The One You Feed - Michael Pollan on the New Science of Psychedelics and Consciousness

Episode Date: June 6, 2018

Michael Pollan is a writer whose books have topped the New York Times bestseller list time and time again. He teaches writing at Harvard and The University of California Berkley. In 2010, Time magazin...e name Michael Pollan one of the most influential people in the world. His books and essays have historically focused on our interaction with nature and this new book takes that theme to a whole other level. Its title gives you a great idea of what it's about: How to Change your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. No matter how many interviews you've heard of Michael Pollan talking about his new book, our interview will offer you a fresh perspective, things he has not previously discussed and things that you may not have previously considered. The very last concept discussed in Eric's conversation with Michael Pollan will for sure leave you thinking anew. Visit oneyoufeed.net/transform to learn more about our personal transformation program. Our sponsor this week is Casper Mattress visit  www.casper.com/oneyoufeed and use the promo code theoneyoufeed for $50 off your purchase In This Interview, Michael Pollan and I Discuss...His book, How to Change your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and TranscendenceHow fear is a big motivator in people's action and inactionThat your obstacles are all between your earsHow consciousness is a big mysteryWhat the newest science tells us about psychedelicsThe way psychedelics affect us by allowing us to look at normal, everyday consciousness in new waysThe default mode network going quiet during a psychedelic tripThe ego, idea of self in the brain and our lifePsychedelics impact on the sense of selfThe experience of the dissolution of the egoThe mind-expanding power of mystical experienceThe theory of the entropic brainHow the brain works to reduce uncertainty and surpriseThe narrowing of consciousness by rigid thinkingThe stories our brains tell usInsufficient entropy in the brain perhaps leading to mental illnessesPsychedelics disordering the brainThe similarities between a tripping brain on psychedelics and a meditative brainAn ego-free state of consciousness through the use of psychedelicsThe mistake of seeing spirituality as the opposite of materialismThe opposite of spiritual being egotisticalThe ego keeps us from having a deep connection with everything around usHow psychedelics are "wasted on the young"That those in the 2nd half of their lives may benefit most from the use of psychedelicsThe importance of breaking the rigidity that growing older bringsHow psychedelics can help us make peace with our deathPsilocybin benefiting those facing imminent death with great fearHow psychedelics and a psychodynamic approach are not opposites"Psychedelic assisted psychotherapy"Positive trauma in the brainAdministering an experience rather than a drugThe importance of set and setting when taking a psychedelicHow a spiritual experience alone doesn't make a spiritual lifeThat ego is nothing but a contraction Please Support The Show with a DonationSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 I think fear is really a key driver of human action and inaction. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.
Starting point is 00:00:41 But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like
Starting point is 00:01:19 why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Michael Pollan, author of many books, including Cooked, Food Rules, In Defense of Food, The Omnivore's Dilemma, and The Botany of Desire, all of which were New York Times bestsellers. A longtime contributor to the New York Times Magazine, Michael also teaches writing at Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley.
Starting point is 00:02:02 In 2010, Time magazine named him one of the most influential people in the world. His new book is How to Change Your Mind, What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. Hi, Michael. Welcome to the show. Thank you, Eric. Good to be here. It's a real pleasure to have you on. Your writings have been wonderful over the years, and you have a new book called How to Change Your Mind, What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence.
