps://hopkinspsychedelic.org/alzheimersAnorexia Nervosa-Psilocybin Study Websitehttps://hopkinspsychedelic.org/anorexiaCo-occurring Depression and Alcohol Use Disorderhttps://hopkinspsychedelic.org/depression-alcoholPsychedelic Survey Studieshttps://hopkinspsychedelic.org/index/#researchPUBLISHED STUDIES:All Johns Hopkins Psychedelic Science Publicationshttps://hopkinspsychedelic.org/publications

Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast. I'm Mikaela Peterson. This is episode 20 in season four. This episode was recorded on March 2nd, 2021. Dr. Roland Griffiths joins my dad. Dr. Griffiths is a professor of neuroscience, psychiatry, and behavioral science and director of the psychedelic and consciousness research at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He's the author of over 400 scientific research publications and has trained more than 50 postdoctoral research fellows. He's been a consultant to the National Institutes of Health and Numerous Pharmaceutical Companies

in the development of new psychotropic drugs. Dr. Roland Griffiths and dad discuss the research with Johns Hopkins University. They spoke about how he got into psychedelics and convinced ethic committees to approve his research, why he chose the scientific path, specifics about his studies with psilocybin, transformations of cancer patients with family members, the impact of psilocybin in existing institutions, the ongoing studies he's performing with long-time meditators and religious leaders, how the integration of psilocybin may look in society and more. This episode is brought to you by

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Hello. If you have found the ideas I discuss interesting and useful, perhaps you might consider purchasing my recently released book Beyond Order. 12 more rules for life, available from Penguin Random House, In Print, or Audio Format. You could use the links we provide below or buy through Amazon or at your local bookstore. This new book Beyond Order provides what I hope is a productive and interesting walk through ideas that are both philosophically and sometimes spiritually meaningful, as well as being immediately implementable and practical. Beyond Order can be read and understood

on its own, but also builds on the concepts that I developed in my previous books, 12 rules for life, and before that, maps of meaning. Thanks for listening, and enjoy the podcast. I'm very pleased today on this good Friday, as it turns out, to welcome Dr. Roland Griffiths, PhD professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Neurosciences and Director of the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. And author or co-author of more than 400 scientific

research publications. And I should let those of you who aren't that familiar with scientific enterprise know that three publications is roughly equivalent to a PhD thesis. All things considered in the biologically oriented or psychologically oriented research domain. So that means that Dr. Griffiths has been involved in something approximating 150 PhDs.

And if you just think about that for a minute, then you can understand what that means. About 20 years ago, he initiated a research program at Johns Hopkins, which is one of the world's foremost universities, investigating of all things, transformative psychological experiences, the mystical type and insightful type experiences occasioned by the classic psychedelic psilocybin, the active component in what are popularly known as magic mushrooms. His research has indicated that the participants in his studies rate their experiences of psilocybin use as among the five most personally meaningful

of their lives, and later attribute to them enduring positive changes in moods, attitudes, and behaviors months to years after the experience. He's also conducting a series of intense related studies of brain imaging and drug interactions, examining the pharmacological and neural mechanisms of psychedelic action. He's conducted a series of extremely interesting and well-received therapeutic studies with psilocybin, including the treatment of psychological distress in cancer patients and more specifically fear of death,

major depressive disorder, nicotine addiction, so smoking cessation, anorexia nervosa, and various other psychiatric disorders. His research group has also conducted a series of survey studies characterizing both naturally occurring and psychedelic occasion, transformative experiences, including mystical experience, entity, and God encounter experiences, near death experiences, and experiences that have been associated with those who have had them with reduction in depression, anxiety, and proclivity for substance use. He's also engaged in a series of ongoing studies in healthy volunteers, in beginning in long-term meditators, and most interesting

as far as I'm concerned, in practicing religious leaders. And so, while any one of those topics would do for two hours, but we're going to try to delve into as many as possible in the next in the next in this following conversation. And so thank you so much for agreeing to talk to me. I'm extremely excited about this conversation and have been thinking about it for for weeks. Well, it's a great pleasure to to join you, Jordan. You and I met some 15 or 16 years ago at a retreat in California. And frankly, as this work has unfolded, and as I've followed the, you're fascinating course, maps of meaning and, and your other books. I really became intrigued by having a conversation with you about all this. And so I'm very grateful for this opportunity. And also delighted that you and Tammy are now back in the land of the living in the land of the living right.

So yeah, thank you. Yeah, I was I was really taken with our first meeting. I remember that that was just before you were about to publish the first of what a really a series of revolutionary papers. And I would say revolutionary, not only for their findings, but for the mere fact that they're being conducted at all. I mean, the psychedelics burst into the West, into Western consciousness in the late 1950s and caused so much trouble and distress that they were rapidly made illegal. And that was the end of research really for what, 20 years more than that. Yeah, more than that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and I thought that was a complete catastrophe because as a psychologist, my sense was that

the most interesting possible domain of study for a truly curious psychologist was the mystical domain that appeared to be opened up by these psychedelic substances, which indicated something that we do not understand, in my opinion, at all. Yeah, absolutely right. But by the time I got to graduate school, that was University of Minnesota in in the area of psychopharmacology, which is a predecessor to neuroscience. The idea of studying psychedelics was entirely off the table. As a matter of fact, it was considered a third rail issue to even suggest interest in that area. It was a career-destroying interest. Yeah, it was. Let alone a pursuit. Well, I was so interested meeting you. And when we met in California, we went to this conference on awe, which actually turned out to be quite a good conference. It was a small conference. There was about 30 of us,

if I remember correctly, off for three days, for the full days. And there are really a series of extremely interesting experiences. We did laughing meditation at one point, which I found extremely interesting and quite easy, but I couldn't duplicate it myself at home. But I was really struck by you in particular, because you're not, there was nothing about you that I would have associated

with the probability of restarting the psychedelic, the investigation into psychedelics in the scientific community. And that's a compliment. That's the deepest compliment because it seems to me that the reason you were able to pull this off is because you're, what would you call it, surprisingly sensible and level-headed. And so, I'm very curious about why it was that it was you that was able to get through all the regulatory, social, career hurdles, psychological hurdles, all of that, ethical hurdles, and actually managed to establish this research program and add such a prestigious university. Why do you think you were able to do that?

You know, part of it was the innocence with which I came into the area. So I came into the area having initiated meditation practice. And I had been, I was trained as a radical behaviorist in psychopharmacology, you know, and which means that you don't pay any attention to, you know, motives or thoughts, those are your relevant, you want to focus on behavior. That's my observable behavior. It's great scientific training to be trained as a rigorous behaviorist. Yeah. Yeah. And, but even in graduate school, I, you know, I was curious about interiority and had tried to do some meditation, but like so many, when I tried, it became hopelessly difficult. Three minutes felt like three hours. And so I set that aside. I went about my developing my career in psychopharmacology at Johns Hopkins became internationally prominent in drug abuse pharmacology. And then 25 years ago started a meditation practice again. and this time there was something fundamentally

different about it, and I don't know why, but I engaged with it, and it became really intriguing to me. There were states of consciousness that emerged from that, getting me to ask questions about the nature of spiritual and transformative experience, you know, what's going on with meditation. I didn't have a strong religious grounding or background, no matter if fact, I had flunked out of confirmation school and in the sixth grade. and in the sixth grade. But there was something really compelling and it got me reading about different meditation traditions, different religious traditions. I was trying to understand this whole area of spirituality and then came to be reintroduced. And I was reintroduced incidentally by Bob Jesse who organized that conference we went to and he's an engineer who founded a group called the Council on Spiritual Practices and I got reintroduced to the idea, well, you know, Roland, if you're interested in and spiritual experience, if you want to investigate that, take another look at the psychedelics. And so I came into this just out of raw curiosity.

And frankly, I would have to say that my intrigue with the nature of these experiences was so compelling that it made me question whether I should be allocating all my time to running around the world and giving conferences and giving papers and doing studies on the next abuse liability risk for a new compound. And so that in itself seems quite remarkable. Okay, so let me summarize that to some degree. So you had you had rigorous scientific training and of the least mystical kind possible in some sense, because that's a good way of characterizing behaviorism. No concentration whatsoever on subjective experience. And the reduction of everything to measurable, to that which can be objectively measured. And I would say, like some of the most impressive work ever done in psychology was done by behaviorists, like Jeffrey Gray is a good example. He's an absolute genius.

And that all came out of that behavioral tradition. And so did I think the field of neuroscience itself. So you established, and then you established your credibility methodologically, but also as a communicator within that domain. So what do you think you had for a publication record by the time you started the meditation practice and followed this other interest?

Well, I mean, at that point, I was a full professor. I had a long history of publication in drug abuse pharmacology. And in that sense, we did measure subjective effects and euphoria and things like that. But I was very well established in that field, had done also a whole parallel set of studies in animal behavior of pharmacology and drug abuse, looking at physical dependence and drug self administration. Right. So there was no, there was no way by that time of casually dismissing any interest that

you might manifest. You'd already established yourself and as a highly credible researcher. And so that was a precondition for the next move. Why do you think your interest in this alternative domain, let's say, became so intense that it was able to displace and already developed expertise and a fully functioning career in this other direction? What was going on?

Well, there's something very compelling about the nature of these transformative experiences, and that's what we can describe the kinds of effects that emerge with the psychedelics. But more than that, in meditation, in prayer really is, there arises a sense of the ineffable and there are a lot of things tied to that, but but but meaning is is intercly involved in that. And that frankly just became so compelling to me. As a matter of fact, it kind of dwarfed my interest in drug abuse pharmacology to the point that I actually considered, at one point, dropping out of scientific academy and going off to India to an ashram to do much more intensive meditation practice.

Were there existential reasons for that or was it merely a matter of where your curiosity took you? You had a very well-established and productive, and I would presume meaningful and engaging career. I don't know how you found the teaching aspect of that. Was that rewarding to you as well, or were you more a pure researcher? A pure researcher. Okay. Okay. But I mean, you had a fully functioning professional life at that point, but something gripped you. Were there personal reasons for that? Or do you think it was more a manifestation of curiosity? I think it was raw curiosity, but once one enters into that relationship of investigating

this mystery of what it is that we're doing here, right? I mean, this is, it's kind of the core existential mystery of being that I think comes up in this. This is my framing now. At the time, I didn't, you know, I didn't know how to even contextualize this. I knew it was something that emerged from meditation. I thought it had something to do with what religious teachings were about. I couldn't, I just had no context for putting that together. But it was super compelling and it seems incredibly important.

