TrueLife - Dr. Samuel Douglas- The Language of Psychedelics

Episode Date: November 10, 2022

https://www.psychedelicoverground.com/ http://linkedin.com/in/dr-samuel-douglas-62061871 BeachPhilosophy President of Australian Psychedelic society, writer, philosopher, and all around amazing individual. Dr. Samuel Douglas and I get into the effects psychedelics have on language.

Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear. Hears through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Seraphini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the True Life podcast. We are here with Dr. Sam Douglas. He's a interesting individual. He's big on psychedelics. He's big on language.

He's a philosopher. We're going to learn a lot about him today. We're going to have an interesting conversation like we always do. I'm super excited to have you here, Sam. Why don't you introduce yourself to the people who may not be aware of who you are? Okay. So, for people who don't know me, and that's probably most people in existence, you know, I don't think I'm very well known.

Yeah, my name's Sam Douglas. Yeah, as you say, I'm a philosopher. I'm the president of the Australian Psychedelic Society. I'm, you know, a freelance writer of sorts and, you know, content creator. Yeah, I mean, what's to know? My background academically is in philosophy of language, so that's what I have a PhD in. Really niche, super niche area. I'm arguing about meaning, you know, about why.

particular words like attached to or refer to or mean particular things and not something else. It's a little kind of corner of analytic philosophy that people who get obsessed about, you know, Wittgenstein like to really kind of get very fired up about. And I was, I was one of them. I don't know if it's, I think it's a familiar story amongst people who go on to do PhDs. You come across a problem, you know, we, you know, something comes up in your, your studies in your first degree and it's just something you can't let go of and the only way to get it out of your system is to uh is to do a PhD about it and I can confirm that that it is well and

truly out of my system now I love I love language I love philosophy of language I don't feel compelled to do you know to do a huge amount more work on it um after that um but I guess you know something I can come back to um in in terms of my interest of in psychedelics and plant medicines, it's really just something I've always been interested in. I grew up on a farm. My dad has worked as a horticulturalist and botanist. My mother was a teacher. So I was just always in an environment of being interested in the natural world, interested in just plants and what they could do. People who know me will want this anecdote is that when I was 12, I mean other kids,

you know when they're 12 what are they asking for for Christmas bike the skateboard you know they want something cool I and when I was 12 for Christmas I demanded that my parents buy me a book on permaculture so so yeah um and that's really what started me off I got I got a copy of permaculture one when I was when I was 12 and then you know read that and then in the back section it's all about what these plants and what they can do are like just just just blew my little mind, you know, that, you know, that you could grow something and it could, you know, treat physical ailments or, you know, or feed cows or, you know, you know, just all the things that you can do kind of with the natural world really kind of grew from there. And I think it was

just my interest in, in, I guess, fringe things and really unpicking, I guess, the story of of philosophy and psychedelics for a long time. It was kind of separate. It was, you know, interesting plant medicines and psychedelics is something that I've done kind of on my own time outside of my formal studies and outside of my professional life. But it was always driven by just, both of them, I always driven by this kind of just need to unpick

really fundamental things about existence and reality. Yeah, so fast forward a few years. quite a few years of teaching and and and sort of you know just working in the background on on things around plant medicines um i've had my PhD i've taught professional ethics and critical thinking in particular at a university for years um without not with tenure obviously um you know on that kind of ongoing adjunct basis that a lot of people find themselves in. And around the same, you know, I'm working through this and still have my own interests. And then, you know, and then COVID happens.

As people who aren't familiar with, with the university system in Australia, about a third of our students here are from overseas who attend. So when COVID happened, all the overseas students went home. And that meant that everyone who wasn't, you know, a kind of a secure, everyone who didn't have a secure job in a university sector found themselves without work for sort of, you know, six, 12, 18 months while all this was happening. So I, at this time, was when I needed something to do was really at a loose end. wasn't earning any money.

So I pitched third wave to do some writing for them, so Paul Austin's company. Just because, yeah, I needed something to do. And at the same time as I was doing that, I went to a mushroom day that the psychedelic society here was running. And they reeled me in as a volunteer with, you know, promises of being able to do kind of advocacy work for them. And yeah, these kind of things concurrently grew from there. I, yeah, I wrote quite a bit for quite a few blog posts and educational material for Third Wave with Paul.

And, you know, I now have my own content business. those are I write professionally now for people who need psychedelic content for their websites and their blogs and things. And yeah, after three years, you know, four years now in the psychedelic society, I went from volunteering to being a member of the National Committee to being vice president and to now into my second year of being president of that organisation, which is cool. but I largely think is a function of knowing else. No one else wanted to do it.

Well, no one else was, you know, unwise or egotistical enough. I'm not sure. But yeah, that's kind of how I got to where I am. It wasn't, you know, that's my, not a smooth or kind of expected path, but it's interesting. It's interesting now to be in a place where I can start, you know, the last few years of having thinking about talking about psychedelics is a thing that I can do in a professional capacity i say professional most of all work that i do in psychedelics is volunteer

don't i don't um you know i earn a little bit from writing but but most i do i just do for the love of it and and you know kind of the principle of the thing but yeah that's that's how i got to where i am and uh yeah i mean if it doesn't sound like it makes much sense then you know i'm as mystified by the whole process as anyone honestly it's like a it's like a psychedelic trip where we end up you know it's it's interesting where you wind up where you end up on a psychedelic trip if you take a handful of mushrooms or you take an eighth or a quarter whatever you're going to take you've never end up in three hours where you thought you would be and it's kind of like life you know you get to see things different you get to participate in something that isn't what you

expected it seems like to me and i it may not seem like there's a path, but you've seemed to mingle. You've seemed to marry language, one of your passions, and psychedelics, another passion. Like, somehow they've grown together with you writing for Third Wave. And shout out to Third Wave, great place to go and get facts, great place to go and do a lot of learning on psychedelics. I'm curious as to, you know, if we can talk about language and psychedelics, like, what, how do you think psychedelics has influenced the language for a period of time. Has it changed the way you speak, change the way you communicate, or we can shift the gears and go into how it's maybe change humans' ideas of communication,

wherever you want to take it, man. You let me know. Yeah, yeah. Look, it's a really big question, and I think it's, it's how you answer that in some ways. It kind of depends on how do you, how do you think language works or how, how, like, what's going on sort of underneath. And I think it is, I think it has been, I think, anything that influences has an influence on people, has an influence on our language, and vice versa. This is kind of the way I see is this kind of loop of cause and effect that kind of turns back on itself where, you know, things that happen to us influence our language.

But our language also has a huge influence just on how we think about things, how we see the world, how we kind of, the structure of our thoughts and beliefs. I mean, it's, it's like there's the, the, you know, the Wittgenstein quote, which is, you know, the, the limits of my language means the limits of my world. Wow. So it's, it's, you know, what you have, if you don't have a word for something, then it's kind of, it's kind of not a thing. But where you experience something new, then, you know, we now. just kind of try and find a word or, you know, a tag or a label or something to put on it. Right.

So anytime that we are experiencing anything new, like it's just, it starts this, this process off of influencing. Yeah, like just literally the world, you know, in the sense, if you're going to be really kind of like the world, you know, some people, you know, that don't like to think about the world outside of what we can kind of perceive. but when you perceive a new thing, like you're kind of propagating sometimes quite a bigger change than you necessarily think. It's an interesting thing. But yeah, I think it's, I think broadly, yeah, like you can see the, I mean, if you look at language and look at just, you know, language and kind of how intersects with popular culture, you can see kind of the ongoing effect of psychedelics, particularly over the last sort of 50,

60 years has definitely been a thing. And I think one of the places where it's really influential, and I have so many tangents in my head, so I'm trying to collect me. It's all good, man. It's all good. Like one of the things that's one of the obvious influences and why I think I was always really attracted to psychedelics,

you know, amongst many other things, is it's showing you something new or something different or showing you that the world could be a different way than it is and just kind of like in a way that no one's necessarily really thought about before and that's you have an experience of something you see something where you think or feel something and the process of trying to like what do you even call that like this really i think this is this really kind of takes our our cognitive abilities in our brains out to a kind of a place where they're not normally,

but they don't normally go. I mean, how often, and I will come back to this, I mean, how often do you, how often do you ever see something really new? Like how often do you ever see something that you, like, that's just totally outside your experience? It's not, for most people, you know, it's not that often. Like, so, you know, when there's something really new, well, something's so new that you don't even have a word for it, or we don't even have even have a word for it, and you've got to try and construct something together from all the words we already have.

Like, in some ways, that's kind of, like, that's, I don't know, it's not really not the peak, but it's right out the edge of our abilities, you know, where we are right out, you're right out on the edge of, you know, in some ways you're right out kind of on the leading edge of knowledge and human experience at that. point. So, I mean, if you look at it that way, every time someone, every time someone trips, you know, you're doing something kind of really profound. But then also this is, this is, like this is humans. This is what we do is go through this kind of process. It's just that modern life doesn't expose you to that as much maybe as it used to when, you know, we were just, you know, spreading across the world and, and, and, and, and, a whole bunch of stuff for the first time, you know, kind of as a species. Yeah.