Starting point is 00:02:36 And we'll jump into that book in just a second, but let's start off like we usually do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and thinks about it for a second and looks up at his grandfather. He says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well, that's a good question. You know, I think fear is really a key driver of human action and inaction. And we feed it all the time. Our ego feeds it. Our ego uses fear to
Starting point is 00:03:28 or tries to defend us and relies on fear. I don't know. My dad actually was a very wise man. He died in January. And his clients used to call him a professional fear remover in that he recognized that what kept us from realizing our dreams and doing what we want to do in life was our fear. You know, he said, your obstacles are all between your ears. And that obstacle was usually fear. I thought about that a lot in the case of working on psychedelics, because one of the things they do and you need to do in order to get benefit from them is remove fear, overcome fear, stop feeding fear. So that parable means quite a bit to me. Wonderful. So what I'd like to direct this conversation towards in our relatively short time is sort of the second part
Starting point is 00:04:20 of the book or the title, which is really, what does the science of psychedelics tell us about consciousness, dying, addiction, depression, transcendence? It's kind of the whole book, and I'm kind of asking you to maybe start us down that path. But from your perspective, what are some of the things that psychedelics are telling us about how the human experience works? that psychedelics are telling us about how the human experience works? Well, let's take consciousness. Consciousness is a big mystery. We don't know how brains produce consciousness. In fact, we're not even completely sure they do. Consciousness may, some people believe, reside outside of minds, and that minds tune it in, in some sense, that it's a property of the universe, like electromagnetic waves. You know, I don't have an opinion on that. It seems implausible to me, but people do believe that. One of the things that
Starting point is 00:05:10 psychedelics and other technologies for changing consciousness do is show us normal, everyday waking consciousness from a new perspective. And it sort of relativizes it. You see that it's not the only way to go through life. And that curiously, as William James wrote more than 100 years ago, there are these other forms of consciousness that have a very different flavor and a different kind of set of rules and laws than everyday normal consciousness. And they're not that far away. I was really struck by the fact that either a molecule you ingest, like a psychedelic, or even a certain breathing exercise or a sweat lodge or sensory deprivation, all these technologies rock normal consciousness and suggest that there are other forms of consciousness.
Starting point is 00:06:07 The other thing that I think that's really interesting, and this is kind of more on the neuroscience side, is that using these drugs now, we can image the brain when it is tripping, when people are in these altered states of consciousness or alternate states of consciousness. And that has taught us some very interesting things about consciousness. So when they started this kind of imaging work using fMRI and another technology called magnetoencephalography, they discovered something surprising. They expected to see lots of brain areas light up, lots of activity, you know, consistent with the fireworks people report on the experience,
Starting point is 00:06:46 the hallucinations and the synesthesia and things like that. But what surprised them was that they found that a very important brain network that's deeply involved in our sense of the self goes quiet under the influence of psychedelics. And this is called the default mode network. This is a tightly linked set of structures that's kind of at the top of the hierarchy in the brain. It exerts a regulatory function on the whole. And it's involved with self-consciousness. It's involved with self-criticism. It's involved with time travel, the ability to think of the past or the future, theory of mind, the ability to compute mental states to others, and something called the experiential self, the sort of place
Starting point is 00:07:31 where we go to tell the story of ourselves, you know, who we were, our biography, and who we want to be. And it's where we fit whatever happens to us into that story. You know, we're narrative beings. Without a sense of a continuous story, it's hard to be a self. I mean, if you don't have that sense of story, you have no sense of identity. So all this is going on in this particular network. And when you quiet it, is when people have this radically different set of consciousness, sort of consciousness, where they essentially feel their sense of self or ego dissolve. And when that happens, and I had an experience of ego dissolution during one of my experimental journeys for this book, when that happens, you're not annihilated. We think we're identical with ourselves.
Starting point is 00:08:26 you're not annihilated. We think we're identical with ourselves, but in fact, there is another place to stand and experience life and another form of consciousness. And it is a most uncanny thing. I had this experience, and many other people have reported the same thing, of watching myself essentially scattered to the wind as a bunch of post-its. And then I saw myself spread out over the landscape like a coat of paint or butter. Now, when I say I saw, what am I talking about? Well, there was a split in my consciousness between my usual ego self and this other much more disinterested, objective, unperturbable way of experiencing things that, you know, to whom all this was fine. You know, what could have been a catastrophe, losing your sense of self was absolutely just, hey, interesting. So anyway, that's the kind of stuff we're learning about consciousness. It's a long answer to your question, but it's very rich.