And I would say of anything, it's at least that interest in the importance and it hasn't faded one bit for me. So why did you decide then instead of abandoning what you'd already created and journeying, let's say to India to, for the second half of your life? That's how the Jungians would think about it, I suppose, as the spiritual part of your life, that's how the unions would think about it, I suppose, is the spiritual part of your life. Why did you decide to continue walking down the scientific pathway, and what do you think of that decision? Well, I think it's one of the best decisions I could have possibly made. Let's see, it was what I knew. I mean, it was all the tools I had.

I was in a unique position. I started reading the literature on psychedelics and going, huh, this is interesting. And I wonder if this is true. And frankly, I went into that first study, and this may have made me an acceptable person to take this on. I went into that first study with a deep sense of skepticism. I was very happy with what I was learning about the nature of these experiences from meditation, I was kind of put off by the what struck me as excessive enthusiasm among those people who have continued to be engaged in psychedelics.

Well, enthusiasm means to be filled with God's spirit. So it's exactly the right word for people who've been happy by psilocybin, let's say, or hypothetically out of the mind, excessive enthusiasm. And of course, that is a danger. There's no, it's not like there's any shortage of religious manias. I mean, that can manifest itself as part of a manic depressive disorder. And you see, you see religious experience of a sort often in schizophrenic delusions as well. So it's not like there's no danger there. There's plenty of danger. I agree, and there still is. And the first study was, which one was that?

The first study was looking at a high dose of psilocybin and comparing it to a fairly high dose of methylphenidate or ridolin under very deeply blinded conditions. So it was a good study because you used an active placebo, so to speak. Did you have a placebo in there as well or was it methylphenidate versus psilocybin? It was just straight up comparing methylphenidate in psilocybin, but under deeply blinded conditions where people knew that in the course of two or three sessions, they would have at least one session in which they would get a dose of psilocybin, but they were also told that

they could get, I think it was 13 other psychoactive compounds. We recruited in only people who had zero prior experience with psychedelics, so because the allegedly, the profile of subjective effects are so unique that people could unblind themselves. By taking in naive people, we also eliminated a potential recruitment bias of people who had good experiences.

So we could actually... How did you convince the ethics committees that it was acceptable to, to, first of all, to do this at all, and also the administrators at your university. And second, that it was acceptable to use naive participants. Why did they, and do you think that in today's climate, do you think that that study would now be possible?

Well, let's say if you hadn't laid the groundwork for it. would now be possible. If, well, let's say if you hadn't laid the groundwork for it. You know, I think partly it was good luck. And partly it, it actually speaks very well of Johns Hopkins and their ethic review procedures. So when I assembled that protocol with some help from the Council on Spiritual Practices and counseling from Bob Jesse, when I assembled that protocol, I actually thought that there's probably less than a 50% chance it would even be approval because because of these, you know, ethical committees, it has to go through, you know through not only the Hopkins Ethical Committee but FDA.

And FDA hadn't approved a study giving a high dose of a psychedelic to a psychedelic naive individual for, I don't know, 25 plus years, decades. And so it was no means clear that it would even go, but it was so interesting to me. And as I said, I was losing, losing comparative interest in the other things that I thought, well, you know, why not? The ethical scrutiny that that got was unlike, as you might imagine, unlike any previous protocol or even any protocol sense. It went through many levels of scrutiny within my institution, Johns Hopkins, including being looked at by the dean and the managing attorney's office and whatever. And I have to say I'm very proud of Johns Hopkins as an institution. It's stunning that they did it. I can't believe that they did it. I can't. What arguments did you marshal to put up against?

Because I mean, it's so easy for a committee to see if they see risk just to say no, because no is simple, the problem goes away and no one's accountable for it. Yes, yes is complicated. And so how did you convince them this was a worthwhile endeavor, especially given your own skepticism at that point?

Well, it really came down to science and risk benefit ratio. I think the big risk that most institutions would have caved in on is a political risk, a reputational risk. You know what? To be associated with psychedelics, look at that. You know, look what Larry did for Harvard. Yeah, exactly. But the committee at Hopkins that looked at this really put the politics to one side

and weighed the risk benefit ratio to the volunteers. What did they see as the benefit? Oh, in terms of just understanding the nature, let's say we put it forward as a comparative pharmacology study. Okay. And so, and we had done a lot of work with comparative pharmacology. And in fact, I had a grant from the National Institute

on Drug Abuse to compare one of my specialties of the time was sedative hypnotics. And I had a grant that had proposed to compare ketamine, which is an NMDA dissociative anesthetic with some other compounds. And so I modified it to say, well, we were going to look at ketamine, but I think we'll look at psilocybin. And instead of comparing it to a classic other set of insulin. Because ketamine is already like radically psychoactive, although perhaps not so much as a pure psychedelic, let's say. So there was some incrementalism, and you'd already got support from granting agencies, and you had all your credibility behind you. Yeah, and so what we could argue is

we're looking at relative abuse potential here. Now, the study, as it's published, doesn't read out as that, but that was really how it was designed as a classic comparative pharmacology study in which we could compare the effects of psilocybin to methamphetamine aid in healthy volunteers. We had, you know, we could look at things like the liking. Right. So that's I can see that that would be you could make a mount a pretty straight

forward valid scientific argument for that. You have methaphenidate, which is a standard psychomotor stimulant, basically dopamine, energetically mediated, something like cocaine. And then you have this strange psychedelic. And the reason they're addictive is not, or if they are. And of course, there's tremendous discussion about that. But they don't fit neatly into the category of other abusable drugs. And so that's an issue that's worthy. It's very hard to get animals to voluntarily take psychedelics, at least regularly, whereas you can do it with cocaine with no problem.

So I can see that you can make a basic science argument right there. And you said also abuse potential. Okay, okay, okay, fair enough. I'm still stunned that they managed it, but, but it's so interesting to see how much work and preparation and care at all sorts of levels had to go into that before it was made possible. And it's also even possible that maybe that caution was warranted because one of the things that really strikes me about your research program is that it hasn't got out of hand, right? I mean, and that's what happened in Harvard in the early 60s when

Larry started playing around, let's say with LSD, which you don't play around with, you've been able to really keep this within a tightly bound scientific box while still investigating and popularizing the reality of the mystical experience for the participants. Okay, so you started the study. You had 90 people. What happened? Well, what happened is the story that actually changed my career direction because the results, you know, I was interested in spiritual experience. I put in questionnaires into this study that had been used to measure

naturally occurring mystical experiences and Ralph Hood, who may have been a participant in the meeting that we went to. I think we met where else there, yep. Yeah, had a nice questionnaire. You know, but I wasn't sure what to, entirely what to expect and whether the effects would live up to the, what struck me as exaggerated claims by the psychedelic and enthusiast populations. But indeed, what happened was under these blinded conditions

and both the guides were blinded and the volunteers to what drugs were administered other than on some session that get a dose of psilocybin. And what emerges number one that immediately during these sessions that are done after careful preparation. So they're really curated experiences in which we meet with volunteers for eight preparation hours prior to the session. And then they come in, they take a capsule. We ask them to lay on a couch for the duration of the session, which can be up to eight hours, six to eight hours. We encourage them to use blind folds so that their visual system is cut off. We have them use earphones through which they listen to a program of music. And so it's an introverted kind of

do they select the music or do you select it? We selected what were your guidelines for selecting the music? Well, our our main guide who played a very important role in our initial study was Bill Richards. And he had actually done psychedelic work at Maryland Research Center back in the 1970s. And so he had a strong bias toward Western classical music. And so our initial playlist was very strongly influenced in that direction since that time. Any particular composers? Like was it heavy on Bach, for example?

When it was not particularly heavy, but it covered a range of classical composers. Yeah, I'm focusing on that because I mean, music and dancing are components of psychedelic experiences that stretch back tens of thousands of years. And so the fact that it's easy to skip over these details in some sense, you had people lay down, their eyes were closed. Okay, so they're not, they're not having a sociological experience of psilocybin. They're having an interior experience. And then you use music and God only knows what music does in the final analysis. And it's certainly the case that there isn't a tremendous amount of space between classical music and religious music.

And so there's all sorts of things that you've done that are implicit in the experiment that are integral in some some indeterminate sense to the outcome. Now these preparation sessions eight hours. Okay, what are you doing with people during those eight hours and why? The preparation is really developing rapport and trust with them. These experiences can be hugely disorienting, and fear, anxiety can arise at very strong magnitude. It's very important that people feel safe and cared for. So I think of it that we're trying to create a container around these experiences. They have to trust their, sometimes they're called guides

or sitters. They really have to implicitly trust these people to take care of them. Okay, so how important do you think, you know, because you said they have to feel safe, but I would think that it's more that they have to be safe. And you know what I mean? That if this is why psychological research in particular

is so likely to go astray because its validity depends on integrity in ways that aren't obviously measurable or describable in a research paper. So, you know, I would think, and please correct me if I'm wrong, that if you didn't have exactly the right sort of people qualified, intelligent, insightful, competent, caring, awake, all of that and dedicated to actually taking care of the research subjects. Like none of this can be a show for that to work right, because this can go wrong very badly and it didn't go wrong.

So to what degree, how did you select the people who were going to serve as the as the protectors slash guides? And and what were you thinking about when you did that? So in that initial study, Bill Richards, who I already mentioned, came in. So so Bill came in as someone who was already a strong believer in the power of these kinds of compounds. So we actually, he was a perfect person to bring into in that role. And was he associated with the council of spiritual practice? Was he a Bob Jesse contact? He was.

Yeah, okay. Okay. He knew from that from that domain of expertise already. Yeah, and he's a psychologist in the world. So he already came in with substantial experience. He was our primary guide throughout that first study. And then he trained an assistant guide who's with us still, Mary Cosumano. And it was the pair of them that, in that very first study, that provided that rapport, trust and support

before, during and after, and the aftercare is also important. But that relationship is critical, and you're right, people, they have to feel safe, and they have to be safe. And that's the value of doing this under within the institutional structure of something like Hopkins, because people know that what we're doing

is giving them a compound that we know structure of something like Hopkins because people know that what we're doing is giving them a compound that we know to be psilocybin. In this case, synthesized psilocybin in capsules. And it's done with under medical supervision. And if anything went amiss medically, we're capable of intervening. Medical intervention is very rare. I mean, these drugs turn out to be remarkably safe. But they can, these kinds of sessions, certainly can go off the rails. And so that's the nature of that preparation and caring and being with them in the session. We've probably been possibly more conservative

than we need to. Our sessions even today involve two sitters or guides there throughout the whole duration of the six or eight hours. So people are tucked into their couch. They're asked to go inward. We're not we're not guiding the session per se. We're asking them to pay attention to their own experience as it unfolds, we'll check in with them occasionally. What about mindset? Like, what do you tell the people about how to prepare psychologically for the experience? How are they informed? How do you want them to react? Let's see, we want them to go in and be deeply curious about what they have to learn. Okay. So, you want them to be open and let it go and let it happen.

