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There's a lot more to the world, to the universe, to the cosmos than what we immediately encounter,
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conceive or know.
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All of us carry the imprints of previous generations.
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So that the pain that we experience is never purely our own.
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However it's our responsibility to respond to it, lest we pass it on.
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It's terrifying to be liberated.
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It's terrifying to be set free, to have those chains and fetters removed, to have the walls
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taken down around you and to see just open space all around you, the open space of reality.
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Of course it's terrifying.
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Beware of the sorcerer's apprentice.
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Beware of the sorcerer's apprentice who gets the genie out of the bottle but can't get
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the genie back in.
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We're kind of putting forward this persona as an identity to hide the fact we don't
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know anything and yet hiding behind that is the idea that we know everything and that
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we are completely cosmic divine beings.
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It doesn't require faith.
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It only requires courage.
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It requires the courage to have the drink the cup or take the pill or have the experience
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and then make of it what you will.
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Yes?
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Dr. Leary, there is a Michael Hollingshead on the line from Oxford, England.
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I had been conducting experiments with psilocybin mushrooms at Harvard University for just over
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a year when Michael Hollingshead shuffled into my life.
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Our first meeting was a strange affair, bringing with him a series of surprises.
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His voice was urbane, his face twinkling, aristocratic and somehow gross.
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He told me that he had been involved in running experiments with a mysterious drug called
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LSD in New York and he implied it seemed some pretty awesome things.
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He also told me that he was in a desperate situation, estranged from his wife and family,
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penniless and that I was his last chance before suicide.
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Since he had nowhere to live, I invited this strange and desperate man to stay at my house
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for the time being.
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I made some inquiries about this odd fellow with some well-connected friends of mine
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in New York.
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Hollingshead, he's a no-good, two-bit English con man.
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He's troubled.
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He's got a record on the continent as long as your arm.
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He's wanted by Interpol.
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It's bad news, buddy.
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Stay away from him.
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Despite that less than glowing recommendation, Michael intrigued me.
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No doubt most of it was true, but he'd had extensive experience with this LSD stuff
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and I sensed that he might have much to teach.
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Surely some love and trust is exactly what this poor, wretched creature was in need of most.
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Later that night, he told us about his first experience with LSD.
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The drug came in a one-gram package of white powder.
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Michael and his friend, the doctor, puzzled over how to divide it up into the 10,000
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units which made up a standard dose.
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They decided to mix it with sugar and water into a paste, spreading it out on a piece
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of wax paper.
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That made 5,000 on the left and 5,000 on the right.
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In the end, they figured that one teaspoon made a double dose.
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When this was finished, there was a problem of what to do with the sticky residue left
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on the wax paper.
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They knew intellectually about the awesome potency of LSD, but never having taken the
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eerie chemical before.
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They were completely unprepared for the effect of what was maybe 10 normal doses.
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For five hours, the two of them lay back, paralyzed on kitchen chairs, their eyes bulging,
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completely severed from their bodies, from their minds, from normal reality.
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Helplessly spinning through cosmic landscapes, unable to speak or move, communicating only
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by a shining, powerless eyeball contact, like two astronauts drifting helplessly through
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space, or two men caught in diving suits miles below the surface.
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Just that time, Michael's consciousness, his thinking, and his actions were nothing
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but extensions of that trip.
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He had died, spun out into the richness of interior space, had unraveled the riddle
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of the cosmic joke, and was now cautiously, incredulously, comically moving through the
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marionette show of normal reality.
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He was very eager for me to take LSD, but I resisted the idea.
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Everything I had heard about lysergic acid sounded ominous.
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The mushrooms and peyote I had been experimenting with had grown naturally in the ground and
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been used for thousands of years in wise Indian cultures.
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LSD, on the other hand, was a laboratory product that had quickly fallen into the hands of
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psychiatrists and security services.
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I was scared.
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It was obvious that the more powerful LSD swept you far beyond the tender wisdom of
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mushrooms or cacti.
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My two guests, Flo and Maynard, were not so reluctant.
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The next thing I knew, Michael was bounding downstairs with a mayonnaise jar and a spoon.
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A tablespoon, I noticed, overflowing with the syrupy mixture.
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I guess this is the time, Michael, I said.
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After what felt like several billion years, I found myself moving through a puppet show
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version of my family home.
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My daughter, Susan, was sitting in bed, a classic 13-year-old.
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Hi Dad.
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I slumped against the wall, looking with amazement at this marionette stranger from
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Assembly Line America.
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Hi Dad, I love you.
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A shock of terror convulsed me.
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This was my daughter.
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And this was the father-daughter game.
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A shallow, superficial, stereotyped, meaningless exchange of, hi Dad, hi Sue, how are you Dad?
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How's school?
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What do you want for Christmas?
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Have you done your homework?
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The plastic doll father and the plastic doll daughter, both mounted on little wheels, rolling
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by each other, around and around on fixed tracks.
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Two incredibly complex trillion cell clusters, rooted in an eternity of evolution, sharing
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for a flicker this space-time co-orbit, and offered this rare chance to merge souls and
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bring out the divinity in the other.
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But desiccated and deadened into hi Dad, hi Susan Squeaks.
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I looked at her beseechingly, straining for real contact.
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Hey Dad.
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I was stunned with guilt.
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With microscopic clarity, I saw the egocentricity, the sham of my devoted father routine.
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Eleven-year-old Jack was sat watching television.
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Hi Dad.
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Jack, Jack.
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Great program, Dad.
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Once again, the piercing realization of my blind misuse of this divine Buddha child.
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I look back over the last 40 years with pain at my blindness.