Starting point is 00:09:27 And I think we stand to learn more. You know, one of the psychedelic pioneers, a psychiatrist named Stanislaw Grof, said back in the 60s or 70s that psychedelics would be for the study of the mind, what the microscope was for biology or the telescope was for astronomy. That was a really audacious thing to say. But I no longer think that's crazy. Yeah, there's so much you said there. There was one point in the book, and we were talking about consciousness, and I'm just going to read what you wrote. You basically said, no single one of our vocabularies for approaching the subject, that subject being consciousness, the biological, the psychological, psychological the philosophical or the spiritual has yet earned the right to claim it has the final word it may be that layering these different perspectives
Starting point is 00:10:11 one upon the other we can gain the richest picture of what might be going on and i agree with that so much i've read that and i was almost like that's almost a description of what we're trying to do on this show is layer these different approaches, biological, psychological, philosophical, spiritual. And I love the way you said that. And I'm going to jump right to one of the models that you come up with here, which I think it's not yours, but you talk about in the book. And I think it encapsulates so much of what we're trying to talk about, whether it be ego disillusionment or the mind expanding. But you talk about Robin Carhart Harris's theory of the entropic brain. And the idea is that as we get
Starting point is 00:10:53 older, right, we begin to see the world as we're used to seeing it. We become kind of set in our ways. We drive the entropy out of the system. And entropy is a synonym here for uncertainty, right? I mean, the brain is trying to reduce uncertainty and surprise. And entropy is a synonym here for uncertainty, right? I mean, the brain is trying to reduce uncertainty and surprise. And we do that by developing these mental algorithms that kind of predict what's going to happen at any given time and reach for the most conventional solution to any problem that life presents to us. But that this tends to narrow consciousness and make it very rigid. It's adaptive. It's very efficient.
Starting point is 00:11:27 It gets the job done, but it blinds us also in the way that habits blind us to the present moment and to experience. So Robin's theory, and I think it's a very compelling one, is that you need a certain amount of entropy or uncertainty in the brain, or it freezes, it gets stuck. And if you think about the mental illnesses that have responded most robustly to psychedelic therapy so far, depression, addiction, anxiety, and fear of death, these are the products of rigid thinking, of getting trapped in a loop and trapped in a story that you just can't get out of.
Starting point is 00:12:06 I mean, this is what happens to depressed people. They keep telling themselves a very destructive story that eventually shades out reality and other people, and it disconnects them from life. Same with addiction. So all these disorders may be the result of insufficient entropy in the brain and that there is a kind of point of criticality, you know, where you have just the right amount of entropy or uncertainty in the system or noise, as some people would describe it. You know, you can go too far.
Starting point is 00:12:37 And in Robin's model, you know, schizophrenia may be the magical thinking and, you know, paranoid fantasy. All these things may be the result of too much entropy in the brain. But there's a sweet spot is what he's suggesting. And many of us are not there. We move away from that sweet spot as we get older and we become less entropic. So we tend to think of getting older as entropy, as things slowing down and breaking down. But in fact, in the mind, it's just the opposite.
Starting point is 00:13:08 Things are freezing up tight. And we need to lubricate our cognition, as he says, or shake the snow globe is another lovely metaphor he has. And psychedelics appear to do this. They inject noise into that system. They disorder the brain, literally, and give an opportunity for a reboot in the same way that your computer gets frozen after, you know, if you haven't turned it off in a long time and everything gets kind of sticky and frozen.
Starting point is 00:13:34 And what do you do? You unplug it and then you plug it back in. Suddenly it's lubricated. This episode is brought to you by Casper Mattress. And Casper is a sleep brand that makes expertly designed products to help you get your best rest one night at a time. A little bit of info about the mattresses themselves. A little bit of info about the mattresses themselves. They are very cleverly designed to mimic human curves, providing support and comfort for all kinds of bodies. And of course, since we spend one third of our lives sleeping, we should be comfortable. I think about that all the time.
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Starting point is 00:16:59 And use the same promo code one you feed at checkout. Terms and conditions apply. So again, go to casper.com slash 1UFeed. Use the promo code 1UFeed at checkout and get $50 off towards select mattresses. And now back to the interview. The phrase that comes up in the book is Aldous Huxley's speaks of the mind's reducing valve. is Aldous Huxley's Speaks of the Mind's Reducing Valve. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:17:27 You know, how our ordinary consciousness is, you know, basically filtering out down to only what we need to stay alive. So Huxley's saying that these mystical experiences that they have are the same thing as what people are having in religious experiences or meditation experiences. And, you know, a little bit about me is I'm recovering from alcoholism and drug addiction. I have dealt with depression. I'm a long-term meditator. I just came back from a seven-day silent retreat. And so all these things really resonate with me. And I just wanted to sort of talk about how that, you know, we're looking at these mystical experiences being occasioned by lots of different methods, psychedelics being one of them.