And you say, we'll take care of you, but you can let it happen. Yeah, let it go, be open, trust, you know, and we prepare them to not necessarily expect, but, but not rule out the possibility that what may emerge in during the session is something that they'll find absolutely terrifying or anxiety producing. Okay. So they know that. Oh, absolutely. Okay, okay, okay. And so I often do people encounter, I mean, the experiences are exceptionally profound and range across the full range of emotional significance. In fact, past the normal ranges of emotional significance.

So, how frequently in the experience is the negative end of the human experience magnified? Actually quite frequently. So in our first study, about 30% of volunteers would have said, actually rated at the end of the study, that sometime during the experience they had that sometime during the experience they had an experience of fear of or anxiety that they would rated extreme. Now very often those short lived experiences and to the extent that they drag out over long periods of the session the outcomes are going to generally be less favorable. But I think it's actually a very sobering statistic that, in spite of all the selection we do, I mean, we've already screened out people for whom we don't think we can develop

rapport and trust. We've screened out individuals, you know, with borderline personality disorder, for instance. We've already selected a group of people who are open and curious. We're giving them all this time and attention, yet about 30% will experience some significant anxiety during those sessions. What's important is that it's very, very rare for anyone who has a session of under these kinds of conditions to report after the session that they feel as

though their life satisfaction has been decreased. Most people, even if they have a difficult experience, will interpret that experience in a context of meaningfulness. In some cases, it's actually through the doorway of the most difficult portions of the experience that the greatest learning comes up. So let's dive into that a little bit. I mean, I know historically, I know, it appears as though historically

when people were preparing for experiences of this sort that they would often go undergo a process of ritual purification. And I'm going to just abandon the ritual part of that and assume that what they were doing was attempting some moral purification that they were settling their accounts, that they were trying to ensure that they didn't walk into the experience with with karmic excessive karmic baggage that they could conceivably shed, that they were very careful to prepare themselves so that their consciences weren't weighing on them any more heavily than they needed to and when people undergo these negative experiences, but still emerge let's say with the judgment that that was worthwhile. What what's the essential nature of the negative experience? I mean, it's not

contentless terror. It's not that unformed. It's more personal. Well, the interesting piece of it, Jordan, is that it can take many, many different forms. take many, many different forms. So one example that we give is, because psilocybin, very often has a lot of visualizations attached to it, either imagery, and sometimes realistic imagery or patterns or whatever. And so we'll say, well, for instance, if, and this can happen, if during the session, a demonic figure comes up

and starts to approach you, your job is to be interested and curious about it, to recognize that this is a display of consciousness. is to be interested and curious about it. To recognize that this is a display of consciousness, we'll often say there's nothing in consciousness per se that can hurt you. And what we want you to be is interested in this. And so instead of reifying an image in your mind, so take the demon, instead of reifying it, and if you do, you'll either choose to run from it, and then you'll

spend the entire session running from this demon that's going to annihilate you until you're exhausted and the psilocybin's gone. Or, alternatively, you may choose to fight it, but by fighting it, you've also reified it. And what we really want you to do is be really interested in it and be curious about it. And so it's terrifying. It's a construct created by you for you, probably to terrify you, and be interested in it, and curious on end, you know, we would much rather have you

approach it and in effect, ask it what it's doing there. What am I to learn from this? And what the guarantee is, is that whatever the nature of that is, and it can take any number of forms, and it's not necessarily a monster or just visual. But whatever it is, is not gonna be static. I mean, unless you reify it, unless you make it static, if you actually investigate it, it's gonna start changing. And then initially, it actually might become more terrifying, but it can't and won't continue to do that. It's going to dissolve,

and it may dissolve into something disgusting or beautiful or transcendent or silly, but it's going to change. And your job is just to stay with the experience and recognize that you're empowered in a way to approach whatever it is that emerges in consciousness. And my own sense, I'd be very curious about how you interpret this from a clinical psychological point of view. But my sense of that is that that's a hugely empowering experience for people to have. That they have literally faced the dragon.

They have faced the greatest terror, whatever form it's taken, and they've come out recognizing that they're safe, they're empowered. And that can be a life-changing experience in and of itself. Because after you really have been there with the worst demon of your dreams, and faced it down, and looked it in its eyes, and realized it's actually nothing other than an object of consciousness, nothing other than yourself. Then what is it in life that can put up an obstacle with that much fear for you?

It's very much like a classic initiation ceremony. I mean, one thing that clinicians have agreed upon regardless of their school of thought, let's say, is that voluntary exposure to what, to obstacles in your path that are threatening or disgusting is almost inevitably curative. And it seems that the rule is that that would you approach voluntarily shrinks as you approach it and you grow. And if you run the reverse happens, and you can play that out very straight

forwardly if you're a behaviorist, because if someone's afraid of an elevator, then you have them stand 10 feet from the elevator and then nine feet and then eight feet. And not only do they learn that what they learn is that they can withstand the fear, that's what generalizes. And you don't get symptom substitution the way the psychoanalysts thought because you're probably not counter conditioning the fear, what you're doing is showing the person

that there's more to them than they thought. And there isn't anything more salutary than that. And that is precisely why you're encouraged, let's say, in mythological stories to confront the dragon and get the gold. That's the basic story. And it's very interesting how that becomes portrayed in a psychedelic experience. I mean, what do you make?

Okay, there's two directions there. I'd like to continue the discussion of the study. Okay, so what happened to you as a consequence of running this study and how did that influence what you did? And then what happened culturally as a consequence of reporting this study? So I think the most interesting and unexpected finding for me was I was deeply interested in the nature of that initial experience. But the most interesting thing to me occurred when people returned two months later. So this first study, we were giving sessions at two month intervals. So people would come in, they would have their session, you know, the guides would meet with them

intermittently beforehand. And then they would come back for the second session, they'd sit down in my office, and this is just a vivid memory. It was one of the very first volunteers, and I asked them, well, so what do you think of the first session? I'm just curious as to what you're thinking.

The person said, you know, I think about that every day. That's among the most important experiences of my whole life. I thought, what? I mean, at this point in my career, I've given dozens and dozens of different psychoactive drugs to people, both healthy volunteers and drug abusers at high doses. How high was the dose? Typically among street users, two grams is a moderate dose for psilocybin of the actual mushroom. Four grams, I think five grams is what Terence for psilocybin of the actual mushroom. Four grams,

I think five grams is what Terence McKenna called the heroic dose, isn't it? What kind of dose were you giving in an act? This is equivalent to five gram dose. Oh, so this was not a trivial pharmacological experience. No, no, no, this is like over the top. Well, well, it's an it's it's it's in that's in the right at the top. It's not it's not a beginner's experience in some sense. It's it's the full story thing. Yeah. Okay. How did you settle on the dose? Well, um, well, we wanted to provide a strong test of what it was that psilocybin could do. That is the same dose, although we did it on a weight basis, but it's the same dose that Walter Panky gave

in the famous Good Friday experiment and given that this is Good Friday, we can reference that. That was the study done in Harvard, back in the very early 60s. But that and they were and there were some limitations to that study. But in effect, many of the things that we showed was were consistent with what they had ended up reporting. But we knew from the literature that

psilocybin of that dose had been given safely in various studies. So we thought that there wasn't any great value in studying a range of doses, nor could we afford to do so because this study was supported partly through a preexisting grant, but also through significantly through philanthropic support. Okay, so people came back two months later and they said this and you listened, which is

also extremely interesting because it did violate some of your presuppositions, even though you were curious about this. Yeah, so it just was hugely unprecedented in my experience. As someone would say, that experience I had two months ago, I think about every day and it's among the most important experiences of my life. And you know, my first thought was what kind of life experiences do these people have? This is, this seems absurd to me. And when you quiz them about it, they would say, well, you know, when my first child, my was born, my whole life changed, you know, I'll never forget that. When my father died, you know, that's, you know, a huge life changer. They say it's kind of like that. And so they're describing it in a metric, you know, across their life

experience that actually makes a whole lot of intuitive sense. You're the major existential episodes. Yeah, but it's so different than any other psychoactive drug I had ever looked at. So I was accustomed to measuring acute effects and describing those acute effects. And so, you know, if you give cocaine or an opiate or a, you know, or a dissociative anesthetic and ask someone a week later or much less than a couple months later. Well, what was that like?

They'll tell you, but they're drawing on memory. Oh, yeah, we got drunk and we had a good time and we laughed a lot. But if you said, well, is that important to you? It wouldn't be unless they've learned not to drink that much. But this has embedded existential personal meaning of kind of the deepest order. And so after those interviews, we put together another set of questionnaires that we have used since then. And that's actually rating these experiences with respect to your entire life experiences. And so just replicated across now a variety of studies, we can show that, you know, it's usually 80 to 90% of people rate these experiences in the top five of their life.

And in that first study, I think 30% rated it as the single most spiritually significant experience of their entire life. So it's of that order of magnitude. Right. So now you went in there with this, this, some apur skepticism, but you'd also been gripped already at that point by some intuition that There was something in that domain of experience that was crucially important and so now people came back and said well Look, I've experienced that and you know, it had a huge impact on me And so what happens next in your reach? Where do you take that you you develop this new questionnaire? What's the next study and why?

Well, yeah, so it interface with my own experience because you know, I've been involved with meditation. I appreciated aspects of the primary mystical experience and we can talk about that that those are the qualities of the acute experience that seem to predict these longer term attributions of meaning and spiritual significance. Right. So you, you, okay, so were there people who took the psilocybin that didn't have the mystical experience and that didn't report the long-term effects. Or was everyone affected by the psilocybin, regardless of... No, there's some variation, and some people will not have classic mystical experiences.

And some people won't have classic mystical experiences yet will describe them as meaningful, but overall, those people who have these experiences that we describe as classical mystical experiences are the ones that will report enduring positive changes. And there's a good correlation there. And what kind of changes are they reporting? Sorry, I also interrupted one of your points there. Yeah, let's see.