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Every second had presented me with a golden chance to tune in, to break through, to glorify,
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to really dance with God's great song.
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And every second of every minute of every hour of every day.
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I'd grimly played out my own narrow little mental chess game.
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I now saw the plastic film I'd put between me and the divine process going on all around.
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My egocentricity, my deadening mind had created a plastic hell that separated me from this
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precious, fragile gift that we called life.
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My previous psychedelic sessions with psilocybin mushrooms had opened me up to the sensory
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levels of consciousness.
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But always rooted in life here on Earth, LSD was quickly becoming something very different.
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Michael's heaping spoonful had flipped my consciousness out way beyond life.
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Out into the whirling dance of pure energy, where nothing existed except whirring vibrations.
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And each illusory form was simply a different frequency, a momentary stage prop for the
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great theater of illusion continually changing.
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The most frightening experience of my life, I sat there, a part of Einstein's equation,
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seeing it all, terrified and confused, desperately looking for some structure which would last
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against the ruthless bombardment of energy waves.
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And through it all, sitting with his head cradled in his knees, was the architect of
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enlightenment, the magician who would flick the switch, turning us on to this ultimate
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cosmological horror, Michael the Trickster.
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He's not a free agent, I thought.
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He knows what he's doing, but he's got no control over it.
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His giving us LSD is not an act of love and glorification, but some sort of compulsion.
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He has to do it.
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He wants us to share the immobilization of his profound vision, his cosmic loneliness.
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How can one act in life when you see that all form is an illusory package of vibrations?
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Just like your television screen, nothing but beams of light, while we comfort ourselves
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with childish explanations of philosophy and religion.
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The effects of the drug began to wear off by dawn, and I felt a terrible sense of loss.
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I was in a daze, trying to figure out what to do with these new revelations, what to
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do with life routines, which were obviously pointless, senseless, and completely artificial.
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Don't you see how it's all composed?
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It's hard to go back to the game.
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How right and beautiful it was that God should send his messenger in the form of this eccentric,
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impatient, and mildly disreputable man.
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Every time I questioned him about the session, he reacted with an evasive casualness, no
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more detailed explanations.
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I've never forgotten that first LSD trip with Michael, nor has it been possible for
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me to return to the life I was leading before that session.
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I never recovered from that shattering confrontation with the universe.
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I've never been able to take myself, my mind, or the social world around me as seriously.
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On the date of this session, it was inevitable that we'd leave Harvard, that we'd leave
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American society, and that we'd spend the rest of our lives as mutants, faithfully
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following the instructions of our internal blueprints, and tenderly, gently, disregarding
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the parochial social insanities.
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What comes across from Timothy Leary's experience
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is the way that that illusion is all stripped away, and you suddenly see the constructed
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nature of all reality, and that you realize you're participating in some kind of game
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or some kind of play, in which you are not a free agent.
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I suppose what's exciting and liberating about that is the notion that LSD can break those
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those chains, can allow you to interact directly with the wider reality of which we are all
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a part.
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Shamanic, plant-based psychedelics have had similar effects on people.
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I don't think you can say that one or the other is superior in any way.
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They're qualitatively different, but given the right context and the right dose, something
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So many times I've heard people say, it transformed my life, it changed my life, I'll never be
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the same.
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You know, and that's what they used to say about LSD, that was one of the admonishments,
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you know, if you take this drug, you'll never be the same.
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But that was sort of the point, right?
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You will never be the same, because once you've looked beyond the veil, you know, you realize
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that there is a veil.
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The wisdom of the years, of the traditions, has recognized that sometimes one can not
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be served by prematurely entering into elements of spiritual experience and territory when
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one doesn't have yet the maturity to sustain and support what the implications are.
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And it seems to me that psychedelics, if they're being used outside of a mature and
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wise, compassionate contemplative training and sort of tradition, would have the risk
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of too quickly throwing you into territory which you cannot usefully handle, and rather
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than opening you up to further exploration may in fact scare you and cause you to be
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uninterested or unwilling to ever go to such territory again, which would be in my mind
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really unfortunate and sad.
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It's probably one of the problems with really high dose psychedelics, that you know, you're
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catapulted out of your ego, you're catapulted out of consensus reality, but because the
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dose is so high, it's quite difficult to remember, retain, digest, metabolize, make sense of
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where you've been.
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And often for those of us who've had an experience like that, you know, you can spend many years,
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sometimes the rest of your life trying to make sense of it all.
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And I think that's probably what happened with Timothy Leary.
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You know, there was no going back after that.
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There was no going back.
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It's a bit like Humpty Dumpty falling off the wall.
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You cannot put the pieces together again.
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The understanding of modern neuroscience is that you are shattered, but that shattering
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can be part of a deeper emerging.
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You could say that the bird coming out of the egg, the egg is shattered, but that's
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not a tragedy for the little bird inside the egg.
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So if you can see that shattering as part of this evolving process, and also that if
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you just want to have a positive experience, that's very dangerous.
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When you approach a psychedelic experience, you have to be saying, I'm willing to experience
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whatever comes up.
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Very often when people look at bad trips, they're talking about difficult experiences.
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Where pain comes up, where shame comes up, where fear comes up.
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And the mind says, well, this is bad.
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In reality, what's coming up, that the pain and the fear and the shame are qualities that
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you've carried all your life and you've defended against by becoming a Harvard professor
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or a medical doctor or a nice guy or a good wife or a successful actress or whoever you are.
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Your defenses all of a sudden are not available, and now you're experiencing the fear and
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the pain and the shame and the grief that you've always buried inside your personality.
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And we call that a bad trip.
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Well, it's not bad if there's deep learning from it.
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It was painful, fearful, but that doesn't make it bad.