Starting point is 00:18:09 Yeah, I think that if we could look at the mind during a vision quest or sensory deprivation or holotropic breath work, all these other modalities, we might find the same suppression of activity in the default mode network. And we have found it in meditation. The brains of people, very experienced meditators, if you put them in an fMRI machine and let them meditate, their brains will look very much like the tripping brain. The same networks are turned off. And that makes sense because the experience is similar in the sense of, it may not be as visually dramatic, but there is this sense of ego dissolution that is achieved in meditation. It's a transcendence of the self. You know this better
Starting point is 00:18:50 than I do, but Buddhists are convinced that the self is an illusion. And it's a contingent thing. It's a projection of our minds. And one of the things psychedelics give you, and you can do it sort of more easily than you can meditating, is a glimpse of an ego-free state of consciousness. And that is, there's something very liberating about that. So yeah, I think we're talking about the same phenomenon, just different technologies for getting there. And some people think it's cheating to use a drug to achieve these states, but, you know, no doubt there is some chemical that's involved in the more natural achievement of that state through meditation. You know, all mental experience is mediated by chemicals and electricity in the brain. So, you know, I think it's our moralism point about that in the book, where you said that a lot of, I'm going to use the word, civilizations thought that the fact that it came from nature,
Starting point is 00:19:50 that they got this experience from nature, a plant, made it more valid, not less valid, than them inducing it themselves. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you know, we think that if you get it from nature, from matter, it's less spiritual. But they thought, and this owed to their relationship to nature, that it was a more sacred thing that nature was doing this to you. I mean, how amazing that a mushroom or a plant could change your consciousness. And, you know, we tend to look down on that idea because we want our spirituality to be so pure. We conceive of spirituality as in opposition to materialism. And I think that that's a mistake.
Starting point is 00:20:31 And I conceived of it that way. There was, you know, the supernatural and the natural. And the big insight I had after, you know, my own psychedelic experiences was a reconception of what the spiritual is. And I realized the opposite of spiritual is not material, as I had thought. The opposite of spiritual is egotistical. It is the ego that keeps us from having this deep, profound sense of connection with other people or with nature or with the universe
Starting point is 00:21:01 or whatever our concept of the divine is. That opened a big door for me. And, you know, I mean, I know other people have different concepts of the spiritual, but it created an opening that had been closed before. Yeah, actually, I was headed right towards that because spiritual is one of those words that means a million things to a million people. But you gave what I thought was a very, I never heard it phrased this way before, but spiritual is a good name for some of the powerful mental phenomenon that arise when the
Starting point is 00:21:30 voice of the ego is muted or silenced. Yeah, that's, well, I wrote it, so it is exactly what I believe, but I'd forgotten that line, but there it is. There it is. What page is that on? I can't tell. I don't have pages. You copied it is. There it is. What page is that on? I can't tell. I need to underline that. I don't have pages. You copied it out. I have lots of pages and pages and notes, but I can't reference the book page. Yeah. This is where this experience took me. You know, I just really, you know, I had not explored spiritual paths in my life at all. And I was held back from it by this very naive understanding of what spirituality was. And thanks to my experience of these molecules and also the people, you know, all the people I interviewed who had transformative experiences, some on these drugs and some on, you know, through meditation.
Starting point is 00:22:20 I went down this path I never thought I'd be going down as a writer. And it was actually quite thrilling for me to, you know, it's not the young people that need an experience of the numinous, which is another way to sort of phrase what we're talking about. It's people who are transitioning in the second half of their lives are the people who need that more transcendent experience. And I thought that was, as somebody who's transitioning in the second half of their life, or maybe a little bit beyond the transition, I totally agree. Yeah, you know, I didn't mean to demean the experience that some young people have on psychedelics. It really can be profound. But it seems to me what they're
Starting point is 00:23:13 particularly good for, well, two things, is this breaking of mental rigidity, of habit, that, you know, that kind of ossifying mental patterns that we get into as we age. And that's very important. I mean, the young don't have patterns like that. They're still open to experience. They don't have all these mental algorithms, these priors in their minds to organize their experience yet. And the other is the contemplation of death.