So, so they're reporting, you know, in the most general terms, you know, positive changes in attitudes about themselves, about life, their emotions, behavioral changes, spirituality are all changed in ways that are felt to be deeply meaningful and significant. Right. So things are bad. So they report that their lives are better, but it's not hedonic better, like cocaine better. It's not psychomotor stimulant better. It's philosophical better. And I mean, that's why I think your findings on this increase in trait openness are so absolutely,

well, they're unbelievable. First of all, they're so powerful. It's just, and I have no idea in the final analysis what to make of them, but it is really something, stop me if I'm wrong, but it's it's like a philosophical deepening, and it is better conceptualized as an expansion of the experience of significant meaning rather than a generalized rise in positive emotion. Like, you didn't get an increase in extroversion, which is the positive emotion dimension. You got an experience in openness, which is the creativity dimension. And it's also associated with revelatory thought, right?

Because openness looks like the trait that we would identify as creativity and creative people are generative in their ideas, right? They're intuitive. They have these insight experiences that you were all also interested in. They're able to make associations between distant thoughts and observe patterns. And if you're high in openness, you're also interested in ideas. You tend to be philosophical and you're outlook. You have a strong affinity for fiction and narrative. All of that clumps together. And your research, maybe we can go there next, is you showed that after a single dose mystical experience on psilocybin, people moved the equivalent

of from the 50th percentile to the 85th percentile in trade openness, one standard deviation. And so that's, and that was permanent. Okay, so talk about that. And what the hell happened? And what do you think's happening neurologically? Yeah, well, let me, let me back up to the acute experience and describe components of that because it, that explains then, I think, how people are looking back at these experiences. So the key features of this so-called primary mystical experience, and we now have developed a very good questionnaire that's psychometrically solid and can measure this. The key features of this are this sense of unity, this sense of the interconnectedness of all people and all things, and that can be

experienced both introvertively, and that is that everything is within or it can be experienced extra vertically. And the whole, you know, the literature on mystical experiences outside of drugs, you know, was laid out and they and set forth this kind of template. So there's a sense of the interconnectedness of all people, all things, the unity. There's a sense of the interconnectedness of all people, all things, the unity. Yeah, the meaningful interconnectedness, right? That somehow that's all connected, not just connected, but also that the entire pattern of connection has some transcendent or ultimate significance that's hidden from us. Yeah, let me go into the other qualities.

So it's that unity that's accompanied by a sense of sacredness or reverence. So there's something about this experience that's felt to be deeply precious. If you don't want to use a word that's tinged with spiritual implications. But there's something deeply precious about it. And then there's the noetic sense. Not only is it precious, it's absolutely true. And for most people, they will endorse it's more real than everyday waking consciousness. It's more real than real. And then there are subfactors to the mystical experience, and

that's positive mood, transcendence of time and space and inethability. One of the first things that people say in coming out of these experiences when I walk into the session room and ask them, you know, tell me about your experience, they'll kind of look down and maybe smile or look baffled and they say, you know, I can't even put this into words.

And I'm thinking, okay, well, that's one of the six criteria here. So what I think is that this sense of unity, the fact that there's some sense that we're all in this together. This is all interconnected. There's a wholeness there. This precious and it's absolutely true. And with that, maybe that noetic quality that it's absolutely true might account for why these experiences then are sustained. They have enduring effects because people believe that there's some fundamental truth value in what they have learned. It's not like getting drunk and saying, yeah, I had a great time, but you don't learn anything important on how to conduct your life going forward, other than maybe not drink so much.

You know, but this is something at a very at a very personal level and and then I think that that explains a lot of how it is that people then come to change. So very often, you know, there's a level of meaning making. I mean, this is right down your alley, George. There's a level of meaning makingmaking that comes out of these experiences that end up

rewriting the personal narrative that the person has about themselves and about the plate their place in the world and and that accounts for these Enduring changes and the fact that people then become behaviorally much more flexible. Because if that narrative structure is changed, then the analogy I think of is you're rewriting the underlying operating system. And with that, everything can change. People can change their life courses in ways that they were unimaginable.

Let me make a couple of comments about that and you tell me what you think about this. When I've looked at, I think of the operating system as it has a narrative structure fundamentally. The reason for that is that we have to know how to behave, and narratives are about behavior. And so, and narratives address the question of how we should behave. There's a perceptual element too, because you have to perceive in order to act. And so, your perceptions are very tightly linked to your behavioral aims. And that's quite clear from the hardcore psychological literature. Okay, so my sense of the deep narrative, because I think that the world is best construed, and I do mean best construed, as a place of order in chaos, and that can be technically described the distinction between those two, and that there's a battle between good and evil going on against

that background. Now, I want to talk about the good and evil background a bit because it pertains to this rewriting of the narrative. So, I look at stories like the story of Cane Enable, which is a very ancient story, and it's clearly a story of good against evil. And it's a foundational story because it's really in the Western culture, in the narrative tradition, it's the story of the first two genuine human beings because Adam and Eva made by God, but Cain and Abel are born.

They're the first actual people. And one of them is a murderous genocidal psychopath and the other is a hero. And so you see that dichotomy there instantly. And so Cain is the adversary, the dark narrative, the dark force, let's say, and why? Well, what happens to Cain is that he struggles and sacrifices like we all do.

We make our sacrifices in the present and we assume that by doing so, the benevolence of the world will manifest it to us. That's why we're willing to forego gratification and to work. That's all sacrifice. And so, cane sacrifices, but God rejects his sacrifice. And the story is brilliantly ambivalent about why. And the reason that's a brilliant ambivalence is because you can work diligently and make the proper sacrifices as far as you're concerned and yet fail, which means that all that work,

all that foregone gratification, that packed with God, that what is it that God has with the Israelites? So there's a name for that covenant. The implicit covenant has been broken and Cain responds to that with tremendous anger, right? He raises his fist against the sky and shakes it and says, this should not be. And then he takes revenge. He says, I will destroy what is most valuable to you.

And so he goes after able who is an ideal person, who sacrifices are welcomed by God. And he kills them. And then all hell breaks loose in the aftermath of that in Cain's relatives. And like the more I delved into that story, the more it shocked me. I couldn't believe that much information could be packed into what's essentially 12 lines. OK, so now imagine that in each of our souls, we have this competing tendency. You know, we see the suffering and the each of our souls, we have this competing tendency.

We see the suffering and the horror of our lives, the vulnerability and the mortality of everything that we love and cherish and our failure. And that turns us against being, you talked about being at the beginning of this, that turns us against being. And then there's the other part of us that maintains faith and that strives

forward, but each of us is an intermingling of those. And so the rewrite seems to me to be something like the revelation that the positive end of that proper set of propositions is actually true that things are interconnected, that things are fundamentally good, that love and truth can actually prevail. And that gives some experiential weight that can be used as a counterposition against that destructive cynicism. And the psychedelic, the mystical experience seems to allow for that transformation. Does that seem, what do you think of that? That sounds right. I mean, there's something hugely curious about the nature of these experiences because they are, they appear to be strongly biased toward this benevolent sense of wonder.

Yeah, and that's associated with that certainty of truth, which is not what you'd expect, right? Because it's not that easy to make a powerful, credible case for benevolence and truth. We're not even wired that way, because we overestimate, like we over-experience the magnitude of negative, of negative experiences. it's more sensitive to them. So it's surprising that that would emerge. It's unlikely. Yeah, and well, but isn't it interesting? I mean, the fact is, you know, the these experiences that occur with psychedelics are very

much part of naturally occurring experiences of this type. So there can be conversion experiences or religious experiences that come out in under various conditions either spontaneously or in prayer practice in breath work. So to me, I we're we're wired to have these kinds of experiences. What? So that in itself is an absolutely radical claim, you know, I mean, I've gone after some of the Darwinians that I've the atheistic Darwinians that I've talked to for failing to take into account what I regard as the the preponderance of scientific evidence indicating that the religious instinct is real and that it's biologically grounded.

It's like, okay, it's real. It's biologically grounded. What do you have to say about that from an evolutionary perspective then? Is that a spandrel? It's like no, because it looks like it's central to the development of human culture itself. Not only is it not a spandrel, it's like no, because it looks like it's central to the development of human culture itself. Not only is it not a spandrel, it's like the opposite of a spandrel. And so what are we supposed to conclude if we conclude that the religious instinct has actually evolved, it's deeply biological, and it speaks of like a benevolent and truth-oriented teleological reality. That is not the way our culture is constructed. That is not the way our culture is constructed. Well, this is the question I was going to pose to you. What's going on here?

No, well, that's exactly what we're trying to figure out, isn't it? Just what the hell is going on here? Yeah, what the hell is going on? And just to reflect it back on, was it a good decision to follow this? I mean, what's more important than this, Jordan? What's more important than finding out what's going on here? Well, I can't believe, like, I actually can't believe how important this is. You know, I mean, I've been studying the psychedelic literature for 20 years.

And in this deep amount of as I can possibly manage, is. You know, I mean, I've been studying the psychedelic literature for 20 years. And in this deep a manner as I can possibly manage. And every time I think I have some grasp on how important it is, I learned something else. And I think, oh, it's way more important than I thought it was. It's, it's of crucial significance. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's of central, it's literally of central significance. It's, it's literally of central significance. And so now it needs to do it. And you know, partly why I was so interested in talking to you is I'm trying to figure out, it's like, okay, well, what happens if we take this seriously? Like if we start to actually take this seriously with dead seriousness, what,

what's the consequence of that? You know, and so, all right. So, so let's look at the, let's look at the consequence of that. You know, and so, all right, so let's look at the, let's look at the fear of death. That's the place I want to go next. And there's a couple of things I'm interested in about that. The first is that there, so you have this study showing that cancer sufferers take

psilocybin and they show a marked reduction in the fear of death. And, and that gets stranger that more deeply you investigate it. And there's these ancient hallucinian mysteries that seem to be associated with something like the experience of a voyage to the land of the dead, an encounter with ancestral spirits, a religious transformation, and then the eradication, or at least the diminution of the fear of death. But all of that mythological baggage, so to speak, went along with the experience. There's a journey of some sort to a place of some sort that seems to have commonality across different individual strangely enough

that results in this pronounced transformation of the existential consideration of mortality itself. So it's again of sufficient significance so that there's no end to how deeply you can investigate it. So tell me about that experiment and what you saw happening and what you've made of it. So, these were cancer patients who met diagnostic criteria for significant anxiety or depression, secondary to their cancer diagnosis. And you know, as you well know and can appreciate when someone's facing a life-threatening illness that can be hugely disruptive to them. So the study was a simple study. It was blinded and done very rigorously, but people ended up getting a high dose of psilocybin

at some point. And after doing so, their depression and anxiety drops just precipitously, it remains completely low out to the six- point and another group that ran a parallel kind of study did a follow up five years and they're still reporting those kinds of effects. So these are those kind of enduring changes. So you know what's going on there? Well, it's a mixture. Part of it is a different attitude about death and dying, and we're actually analyzing data from a huge survey right now on changed attitudes

about death and dying secondary to psychedelic exposure, and comparing that to the kinds of changes that people have that occur naturalistically, such as near death experiences, where you get that same kind of shift. So, that's certainly an element, but there's also related to that is this sense of benevolent unity, that there's something about this mystery that we find ourselves in. help. So our life is dependent on death because ourselves are constantly dying. And if death isn't regulated properly within us, we get cancer, for example. So the fact of our healthy existence is actually paradoxically dependent on death itself. The proper amount of death keeps us healthy. And you know, it's so interesting because that's also true psychologically is that you have to let old concepts die and they don't like to die.