Yeah. I agree. I think it's fascinating to think of. And I got a couple points that I wanted to drill down on. The first is, the first is that I thought it was fascinating when you said that the, when you take psychedelics, it allows you to go places that you don't regularly go. And automatically in my mind, I, I just line that up with, maybe. you're beginning to process information in different parts of the brain than you normally wouldn't.

And that's kind of what allows you to maybe have these different thoughts. Like maybe if you are deciphering, you know, ideas in the visual core, like when you hear a sound, now it's getting processed in the visual cortex. Or when you see something, it's getting processed in Broca's area. And so you have this ability to like, whoa, I've never seen sound before or I've never seen that color. I've never heard that color before. Like you really get this idea of synesthesia and this ability to,

and I think that that's where like the idea trip comes from. And when you start thinking about the words that were brought up in the 60s, like that's far out, man. Like that's a way of thinking. Like far out, yeah, you're way out there. You're thinking about this thing that maybe you've never thought of in a certain way before.

And like it brings me back to this idea of language and psychedelics and how it allows us to process, see things, hear things in a different way. The second point I wanted to get your opinion on is this idea that, you know, maybe we don't see new stuff anymore because we're, there's really no original ideas, right? Like, maybe you know this when it comes to language. If I ask you to, if I ask you to create, like, let's just do a little quick thought

experiment right here. Let's do this together. Okay. I want you to speak to me and the viewers. I want you to create a fictional monster and tell me what it looks like. Fictional monster, all right. No one's ever seen before. No one has ever seen before.

Yeah. Right. Well, that's hard. Yeah. I will overthink this because I overthinking. That's all, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Like, I mean, I like to go with, I don't know. something, I don't know, you can think of something, I can think of something amorphous. Maybe, you know, like, and I already know, see, I know where you're going with this. Yeah. Something that's, yeah, that's like the, I don't know, if you've seen, see it, see, we're already going there. Have you seen like the magnetic furrow fluid, yeah, stuff, where it's that living black liquid that's kind of geometric, but moving and organic? I don't know.

That's the kind of, you know, that's what springs to mind for me. Yeah, that's all good. It's shiny, it moves, you know. Okay, okay. Nice, that's good. That's good. Here's one of our comments that someone put up. Someone put up a giant floating anus with flowers.

we're spring. See, okay, it doesn't matter. We can make up whatever we want. The point, the point I was talking was that we can, we can make up something, but it's not original. We're just taking piece of something we already know and putting it together. It's not necessarily an original idea because I don't know if we can have an original idea. Like, we can't make up something brand new. We just, it's, maybe we can't, but it seems to me most of the Most of the time we just take parts of the springing flowers or part of this fluid. Like we can take ideas and rearrange them any way we want and come up with a different idea, but it's not necessarily an original brand new idea.

And I think that's important because that is where psychedelics come in. I think psychedelics allow us to potentially come up with something new. Instead of just taking things and rearranging them, which can help us do that as well. But I think psychedelics allows us to be way out there on that edge and maybe cast a net and pull something back from the abyss that no one's seen before. And that seems to me be what's happening when language fails. If you ever been on like a deep trip before, whether it's LSD or mushrooms or, you know,

any of these analogs like four ACODMT or these DPTs or whatever, if you go way out into that to the abyss, you know, you see some things. out there's no words for you see some things out there that you're like oh man they're hide from this thing you know but i think the trick is to try to bring something back from there and when you do that you can bring back an original idea what do you think about that is that crazy or what i don't think it's look to back up a bit i mean if we're thinking about what's what you're going to count as i mean you know i mean this is a my bad as my favorite bad habit from my years of studying analytic philosophy as my supervisor who always used to say it was

It was, well, what exactly do you mean by this, you know? I mean, so, you know, a lot of this is going to be around what kind of, what kind of border do we want to draw around, you know, around what counts is new. But I get your point. Like, there's new as in, I mean, any combination, any random combination of things that we already know is technically new. If it's an combination no one's ever tried before. And then that's interesting sometimes because sometimes it'll do what you expect, then sometimes your random combination of stuff we know does things that we don't expect, you know.

But, yeah, look, I think the point is, is probably at least partially right where when you're if you're if what we if the stuff we're assembling is all based on things that we've heard or we've experienced you know we're just we might be having novel combinations of things but we're all using the same building blocks you know under normal everyday life you know for a lot of the time but when you throw psychedelics in the mix then yeah maybe you're you're trying to you you might be assembling something but you've just You've just bought yourself a new bag of Lego, you know, or whatever. And, you know, you've got a whole bunch of bricks that are now just not the colors that you had before.

Yeah. So you'll, you might be pulling something back. Yeah. And it is, it's different. I mean, I don't know that I've, I mean, part of like some of the things, some of the things that I think are being most kind of really mind melting that I've experienced have really been sort of product of slackened dogs at all. I think that, you know, my, I think my dreams, you know, I just have, you know, I've probably been weirder and harder to integrate than any trip that I've had. But, I mean, to see something, you know, the things that are really new, what have a thing that you, that you understand,

a thing that you intellectually understood, like, to kind of experience it or see it sort of illustrated in a very immediate way is just, is, is, yeah, is a really, really, really, wild thing. I mean, I think, I mean, the one that I always remember, the most kind of intense thing I always remember is, is under the influence of, you know, really like immoderate amount of salver extract and having an experience of, that I, the only thing that I could really bring back was kind of an experience of time as kind of an extension or a distance. being in a place where, you know, another, where we were, you know, where the past and future were just kind of over here or over there, which is a really like, but trying to, you know,

I spent like a couple of years trying to work at how to articulate that that well, you know. But yeah, I think when you have, I think psychedelics can show, yeah, can, you have an experience or see something you haven't, haven't ever seen before. And there's a thing that we kind of do, and I guess it's, I think about this the way that I, it's kind of how I think about it is informed by how I think about language works, in particular how kind of reference and, you know, how words sort of attach to things. There's this idea where, like, you know, phone refers to this thing rather than this thing. Like, there's a real kind of cause and effect process that happens.

Like, there's a real sort of history. of how we've used a particular word, and that's kind of why words refer to particular things. And, you know, the roots of all of language are really hidden, very deep. You know, we don't usually get to experience them. And there's one of the, like, examples that philosophers of language talk about. I say philosophers of language, you know, this is something that like a dozen people in the world kind of read about or really care about. But there's one of the accounts of language that people talk about,

or reference the tool. It's the causal theory of reference. It's basically just like the word tiger, right? The word tiger refers to the big, stripy things with teeth because some stage in the very, very distant past, you know, a person from a particular language group will have seen, you know, been making their way across maybe what's now modern-day India

and saw the big, stripy, dangerous animal. and we are going to call that we know you know i think we need a name for this thing so we're going to call it a tiger and you know that kind of once someone's decided what a thing is called that name sort of propagates out you know or the name for the class of things propagates out sort of via language it spreads and that's if you're looking you know if you want to give an explanation of why tiger means that sort of animal um and not something else you kind of look at that history of how it's been used and it goes back to that kind of eventually it goes back to a point where someone looked at a thing or a class of things or a collection of things and went

yeah we're going to call these things that that's the label we're going to slap on that and what's interesting about that is that whenever you do that in normal every day not that we get to do that very often anymore but whenever people have been going through this process like you always have some idea of what it is that you're naming right like if you if you see a target for the you know someone you know hundreds of thousands of millions of years ago sees a tiger for the first time it's it's definitely not going to be the first animal that ever seen it probably isn't even the first cat they've ever seen you know um so you're giving this new thing a name but you already have a bunch of categories you

already have a bunch of these bricks to kind of build up a new word and you get the concepts are already there. Like you already have these kind of background concepts of this is an animal, it's a carnivore. It's, you know, it looks like it looks like other cats I've seen, but it's bigger and it eats you. Great. Yeah, right. So you have, you build this, this kind of concept of what a tiger is. You already have some blocks to build that. So the theory goes. But when you have a psychedelic experience, when you see something really new, really, really new, where maybe. you don't even have those that collection of background concepts to put together to make like a bundle of what this thing is so you can stick the label on it like that's kind of where i think that a

lot of the psychedelic experience that's what's going on there is you just you're seeing something just utterly so new that you don't even have a complete set of concepts to kind of put together a definition for what, you know, what just happened to me. And I think that's kind of where, you know, you're in unpacking that and integrating that and, you know, you're doing some really kind of creative work in, in what, you know, what do you call that? How do you, how do I process this?

You know, what happened? What did I see? What are these, what are the concepts? So some people and in some, some experiences that are, really out there and confounding. I think it's kind of part of the, you know, the after processing and the integration where you have to really think hard about, you know, you've got the thing and you have your collection of all the words, all the concepts, and it's just sometimes it's really hard

to find things to put on it, to put together what's happening. And yeah, like that's a really, from a linguistic point of view and from that kind of philosophy language point of view like that's a thing that's really as I say it's really out on the edge of our experience and not something that modern people get to get to do very often but you do get to experience it when you trip or the really cool thing that that i've experienced is also is looking at a normal everyday object and having temporarily just kind of lost the concept for what it is another story, which is actually kind of embarrassing, but funny at the time. Many, many years ago, the first time I took LSD, I was, of course, you know, I mean, as an aside,

it's really funny now because, you know, people that it's intentional, and we talk about, you know, you sit your intentions, you've talked to someone about it, you've done your research, you've got an integration therapist, you know, read your role afterwards and stuff like that. You know, this is over 20 years ago now. I went to a house party where I knew like two people, bought some asset off a guy that I'd met five minutes ago. Right, right.