Starting point is 00:23:42 And people in their 20s pretty much think of themselves as eternal or death is such a great distance. It's unimaginable to them. When you're in your 60s, that's not the case. And I think that psychedelics are, as is meditation, an excellent tool for figuring out what you think about death and what it means. And so in that sense, I think that they're particularly valuable later in life. And it's ironic that they were discovered by the young, by and large, in the West. That's not true in traditional cultures. But I think they're greater uses for people as they're aging. And the particular, I mean, one of the great successes in the research has been thus far has been with people really facing their mortality with a sense of urgency. I'm talking about the cancer patients who've been treated with psilocybin.
Starting point is 00:24:39 And a very substantial percentage of them found relief, found comfort, you know, had their anxiety and their depression and their fear diminished, and in some cases eliminated. That's quite a gift. We have very few tools to offer, comforts to offer people in that boat. And at least on the basis of these small studies, I mean, only 80 people were in these two trials I'm referencing, there's a really strong signal that these drugs have something important to offer people facing death. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like
Starting point is 00:25:42 why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth.
Starting point is 00:25:58 Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when
Starting point is 00:26:15 Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Starting point is 00:26:38 You mentioned the research into psychedelics, and research into psychedelics is really having a resurgence. And I don't want to go into the history too much. But it's interesting that you talk about before, you know, the cat got out of the bag, so to speak into the 60s culture with LSD, that there had been 40,000 research participants and more than 1000 clinical papers. Yep. From people who were researching psychedelics as really psychological tools, you know, as a way to facilitate improving our quality of life, for lack of a better word,
Starting point is 00:27:15 mental health. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, I was surprised by that, too. I thought, you know, I thought the story began in the 60s. It began with Timothy Leary and the Harvard Soul Sideman Project. But in fact, he came kind of late to the game and that there had been this fertile period of research all through the 50s that, you know, was showing really good results. And that many people in the psychiatric establishment regarded these drugs as potential wonder drugs. And that that research got choked off at the end of the 60s and the early 70s, it just is a shame in retrospect, because imagine had we not had this 30-year hiatus between the closing of research in the early 70s and the resumption in our own time. Imagine what more we would have learned. You know, these drugs might already be in the pharmacopoeia as something available.
Starting point is 00:28:08 I think it's important for people to realize also just how limited our tools are to help with what is becoming a crisis in mental health in this country. Only about half the people who need mental health care ever get it. Rates of depression are rising. Rates of addiction are rising. Rates of addiction are rising. Rates of suicide are rising alarmingly. And the last big innovation was SSRI antidepressants in the late 80s, early 90s. And those work for some people, but their effectiveness fades over time. They don't work much better than placebo. And people don't like taking them. They have side effects.
Starting point is 00:28:44 They're hard to get off. And so the prospect of a new tool that can treat a lot of the same illnesses, anxiety, depression, obsession, is very exciting to people in the mental health community. And, you know, we're not there yet. We have to prove these drugs work in larger trials on a bigger scale. So we shouldn't all rush to the conclusion we've got the panacea here. But the data is very encouraging. And, you know, we can hope that within five years or, that we've had a conflict between biological based treatment, so drugs, and psychodynamic treatments, right? Talking therapy. And that they've been fighting each other for legitimacy and resources. And, you know, the question you write, is mental illness a disorder of chemistry? Or is it a loss of meaning in one's life? Psychedelic therapy is the wedding of those
Starting point is 00:29:45 two approaches. And I think that's such an interesting thing because I do think it's, the answer isn't one or the other. It really, the answer is, it is both a disorder of chemistry and a loss of meaning in life in a lot of cases. Yeah. And those things are probably connected in ways we don't understand. And that, yeah, it's a very novel approach because it shouldn't be called psychedelic therapy. It should be called psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. And you are using a chemical not to change the brain's chemistry long-term, but to occasion an experience, a powerful experience that some call a mystical experience or ego dissolution. That's, you know, just a different set of terms for the same thing, I think. But that experience is so powerful that it becomes transformative. It's kind of like this
Starting point is 00:30:33 reverse trauma in the brain. Instead of a negative trauma, it's a positive trauma, but it's a quantum change in some people, not in everybody. And that's a new approach that you're administering an experience rather than a drug. And that that's a new approach that you're administering an experience rather than a drug. And that's hard to get our head around. We're going to have to organize mental health care if this works, because we're set up either with the weekly therapy session that goes on forever or the daily drug that also goes on forever. Here would be something you would do that would be quite dramatic and short term. It would be one session or two sessions or maybe a session every six
Starting point is 00:31:10 months or every year. We don't really know how long the effects will last. So it's going to take some doing to create a container really for this new kind of therapy. Yep. And this is where I remind everybody what you just said, that this is psychedelic experience is assisted by mental health professionals. And so every time I bring up any slightly strange approach to mental illness, I get some sort of message from people that it's dangerous and don't rush off and get rid of your SSRIs tomorrow and go drop acid. That's not what we're talking about here.