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So bad is a kind of judgment, and who's making the judgment?
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If the outcome, however, is a constriction of the self, a more fearful self, a less
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effective self, then you can say that that's a negative outcome.
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And usually that has to do with context.
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That has to do with lack of guidance, lack of process, lack of integration.
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Do you then spend the rest of your life thinking, oh, God, I'm not connected to anybody
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and this is awful and there's all this happening?
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Or do you make different choices then?
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I think this is the work of healing.
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This is what has huge potential.
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This is what can bring hope.
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You go into these experiences where you are shaken to the core, and afterwards you make
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different choices.
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You think about things in a slightly different way.
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Your perspective is changed.
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You look through different lenses.
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So I think it's hard work.
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It's not glorious, glorified, you know, let's have the next hit, let's go and get some
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ecstatic experiences from somewhere.
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Your reducing valve gets taken off.
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Your life paradigm is challenged, changed, shifted, and then coming back into your human
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experience to do something.
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A bit of backstory, his wife had died a few years ago.
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His wife committed suicide.
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So Leary was a single father of two young children, working hard, doing the things
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that single dads do.
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And I think what came across very clearly with his LSD experience was his insight into
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the superficiality of his connection with his children, how deeply painful that was
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for him.
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I recognize his response.
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I've had it myself.
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I know it.
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That said, oh gosh, this all seems so superficial and empty.
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And yet what I think what wisdom and compassion would say in that place would be something
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along the lines, okay, so let's see what's possible here.
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The wisdom sees how little there is of real contact, but the compassion says, well, let's
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see how much more we can find in these conditions.
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I'm not saying I'll reject it unless it's complete.
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And we have the intimate and absolute no holds, no defenses, merging of two human souls
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and the miracle of creation, which may or may not be possible, but probably isn't going
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to happen quite like that.
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But it might be we can just come a little closer, some little bit of defendedness about
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me I can just put down here and let myself be vulnerable to my daughter and even say
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something that allows her to see me just a wee bit more.
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I gather that mayonnaise jar was quite well known.
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People talk about people who did get the hit from the that mayonnaise jar.
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It's a famous mayonnaise jar.
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Well, clearly it was influential.
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I mean, I think, you know, we're on a familiar sounding track here.
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You know, was acid instrumental in affecting culture in the 1960s?
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Clearly it was.
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Massively.
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Massively.
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For good, for bad, for, you know, for everything, neither good nor bad.
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It just had a profound effect.
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So in the 1960s, a lot of young people without any guidance from adults and sometimes with
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the very irresponsible encouragement of someone like St. Timothy Leary, who would engage
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in mass use of psychedelics without guidance, without support, without processing, without
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any intention except to have to get high.
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And a lot of negative things happened.
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So again, it's a question of context, intention and guidance.
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That was massively lacking in the psychedelic experience in the 60s as a result of which
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the genuine, legitimate and potentially healing value of psychedelics was lost sight of.
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Now it's being, now we're witnessing a resurgence.
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And thank God we're seeing a resurgence under much more responsible auspices.
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I think that what really happened in a culture was that the crackdown was because of psychedelics
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going right more so than psychedelics going wrong.
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That there were a fair number of tragedies and people having disorienting experiences
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that left them worse off.
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And it's true that those are the kind of things that people would want to stop.
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But I think what really deeper, on a deeper level happened is that psychedelics went right.
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People had these deep experiences of connection, these deep mystical unit of states.
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When they came back from them, it wasn't with the sense that Leary described of as the sort
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of meaninglessness of daily life, but they were reinvigorated to make daily life better.
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They had dropped a lot of their prejudices.
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They identified with the Vietnamese who our government was trying to bomb into oblivion.
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They identified with national struggles for independence.
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They identified with African Americans and the civil rights.
31:17.080 --> 31:22.160
They identified with the environment and started pushing back against a culture that was really
31:22.160 --> 31:25.040
destructive in a lot of different ways.
31:25.040 --> 31:30.880
The existing socially constructed reality in which we live in the 21st century and the
31:30.880 --> 31:39.480
20th century tells us adamantly and clearly that our purpose in being here is to produce
31:39.480 --> 31:42.680
and consume, that that's what we're for.
31:42.680 --> 31:46.480
We are to buy products and we are to make and sell products.
31:46.480 --> 31:53.440
And we have to define ourselves in terms of our ability to buy more products than other
31:53.440 --> 31:54.440
people.
31:54.440 --> 31:59.400
In other words, we're defining ourselves totally in material terms in this society we live
31:59.600 --> 32:03.760
in and every aspect of the ideology of this society, whether it's from politics, whether
32:03.760 --> 32:09.320
it's from commerce, whether it's in the media, is sending that message to our minds all
32:09.320 --> 32:10.880
the time.
32:10.880 --> 32:20.160
And what came across to Timothy Leary was the realization that we may be being led down
32:20.160 --> 32:26.760
a completely false path, that our purpose here on this beautiful garden of a planet
32:26.840 --> 32:31.840
in this incredible universe is not simply to buy and sell.
32:31.840 --> 32:36.680
It's not simply to define ourselves in terms of material things, but it's to grow and
32:36.680 --> 32:38.880
develop the spirit.
32:38.880 --> 32:41.880
It's to develop the soul of the human being.
32:56.760 --> 33:03.760
In the spring of 1953, Humphrey Osmond, a psychiatrist, offered me the chance to take
33:03.760 --> 33:10.760
part in an experiment to further understand the psychological effects of mescaline.
33:10.760 --> 33:17.760
At 11 a.m., I swallowed four-tenths of a gram dissolved in half a glass of water and sat
33:17.760 --> 33:20.760
down to wait for the results.