I'm with you. You know, like the normal thing that people really do. I say normal, but anyway. At this party, you know, and sitting outside, you know, out on the porch with a bunch of people just, you know, the acid sort of has really set in earnest. So we're just sitting out in the nice cool night, you know, having a smoke while the acid's really sort of coming on. Right. And I look across the table. Again, someone I've met just this night sitting across from me. And it just sort of snuck up on me. And all of the

of a sudden I'm just staring at his arm. I'm like what is this thing this is something something it's on his arm and I don't understand. I'm just it was just like I had just completely lost a whole bunch of concepts. I'm just like so and all of my sense of self-awareness so I get up, walk around the table to the other side. I'm just staring at this guy's arm and you know by now conversation is utterly stopped there's just a bunch of people just staring at me looking at this guy and and I just looked at him

and I'm like, looked at him and I'm like, he's like, dude, that's my watch. That's funny. And then I'm just like, yeah,

yeah, it is. And then you know, snap back to it. And I'm just like, but it was that thing where yeah, just for a second,

it was just like, I've just, and so that's a thing that, you know, thing that you don't often get to, you know, experience that, or you, or you experienced it, you've experienced it lots when you're a child, but you kind of forget that, you know, the absolute utter, utter, mind-blowing wonder of seeing something, like, completely anew. I think these things kind of fit together. There's just this, but that's really like you push, whether it's, I mean, I don't know how the cause and effect of this goes in your brain, right?

So is it, do I feel like I'm saying something new because of kind of that, you know, default mode networks kind of shut down and quiet it and your brain's just, you know, interconnecting and firing in a really different way? You know, is that causing the experience of seeing things in you or is it the experience of seeing things in you that's causing, you know, that effect in your brain? I don't know, like I can, I will leave the science to a to a scientist, I think, in that regard. But, um, but yeah, like those, those things have. that seeing stuff are new, but you can, like, it's, it's, you know, this isn't a precise process

of having a new thought about something, you know, I mean, yeah, it's a really, it's an interesting learning experience to have that, my particular experience, but it didn't cause me to have any particularly brilliant new thoughts about watchers, even though, is it something that I go back to kind of as an educator, and I think. about that experience a lot when I think about teaching and how I teach and stuff. But yeah, you can kind of something, whatever it is that is happening in your brain, allows you to access things, you know, to see things in you or see something you haven't seen before. And it's that process, like it's a really creative process that happens after,

after this. And that's where you can really start to kind of have a thought, you know, have an idea that no one's had before because you've, you can really have an idea that no one's had before, because maybe you've really seen something that no one's, well, you know, you don't know, you don't know what ideas other people have had.

You don't know what experience of other people had. But if you go off, if you're basing it on, you know, have an experience and you look at this and you go, I don't have a lot of words for what happened to me. They just aren't a lot of words in my language and there aren't a lot of concepts,

you know, you know, it's fair to say that you're probably having, you probably, you know, having a pretty unique experience. But again, this, this loops back, if we come back, this loops back in onto the language. So, you know, we have, we have words for these things now. When you get kind of into, you know, into the corners of sort of DMT or 5MEO DMT sort of culture, there's like, there's these words and concepts and bits where people are kind of, they're painting out this area of language and experience that we didn't have before. Whether that's, you know, sort of, you know, ego death or self-replicating machine elves or whatever, you know, there's this, and this, you know, this comes back.

So there's a bit of the world. We've created it. Not created. We have created it. We just described it, you know, I'm ambivalent on the kind of the metaphysics of this, but either way, something has happened, and it's something that, you know, hasn't happened before, at least hasn't happened before, you know, in our, in our culture or in our language group. Yeah, that's, I really like that story, and I really like the way you described it, and it makes me think of a lot of different things. And I hope everybody, well, let me take that back, I hope that the people that are willing to have an experience on psychedelics get to have a experience like that. In some ways, it seems to me that, you know, maybe we have destroyed or better yet covered up a lot of the world with our language. And on a

trip like you had, when you got to see his watch, it's almost like the ideas that were given to you by whoever, however many times the word watch was repeated, however many times you've seen an actual watch, like that particular construct was wiped away and you've, you've, got to see it again for the first time in a way. And that's why it was so amazing to look at it. What is this thing? And maybe what happens in those particular modes when you lose the construct of language, but you still see the item, maybe you're getting to reconstruct it again for the first time for yourself. And that's what allows you to find the new parts. Maybe you're putting it back together. Like when you went from like staring at it to snapping back, being like, oh yeah, it's a watch.

maybe in that period of time, you got to rebuild your idea of what a watch is. You know, you're so involved in it. You're staring at it. And then as you snap back and you can still remember that story today, maybe that happens with a lot of things in our life. And it just seems to me that the psychedelic experience, the way you described it, allows people to have another chance at seeing things again for the first time or seeing things again anew.

A lot of possibilities come out of that, right? Totally, totally. And I think this is like, I think if you can direct this, and this is, again, where maybe, you know, a bit of intention can kind of direct this. This is, this is, and I mean, from what I've read and people I've talked to, this is a big part of, of what happens or what can happen in psychedelic cystic therapy or what can happen, even whether it's psychological, whether it's, you know, clinical psychedelic, assisted therapy, or whether it's just, just, you know, the healing that people can experience outside of a strictly

clinical setting. Because I've heard lots of people, both, you know, actual clinicians who are doing sort of psychics research talk about this, but also a lot of people who are sort of work with people, you know, sort of at retreats or out, you know, facilitators who work outside of a clinical space. They also understand this that you you can kind of you can strip things away and I think you know this is particularly where people will talk about five-o dmiumt because it's so kind of powerfully just you know it very powerfully and quite specifically in some ways um um undo your concepts of self um so yeah you can kind of

kind of get to, you know, have an opportunity to kind of temporarily lose, you know, some, some concepts about yourself. But psilocyll, you know, magic mushrooms will, we can do that too. But, you know, to kind of, to maybe not lose, maybe it's just your brain temporarily bypassing, you know, that these, these things. I'm not sure. Either way, you get a chance to, you know, temporarily bypass or forget. or lose these certain concepts, you get an opportunity to reconstruct them from scratch.

But even if you don't get quite that far, you get the opportunity to sort of take a step back and sort of see them, like, as a, you know, have some distance from them rather than just be a thing that's kind of immediate. You don't think about this, this is just who I am, this is just how life is, you know, if you think about it at all, and step back and go, oh, well, yeah, you know, I do do that and I do think that way. But does it have, you know, again, it's this, you know, this possibility, does it have to be this way? Or if there's something about the world that has to be that way,

because the truth is that there is just is some stuff you can't change. If it does have to be that way, then do I have to feel about it the way I feel about it? Or if it is something about the world that I can't change and I am going to continue to resist it? Because again, as a side note, this is a thing that I think humans do. Like, there's just, we, we, we, it's just in us that we struggle against ridiculous odds. We refuse to accept that something's, like our history is the history of a species who just refuses to take no for an answer and refuses to accept something like how many, how often in history of people, that's impossible. You'll never do.

We will never do that. That will never be achievable. And yet, you know, here we are, you know, the product of a bunch of, you know, social and cultural and technological things that were always at one point seen as impossible. So this is just a thing we do. But, you know, if I'm going to struggle against this thing that's seemingly impossible, you know, do I have to beat myself up about it? No, probably not.

Because like that's just, this is, you know, I'm not going to, I will resist, but I'm not going to resist my resistance, you know. So yeah, like you can, there is an opportunity. Yeah, there is that opportunity to rebuild, you know, things about yourself or re, re-contextextextextualized things about yourself. And that's, I think, what's really powerful in terms of personal work and healing and therapeutic kind of potential for psychedelics, for sure. Yeah, it's, you know, there's so much to think about when it comes there.

And first off, I want to commend you on explain it. Like, you're great with language. I really like the way you are able to describe things. I've got an effort into it. Yeah. It's very refreshing. I appreciate it. Thank you. It's nice to talk to somebody that can explain things that way and paint pictures in the minds of people. So it's very entertaining for me. I'm curious if you think this, like when we think about concepts, whether it's a wristwatch or it is a situation in your life where you were abused, we spoke about how psychedelics can strip away what was and allow you to redefine that situation.

And we also talked a little bit about there's things that you can't change. It seems like the concept of time is right in between there. And you had told us a story very briefly about salvium and time in the future and the past. I think in the world of psychedelics, there's a lot of people who have found themselves moving between times, whether it's seeing a version of themselves in the future or seeing a version of themselves in the past or seeing themselves from a third person point of view. I'm wondering, in your opinion, how do you think that the idea of psychedelics and language and time interact with each other?