It's a painful experience to have the old you die in the light of new experience. It's painful enough so that people will resist it. But there's this benevolent death that's a reparative mechanism. And when I've allowed my intuitions to extend themselves as far as possible, I think, well, that's that's true of of being itself is that in a manner that we can't comprehend, death plays a restorative role. It's it's hand, death plays a restorative role. It's something like the precursor to resurrection. And God only knows where that idea goes. But I believe that these mystical experiences provide a window into that. That there's this mechanism of death at work, but it's a reparative and creative mechanism. All things considered, it's building towards something that we have,

that we have an intuition of and want to participate in and are tortured by our conscience for not participating in. And a glimpse of that, a glimpse of that, glimpse of that. It at least shows you that there's more going on than you think, that there's more going on than you want. So so much of hopelessness is a consequence of premature,

if premature closure. I am certain this is hopeless and pointless. Well, that mystical experience can dispense with that certainty. I'm not so sure that I know what's going on. I'm not so inclined to be, what? To be, to not have doubt about my own skepticism. So, all right, so back to the study. Well, let me just pick up on that because one of the questions that I found myself asking people

as they enrolled in the study is, you know, so, you know, what do you think happens when you die? And it's a very interesting question to ask people. And, you know, and there are those who say, it's computer, it's lights out, it's unplugged, that's it. After these kinds of experiences, there's a crack in that doorway. There's less certainty about that. And that is part of this, part of the kinds of changes

that come about with these experiences. There's a shift in worldview, a shift in the sense of the nature of consciousness, maybe having an eternal quality to it, and that can be tinged with spirituality if someone interprets it within a religious framework, there's something enduring about that. And so the certainty that everything ends at the moment of death is, it comes into more significant question very often with these kinds of experiences. But I don't think it accounts for everything. There are people who come out of these experiences still saying, well, yeah, I don't believe in any kind of afterlife or anything existing. But there is a sense that they may have of the elegance and the beauty and the benevolence

of the entire process that just makes them feel filled with gratitude for the opportunity to be a sentient being and have this experience. There's something celebratory about that. Why gratitude? Why that emotion in particular? Did you focus on? I think that's actually, I think that's the core to what very often, well at least what I believe comes out of these experiences. There's a sense of wonder that comes out of these experiences.

There's a sense of wonder that comes out of the mystery of what it is that we don't know. I mean, you know, there is this hard problem of consciousness but most people don't contemplate it very, very seriously. With a psychedelic, it's almost impossible not to be astonished by how much and humbled by how much you don't understand about the nature of your own mind and the nature of reality. And so we're confronted with this mystery of what is this about? How is it that were these highly evolved beings that have developed the capacity to sense things,

to walk, to talk, with developed societies, with developed sciences and methodology we can communicate. And on top of all that, the astonishing fact is that we're aware that we're aware that if we, and that wouldn't have to be the case, and that's the hard problem of consciousness. And well, I think there's even a harder problem which which the mystical experiences seem to shed some light on, which is to what degree is being itself dependent on consciousness? Because there is the problem of consciousness, but there's the problem of being,

what does it mean that things are? Well, it seems to mean, or at least you can make the case that, well, things aren't unless they're experienced. Because what sort of being is there in the absence of any experience whatsoever? It's all there is is all you can do is construct the hypothetical picture of what being would be like in the absence of consciousness as a conscious creature would formulate that. That's the best you can do, but that's still dependent on consciousness. And so there's a real mystery there, which is well, you know, and I don't think it's a mystery that's properly addressed by, I mean, I'm an evolutionary biologist for all intents and purposes in my orientation.

But a reductive materialism doesn't address that problem. And there's many other problems it doesn't address as well. And it doesn't address them if you take them seriously. It's like there is some relationship between consciousness and being. And I don't see how that can, that's not easily explained by making consciousness and epithelm and of matter. That just makes matter more mysterious as far as I'm concerned. It doesn't get rid of the problem. But there, there in comes the gratitude, right? The very, the very fact that fact that we are gifted with this experience of experience. So I ended my last book with a chapter, be grateful in spite of your suffering.

And that was the end of a two book cycle of thinking. And I put it at the end as the culmination, like what's a final moral rule. Well, that's it because that's the end. That's the antidote to cane. You know, and I take cane's argument seriously, it's a serious argument. Are things so terrible that they shouldn't exist at all? Well, you know, you can accrue a fair bit of evidence in favor of that hypothesis. It doesn't lead to the right place. It makes everything worse as far as I can tell. And I haven't encountered a situation personally where gratitude wasn't better than its alternative. And the alternative seems unbelievably destructive. Resentment, I think, is the opposite of gratitude. And resentment can be a

salutary emotion in that if you notice its emergence in your life, it signifies something that you should pay attention to. But I have seen nothing about it. That's positive as something to be cultivated. You certainly don't teach your children to be, you know, if you sit down and have a discussion with your wife about what sort of children you want, you never say resentful. Everybody agrees that that's toxic beyond tolerability. And so we know there's something wrong with it. And it is extraordinarily, well, I think it's extraordinarily interesting that you focus on that particular experience. And I think that's a humbling as well, that gratitude. Oh, it's hugely humbling.

Yeah, I mean, the thing, I mean, the first experience, you're looking into the existential mystery, right, of a bean. And, and it's a mind-boggling proposition that initially is, a mind-boggling proposition that initially is unfathomable. And then from that emerges this gratitude for that opportunity. And if we want to circle back to the cancer patients, it's that gratitude for the opportunity to live, whether or not they believe that something occurs after death. There's a celebration of life and very often a joy. It's really quite remarkable to see how people who have been so transformed,

how they interact with family members who are, turn out at that point to be more distraught than they are very often. And so how do you, what sort of transformations do you see in their actions with their family members? Oh, they're reassuring. I mean, they'll say, you know, I'm, there's a realism to the seriousness of their condition. So, you know, they'll say, this is, this is very sad. I'm dying. I'm going to leave. But it's okay. It's, it's's it's okay. Everything is all right.

Yeah. So, so the transformation is so radical that not only do they suffer less with regards to their own mortality, but they're transformed sufficiently so that they can now attend to others despite the fact that they are the people that have the fatal illness. Yeah, they become the caretakers in the family unit. And it also has the potential for totally shifting end of life care, because if you're no longer grasping to every shred of every minute of life, there's a deep interest in connecting and staying connected and so you're much less likely to elect to go in the hospital and under incredibly brutal conditions to achieve those last days or weeks. to achieve those last days or weeks.

So the potential actually in terms of large kinda cultural change to change death and dying and how we handle that as a culture is very significant. Why Silasibon? Why did you pick Silasibon? Why is psilocybin? Why did you pick psilocybin? A couple of reasons. One, it's duration of action is clinically manageable. So it's not too short if you did intravenous DMT that's a matter of 15 or 20 minutes.

And this gives you a longer period of time to have an experience and then to reintegrate that experience. But it's not nearly as long as something like LSD, which is like a 12-hour time course, which is just taxing for everybody and pretty clinically unmanageable. There's a sense, but I don't think we have good data on this, that psilocybin can be gentler than LSD psychologically, and I'm not positive about that. But, you know, the most important piece of it is that most people can't spell psilocybin,

and it simply didn't have the cultural baggage that LSD did. cultural baggage that LSD did. So, and I think it turns out to be a really good pick for a model system. But there are literally thousands of other compounds that could be synthesized that are going to have a different influence on the nature of consciousness that should be and will be explored over time. I've been reading this book recently, The Immortality Key by Brian Murerescu, and he's making a case

that has been made by other people, although he makes it in a very interesting way and a very original way. It's reminiscent to me of John Legro's work from the early late 60s, late 60s, which sort of got pilloried at the time because, well, that was just when LSD and all the psychedelics were being made illegal, and Legro was sort of jumped, jumped, lumped in with the hippie types and ignored. I read the Sacred Mushroom and the Cross years ago, and I thought he's a linguist and he claims to have gathered an immense amount of linguistic data suggesting that early Christianity was a mushroom cult. And I couldn't assess his claims because I'm not a linguist, but it certainly looked to me at the time like it was

an extraordinarily serious book. And I read it and I thought, I have no idea what to do with this information. I can't tell if it's credible or not. And if it is credible, well, then what? Like what in the world are we supposed to do with this? And then Murerscu, he's making a strong case that the Illusinean mysteries were, which, upon in which the Greek society that gave rise to the West, let's say, was embedded, was deeply embedded within a psychedelic religious tradition that was

actually an integral part of the culture, not some peripheral element, but a central element, that that was also the case with the cult of Dionysius, the God of the Wine, and that Christianity took many of the mysteries, including the sacrament cult of Dionysius, the God of the Wine, and that Christianity took many of the mysteries, including the sacrament from the Dionysian cult. And so I think, and I certainly think that the book of Revelation bears all the hallmarks of a classic psychedelic experience. So then I'm thinking, well, what are you supposed to think about that exactly? I mean, I take the fact that our society is Judeo-Christian and it's underlying narrative structure extremely seriously.

I think that's true as a fact, whether it's the right way for things to be is a different question, but also an important question. But I have no idea how to conceptualize our relationship with psychedelics. Let me tell you my most paranoid thought about this. Okay, you tell me what you think about this. So on the one hand, you have this, the most extreme idea on the one hand is that psychedelic experience is a gateway to something that's actually divine and God only knows what the significance of that is. But here's another thought. There's this, you know, that parasites can hijack nervous systems. So there's this one example of, I may not get this story exactly right, but there's this parasite that hijacks ants nervous systems

and the insects. It makes them climb up like a stalk and they pincer themselves to a leaf and then their body fills up with the parasite spores and they explode and the parasites go everywhere. And so the parasite is evolved to hijack the ants nervous system. And there's plenty of examples of parasites doing that sort of complex thing over time. There's a cat parasite that lives in cats that makes rats more less fearful.