33:26.760 --> 33:41.760
An hour and a half later, I was sitting in my study looking intently at a small glass
33:41.760 --> 33:42.760
vase.
33:42.760 --> 33:49.760
At breakfast that morning, I'd been struck by the lively dissonance of its colors, but
33:49.760 --> 33:52.360
that was no longer the point.
33:52.360 --> 33:57.760
I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement.
33:57.760 --> 34:05.840
I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation, the miracle moment by moment
34:05.840 --> 34:07.840
of naked existence.
34:07.840 --> 34:11.000
Is it agreeable?
34:11.000 --> 34:12.000
Somebody asked.
34:12.000 --> 34:16.960
Neither agreeable nor disagreeable, I answered.
34:16.960 --> 34:20.360
It just is.
34:20.360 --> 34:27.040
A bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the
34:27.040 --> 34:32.040
pressure of the significance with which they were charged.
34:32.040 --> 34:40.480
What rose and iris and carnation so intensely signified was nothing more and nothing less
34:40.480 --> 34:42.480
than what they were.
34:42.480 --> 34:47.240
A transience that was yet eternal life.
34:47.240 --> 34:51.920
A perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure being.
34:51.920 --> 34:59.160
A bundle of minute, unique particulars in which by some unspeakable and yet self-evident
34:59.160 --> 35:05.080
paradox was to be seen the divine source of all existence.
35:17.240 --> 35:43.480
We walked out into the street.
35:44.480 --> 35:47.840
blue automobile was standing at the curb.
35:47.840 --> 35:53.640
At the sight of it, I was suddenly overcome by enormous merriment.
35:53.640 --> 36:00.760
What complacency, what an absurd self-satisfaction beamed from those bulging surfaces of glossiest
36:00.760 --> 36:02.560
enamel.
36:02.560 --> 36:08.280
Man had created the thing in his own image, or rather in the image of his favorite character
36:08.280 --> 36:10.040
in fiction.
36:10.080 --> 36:26.320
I laughed till the tears ran down my cheeks.
36:26.320 --> 36:35.560
And then, abruptly, we were at an intersection waiting to cross Sunset Boulevard.
36:36.440 --> 36:42.880
The cars were rolling by in a steady stream, thousands of them, all bright and shiny like
36:42.880 --> 36:48.080
an advertiser's dream, and each more ludicrous than the last.
36:48.080 --> 36:59.120
Once again, I was convulsed with laughter.
36:59.120 --> 37:03.960
I was taken for a little tour of the city, which included a visit to what is modestly
37:03.960 --> 37:14.160
claimed to be the world's biggest drugstore.
37:14.160 --> 37:21.000
At the back of the WBDS, among the toys, the greeting cards, and the comics stood a row,
37:21.000 --> 37:24.160
surprisingly enough, of art books.
37:24.160 --> 37:29.000
I picked up the first volume that came to hand and found myself looking at a large
37:30.000 --> 37:35.040
of the well-known self-portrait by Cezanne.
37:35.040 --> 37:39.760
What pretensions, I kept repeating.
37:39.760 --> 37:46.200
Who on earth does he think he is?
37:46.200 --> 37:51.520
The question was not addressed to Cezanne in particular, but to the human species at
37:51.520 --> 37:53.280
large.
37:53.280 --> 37:57.320
Who did they all think they were?
37:57.320 --> 38:08.960
Successfully or unsuccessfully, we all overact the part of our favorite character in fiction,
38:08.960 --> 38:17.480
and the fact the almost infinitely unlikely fact of actually being Cezanne makes no difference.
38:17.480 --> 38:25.720
The consummate painter is also, and just as genuinely, the whiskered goblin with the
38:25.720 --> 38:46.160
unfriendly eye.
38:46.840 --> 39:01.840
This is how one ought to see, I repeated yet again.
39:01.840 --> 39:08.120
I had turned at the investigator's request from the portrait of Cezanne to what was going
39:08.120 --> 39:14.400
on inside my head when I shut my eyes.
39:14.400 --> 39:20.800
The field of vision was filled with brightly colored, constantly changing structures that
39:20.800 --> 39:25.080
seemed to be made of plastic or enameled tin.
39:25.080 --> 39:28.280
Cheap, I commented.
39:28.280 --> 39:33.680
Trivial, like things in a discount store.
39:33.680 --> 39:39.120
And all this shoddiness existed in a closed, cramped universe.
39:39.120 --> 39:42.320
As though one were below decks in a ship, I said.
39:42.320 --> 39:46.760
A discount store ship.
39:46.760 --> 39:54.440
And as I looked, it became very clear that this discount store ship was in some way connected
39:54.440 --> 40:01.760
with human pretensions with the portrait of Cezanne, each one of us overacting his favorite
40:01.760 --> 40:04.760
character in fiction.
40:09.120 --> 40:22.040
This suffocating interior of a dime store ship was my own personal self.
40:22.040 --> 40:29.400
These Jim Crack mobiles of tin and plastic were my personal contributions to the universe.
40:29.400 --> 40:35.640
I felt the lesson to be salutary, but was sorry nonetheless that it had had to be administered
40:35.640 --> 40:41.320
at this moment and in this form.
40:41.320 --> 40:48.420
What the mescaline had allowed me to perceive inside was not the dharma body in images,
40:48.420 --> 40:50.440
but my own mind.
40:50.440 --> 40:54.120
Not suchness, but a set of symbols.
40:54.120 --> 40:57.640
In other words, a homemade substitute for suchness.
41:35.640 --> 41:47.200
In their art, the Taoists and the Zen Buddhists looked beyond visions to the void, and through
41:47.200 --> 41:56.960
the void, at the 10,000 things of objective reality.