Why does it seem we can move through time on high doses of psychedelics? Yeah, that is something that I don't think I have a good answer to, you know? Because to this day, like my experience, like it's a really immediate, profound thing. Like it's not, and it's that, before I had this experience, I mean, I'd read, I'd read the spirit molecule. Right. I knew, and I, I was really struck, you know, many, many years before I ever, you know, had tried D&T by, you know, their language where, you know, Strassman's talking about people's accounts of

DMT. It's not like, you know, they're very, they're adamant. This really happened to me, you know. Yeah. what I experienced, this is a real, I really experienced a really, you know, different thing. Not that I, you know, it wasn't like a had a hallucinations. I, I went to this place. I met these beings. I had this, you know. So even though this was not, this was not the DMT experience, this is like something

very different. And in some ways, much for me, really, like, I don't know, it's just, just like beyond, like, I should have been terrified. but I was too distracted to be, you know, it didn't even occur to me to, you know, to be worried that, you know, I sort of somehow wandered out of normal space and was in a place, you know, yeah, where it was just, I can't even really, I can barely describe what it looked like. It was just, you know, maybe tell us, start off, tell us the whole experience, Nick. The whole experience, the whole experience. I mean, again, this is me. if you are going to use Salvia, you know, people watching at home,

please do this in a more intentional and responsible manner than I did. All my best stories are from when I was, you know, or most of my best stories of my eyes, I was young and much less cautious. I say I was young. I was like yesterday. Yesterday, you know, it was like last week. This was again some years ago. This is back when, I mean, it's really, you know,

a ridiculous situation in Australia is now that Salvia is illegal here. So I haven't haven't used it for many years. But at the time when I had this, it was still legal. I'd been someone had, I'd swapped a bit of cactus for a cutting with someone. So I've been growing this at home, had huge amounts of it. And so, you know, I'd made an extract. And I'd used a bit, but really, I was just a bit scared, to be honest. But there's no other way, you know, I was just scared to really, really, you know,

break through on it. And I'd gone over to a friend's place, I had a few beers, smoked a joint, wandered home back to my, because this was back to my house. I was, I think it was my second or third year of university at the time, so I was living in a sharehouse with a bunch of buddies. One of whom basically didn't sleep.

So I wandered back at like two in the morning. My friend's sitting up, you know, on the computer. Gaming. Right. I need someone to sit for me. So, you know, let's let's get the bong out. Let's do this. Nice. Yeah, it's like, so, you know, he, you know, he just, he just, I sat there. He just kept packing, packing bowls of this homemade salvi extract for me. And, you know, I was sucking it down. So I think I got to about the third. of this, I think there's about a five times extract that I've made. And I just, everything just kind of,

you know, I guess just really fine-grained pixelation and just flew apart, you know, from his perspective, he just basically takes the wrong off me and I lay on his bedroom floor, you know, mumbling stuff about maths, you know, but I really, I don't really get much, it was very, there was no transition. It was just, I'm here, And then I mean a place as I say it's kind of I have a really my only visual recollection is from this kind of I guess three-dimensional fields of sort of golden light but and a real sense of like you know I wasn't alone but I wasn't not alone my sense of self was pretty thin you know at this at this

point, but I was really struck by the fact, like I just instinctively knew that when I looked over there, that was a different time. And that was a different, that was kind of a different place in kind of in time. And that here, where I was, you know, I as a disembodied consciousness kind of in this place, where where I was closest to me was, was closest to now. And then other places in a really non-linear fashion. It wasn't like it was kind of, you know, there's the past, there's the future. It was just, it was just kind of like that, you know, different directions up down over there, over here were just different places in time. And yeah, if you wanted to go to a different place in time, you just had to go over there and then you're at a different place in time.

And like that's really, you know, a long period of time of that, a period of time that was either no time at all or an infinitely long amount of time. I don't know. You know, it's, you know, it was no sense of time because like it was just, yeah, that was just what was happening. But it was just so it was just that. It was just very instinctive in the way that I would look, you know, in the way that you look at something down the street,

you just instinctively have this sense of how space and extension works because that's what our brains do in everyday life. It was just like that. It was just like, oh yeah, that's over there, but me just going, you know, yeah, yeah. And then, you know, I, you know, it just kind of, as quickly as it came on, it just sort of went and it was gone.

and I was lying on my friend's bedroom floor, you know, with him, you know, are you a runch? And yeah, that was, and I went, no, that's, that is enough for tonight. I'm going to. And then, and then, you know, as an aside, and people who, again, people who are familiar with Savia will know the feeling. It was just the feeling for the next sort of four or five days and just, I think it really, really kicked my mind. ass, you know. Yeah. Like that was, that was, it was a feeling.

And again, this is the thing that people are, we're instinctively quite good at, you know, the feeling of being watched. You know, you know, when you feel like someone's looking at your shoulder, feeling being watched everywhere I went for like the next sort of few days, even when I was by myself, I would literally be walking to, walking to university. There's no one else around anywhere, you know, and still having a feeling. in between your shoulder blades like someone's like someone's watching you you know so I um yeah that was um that was not something I repeated again in a hurry or was it was felt inclined to

repeat again now because this is an experience that took me a long time to kind of I grasp the time thing immediately like and that that's hard to process in itself to have a really immediate experience that just not like everyday life yeah and yeah um yeah you know and it was again and this is a thing very much later found that a lot of people consider that, you know, doing extracts and, you know, smashing huge amounts of extracts smoking it. But I've even heard people tell me that that it's considered, you know, disrespectful to the plant to even smoke. So whether or not you subscribe to that, you know, is, you know, that's a matter of, I don't know, I don't know how to settle that, that argument.

but it's safe to say that I you know I approached this very incautiously and it worked out okay for me in the end but that's by my poor by good luck than design i think but yeah it was just that was a really it was a really strange thing and you might like time is people people experience things from their personal past or from a relative's past like people it's not uncommon for people to have experiences or be shown experiences of illustrations of things of their of ancestors you know or or you know what they, the things that they can, you know, are or that my interpreters past lives, because, you know, I don't know if they're really experiencing past lives or not, but, yeah, but yeah, things from other times or, and I mean, I don't know, I think I've always felt like

I have a kind of a weird, I always felt like I have a weird experience. My, my relationship time feels different now because I never feel like, I mean, I don't feel like the past and the present are really that far away. You know what I mean? You know, now I kind of in my brain, I'm like, they're just, they're really just kind of there. That 10 years ago, it's, you know, it's just as close to you as 10 minutes ago.

Really, in a lot of ways. And so is 10 minutes in the future, 10 years in the future. Like, there's a sense in which, I don't know. I sometimes, you just sort of think. And it's that we don't always realize that, but sometimes I wonder if it's that thing where you, you ever wake up, you turn around and you go, like, where did the last decade go? You know, you know, I mean, I also do some sometimes, you know, think things that are probably strange right guy, you know, is it really now, or am I just remembering now in 10 years time? I don't do that. It's not not often, but you know, it's, um, again, the idea of like of time and

because like the, yeah, the, the, the, we are, we seem to be, we seem to be sort of, we seem to experience time in a particular way and we seem to kind of, uh, perceive it in a particular way. Um, but, um, you know, is this real, is this, is this, is this kind of what's actually happening out? in the world is it is because you can kind of you know mathematically from a certain viewpoint you know you the universe you know just in its entirety of space and time just is you know from from one perspective so there's just you know your whole life if you when you stick outside of time everything that's that's that exists you know like i across your lifespan like

it exists, you know, it always existed and always exists from a perspective outside of time, which is, you know, interesting. It's not particularly useful for beings that largely exist from the perspective of being inside of time. But it's, you know, I don't know, that's the kind of stuff I think about based on that experience. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's fascinating. Like, I love it, man.

That is awesome. It reminds me of some of the experiences that I have had in a similar way. And some crazy, like some, I have some similar thoughts. Let me share one with you that I have been thinking about lately that kind of pertains to that. For some, I'm getting ready for an interview where I'm going to talk about the book Flatland. Have you ever read that book? I haven't, but I've heard about it. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. And so for the people who may just be listening to this, the book Flatland is about dimensions. And it's a story about a lot, people that live in line world. and they're only seeing like this one dimension. But line world, this guy from line worlds ends up going into another dimension where he sees like a three-dimensional or a two-dimensional and a three-dimensional square. But he doesn't have the words to describe it. And so he's like, whoa, look at this.

I can't even, you know, it's like mind-blowing to him. And so as I was reading that book, I began thinking about dimensions and, you know, one, two, and three-dimensional. And I'm like, man, maybe time is the fourth dimension. And then, you know, I started, there was a cup, much like it was actually a cup like this one. It was on my table. And I said, yeah, that's the dimension right there. That cup is both there and not there, depending on what time it is.

Like if it's a hundred years from now, that whole table won't even be there. But that spot will still be there, you know. And then once I begin going down that rabbit hole, it led me to this experience this morning where I was packing my daughter's lunch for school. and I packed her little lunch and I put it on the stairs and then I put it in her and then I took the stuff out to the car and I realized

hey wait a minute I don't know if I packed her folder or not and so then I was looking all around the house for the folder and I go I could have swore I had it here just a second ago and I went back out of the car and it was in her bag

and I probably just didn't realize I put it in the bag but in my mind I was like I just imagined it was in the bag and now it's there. You know, it's in this weird, I know it's kind of a roundabout way of thinking about time and objects and space that may or may not be there. But, you know, in my mind, it was like, I had just imagined it was gone, but then I imagined

it was in her bag and so it was in her bag. I don't know if I did a good job of explaining that, but it's interesting to think about it. Yeah, yeah. And like, then it makes me think, okay, can I do that more often? Is it possible that let's just pretend that I did do that. Let's pretend that the folder that I just imagined it was in her bag and so it was. Can I use that in my life? Can I imagine on some level that, you know, can I just imagine something happen and then make it come true?