And they're more likely to be caught by cats, which is quite interesting. And so then I'm thinking about psilocybin. And it's this mushroom, and it produces this chemical. And nobody really knows what good the chemical is to the mushroom. And it has this immense effect on us. And like, have we been using psilocybin for 500,000 years and have we been distributing it spores everywhere? And is it a parasite that's hijacked our nervous system? And the way it's done that is by producing this religious experience that we value. I mean, that's the most devastating materialistic critique

of this psychedelic idea that I've been able to formulate. And I mean, one piece of counter evidence to that, I think is the fact that I think the evidence seems to suggest that the psychedelic experience is salutary from the perspective of mental and physical health rather than destructive. But... physical health rather than destructive. But it looks like we've been using mushrooms for God only knows how long.

I mean, it's certainly tens of thousands of years. It's certainly at least as far back as the last ice age. And God only knows how far back it is before that. It's what, as a biological thinker, say, what are your thoughts about that? Yeah, yeah. I don't know if I can take that on. I don't understand. I mean, it's a huge mystery. And what role do these experiences

play in the evolution of culture? Let's start with that one. Well, and so yeah, what roles do religions play in the evolution of culture, and you know, a really important and central role, right? Yeah, well, the central role, like it looks to me like integrated cultures, there's no distinction between their ritual and their dance and their music and their stories and their religion. That's all one thing. and their music, and their stories, and their religion. That's all one thing. And it's the central source of meaning that enables them to live as individuals

and that unites them as a people. So that seems clear. So you can't just push the religious idea off to the side. That's a mistake. I think the data for that are in. And so it's central. Well, now it seems shaped by these psychedelic experiences. So what the hell are we supposed to make of that? I don't even know what to make of that.

Either epistemologically, as a theory of knowledge or ontologically, I don't know what that says about the structure of reality itself. I don't know what God says about the structure of reality itself. Well, let's see. It provides an evolutionary explanation for why, yeah, why that might have been conserved, right? That there's something super adaptive about the religious experience in terms of evolution of culture and organization of culture.

Well, I think, look, when I've tried to reduce this, I mean, that experience of awe, so we went to a we went to a whole conference on that. So if you see someone that you really admire, that shades into awe. And you can see that in in the affected celebrities have on the public. It's a parallel, it can be paralyzing. So, the admiration, there's a continuum between admiration and awe. And then you can easily make the case, I think, that admiration is the felt sense of the instinct to imitate. So you see children maybe, they hero worship someone and then they they'll imitate them, they'll copy them, they find someone who's in that zone of proximal development and they start to copy them or they'll take on the identity of a hero or heroine in a

movie, my little granddaughter who's three for a year now, literally a year. She has two names, Scarlet and Ellie, Elizabeth. And we kind of call her one or the other. And if you ask her, is she Scarlet, she'll say yes. Is she Ellie, yes. Is she Pocahontas? Yes. Is she Scarlet, Ellie, or Pocahontas? Pocahontas, one year.

Now she watched that Disney movie over and over and she has a Pocahontas doll. But she's picked that figure and that's quasi-mythological figure, obviously, not a historical figure. She's picked that as her identity. And I see that as we can imitate people. We talked about reality and hyper reality before. Well, you can find someone you admire and they're real, or you can

find someone who's a mythological figure and they're hyper real. And the hyper reality is so adaptive that imitating the hyper real is more adaptive than imitating the real. And that's to me, that's the essence of the religious instinct. It's to derive the hyper-real and then to imitate that. And I think that's what worship means essentially all with everything stripped away. And so that's a profound instinct

because human beings are unbelievable mimics. I mean, that's a very underappreciated element of our cognitive architecture, a fundamental element. And that, that instinct to admire and experience off facilitates that mimicry and that increases the probability of the manifestation of complex adaptive behavior. Okay, so, and then what does what? That makes of the religious domain something real as far as I'm concerned, even real from the biological sense. But that deepens the mystery of the involvement of the psychedelics in that. Like, are they, are they parasitizing that? Or are they cocaine hyperstimulates the psychomotor stimulant system? Well, does psychedelics hyperstimulate the imitation awe system? And is that an illusion, or is it, in fact, the revelation of something deeper?

Yeah, to circle back to the ontological question. So just recently, I listened to a lecture that Francis Collins gave. Now, so Francis Collins, you may recognize is director of the National Institutes on Health. And he was also the director of the human genome project. So he's a strongly credentialed scientist as one can have, and yet he's absolutely confirmed Christian. And so he was giving a lecture on the reconciliation of, I think he called it, harmonization of a scientific and religious worldview. But he was laying out his arguments for the existence of God.

And one of them would be his claim, and it's an interesting claim, and you could argue it, but the existence of moral law, that there is an absolute moral law. Well, look, you know, you, I looked at Jack Panck's work, you know, and he shows that you see complex morality emerging rats in play, play iterated play, which is a crucial issue, right? What pattern of behavior is sustainably optimal

across repeated social interactions? Well, you know, you hear all these postmodern critiques, say, of hierarchical structure because of its predication on power. I think, no, no, corrupt hierarchies are predicated on power. Functional hierarchies are predicated on reciprocal are predicated on power. Functional hierarchies are predicated on reciprocal, on reciprocity, on productive reciprocity. I was talking to this, this Jocke Willink, who was the commander of Fallujah in the 20 years ago, and he's a real warrior type, you know, like a real intimidating person physically and mentally for that matter. He talked about his Navy seal training and, you know, he said, well, we were taught, it was pounded into us to have the back of the guide next to us. It wasn't like every powerful clambering ape for himself,

not at all, in these intensely competitive hierarchies, which would be, you'd think, as pure a manifestation of the power mode of S would be, you'd think, as pure a manifestation of the power mode of S would be possible. Power is not the guiding ethos. And he said, quite clearly, no, your men won't attend to you unless it's reciprocal. You, they have to know you have their backs. And so, and he made also a very sophisticated case for the development of verbal intelligence and the ability to communicate and strategizing and also when taking care of your team. And so I don't believe that,

so what am I getting at in relationship to your last point? This religious, this emergent ethic, this natural law, okay. So imagine now hierarchies are organized around an ethical principle if there to be stable and productive across long spans of time. And a pattern that pattern emerges cross culturally. It's reciprocal productivity, something like that. It's more, there's more to it than that. Okay, now you're selected for your success in those hierarchies based on your ability to manifest that pattern. Because that'll push you up the hierarchy. That increases as far as I can tell. That increases your attractiveness as a potential mate substantially. And so I think you can make a very deep biological case for the even for the emergent evolution of an ethical sense. And I think that does speak to people in the voice of their conscience.

And that is part of, well, then you think, well, if that's part of existence, how deep a part is it? How built in is it? You know, and I don't, and that I suppose depends to some degree on how crucial consciousness is to be. Okay, so back to the gentleman that you were discussing. I suppose depends to some degree on how crucial consciousness is to be. Okay, so back to the gentleman that you were discussing. He was talking about a natural ethic. Yeah. Well, I think as a pointer to God, something absolute about the nature of what more law is. And from that standpoint, if you're willing to go that route, then maybe these experiences are actually pointing to

something that is absolute and true. And informative. Do you think that's true? I don't know. I'm a scientist. It's fine to be investigating it. Yeah. No, I want to pin you down.

Let's see. I'm trained as a scientist. My default is to be deeply curious and to be deeply skeptical. So, just the right attitude towards all of this. And so my response always is that I believe in the data. And so that remains an open question, but it's certainly fun to toy with

as an alternative framing of what's going on. I mean, we're in the middle of this huge mystery. as an alternative framing of what's going on. I mean, we're in the middle of this huge mystery. So, historical significance. What do you think of the theories associating early Christianity and the sacrament with the ingestion of psychedelic substances? I don't know. Certainly, it's quite plausible. I mean, if you read the accounts of the illusion mysteries and the kinds of experiences people had.

It sure sounds like a psychedelic experience, at least some of those accounts. But we also know that those kinds of experiences can be engendered naturally as well. And so, yeah, I don't want to discount that, you know, that is a possibility. There's actually some, you know, some the psychedelic proponents, the enthusiasts, you know, think that what we're laying down is the, you know, to open up to these kind of experiences. And I see it actually quite differently is, you know, we're learning about the capacity of the of the human species of the organism to have

these experiences. And what I would suspect is that in, you know, 10, 20, 50 years, in, you know, 10, 20, 50 years, psychedelics are gonna be very considered very crude tools to engender these things. We're gonna have, you know, much better ways and more precise ways to intervene in this process to occasion experiences of this sort. But to go back to your question, so what, yeah,

is this plausible that it has played a role? It's certainly plausible. It seems quite unlikely that accounts for the entirety of these kinds of transformers. It still leaves all sorts of things unsolved. Why did the worship of Dion kinds of transformers. It still leaves all sorts of things unsolved. Like, I mean, why did the worship of Dionysius transform into the worship of Christ, for example? I mean, even if there's psychedelic continuity there,

that's a question that we can hardly pose, let alone answer. And I'm also extremely curious. I mean, this place, do you think it's reasonable to conceptualize the destination place of a trip as a place? I mean, that's what Greek mythology appears to do. That's what the mythology of the underworld appears to be about, as far as I can tell. What are you thinking about? We've talked about how psychedelics shed a different light on the structure of reality

as we perceive it, but people also report going places that aren't here exactly. The idea, the shamanic idea, the universe is a tree, I believe that that's the tree of size, essentially, that that's the realm from the subatomic to the cosmic. That's how that's portrayed in the in the primordial human imagination and the shaman report traveling up and down those levels. And that's not out of keeping with the experiences that people report on psychedelics unsurprisingly, because hypothetically they're derived from the same domain. And then there's the entity problem as well, especially with DMT. I know Rick Strassman, who studied DMT so

intently, and I have never met Rick, but my impression from reading him is that he was a pretty buttoned down sort of guy when he got into the psychedelic field. He wasn't driven in there from the hippie end of things. It was more from the sceptical intellect type direction, but he appears to have been so shocked by what the DMT experience produced in terms of reports from people that, you know, while it was shocking to him to say the least, and no wonder because it seems that everyone who takes DMT reports going somewhere very fast and encountering all sorts of alien entities. And, but they also describe that as hyper real and if you object

that those are figures of the imagination or even Jungian archetypes among those who would know of that sort of thing, that that's not an acceptable explanation appear apparently. So what do you make of that? Yeah, and well, the story with Rick Strassman is interesting because it was literally so disguiding to him that he ended up stopping his research because he had such a high rate of his participants, you know, talking about encountering entities within that that he, he didn't know how to manage that. So one of the surveys that who does, right? Because it's just what do you do with it? What do you do with data? You know, see you said you go where the data drives you and fair enough, but sometimes the data

itself is you don't know what to do with it. And the DMT experience has certainly seemed to fall in that category. Yeah, so we've run a number of interesting survey studies, and you mentioned them at the outset, one about God encounter experiences, and the other about entity encounters with DMT. We did this as a survey study. We actually ended up getting data on 2,500 people who had had a DMT entity encounter experience. And we gave them detailed questionnaires about the nature of those experiences. Most of them ended up feeling that they had encountered sentient and a conscious benevolent, often sacred other in these experiences, which was surprising to us because we, based on the literature, I had thought that these

entity encounter experiences might be something different than that. But importantly, most of the people claim to come out of the experience with a different sense of reality. The majority of them continue to think that the entity existed after the experience continues to exist. So what? So they're not mere figments of the imagination. No, absolutely not. They're, yeah, their conception of reality has been shifted in a really fundamental and primary way.