41:56.960 --> 42:02.920
When we feel ourselves to be sole heirs of the universe, when the sea flows in our veins
42:02.920 --> 42:10.320
and the stars are our jewels, when all things are perceived as infinite and holy, what
42:10.320 --> 42:17.680
motive can we have for covetousness or self-assertion for the pursuit of power or the drearier
42:17.680 --> 42:19.040
forms of pleasure?
42:32.920 --> 42:49.800
I had returned to that reassuring but profoundly unsatisfactory state known as being in one's
42:49.800 --> 42:53.440
right mind.
42:53.440 --> 42:59.320
According to the eminent philosophers Bergson and Broad, each one of us is potentially mind
42:59.320 --> 43:02.280
at large.
43:02.640 --> 43:08.720
And insofar as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive.
43:08.720 --> 43:15.120
To make biological survival possible, mind at large has to be funneled through the reducing
43:15.120 --> 43:18.800
valve of the brain and nervous system.
43:18.800 --> 43:24.120
What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which
43:24.120 --> 43:30.520
will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet.
43:30.760 --> 43:37.920
Most people, most of the time, know only what comes through the reducing valve and is consecrated
43:37.920 --> 43:45.840
as genuinely real by the local language.
43:45.840 --> 43:54.360
The mescaline experience is what Catholic theologians call a gratuitous grace, not necessary
43:54.360 --> 44:01.320
to salvation but potentially helpful and to be accepted thankfully if made available.
44:01.320 --> 44:06.960
To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless
44:06.960 --> 44:13.040
hours the outer and the inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival
44:13.040 --> 44:19.320
or to a human being obsessed with words and notions but as they are apprehended directly
44:19.320 --> 44:25.600
and unconditionally by mind at large, this is an experience of inestimable value to
44:25.600 --> 44:29.640
everyone.
44:29.640 --> 44:35.920
Our goal is to discover that we have always been where we ought to be.
44:35.920 --> 44:43.080
Unhappily, we make the task exceedingly difficult for ourselves.
44:43.080 --> 44:48.440
The man who comes back through the door in the wall will never be quite the same as
44:48.560 --> 44:50.880
the man who went out.
44:50.880 --> 44:58.640
He will be wiser but less cocksure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging
44:58.640 --> 45:06.040
his ignorance, yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic
45:06.040 --> 45:13.960
reasoning to the unfathomable mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.
45:18.440 --> 45:42.040
What Huxley is saying is that the mind operating as a reducing valve is serving the needs
45:42.040 --> 45:49.120
of the physical body, but how desperately we do need to relax that reducing valve from
45:49.120 --> 45:55.720
time to time, to allow the wider reality to come in, to allow ourselves to realize,
45:55.720 --> 46:02.080
and I paraphrase Huxley, that what we're actually engaging with is just a meager trickle, a
46:02.080 --> 46:09.280
tiny fragment of this vast reality that surrounds us.
46:09.280 --> 46:15.320
Before he refers to the psychedelics as gratuitous graces, that they're something that nature
46:15.320 --> 46:16.320
has provided.
46:16.320 --> 46:17.600
They're not essential.
46:17.600 --> 46:25.300
There are other ways to engage with the wider reality, but a kindly universe and a nurturing
46:25.300 --> 46:32.260
nature has provided us with these graces that allow us to ease off the reducing valve and
46:32.260 --> 46:38.040
see from time to time, glimpse from time to time, what we're really a part of, the majesty,
46:38.040 --> 46:45.400
the enchantment, the beauty, the magic of what it is to be alive.
46:45.400 --> 46:49.800
If I was to have had that experience of mescaline, the last place I'd have wanted to have been
46:49.800 --> 46:57.480
would be Los Angeles and Sunset Boulevard and the world's largest department store.
46:57.480 --> 47:01.040
I would have wanted to have been out in the desert, up in the mountains, in the woods,
47:01.040 --> 47:04.720
by a lake, by a river, wherever, anywhere other than a mall.
47:04.720 --> 47:12.520
So I quite admire his bravery in confronting that reality.
47:12.520 --> 47:16.000
But of course, in a way, that's the very reality he was questioning.
47:16.000 --> 47:20.920
That was the very fabric that he was interrogating.
47:20.920 --> 47:25.640
So he had to go there and he did go there and he reported back in the same way, for
47:25.640 --> 47:31.120
example, that Hunter S. Thompson went deep into the heart of the American dream, which
47:31.120 --> 47:35.160
is also the American nightmare, which is Las Vegas.
47:35.160 --> 47:39.980
He went to the nerve center and he went in boldly and bravely in the same way that Hoxie
47:39.980 --> 47:46.080
does there by going into this department store, hanging out there, looking at art books,
47:46.080 --> 47:48.480
looking at the people around him.
47:48.480 --> 47:51.680
Pretty hellish experience.
47:51.680 --> 47:55.720
And quite clearly, when he shuts his eyes, when he's having that cup of coffee, when
47:55.720 --> 48:02.240
he shuts his eyes and sees these cartoon characters and these plastic tin-like beings,
48:02.240 --> 48:12.680
this is his perception of this particular world that he's inhabiting at that particular
48:12.680 --> 48:13.680
moment.
48:13.680 --> 48:19.320
And quite clearly, it's a fairly savage indictment of it.
48:19.320 --> 48:21.360
They're like tools.
48:21.360 --> 48:26.960
Psychedelics are like a knife and it can be used by a surgeon for healing or it can
48:26.960 --> 48:29.360
be used by a criminal to kill.