And then you get into this idea of how powerful visualization is. And it's kind of the same thing. Like if you want to create something in your life, the first thing you have to do is visualize. And in my own sort of way, it was the manifestation of a visual thing that I'd put in her bag or whatever. I know it's kind of a roundabout way, but it's fun to think about.

I don't think about it. I mean, it could have, you know, or you just put it in her bag and you forgot that you did, you know. More than likely I did that. More than likely I did that, but it could have been the other way. It could have been the other way.

It could have been. I think there is, there is probably, if it were possible, there were probably no, you know, technology or no technique or nothing more tempting than the ability to rewrite your past even in a minor way right um and you know for that reason i would approach discussion of it really carefully because i mean like you know i mean like that would be a great thing you know you want you want

something that you know people will will uh yeah go nuts for it would be that um but um yeah like it's yeah it's an it's an interesting it would be an interesting thing but also like in the same way i don't know time time is and yeah is is a it's complex yeah and you know and if you could i mean i mean if people could do it you know maybe we would have noticed maybe maybe maybe you know it's just you know it's already happened and and you know this is this is the world that is the you know the result of everyone rewriting their past. Yeah. I would hope that they would do a better job of it than this,

but, you know, people being people, they'd probably make a mess of it. Okay, let's think about it like this. Let's think about it from a therapy point of view. The same way people get over traumas is they're kind of rewriting their past, right? They're ascribing different meaning to it. Like, you know, let's say that, you know,

I'll give you an example of my life. When I was younger, I was abused in some ways. And for a long time, I went through therapy and I, you know, I had all these things that gave me different tools to think about it differently. And it's interesting how you can go from feeling like a victim to feeling like, okay, because this thing happened to me, I'm going to love people more than I ever have before. So even, even though this horrible thing happened to me, guess what? Now I found a way to rewrite it as something that is a tool for a better life for me. And if people that have had traumas in their life can rewrite the meaning of that event, aren't they changing that event in the past in some way?

You could see it like that. I mean, I think there is an important division to make. Again, my academic background, you know, makes me kind of addicted to precision. Nice. Good. So I think change the context of it. But, you know, you, you know, did you change? changed, did you change what happened? The thing still happened. You can maybe change how you feel about it. You change how you interpreted it. The meaning of it, but maybe not the meaning of it. But you didn't change, you know, the event still happened. That's a good point. So and, you know, like, hey, you know, if you know how to make, you know, if you know how to change the event that happened, you know, in the past, then, well, I mean, shit, you know. But, you know, but, you know,

if it's I think it's a different thing it's it look is interesting to think about again it's complex most of I say it's complex most of what I know about time is is I have learnt from science fiction rather than right right study of physics or philosophy of time I read I have read exactly one book on philosophy of time I didn't understand most of it and you know I have two degrees in philosophy. So it's it is interesting. And the the sort of the thinning of at least the again is it is it what's hard and what's a challenge for for psychedelics. And I think I see that is it's under underlying a lot of what we see that's written about it is still like it presents this kind of metaphysical challenge for us. because, you know, is, you know, what kind of level of reality do we ascribe to our experiences?

Does this tell us, you know, does this really kind of illustrate this idea that, and we know, we biologically know that this is probably true that our normal perceptions, we don't necessarily perceive the world as it really is. Right. Because, because that is, neither it's not necessary, it's not even helpful. you don't need to perceive everything equally kind of important you just need to know about you know food, shelter animals that can kill you

reproduction, you know, we have evolved like all life as you know, it's much more efficient you can't be, you know, it's like standing there, you know, obsessed with the amazingness of your own hands and then that tiger from before

because, you know, it's like my hands are as important as the, you know, 500-pound death machine that's coming straight for me, you know, no, you know, the people who thought that way didn't make it, except for being protected by the rest of their communities. So I think, but it does, but psychedelics present us with this challenge because, yeah, we, it's difficult, it's difficult to kind of think, like, that the experiences particularly again I think DMT is probably the word you know the the the the biggest presents some of these biggest challenges is you know these entities real are these

places real dimensions real and it's very much it's much more scientifically and and intellectually respectable to say well of course they're not you know and and not kind of kind of worry about that or to you know we can do some hand-waving about you know remove of you know perception filters or something and it's it's all okay because we can still science doesn't have to grapple with the you know the great old ones or you know or the sort of the the pan-dimensional lizard people or whatever because yeah um yeah because we can just say that that they're not real um because we don't perceive them, you know, we don't perceive these things normally.

And like I'm really, you know, for the record, I'm, as with almost everything supernatural, I'm deeply kind of agnostic about this stuff. You know, I don't know enough to make a call either way. I will not be, I will talk about whether or not these entities are real, but I'm not, I can't commit, you know, even though I've had some fairly well perceptions of things. But it's, yeah, I think it's all part of that, all of these things that sort of are there underneath and it presents that sort of challenge for us. And whether it's to do with, you know, different perceptions of time, different, you know, to kind of back to, you know, to vaguely try to get back to the point that I have a faint recollection of trying to make was that we've, you know, we perceive the world and we perceive time in a particular way. and yeah so maybe maybe when we lose our sort of normal everyday perceptions we are you know it's

tempted to say that we're having a more real you know we're perceiving a more more more real version of reality but maybe you are maybe you aren't like i don't think that we're in a position to say that for sure i mean it feels really real yeah but so does the same so do the things you experience without psychedelics. So it's a difficult call to make. But it's really interesting. And I find like the, you know, I get, you know, I don't know how to, I mean, it's not my special because I don't know how to settle kind of the metaphysical

questions because I'm not sure that anyone can. But it's also really interesting to watch people who want to, you know, if you're really fair about these things and if you're really intellectually honest, and if you put, you know, if you think that a lot of the basis for our knowledge is what, you know, it's empirical. It's what we experience, it's what we see, you know, then you have to kind of be, you know, you know, a bit overminded about what's happening and, you know, you know, yeah, like normally, you know, we can all see, you know, the car coming down the street or wherever, so it must be there, you know, that that means something but you know like when you see something that other people can't see

at the time you know what does that mean does that does that just you know does it mean it's literally not real what does it just mean do we just have to kind of find a different label to to put on it um you know again it's like our language you know yeah so it's back to we're really like it's really ingrained in us that that uh things that we all perceive are more real than things that only, you know, we only perceive ourselves, or we only perceive particular bits of time under particular circumstances. I mean, the things that we all perceive, like the car coming down the street, are often more practically useful than, you know,

my lawn furniture, getting up on wandering around the yard or something like that, you know. right as great as that was um you know being able to see moving objects under normal circumstances is much more useful for crossing the road so there's like you know it's important to to remember the practicality of of everyday life you know that uh i don't know how to kind of unpack some of these things because these just i just don't feel like you should just instantly write things off as just, you know, it's just a hallucination. It's just this, it's just that we, you know, if you're really honest, maybe we don't know. Yeah. No, how can you know? You know, there's so many, there's so many great animals of history that talk about seers or sages or gin or demons or

or demons or angels or St. John of the Cross or the talking bush or, you know, there's all these things in life in our history, at least that I feel in a way really curious about it. And I think it's really fun to read about them. And, you know, I find the more I can reach into the historical event. So the more time I spend in the library, the more rewarding my psychedelic trips are. And a while back, I had the great fortune of talking to a gentleman that was, that was, he's the president of the Julian Jane Society. And Julian Jane wrote this book called Julian Jane's The Origin of Consciousness. And it's a really fascinating book.

And in that book, he began talking about his ideas of language. Maybe you're familiar with him. And his idea was that, you know, on the left side, I think on the left side of the brain is currently where Broca's area and Vernica's area are. Is that accurate? Yeah. Inside. Okay.

And so Julian Jane's posited the idea. that when during the times of the Homeric verses and all these great poems that orators would talk about those poems today are thought to be metaphors for anger like Apollo coming down that was anger that it was a metaphor for emotions but julian jane said no in my opinion the voices per the voices people heard like Apollo or Aphrodite or these gods, these metaphors of emotions, they were not, they weren't emotion. They were, in fact, voices that people actually heard in their heads. And he's done some work with schizophrenics that said,

there's a corresponding part on the opposite side of the brain to Vernica's area and, gosh, dang it. The other, I can't think of the name of it now. But he said that there's a corresponding part to those parts of the brain on the other hemisphere. And that much like a schizophrenic today hears a voice, people back then would hear a voice and they would do what the voice said. And the way he backed it up, he did some work with schizophrenics and he asked he would talk to the schizophrenics and say, why is it that you do what the voices tell you to do? And the schizophrenics would say, well, look, you don't understand it. It's like someone's this close to your face and they're shouting at you telling you you must do this thing.

And only after you do that thing does that voice go away. And we know in modern behavior today, at least in the Western culture, when you're, when someone's this close to you, like you're probably going to be in a fight or it's probably somebody whispering, but it's definitely a very emotionally charged moment when someone is that close to you. Simultaneously was he talking to the schizophrenic where he did brain scans and he could see these opposite parts of the brain light up when the schizophrenic. would say the voice is talking to me.