Starting point is 00:31:44 No. And these experiences also, it's very important to remind your listeners that these are, this is not the way that people use psychedelics recreational. You're not going to get a prescription and go to CVS. These are guided trips. You're with someone the whole time. A trained therapist prepares you very carefully what to expect, how to deal with adverse feelings or events in the trip. Then they sit with you the whole time. They don't say very much, but they're there watching out for your body so you don't do anything stupid, walk out into traffic or leave the session room. And then afterward, they help you to integrate the experience because it can be a very destabilizing experience. And that's where the talk therapy comes in. And they also help you to integrate the experience because it can be a very destabilizing experience.
Starting point is 00:32:25 And that's where the talk therapy comes in. And they also help you figure out how to take whatever insights you've earned during this trip, how to apply them to your life, how to make this an enduring change, not just a temporary change. So it's a big commitment on everybody's part. It's not done casually and it's not done alone. And that's, you know, that's the lesson, actually, that traditional cultures who use psychedelics have taught us. We ignored it in the 60s. I think that's one of the reasons we got into trouble. But they always had a cultural container for the experience. You never did it alone. You always did it with elders or shamans or some kind of person who really knew the territory. And it was always surrounded by some ritual and ceremony. There was a profound understanding that this was not something to be taken lightly. And we took it lightly in the 60s. And that's one of the reasons that you had some casualties.
Starting point is 00:33:25 of the reasons that you had some casualties. Yeah, I did psychedelics as a young person. I've not re-experienced them as an older person. And they were certainly lost on me because I used them more in a almost a party sense. But I do remember one particularly horrific experience where my little brother, who I still curse to this day for this, convinced me to take LSD the night of my grandmother's funeral. And things got, things really went down, really went downhill for me. He seemed fine, but I want to circle back. I know we're out of time and you've got to talk to get to,
Starting point is 00:33:55 but I want to circle back to what you just said there about integration. And then we'll wrap up because you quote Houston Smith, who says, of all stripes from wherever they come from, I think fall right into this category. As somebody who's working to integrate a couple mystical experiences I've had, I realized that the experience itself does not make a spiritual life. Integration is essential. And I love that you kind of hit that at the end there. Yeah. And I saw that myself. I mean, I'll leave you with this note. I had, you know, I had this experience of ego dissolution. And then I met with my guide and I said, so it was amazing. I realized you don't have to react to everything with your usual ego consciousness.
Starting point is 00:34:54 And she said, well, that's worth the price of admission, isn't it? And I said, well, yes, but now my ego is back in uniform and on patrol. So what good is that? What good is that? And she said, well, now that you've had a taste of that way of looking at things, you can cultivate it. And you can exercise that new muscle and strengthen it. And I asked her how to do that. And she said, well, one important way to do it is through meditation.
Starting point is 00:35:23 And that's kind of how I now reconnect with that experience. That's the difference between having a mind blowing experience and then having a actual state of consciousness connected to it that you can access through other means. So, yeah, I think I think that Houston Smith was so as he was on so many things, he was so on on mark. We've all had amazing experiences and experiences of awe, but it's what do you do with them that really matters. And that's where the hard work starts. Yep. And I'm going to leave you with one quote that came out of my silent retreat this week that I think plays into all this that you can ponder as you go to your talk. And the spiritual teacher said that ego is nothing but a contraction. The whole process of ego is just that. It's a
Starting point is 00:36:08 contraction. And that gave me a lot to think about, and for you and the listeners also. But Michael, thank you so much. I really enjoyed the book. It was great, and I was really happy to get a chance to talk with you. Oh, thank you. Well, I enjoyed this, and thanks for leaving me with something to think about. All right. Take care. Good luck tonight. Oh, thanks a lot. All right. Take care. You take care too. Okay. Bye. Bye-bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to oneyoufeed.net slash support.
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