48:29.360 --> 48:38.240
So psychedelics themselves, in combination with certain respectful and thoughtful contexts,
48:38.240 --> 48:44.800
I think can be and are an antidote to consumerism because what we see under the influence of
48:45.800 --> 48:52.560
psychedelics is that the things that we have are important for survival, they're important
48:52.560 --> 48:57.360
for the kind of things we want to accomplish in life.
48:57.360 --> 49:04.120
You know, a sailboat is great or a car or the things that we have, but that the accumulation
49:04.120 --> 49:10.400
of ever more and more things is on a kind of a different plane than meaning, than what
49:10.400 --> 49:13.240
is the meaning of our life to ourselves.
49:13.360 --> 49:16.640
How do we address the fact that we're going to die?
49:16.640 --> 49:18.040
What does that mean to us?
49:18.040 --> 49:19.840
What are our values?
49:19.840 --> 49:24.240
What is our sense of understanding of the universe and our role in it?
49:24.240 --> 49:32.000
And so I think psychedelics put more of a focus on meaning rather than on things.
49:32.000 --> 49:36.240
We pride ourselves on the achievements of our society.
49:36.240 --> 49:40.760
Look, we've sent men to the moon, we have satellites going around the planet, we have
49:40.760 --> 49:46.320
all these amazing cars and airplanes, and we feel that that's what civilization is.
49:46.320 --> 49:49.360
We feel that, you know, that's what it's all about.
49:49.360 --> 49:55.800
We've been taught to believe that, but our society is failing us utterly in the sense
49:55.800 --> 50:01.920
that it does not nurture the human spirit, that it rather crushes and diminishes the
50:01.920 --> 50:02.920
human spirit.
50:02.920 --> 50:07.280
It persuades us, actually seeks to persuade us that there is no such thing as the spirit,
50:07.280 --> 50:11.240
that we are just these physical material creatures and that we are only here to do
50:11.240 --> 50:13.200
physical and material things.
50:13.200 --> 50:20.720
What a lie that is, what a falsehood that is, what a delusion that is, and how grateful
50:20.720 --> 50:27.240
we should be to the psychedelics for allowing us to break that delusion and see the reality
50:27.240 --> 50:29.880
that lies beyond it, our true birthright.
50:29.880 --> 50:44.080
Huxley, in his first experience, is coming to recognize and communicate to the rest
50:44.080 --> 50:55.320
of us that the world out there is a projection of the world in there, and the distortions
50:56.320 --> 51:01.720
of the world we've created out there is again a mirror of the distortions and the
51:01.720 --> 51:07.160
caricatures and the superficiality in here.
51:07.160 --> 51:16.920
So there's a direct link in what he describes in his experience between, again, our level
51:16.920 --> 51:23.160
of consciousness on the inside and the world that we create on the outside as a result
51:23.160 --> 51:25.480
of it.
51:25.480 --> 51:30.880
The Buddha said that, or implied, taught that with our minds we create the world.
51:30.880 --> 51:34.320
So how we see the world, that's the world we're going to live in.
51:34.320 --> 51:39.000
What he didn't say, which is more a modern psychological insight, is that before with
51:39.000 --> 51:43.300
our minds we create the world, the world creates our minds.
51:43.300 --> 51:46.560
So somebody who believes that the world is a horrible place lives in a very different
51:46.560 --> 51:53.120
world, different universe than somebody who sees the world as beautiful and painful and
51:53.120 --> 51:57.520
capable of generating sorrow and generating joy.
51:57.520 --> 52:02.760
A world where there's cruelty and there's a lot of compassion at the same time.
52:02.760 --> 52:07.120
That's very different from the experience of somebody who perceives the world as a horrible
52:07.120 --> 52:10.220
place.
52:10.220 --> 52:15.120
The person who said that the world is a horrible place is the current president of the United
52:15.120 --> 52:17.360
States.
52:17.360 --> 52:28.600
He was shaped by a family of origin with a rich, rage-aholic, emotionally abusive father
52:28.600 --> 52:39.760
who drove one of his sons into death by alcoholism and drove the other one into such grandiosity
52:40.760 --> 52:48.760
attention that without any genuine capacity for it whatsoever, now he sits in the White
52:48.760 --> 52:53.760
House and is suffering terribly.
52:53.760 --> 53:02.000
Now we're created in this world, in the culture of greed and stress and disconnection.
53:02.000 --> 53:04.560
A lot of people are being traumatized.
53:05.160 --> 53:11.520
The more traumatized they are, the more they take refuge in their personality and they
53:11.520 --> 53:21.060
themselves become selfish and greedy and defensive and scared.
53:21.060 --> 53:24.760
Then they create the world some more in that same image.
53:24.760 --> 53:27.880
And the fact that it's unfulfillable is part of its tragedy.
53:27.880 --> 53:33.600
The harder we try to project that sense of a lovable me, a likable me, a successful me,
53:33.600 --> 53:39.920
a gorgeous me, a spiritual me, whatever, the more we find ourselves actually not quite
53:39.920 --> 53:43.160
trusting the whole projection.
53:43.160 --> 53:47.520
And I think that's because something in us knows, even if we don't quite let ourselves
53:47.520 --> 53:52.920
know that we know it, something in us knows it's a fabrication and fabricating by its
53:52.920 --> 53:58.800
very nature requires effort and energy that is A, exhausting and B, unsustainable and
53:58.800 --> 54:05.040
C, just unsatisfying because it's not quite real.
54:05.040 --> 54:09.080
And taking the risk to let ourselves not have to do that and that maybe other people won't
54:09.080 --> 54:12.640
like me or maybe I won't get on in the world so well.
54:12.640 --> 54:14.760
And that's a very real risk.