And so he's done like a lot of, I highly recommend the book to everybody listening. It's called Julian James and the Origin of Consciousness. And I may not have described it as accurately as the book does, but it's really well done and really well research. And I recommend everybody doing it. That, you know, just explodes the idea of language where we are today and some of the thoughts we have on it. And I think it rhymes a little bit with what may be happening in the psychedelic experience.

Maybe we are hearing these echoes from a. different evolutionary point where we process language differently. What do you think? Is that? Yeah, look, I think that's it's it is plausible. Um, just a polite way of saying, I don't know. Um, no, I think it's, I think it's entirely plausible because you have, you know, how our brains develop just across our lifetimes. Like, It's so heavily influenced by our, you know, our environment, yeah, our language and the structure of our, you know, maybe not the structure of our language. But, you know, but like everything that we're kind of our environment has a huge, because I mean, our brains, particularly, you know, when we're young, they're so malleable. So we have so much neuroplasticity when we're young.

We have more than we think when we're old and psychedelics can kind of, you know, re-kickes. start that, I think, but certainly, you know, you think about that and then you think about, so you kind of have these, these, you know, impacts just in how your, in your environment, how you're raised, but you have, you know, maybe even over a sort of a few thousand years, you can kind of, I guess, a combination of changes in culture and a slight change in, maybe even a slight change in genetically. Not that I think there's a lot. It's possible. Yeah, I think people don't understand how much of a difference, kind of your context, your environmental context, and even just, I mean, and again, in the area that I'm more familiar with, just your language

has on it. I think it's, I mean, maybe like experimentally, it's not necessarily as, bigger differences. Some people have kind of theorized in the past, but it's like the things, you know, I mean, again, thinking we're going back to sort of hermereic sort of era. Yeah. You know, things where people talk about, you know, talking about the wine, dark ocean, you know, because like the color, like, you just, it wasn't just, it wasn't poetic. It was the colour of wine and the colour that classical Greeks called the ocean. Like it was the same thing. And now we have to try and go, well, look, did they see them as different, did they see them as different colors or not?

Like some people are like, well, no, they literally, it's the one word for, you know, the this and that. So they literally would just look at, you know, the dark coloured ocean and a cup of, you know, dark red wine and go. yeah, it's the same color. What are you talking about? And, you know, if it's possible that it has that kind of, like, just, I mean, we know, we know scientifically that the receptors in your eyes can tell the difference between those two colors, but how it's interpreted in your brain and how you, like, how you, like, all the cognitive processing that happens, where you really see, which is in your brain, not,

in your eyes, you know, that can be very different. So I think something like this, yeah, look, it's, it's, it's possible, it's possible, you know, possible that they kind of, there's bits of our brains that we haven't, for whatever reasons that we haven't, you know, they don't have the same role or they're not doing the same thing or functioning the same way that maybe they did, you know, 5,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago, maybe, maybe there is something kind of that you, you wake up and that gets connected to that it does it usually but um like it's it's it's so hard to establish that scientifically it's really hard to kind of establish that because you know um because we don't have someone from the past to do a brain scan on um which would make it which would settle the

whole question really really easily but um yeah we're not we're not at that point but it look i think it's i think it's possible whether it's the same thing or whether it's something different or something new, it happens. I think you know, I think you kind of can't escape the comparison to these kind of non-ordinary states of consciousness that people can experience without psychedelics, for whatever reasons, whether it's due to something like schizophrenia or whether it's just, you know, it's, you know,

it's dreaming or not having up oxygen or having too much of precision or you know or whatever like this yeah i think it's i'm i'm a big fan of approaching it with an open mind i think is is my where i like to stand on it and you know we don't know sometimes all you can say is what's happening now sometimes you can kind of and and but um and not you know don't extend things too far i mean science is we can theorise stuff but in the end like science is it's all it's based on what you can kind of observe and and some stuff you know like the brains of like like you know the original homer's brain we can't we can't do a scound on it so we can't we can't settle the question that way and then other things are just things that that really just defy observation at the best of times

yeah like everything we know about pure maths or ethics or things like that you know you can't there's some stuff you just can't observe your way out of and so whenever when we kind of approach these questions sometimes it's just important to keep those things in mind last week you know you know let science kind of start throwing its way around in areas where just really can't because you know if you can't observe anything you can't do a science you know you know what I'm I mean, it's... It is. Let me ask you, I'm going to jerk the hard load.

I'm going to jerk the wheel a little to the right over here. And I have a language question for you. Can you think of a time where a civilization or a culture with a small alphabet has conquered a culture with a larger alphabet? That one is, that's, that's... Look, going back historically, like, I mean, I'm... and most of my historical knowledge, which again, you know, is secondhand due to studying philosophy.

I don't know. I'm not a history major, you know. Look, it sounds pretty plausible. That said, again, you know, depends on how you define language. When the Egyptians, you know, kicked a lot of ass for a while, you know, but conquered by the Romans. was the Roman alphabet more than the kind of collection of hieroglyphs that Egyptians used.

I don't know. I don't think it was. More modern kind of, the closest example in modern day to this might be something like, if it were the case. And again, where this sort of falls down, I guess is that. Like a Sapier Wharf kind of a theory. Well, yeah, look, it could be. I didn't want to mention the Safe Newark because I know this is like a, this is that people get really like, can get really fired up about.

I don't know why. Like, why? Who, let, we can talk about it just fine. Like, what, is it, like, it seems plausible to me. Like, it seems plausible. That's all I'm saying. It seems plausible. I don't think, as far as I'm aware, I don't think scientific evidence supports it to the extent that

that the original claims were were so for safer war but um but language does you know it sets it's so much easier to think about something when you already have the concepts and the words for yeah it's so true and languages have different ways of expressing relationships between things so um and i used to have a bunch of these examples but it's been so long since i've talked about it i can't remember all women but i know that in different languages like we we think about objects in particular ways and we describe things, unlike this particular kind of concepts, but other languages may, you know,

the kind of core underlined concept for things might be how things will relate to one another, rather than what kind of object they are, or that I would have to look this up. I'm sure that there are, one of my lecturers had told me about there were languages where, you know, the kind of key concept, the keystone concept wasn't objects but processes. So things that are really deep in language like that, I think, could have,

maybe they have a big influence on how you see the world. Right. Or maybe they don't. Like, it's really hard because part of what's difficult in this is that, like a lot of what's happening in language, you can kind of think about it, like things can happen in language groups, you know, or linguistic communities.

So you have a, you know, people who speak a language. And you think about them as a kind of as a group. But in reality, like in the modern world, they're never really, linguistic communities aren't, they're not isolated. And because of how language, because of how language works, language is a cause and effect thing.

And once, you know, groups that didn't interact, you know, before they're interacting now. So while you might have two groups of people who speak different languages, there's interaction and influence kind of going both ways, you know, because we, you know, because we live in an interconnected world. And why that's difficult things like thinking about the influence of language and safer war for. from these things as soon as, like, you can, there can be a bunch of people who speak a language and they don't have contact with anyone else who doesn't speak their language. But as soon as we discover them,

where we've made contact with them, we're influencing them, where, you know, you would have such a short time to kind of test some of these theories before the fact that we're even there at all interacting with these people ruins the experiment. Because we're just, just by, you know,

as soon as any communication passes between, you know, two groups that have previously never met, then the isolations over the language groups start influencing each other. You know, words, ideas, concepts start going back as and forwards. And, you know, concepts change. Meanings get re-grounded into different things or things get renamed or, you know, can get. colonised or conquered and then a different way of, what might have been a different way of seeing the world,

you know, it can get lost. So it's kind of hard to settle these things because the only way that you can settle some of these things scientifically is to have people kind of, lots of people speaking different languages with these different underlying concepts isolated from each other so you can test them. But like the reality is that we don't really have that anymore.

And we don't, or we don't have enough isolated linguistic groups to kind of generalize from. You can't just have, might find one lost tribe, you know. And I use the term real hesitancy because I'm aware that carries a pretty kind of like colonial undertone, you know. But there might be, might be a group of people who are lucky enough to have been isolated from the modern world. Or unlucky depending on how you say it. But, you know, as soon as, as soon as the interaction starts, then a bunch of stuff

that we kind of, that people, you know, that things like the same people, you know, hypothesis might have said something about as soon as that contact happens, um, you've, you've lost kind of the opportunity to really settle, uh, that question. Yeah. It, you know, it's so interesting to me. Like I, when I start thinking about language and concepts and interaction and colonization and, you know, you, you,

you had mentioned that as soon as one linguist, group comes into contact with another one. All of a sudden, there's this interaction between them. I was talking with a Native American Indian friend of mine, Dan Hawk, and we were talking about this time when, you know, in American history, we had this thing called Manifest Destiny, or we just came west and slaughtered all these people. And, you know, at some point, there's a great book called Black Elk Speaks. And in that book, Black Elk is talking about the time where the white guy came over and told the Indians like, we want to buy your land. And the Indians like, you can't buy the land. Like the land belongs to everybody, you dummies. Like, you can't buy it. Like,

you know, but the, the European mindset was different than the American Indian minds. And it was foreign to them. Like, this idea we're going to buy the land. And like, good luck. Good luck. No one can do that. But they did do it. And in some ways, like, I think it's important for us to understand the linguistic knots or the linguistic cultures or the virus that is language, you know, and we can look at it, hey, what happened in the past can't happen again. And when I think about that, I think about like carbon capture or I think about, and I talked with Dan about this because this idea that they could buy the land was so foreign to this group of people.