And so that's haunting. Now, one of the curiosities is that in a different survey when we asked people about God encounter experiences and we did that naturally occurring God encounters and psychedelic occasion God encounters, it actually was much of the same story. People felt that they were in the presence of a conscious, intelligent, benevolent entity,

caring entity, and their worldview shifted. But these were people who went into this framing it in terms of a spiritual religious experience. The DMT people very often didn't have a religious orientation to begin with, yet they come out with these beliefs. It's, um, and we should point out to everyone who's listening that DMT is the active ingredient in the Brazilian, in the Amazonian, Iowaska, which is also a complete mystery in and of

itself because nobody can figure out how those shaman figured out how to make that stuff. So yeah. And with, and the ayahuasca DMT is ingested along with a compound that, that slows its elimination. So it changes the entire time course. And, and my sense, although entity encounters can occur with psychedelics generally, my impression is that the intensity of these kinds of entity encounter experiences and the probability are much greater with, this is smoked DMT or in the case of Rick Strouseman, it was interbenis DMT, but it's a very fast

onset. Right, well, and that's pharmacologically relevant because one of the, one of the determinants of the effect of a drug is maximum blood level, say, or brain level, but another is the rate at which that level is attained. So which is why injected cocaine is so much more potent and also dangerous than, than say, orally administered cocaine, same with most drugs. So that rapidity of onset is relevant. So, I mean, do you have any ontological sense of what's happening in the DMT experience? Well, before we go to the ontological sense, the DMT experience maps on to naturally occurring entity encounter experiences. So, you know, we have a whole history of people reporting

alien encounter experiences or alien abduction experiences. And if you really look at that, those descriptions, they're much more similar than different to what we're seeing with the DMT. So I would come. Yes, which makes things even weirder, I would say. Well, weirder and maybe not, in the same sense that we're biologically wired or predisposed to have these kinds of experiences, but then ontologically, what do you make of them? And, you know, when, you know, certainly when I had read Alien Encounter literature, you know, just apriori, I was entirely dismissive of it. Who was that was Mac, right? At Harvard, very well-credential psychiatrist? He was, he has his tail put in a complete knot by his investigations of alien encounters,

because what he showed was that he figured that people who were reporting this would have an extensive history of psychopathology of one form or another. But when he did the analysis, there was no evidence for that. And so Mac ended up believing that, well, that something real had happened to these people. And of course, that did his career, no favor. And which is also, I would say, an indication of how strongly he came to believe that. Yeah. And there have been other studies done since then. So I think we're talking about the same kind of process.

Now, what's going on and what does it mean? Boy, I don't know. I mean, it sure seems unlikely at priori. Well, I don't know. I don't know what to make of it. One of the striking features of the DMT encounters was that the attributions made to the entity really mapped onto the same kinds of attributions that people describe in their God encounter experiences. So those are more similar than different. Now if you read that DMT literature,

you get other wild descriptions of, you know, alligators and insect doids and... Mechanical clowns and... Yeah, yeah, it's really, it just makes things weirder. The more you read about the experiences. It is, but, you know but having 2,500 cases, we were looking at, is there a modal description? Are these going to look like the alien grays or something like that? Well, no, not at all. of descriptors of what they think they encountered.

And what I wonder with the God encounters, I mean, if that's not the same kind of mechanism at work, and maybe there's less visualization, maybe it's less likely that there's going to be a sense of encountering embodied other, but there's something inethable, more inethable about some of those experiences. Okay. So, I'm going to pull us in another direction because there's definitely, there's other things about some of those experiences. Okay, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna pull us in another direction because there's definitely,

there's other things I really wanna get your opinion about Tom, many things. Let's start with your studies in religious leaders. Like what are you doing? What motivated you to do that? Why, yeah, I really wanna know why you're doing that. What you think will happen, what the cultural significance,

because it's such a wild thing to do. Like you've got, you've already established the fact that these mystical experiences are reliably inducible. And now you're pulling in figures of significance in religious communities. So, that's another thing I can't believe you've managed to do. But why and what are you seeing and what do you think's going to happen? Well, let's see.

So I'm a little bit handicapped in how much I can say about that specific study, but let me describe that line of investigation. So that came, it just comes out of my own deep curiosity about the nature of these experience and their spiritual religious significance. So we started out with healthy volunteers, and we've done a whole bunch of stuff with patient populations.

So where the rubber meets the road here and our culture immediately is these drugs as therapeutics and they're gonna be very powerful. Yes, if you've had amazing success with smoking cessation, for example. Smoking and depression and end of life and there's good evidence for alcoholism and there are a variety of other targets now and that

an excitement is that we may have trans-diagnostic efficacy because the very nature of these experiences are so fundamental to rewriting the operating system if you will that the kinds of changes that can come about can cut across a variety of psychiatric diagnostic categories. So that work is going on. So a psychiatric drug that's not hampered by diagnostic diversity, essentially. Yeah, I mean, it's not going to work with everything, obviously, but I think its application is going to be much broader than any psychiatric. Well, and as you already pointed out, we're not very good at this yet.

Like, what have you been investigating this for how long? Well, 20 years now. Right, right. So, you know, all things considered a drop in the bucket. Yeah. So this other line of investigation, you know, grew out of my interest in meditation. So we started with healthy volunteers. We did some just parametric work, just figuring out dose effects and repulability and stuff

like that. And then we went on and we did a study in beginning meditators, people who were interested in taking on a meditation practice and who were psychedelic naïve and what we showed is again the mystical experience drives long-term trade-level changes of the type that you mentioned in terms of openness, but there's a number of other trade-level changes that occur very often in a pro-social direction, you know, gratitude, now-trueism, and that sort of thing. We then did a study in long-term meditators, and of course that came right out of my interest, so the question there was, well, what about people who have spent decades exploring the

nature of their mind and have developed some capacity for sustained investigation of that sort? What do they make of these experiences? And that study we're writing up, but I can say that most of those long-term meditators found those experiences to be astonishing just as everyone else has. So that's very crucial, right? Because they're initiates already in some sense, but this is pushing them past where they've already gone and radically. Yeah, and they attribute positive changes to their sitting meditation practice and to their sense of

awareness and daily life, which is really the core of what meditation practice is cultivating. So all the same kinds of positive attributions and saying that it facilitates their engagement, none of them would say that it's a psychedelic or a substitute for what the meditation practice, because meditation results in the stability of awareness that psychedelics certainly do not. So then the next step was religious professionals. And we are collecting the last data on that.

It was a study that was run jointly at Hopkins and NYU. And we have made a pact in the study team not to talk about any results until we're ready to publish. But I can tell you, I can give you a broad brush stroke of what we're thinking there, of course. And hoping, perhaps, maybe, because we maybe we can close this off with a little bit of discussion about, you know, the potential impact of this. I mean, I'm very interested, for example, in the decline of religious belief across the West. And there's a necessity for revitalization. And, and, well, back to the religious leaders. Yeah. So that's the question. So among people who have made career commitments to ministry and to supporting people's spiritual growth, what happens with them a with a psychedelic experience and and how does that fit with

their ministry their engagement in that and And they're bleak. Do you plan to do long-term efficacy studies like I'd be really curious if you're your psychedelic enhanced ministers Let's say we're then more credible your psychedelic enhanced ministers, let's say, were then more credible proponents for their community and their congregations were disproportionately, for example, or perhaps not likely to grow? We probably don't have the power to address that question. We'll certainly follow these people up. And the initial study we have follow up to 12 months.

And we're doing a lot of qualitative work on this. I think what I can say without saying anything specific about the data, is that the results are not inconsistent with that that we have seen in healthy volunteers and beginning meditators and long-term meditators. That is, there's something astonishing about these experiences, and I'll have to Leave it at that, but but I think the implications are Are important. I mean so the question is yeah, how does this

Interact with faith traditions and traditions and that's going to be an interesting story to tell and to have unfold. But I don't think I can say anything further about it. Yeah, well, fair enough, fair enough. I guess I'm so curious. I can backing off the study per se. I mean, you know, there's something about these experiences that speak to the ineffable and this whole project of organizing community around investigation and cultivation of the fruits of those kinds of experiences. And I think that's hugely consequential. So one of the features of the, you know, that I've already discussed of the primary mystical experience is this sense of the interconnectness of

all people and it's sacred and it's true. And, and from that arises this sense of a pro-social sense of altruism, a sense that we're all in this together. Well, if that isn't the golden rule, and if that doesn't, you know, speak to the nature of, you know, most ethical and moral traditions. Okay. So I want to unpack that for a minute because it's so surprising. Like, you can go over that quickly and it doesn't sound surprising. So the drugs are producing an expansion of human experience that's meaningful and positive, but it's not hedonic precisely.