54:14.760 --> 54:17.520
It's not that it's a fantasy risk.
54:17.520 --> 54:22.720
But the bottom line is that if we don't allow ourselves to be who we are and get to know
54:22.720 --> 54:28.240
what we really are, we end up not quite being in relationship with ourself in terms of what's
54:28.320 --> 54:29.320
true.
54:29.640 --> 54:38.960
And that's a deeper loss and a greater tragedy and an ongoing unease, which if we're not
54:38.960 --> 54:42.920
conscious of us, drives our lives, it seems to me.
54:44.920 --> 54:52.440
Psychedelics can reveal the truth about the personality in a compassionate way.
54:53.440 --> 55:02.760
Psychedelics can reveal the suffering and pain that the personality has tried to protect
55:02.760 --> 55:05.320
you from all your life.
55:05.320 --> 55:10.680
But it can also reveal that you can be with that pain without having to be an authentic.
55:13.200 --> 55:20.840
So psychedelics properly used can help to release the hold of the personality.
55:20.840 --> 55:25.360
And psychedelics can also, again in the right context, under the right guidance, has to
55:25.360 --> 55:27.640
be emphasized always, always, always.
55:27.640 --> 55:33.640
It can also show you those essential qualities that are yours, such as courage and clarity
55:33.640 --> 55:41.920
and presence and insight, that the personality at some point replaced or at least largely
55:41.920 --> 55:42.920
preempted.
55:45.880 --> 55:46.880
They can.
55:46.880 --> 55:48.880
Do they always?
55:48.880 --> 55:49.880
No?
55:51.840 --> 55:52.840
Is it a quick process?
55:52.840 --> 55:53.840
No, it isn't.
55:53.840 --> 55:57.840
Does it need a lot of integration and work?
55:57.840 --> 56:01.840
Yes, it does for the most people, for the most part.
56:01.840 --> 56:06.840
But these are the potentials that I've seen actually manifested in psychedelic work.
56:09.840 --> 56:15.400
I think a lot of the journey work through psychedelics, through breathwork, through
56:15.400 --> 56:23.400
other modalities, is about self-awareness, self-adventure, self-discovery, all of those
56:23.400 --> 56:24.400
things.
56:24.400 --> 56:27.400
And then the really important question is then what do you do with that?
56:27.400 --> 56:30.400
Do you chase another one?
56:30.400 --> 56:32.400
Do you go and buy your other Ferrari?
56:32.400 --> 56:37.400
There's not much difference to me between, you know, I need that, I need that.
56:37.400 --> 56:42.400
So do you go for something else or do you take some time to really try and figure out
56:42.400 --> 56:43.400
what was that?
56:44.400 --> 56:46.400
How am I going to be changed by it?
56:46.400 --> 56:49.400
How am I going to be different in who I am in life?
56:51.400 --> 56:54.400
And how does that impact on the relationships I have with other people?
56:56.400 --> 57:01.400
So we can do our bit individually and we can do our bit collectively, but we have to wake
57:01.400 --> 57:02.400
up.
57:02.400 --> 57:04.400
This is one way of waking up.
57:13.400 --> 57:29.400
In the summer of 1960, I ingested a modest amount of LSD and decided to go for a walk.
57:43.400 --> 57:56.400
I'm listening to a priest chanting the Mass and a choir of nuns responding.
57:56.400 --> 58:03.400
The priest's mature, cultivated voice rings with the serene authority of the one, holy,
58:03.400 --> 58:07.400
Catholic Church, of the faith once and for all delivered to the saints.
58:07.400 --> 58:11.400
And the nuns respond with innocent, childlike devotion.
58:13.400 --> 58:20.400
But listening again, I start to hear the priest putting on his voice.
58:20.400 --> 58:27.400
I can hear the inflated pompous balloon, the studdily unctuous tones of a master deceptionist
58:27.400 --> 58:30.400
who has the poor little nuns completely cowed.
58:34.400 --> 58:36.400
Listen deeper.
58:36.400 --> 58:38.400
The nuns aren't cowed at all.
58:38.400 --> 58:40.400
They're playing possum.
58:40.400 --> 58:46.400
With just a little stiffening, the limp gesture of bowing turns into the closing claw.
58:46.400 --> 58:49.400
They know how to bend and survive.
58:52.400 --> 58:56.400
But this profoundly cynical view of things is only an intermediate stage.
58:56.400 --> 59:01.400
I begin to congratulate the priest on his gamesmanship, on the sheer courage of being
59:01.400 --> 59:06.400
able to keep up this performance of authority when he knows absolutely nothing.
59:10.400 --> 59:29.400
As I listen, I can hear in that one voice the simultaneous presence of all the levels
59:29.400 --> 59:34.400
of man's history and of all the stages of life before man.
59:34.400 --> 59:39.400
Every step in the game becomes as clear as the rings in a severed tree.
59:40.400 --> 59:53.400
Down at the root of his voice, I can hear the primordial howl of the beast in the jungle.
59:53.400 --> 59:58.400
But now it's been complicated, refined and textured with centuries of culture.
59:58.400 --> 01:00:04.400
Every new twist, every extra subtlety, a fresh gambit in the game of making the original
01:00:04.400 --> 01:00:06.400
howl more effective.
01:00:11.400 --> 01:00:18.400
Sometimes that howl shifts from the mating call to the helpless crying of a baby wailing
01:00:18.400 --> 01:00:20.400
for mother.
01:00:20.400 --> 01:00:29.400
Now I'm also back there, alone in the dark, just as the primordial howl is still there,
01:00:29.400 --> 01:00:33.400
behind the sublime modulations of the chant.