And it seems like today, like we're in this idea where you can buy the air. People are like, we're going to buy all the carbon in the air. But it's like this imaginary thing. It's not that it's imaginary. It's that you can't see it so it's invisible, even though it's not invisible. If you had a microscope, you could see the carbon in the air. But you and I can't see it with our naked eye. But isn't it weird that people want to, they want to charge you for the carbon or the same way they want to buy the land?

I guess the point I'm trying to drive at is that language on some level, if you speak a language that another group is not thoroughly understanding of, there's contract law or buying the land or pricing carbon or all these concepts. Like, you could very easily start taking advantage of people by using words in a way. And it seems like that is one thing that never goes away. If you look at the history of language, like, I've heard people say that maybe one of the reasons we began to speak is to lie. What do you think about that kind of concept? Yeah.

Look, I think, look, I think all of this is completely. possible. I think what you're describing in terms of differences in languages and differences in culture. And then they're kind of, in some ways, the same thing. Because if you understand language well enough, understand, because you don't just learn a word, you like to really understand it, you need to understand the concept. And someone has a concept that you don't. Like, that's where, that's kind of the, that's the deep level of, you can know what a word means. You can remember, you can memorize a bunch of words from another language. But can you see it in your mind? Unless you have a, you know, the concept of it.

One of my friends, I've had a couple of people told me, you know that you're really making headway with learning a language when you start dreaming in that language. Wow, I never heard of that. People have said to me. But yeah, the, yeah, you can mean, maybe you're at a disadvantage. Maybe you're at an advantage sometimes by not knowing some concepts. And it could be down the track that, you know, I don't know.

It's hard. have to get a bit science fiction when I think about making up the linguistic groups that we've had no previous contact with now. But, you know, in the, you know, some theoretical, you know, possible future where, you know, highly improbable aliens, you know, break the laws of physics and turn up here on Earth, then, you know, yeah, maybe, maybe we'll be at a disadvantage because we're like, hey, you know, do you guys, do you want to buy something? they're like, buy, you're talking about, you know? Yeah, and, you know, maybe we'll be the ones that just know, because we'll be like, hey, we're, you know, do we want to, we're going to rent your parking space for your ship or something? They're just like, you guys are morons.

But, you know, like, so this is, yeah, that's definitely, I think the thing is where you don't, I mean, when someone's talking about something, it happens between language groups, but it happens within linguistic groups. Again, to kind of to jump back to Wittgenstein, there's a thing that he talks about, which is language games, and it's not that they're games in the sense

that there are a thing that we do and that there's like there's rules. Like you decide the rules for a game. And they exist kind of, within language as well, maybe for particular words or within particular kind of circles. And so something like, you know, when, if you don't know much about the law and you start talking to a lawyer or the police, you know, and like they're, they know the rules of the game and you don't. And when you don't know the rules of the game, of the language game that

you're in, you can very easily find yourself off in real difficulty. And, you know, again, one of the sadly that's probably pretty relevant for a lot of people who are interested in psychedelics, but you know, you know, that's the thing, you know, like they are, they, you don't, you know, you can hear the talking, you might even think you understand the words, but you don't understand the moves that they're, that they're making in the game and all, and, you know, there was, well, late in his career, because I thought that all language kind of functions like that, but, you know, there's nothing more to look for than just kind of the rules of the game of how people use words or how people you know how kind of concepts put together in any case yeah i think

that that sort of thing is so i think it's it's it's plausible there was something else now you know what i can't actually remember what your other point was there was another question i was going to try and answer it's just gone um that's all right i've lost it trying to remember you know it's fascinating quotes from longer philosophers but yeah like it's you know this stuff does make a make a difference. I'm still in the back of my mind trying to think of an example from the alphabet thing. But I can't. Okay, what about this? What about sometimes like when I take a high dose of mushrooms, like I'll hear voices. Like, or, or, you know, sometimes I'm all over the board. But so Francis Crick had this interesting idea about panspermia. And for those who may not know,

pansepermia is this idea that a, that an alien sort of, sort of, civilization just dropped out all like these seeds off another planet. And they're impregnating the eggs of the earth. Think of the planets like an egg and a sperm hitting an egg. And think of maybe the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. The sperm hitting an egg. And all of a sudden now it's changing and whatever. So what about the idea of mushrooms or fungus being,

being the alien and when we take mushrooms we hear the voices like what if mushrooms are the alien what about that one what do you think about that well look you know I mean it's true that fungi are very you know

distinct and different form of life you know again I think it's a cool idea like it's a cool idea and it's the other I read a lot of science fiction I don't get me started Don't get me started. That is the thing. If I could have made it as a writer, I would have. But, you know, I don't think I can. As is I just, my, my, my dad and one of his brothers,

utterly, you know, sort of obsessed with science fiction through when they were young. So I grew up in a house that just had shelves and shelves. of classic golden age pulp science fiction like other kids are like you know you know reading uh you know goosebumps i'm reading like i'm reading like as well as a romebs foundation so i'm all i'm all about this stuff much the you know which you know led to me use a lot of anecdotes in my my essays as a student where my teachers like what or correcting like the couple of creating writing creative writing classes I did where I knew more about science fiction than the teacher did. But yeah, look, I think I'm familiar with Panspermia and these sort of ideas.

And I'm familiar with the idea of mushrooms, you know, being this kind of alien species or an alien technology. Right. Because it's like, well, you know, that's a, that's a, I mean, that's very advanced. But, you know, it's, it would be very clever, wouldn't it? You know, we will make up this, we'll make up the species, you know, we'll have it, um, throw it onto the, onto the earth, wait until the, wait until all, you know, the, the hairless monkeys down there are smart enough to actually put in their mouths and stuff,

you know, so they can tune into the, uh, to the wavelength that we're broadcasting, you know, um, right, the, uh, messages. It's a great story. Um, uh, is, is that, what's happening. Well, how could we possibly settle that question? We are a long way away from, you know, I mean, I theoretically, theoretically, you know, you can start to think about how you might settle this question. Like when we, if we had the technological capacity, if we could build a device that could then, that could, you know, I can take some mushrooms, take some DMT, hear the voices,

talk to the interdimensional beings or whatever. There you go. Sure, you know, it's, That's private, right? It's a private experience to me. Like, I can have that experience. Someone else can have a similar experience and we can talk about it. And that's a really important kind of cognitive and linguistic thing that happens. But in the end, like all personal experiences that happen to you, no one else knows exactly what happened to you because you're the only one who has the experience.

Now, if at some stage we can build some sort of technological device that can, without that can kind of publicly tune in to the right wavelength so I can just, I don't have to take a bunch of mushrooms or you know, or vape some DMT. I can just, you know, fire up, you know,

my, you know, the app will fire up this device and we can just chat to the interdimensional beings interdimensional beings that way. Like, that's the kind of thing. Like, well, that's public. That's happening. We can all stand around and go. There it is. We did it.

There it is. Shit. Like that, that would settle, that would settle. Like, that's the kind of thing that would settle that question, you know. But are we, like, if such a thing were even possible, and, you know, let's be honest, it might not be, because none of it might be real. The starters, you know, even if it was, like, that's a really, that's a really, that's the kind of thing that's just like, we don't even have the words for the technology.

that it would be advanced enough, if that story were true, we don't have words for technology that's advanced enough to do that. It reminds me of, I don't know, I don't know, if we were talking science fiction, had you read much by, there's an author,

he hasn't published a lot lately, A.A. Adanasia, his last Legends of Earth, there was a bunch of books that he wrote. back in the 80s. It doesn't sound familiar. I'd have to see like a cover to know. He really,

absolutely worth reading his stuff. He's really, really great. I'm going to write it down. What's his name again? So he used, he would write under, hang on, I just have to double check the spelling.

Okay, yeah. A-A-A-T-T-A-N-A-S-I-O. Okay. Anyway, Anyway, he's a great author. He's also a really lovely guy. Nice. Because I just, at the end of my, one of my degrees,

the near the end of my PhD, I, like, we followed each other on Twitter, and I just wrote to him because some of these books that are really perfect, and just said, hey, look, I just wanted to write you and say, last last I did he's just something that's really sort of stuck with me and that I go back to a lot. And we had here's a long email conversation about things. So he was a really nice, nice guy.

Just to respond to just some random person. your books are great you know yeah you know all the authors would just be like whatever um but anyway um in one of his books um there is kind of and this is kind of bound up in a whole storyline so i don't want to spoil too much but um kind of central to some of these stories of the ideas that i'd sort of talked about before where you know you kind of look at the universe from this kind of four-dimensional perspective and but having devices that can kind of tap into or sort of observe this four-dimensional space in this way and interact with with beings and entities you know sort of in that kind of context of the story great story you know

know ridiculously advanced technology that we just don't have but but again you know but but would, you know, would settle a few questions if we did, have it. But yeah, look, I'm not against the, you know, the alien fungi idea. But if I'm, you know, honest, you know, if you're going off the available evidence and you kind of, you know, I want to be a real sort of buzzkill and brag out Occam's razor and just, you know, And you've got to go, well, look, there's probably like a simple explanation that is more consistent with everything else that we know, which is just that, you know, absolutely. These things evolved. But also, like, this is again, this is like part of, it is an important part of seeing science for what it is and what it isn't.