That isn't the system, it's affecting. So that's unbelievably crucial. It's something other than cocaine. It's something other than incentive reward. Okay, now it's lasting. And then there's the prosocial element and the uniting element, so it's philosophical, but it's also ethical. And all of those things are radical surprises, right? It could be philosophical without being ethical, and it could be positive without being philosophical. And then the fourth thing is that feeling of truth

that is associated with it too. So it's got this deep cognitive element that's also surprising. These aren't things that you would suspect or predict. And they do differentiate these drugs substantially from other drugs of abuse, completely, qualitatively. And so people come out, they're more pro-social. And so you think that's a exaggeration or a strengthening of our inbuilt, reciprocal

ethic, like the, so you see an expansion of the philosophical with the radical increase in openness and hypothetically associated neural transformations. Well, now you see a strengthening of that ethic, that's associated with this profound underlying narrative readjustment, it tilts people to the positive, it tilts them to the positive it tilts them to the reciprocal and the interactive it gives them a deeper faith

it's hard to see how all that couldn't be of significance to religious communities and then the question is well what should be what do you talk how do you talk to religious people about this especially if they're more on the conservative end of things, because a less conservative hypothesis could hardly be imagined, right? It's the psychedelic origin of the deep Judeo-Christian ethic. That's a radical idea. And it brings up this question, well, we lost this technology essentially something like 2,000 years ago in the West, except in underground places. Do we re-incorporate it?

How do we re-incorporate it? And what does that mean on the religious front, like the conservative religious front with regards to say, practice? Well, but again, I would say it doesn't have to be psychedelics. We're gonna learn more about the nature of these experiences. And who knows? I mean, there may be a way to do this with, you know,

electrocranial stimulation, you know, or, or, you know, other kinds of manipulations. I'm going to object to that just for a second. Well, and I have a specific reason, because I think that's a careful argument and an appropriate one, but I don't think your data support it, because you just told me that even the experienced meditators for them, it's a qualitative transformation. And so you've already got a population

that have been using disciplined technology, right? And good and good for them. You know, it was Elliott, and Merchand Elliott, I believe that Shomb, the shamanic transformation in its puriform wasn't drug mediated. But I think it looks to me like I have a great respect for Elliott. I learned a tremendous amount from him. I think, I don't think the evidence supports that claim. I think the psychedelics are doing something that is in addition to what discipline practice.

I mean, who knows what happens if you practice for 35 years, let's say, and that's all you do. But it isn't obvious to me that this can be duplicated on the non-chemical front. Oh, let's say, I don't disagree with you. I mean, this is the most powerful intervention we have for creating at high probability these kinds of experiences. We don't, nothing comes close to it. Well, there's an intensity issue too, right?

It's not just probability, but also intensity. Yeah, absolutely. But that doesn't mean that we're not going to refine this further, and that there might not be another way to do it. Right. It also doesn't mean that discipline practice is not advisable and that caution isn't the appropriate byword. Yeah. Yeah. But there, you know, there could be other physiological interventions, you physiological interventions that aren't psychedelic drugs, aren't serotonin-2A agonist. So all I'm scoping out is that this is going to back to the implications. So these experiences are hugely prosocial and ethical,

or speak to basic ethics. And so, I've concluded, and it sounds to some like an overstatement, but I don't think it is, that actually unpacking this whole situation is crucial to the survival of our species, because that impuls. Well, that's what the masters of the Elisynian mysteries proclaimed, that what they're doing, that we would all die without that we couldn't live without it and so if we can understand this The kinds of experiences that give rise to mutual caretaking then we have the ability to solve all kinds of horrors that you know our cultures have

imposed on us and you know there our cultures have imposed on us. And you know, you could imagine an interfaith dialogue that could come out of exploration of these kinds of experiences across faith traditions when, and I, and my guess will be that the discovery is going to be, well, wait a second, the bedrock core, and this is the perennial philosophy, the bedrock core of most of these traditions is really quite similar. And so whether the future is integrating this into existing religious institutions, or seeing evolution of our cultural institutions that can incorporate this sort of thing,

is I think a question. One of the things that is disquieting to me is that the ability of these experiences to shift world view is potentially really destabilizing to existing cultural institutions. Yeah, well, that's what happened in the 60s. And it's no wonder there was, like, we underestimate the magnitude of these processes at our peril. God only knows what's happening at the bottom of them. Yeah. So it is a genie that we maybe can't do without, but it's still fire to mix it.

It is fire. It is fire. And I think that accounts for the history of psychedelics having been discovered in some cultures and then forgotten or suppressed. I mean, look what happened when the Spanish came over to Mexico. I mean, they actively stamped out the use of psychedelics. And I think at the core, if we're not careful, they can be destabilizing the culture, and then culture is going to come back and demonize them as is exactly what happened in the 60s. So I am concerned about the excited movement toward

decriminalization and legalization. And before the, before the, the, well, there's a, let's say an ecstatic spiritual domain of religiosity and there's a dogmatic discipline, traditional end of religion. And, you know,

the spiritual types and they have the personality for this are always opposed to the dogmatic types. But, you know, those two things have to exist together. Carl Jung said was one of the most brilliant things he ever said was that the purpose of religious structures is to stop people from having religious experiences. And he was, he was referring to this destabilizing effect that an untrammeled mystical experience can have

psychologically and sociologically, you just can't have a million separate religions pop up without everything disintegrating. And so we have to figure out how to place the genie inside the bottle. And I mean, this is why what you've done is part of the reason. It's so fascinating to me because for some reason reason you've been able to get the balance between tradition and discipline and empirical reasoning and careful rationality and skepticism. You balanced that with this intense focus on your own curiosity, your sense of meaning and brought those together and managed it institutionally. So something that you did worked, it's right. And taking that apart and figuring out how that can be replicated, let's say, that's a crucial future task.

And the decriminalization, I understand that, but one thing we can encourage anyone who's listening to this, to consider is none of this should be done lightly. It should be done within an ethical framework. You should do it with the highest possible intent and reverence and. Yeah. And they're in their real risks. So, you know, our people are carefully screened. We're really concerned about precipitation of enduring psychotic illness, schizophrenia. We have avoided administering to anyone with bipolar disorder that remains to be investigated.

Maybe it'll work, maybe it won't, probably. it will work, maybe it won't probably. And certainly, the risk of people engaging in dangerous behavior, if they're not in a sufficient container, and that's where you do get people running into traffic or committing suicides or home sides. So this isn't to be taken lightly. But Jordan, if I can just come back to kind of culturally and how do we integrate this? I'm almost thinking of this now in terms of a evolutionary sense. That we have to evolve the cultural institutions that can create the containers around these experiences

such that they don't threaten our existing institutions, which are gonna become reactive and demonize them and shut it down and figure out the intelligent use of these compounds. And so when you're doing that as a scientist and now you're inviting religious leaders to participate in that process, which seems to me to be, I mean, are they sold just out of curiosity, for example, you'll have this group of religious leaders, this assembly of religious leaders who've now undergone this experience. So will they commune and will they discuss collectively

the implications of this? Like, you know, because it's necessary to start thinking about how those social structures might be evolved. You have this first batch of people who already have made an ethical commitment and a disciplined choice, it would be fascinating to it seems to put them together for three or four days and say, well, look, now what do we do with this?

You're in there in a unique position and to see what answers might arise from that. Yeah, Harvard School of Divinity is initiating a psychedelic chaplaincy program. And I'm not sure of all the domains of that. But that's unbelievable. That's unbelievable. Yeah. Wow. So, so, so,

play, play. Do you have any to come in that's going to be launched? Let's see, I think they have declared that. I'd have to go online, but they're actually... Well, that should solve some of their enrollment problems. Well, yeah, but that's also relevant, right? It's like, look, okay, now you've, you've caught into something, that attracts people.

Well, that's to be paid attention to because the church is having a terrible time attracting people, especially young people. And so that can't be ignored, especially if those institutions are necessary. But right now we have no path forward within our culture for approval of administration of psychedelic to to well persons. We're capable of doing these studies as research

projects, but but We don't and we have our FDA that approves drugs, but they're approving them to treat conditions of either psychological or physical suffering. Right. And so this is part of the co-evolution where that needs to happen. And existential insufficiency isn't enough of a psychiatric diagnostic category to qualify. But I'm kind of really quite serious about that. I mean, lots of, it's the sense of futility,

meaningless annihilism, that's not rare. And it's not harmless by any stretch of the imagination. At minimum, it's staggeringly demoralizing. At maximum, it motivates all sorts of terrible acts of commission, not just omission. And it warps and hurts our entire society. It's not a trivial problem that we don't know how to deal with our own mortality, for example, and no bloody wonder. It's a complicated problem. Yeah, so that's one pathway forward is application in death and dying, right? And initially to get approval for people who have

some psychological distress, but you could imagine that actually changing the culture. It's not gonna happen overnight. We're probably talking about a multi-generational process, but one sec. We can move pretty quick when we're motivated now. let me ask you one more thing about this integration issue like so you've given these drugs to spiritual leaders. So then I would think, okay research project in a cathedral, and you administer the psilocybin as a sacrament

with the music, with the entire transformation, mass apparatus, because if it's reasonable to administer to spiritual leaders, at least hypothetically, it's reasonable to investigate what happens when you put it in an intense, I mean, a lot of work went into a cathedral, a lot of work went into that music, the entire ritual, and the idea of what's actually happening being made explicit. You know, I mean, those experiences are already powerful.

God only knows how you might multiply them with the power of, of all of that imagery and pageantry and tradition and layers and layers of meaning. Yeah, so going back to the original Good Friday experiment conducted at Harvard, it was done in a Good Friday service with seminary students, in a good Friday service with seminary students, a number of whom had mystical experiences, not all of whom did. But that's what you're talking about. I mean, those are kind of set in setting conditions that would be really interesting. We have looked at this under such a narrow range of conditions. I mean, you know, we're putting people on a couch with the eye shape. Well, you do everything you can to make it sterile, except the music, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and we're creating the introvert of the experience, but we yet to be explored as the extrovert of, and just experimentally as you can appreciate, there's a whole lot more going on there. So it's a rougher, experimental paradigm to control. You could carve that in stone. Thank you. Well, thank you, Jordan. This is delightful to speak with you about this. Yeah, well, there's so many more things I would like to ask you about, but that was pretty good for two hours.

So I'm so much looking forward to reading the results of this spiritual leader study. And, um, well, maybe we can circle back once we've published where the long-term meditator study is on its way out and we'll have the religious professional study hopefully out within the next, I would hope, year. Maybe we can circle back and talk a little bit further. That would be that would be great. That would be great. So all right, well, happy good Friday, if that thing that can be said. Thank you. Thank you, Jordan. Yeah, yeah, I really appreciated the discussion and I'm well, I think your work is of what's of what would you say, incalculable import? I mean, that technically, I don't really know what to make of it.

So, it's great that it happened. And hopefully it'll be for the good. Let's hope that. Yeah, I mean, it fits so closely with many of the themes that you have developed and advocated for, that it's just really exciting to be able to talk to you about it. So thank you. you