And going, well, look, this is that, the best explanation we have right now is fungi evolved along with everything else, you know. And it just seems improbable to us that they evolved that way because like, you know, we just, maybe that's maybe the probability just seems surprising to us because we don't understand enough about life, you know. And that's, that's, you know, that's reasonable based on what we know right now. But, you know, 10, 50, 100 years, if we make it that far, you know, it might seem very different because, you know, it's, it's, it's, you may have to reassess. these things and you know but maybe there's some sort of break point where if enough people have these experiences and you know we have you know maybe we'll think of it there'll be someone will have an experience and they'll have they'll you know put together a different enough concept that we'll think of we'll have a new way of approaching some of these things you know or maybe we

We won't. But I mean, it's not, that's not implausible because you think of, I mean, one of the things I always go back to, I can't remember the name of the person. I always remember the story of the person who discovered the structure of benzene rings, right? That was a thing, like the person who discovered that literally had a, had a dream, like been trying to solve the, trying to work out what, how, how, like, what was the actual structure of benzene rings? Like, they knew the sort of how many atoms, the kinds were in the chemical, but they, at the time, People didn't understand just like the geometry of how they fit together, how they worked. And the person whose name escapes me right now who discovered this, yeah, the story is that he had a dream of like, you know, it might have been like six women dancing in a row or something very symbolic of that.

And then based on this dream of, you know, the six figures went right, you know, benzene, you know, it has this shape. this is how it works. So like sometimes and then yeah then that goes on to be real science. I had this dream. I thought about this seems plausible we checked it out and it's true. So you know you can kind of sometimes you can kind of have these these wild sort of things that then feed into you know that give you the inspiration to look somewhere where you never thought to look or try something you'd never thought to try and you know create like a major breakthrough in chemistry or physics or something else, you know.

So like, you know, you don't know, you know, again, what are the, what are the effects if you have enough people having the experiences, do you just kind of, every time has one of these experiences, is this raise the chance that some kind of really wild breakthrough will happen. Yeah. Or is it, you know, or is it just that all these experiences,

you know, are they more powerful? Are they no more powerful than just kind of, I don't know, they're just uncovering the weirdness that we just kind of have simmering on today. I don't know. You know what? It brings up this point, like, this idea of the epiphany, this idea of having, boom, there's benzene rings, you know,

or we hear about it quite a bit. And I'm reading this book right here. It's called a non-thing. This is a really good philosopher. Let me move my cursor out of the ways people can see. It's Young Chulhan. This guy has gotten so many cool books and so many cool ideas that I find myself whenever I get some extra cash picking up one of these books and just going through it

because it's really fascinating. And in this one, he talks about non-things. And it just so happened when you started talking about Benzing and people having experiences. I thought of this, boom, epiphany. Like, that's the idea that I get. And he writes about this little paragraph that I want to share with everybody because I think it's really something to think about. The experience of presence is brought about neither by the vision of the starry night. nor the majestic booming of an organ.

Rather, the source of wordless delight is a combination of trifles. In such epiphonic, epiphanic moments, the human being enters into a new and hopeful relationship with the whole of existence and begins to think with the heart. The epiphany includes moments of deep peace. The narrator longs for a thing language in which mute things speak to me and wherein I may one day have to justify myself before an unknown judge. When one pays more attention to things, one forgets oneself, loses oneself.

When the ego gets weak, it is able to hear that mute thing language. And in psychedelics, we talk about ego death. I think it's a great point to think about when the ego gets weak, one forgets oneself. He goes on to say, the experience of presence requires exposure to vulnerability. And he says that without a wound, I ultimately hear only the echo of myself. And I think that psychedelics allow us to get away. When we talk about ego death, you know, the ego seems to be this thing that only allows for the echo of ourselves. But when we lose it, then we can see the language.

We can hear the mute things. We can have the epiphany. And it sounds to me whether it comes in a dream or whether it comes from a whole. whole lot of psilocybin and you watching a tree and talking to your avocado tree or watching a slug or you know whatever it might be i i hope that more people get the opportunity to be alone with themselves to have the ego death whether it's through meditation or psychedelics but i hope more people get to have epiphanies and get to come up with ideas like benzene rings or fungus being an alien or more of these awesome ideas that I think are just as important as real science, you know?

So that's what I'm thinking about. I'm coming up on a hard break here. I'm having an absolute blast with you, my friend, and this is really fun. Thank you for being here. Hey, look, sorry, God. Oh, I was just going to say, you're going to have to come back on. This is way too much fun. I have a group coming up.

Maybe you could join the group. We can all get together. Okay. And so before I, before I have the out, what do you have coming up? Are you going to be speaking anywhere? Where can people find you? And what are you excited about? Well, I have no plans to be speaking anywhere anytime to say.

What do I have coming up? I have, you know, just mainly, look, it's just trying to get the wheels turning the Australian psychedelic society. So if you are in Australia, please look, to Google Australian Psychedelic Society. We're like the first result. We're really easy to find. And just, you know, sort of running, just keeping that going. Because we're always doing, we're doing, you know, we do film screenings. We've recently done a series of, we screened dose two up and down the coast in partnership with filmmakers. We have, we're always, yes, we're doing, we do that, we do book clubs, we do get togethers. We're, um, we're, um,

The big thing that's kind of coming up that I've been working on in partnership with another organization at Theogenesis Australis is a big psychedelic and plant medicine and fungi conference in early December in Melbourne that I've been contributing to. So I'm flying down for that. That's what I'm excited about. What I'm really excited about is that it's a conference that I'm going to, and I'm not speaking at it. I'm really excited by that because I, you know, I'm a real perfectionist.

I'm giving a presentation somewhere I will absolutely not enjoy anything that happens until after I've given my presentation. I've done a lot of academic conferences over the years. It's worthwhile, but I, you know, I, I find it, I put really high expectations on myself and I find it stressful. So I'm really happy to be going along, you know, helping out, I've been helping edit the conference proceedings for that sort of coming up to that. So that's that's in December. I'm really excited about that. If you are in in Melbourne, the tickets for this are quite hard to get. What I was going to say was that our Melbourne chapter is doing a trivia night coming up. And one of the prizes in the on the trivia night is a ticket to the Garden States conference. So that's that's something to watch out for. Really look at the moment, what else I have going on? Like in my personal sort of business side, I've been helping out a bunch of different things. I'm part of a group of ethicists and facilitators who are working on some issues in, some ethical issues around like psychedelics. So I'm part of a group called Epic, which is, you know, the ethical ethics and psychedelics international community, which is, I guess, looking at, that's a whole discussion by itself,

but looking at kind of helping people work through some ethical issues that come out in psychedelics. I've been helping out the five organisations. So there's a group based in Mexico who are doing a lot of work with FiveMEOD&T and helping them out with some of their content, some of their educational content for their facilitation course that they have coming up. Yeah, like a bunch of things. But no, this is the first time I've talked publicly for a while. because I've just been really busy. Right. Doing other stuff.

But, you know, I would love the opportunity to do more. And yeah, I'm always happy to come and talk about this stuff. As you made it, once I get going, I will talk and talk and talk. Like, you know, it's really cool to talk about this. Because people want to know about, they want to know about things about, you know, the nuts and bolts of psychonics and the obvious stuff about psychnots. Or they want to talk about ethics, which is like I can talk about it. Yeah.

I've taught like professional ethics at uni for 15. years like i i know a little about it um and i and i had enough contact with the community to know that's you know things that are happening and issues but like no one ever wants to talk that language so this is there's been you know really really uh cool language and science fiction and yeah it's beautiful conversation ever you know um yeah but no that's um so that is that is kind of of the rest of december for me is getting some of those things across the line um you know helping out getting the garden states, you know, I say getting the garden states conference across the line. It's like it's my role in what's happening is mainly done, but I'll still be traveling down

and, you know, seeing all my friends, you know, for around the country, getting together for that and, you know, spending some time manning our information table there and stuff. And then, you know, in January, you know, I'm really looking forward to doing in January is basically nothing. And, you know, then I guess I will start up my, you know, my pursuit of paying clients, you know, you know, which is, you know, that is the thing. That is what it is. You know, I can write about psychedelics and people, people have to pay me to do it. And, you know, there are worse ways to make a living. But yeah, that's kind of where, where are that, what I'm doing. I'm terrible with plans. I'd like to. Like people will say, what are you doing next week? I don't know.

That's like a week. Yeah. Completely contradicting everything I said about time earlier. It's either here or there, right? It's just there. And if it's not here, you know, whatever. You know, I'm possibly too good at living in the moment, you know. That's awesome.

It's awesome. So I'm going to land the plane, but hang on a second because I want to talk to you afterwards. So ladies and gentlemen, go find, go, I'll put some links in there for, I think I put the psychedelic society link in there, and I got your LinkedIn profile link in the show notes. So if people you want to reach out to him, please do so. Oh, I lost you right there.

Please do so. Check him out. Interesting conversation. Interesting guy. That's all we got for today. Perfect. Oh, I lost you there for a minute. Yeah, you did.

That was totally my fault. That's okay. I'm going to land. I'm going to land. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for being here. And like I said, reach out to Sam. answer your questions and he's got a lot of great advice so that's all we got for today