01:00:41.400 --> 01:00:49.400
If sanity implies madness and faith implies doubt, am I basically a psychotic pretending
01:00:49.400 --> 01:00:51.400
to be sane?
01:00:51.400 --> 01:00:58.400
A blithering, terrified idiot who manages temporarily to put on the act of being self-possessed?
01:01:01.400 --> 01:01:06.400
I start to see my whole life as a masterpiece of duplicity.
01:01:06.400 --> 01:01:13.400
The confused, helpless, hungry and hideously sensitive little embryo at the root of me
01:01:13.400 --> 01:01:20.400
having learned step by step to comply, placate, bully, wheedle, flatter, bluff and cheat
01:01:20.400 --> 01:01:26.400
my way into being taken for a person of competence and reliability.
01:01:27.400 --> 01:01:32.400
When it comes down to it, what do any of us know?
01:01:37.400 --> 01:01:43.400
The whole fabulous complexity of vegetable and animal life, of human civilization even,
01:01:43.400 --> 01:01:48.400
seems to boil down to a tiny germ or nipple of sensitivity.
01:01:48.400 --> 01:01:54.400
I call it the eeny weeny, a squiggling little nucleus that's desperately trying to make
01:01:54.400 --> 01:01:57.400
love to itself and never quite gets there.
01:01:59.400 --> 01:02:02.400
As I chase my own tail, it runs away from me.
01:02:02.400 --> 01:02:08.400
After all, you can't have a game of hide and seek without first hiding from yourself.
01:02:15.400 --> 01:02:19.400
I begin to think of everything that's most alien and disturbing to me.
01:02:19.400 --> 01:02:25.400
The ever receding galaxies, the mystery of death, the terrors of disease and madness,
01:02:26.400 --> 01:02:33.400
the foreign feeling goose flesh world of sea monsters and spiders, the queasy maze of
01:02:33.400 --> 01:02:35.400
my own insides.
01:02:36.400 --> 01:02:43.400
In all these forms, I've crept up on myself and yelled, boom!
01:02:43.400 --> 01:02:50.400
I chase myself back, further through the labyrinths of my brain, back through the
01:02:50.400 --> 01:02:57.400
tunnels, through the devious status and survival strategies of adult life, through the interminable
01:02:57.400 --> 01:03:03.400
passages of half-remembered dreams, all the streets I have ever traveled, the corridors
01:03:03.400 --> 01:02:48.220
of schools, the winding pathways between the
01:03:02.400 --> 01:03:03.400
!
01:03:03.400 --> 01:03:10.400
tables and chairs where one crawled as a child, the tight and bloody exit from the
01:03:10.400 --> 01:03:11.400
womb.
01:03:11.400 --> 01:03:17.400
The fountains surge through the channel of the penis, timeless wanderings through ducts
01:03:17.400 --> 01:03:16.700
and spongy caverns, down and back to ever narrowing
01:03:16.700 --> 01:03:31.240
and ever-reaching
01:03:31.240 --> 01:03:49.240
tubes to the point where the passage itself is the traveler.
01:03:49.240 --> 01:03:56.240
Out of the cosmic maze to recognize in and as myself, the bewildered traveler, the forgotten
01:03:56.240 --> 01:04:03.240
yet familiar sensation of the original impulse of all things, supreme identity, inmost light,
01:04:03.240 --> 01:04:19.240
ultimate center, self, more than myself.
01:04:19.240 --> 01:04:25.240
Standing here I feel with a peace so deep that it sings to be shared with the whole
01:04:25.240 --> 01:04:31.240
world, that at last I belong, that I have returned to the home behind home, that I
01:04:31.240 --> 01:04:38.240
have come into the inheritance bequeathed from all my ancestors since the beginning.
01:04:38.240 --> 01:04:44.240
But how did I ever get lost, and why have I traveled so far through these intertwined
01:04:44.240 --> 01:04:52.240
tunnels that I seem to be the quaking vortex of defended defensiveness, which is my conventional
01:04:52.240 --> 01:05:08.240
self.
01:05:08.240 --> 01:05:14.240
I leave the church and find myself at a corner gas station on a hot afternoon.
01:05:14.240 --> 01:05:19.240
Dust and exhaust fumes, the billboards half-heartedly gaudy.
01:05:19.240 --> 01:05:23.240
I find the flatness so reassuring.
01:05:23.240 --> 01:05:33.240
Nothing around here but just us folks.
01:05:33.240 --> 01:05:39.240
The more dreadfully ordinary anyone or anything seems to be, the more I marvel at the ingenuity
01:05:39.240 --> 01:05:44.240
with which divinity hides in order to seek itself.
01:05:44.240 --> 01:05:48.240
It's hard work for people to constantly deny what they are, to pretend that they're
01:05:48.240 --> 01:05:54.240
not the avatars of divine beings, Brahman, Atman and Shiva, that the cells of their
01:05:54.240 --> 01:06:13.240
bodies aren't millions of gods, that the dust isn't a haze of jewels.
01:06:13.240 --> 01:06:19.240
I can't help but approach the man.
01:06:19.240 --> 01:06:21.240
Come off it, Shiva, you old rascal.
01:06:21.240 --> 01:06:23.240
Who do you think you're kidding?
01:06:23.240 --> 01:06:29.240
It's a great act, but it doesn't fool me.
01:06:29.240 --> 01:06:40.240
How solemnly he goes through the act of not understanding me.
01:06:40.240 --> 01:06:46.240
In the contrast world of ordinary consciousness, man feels himself to be something in nature,
01:06:46.240 --> 01:06:48.240
but not of it.
01:06:48.240 --> 01:06:50.240
He likes or dislikes it.
01:06:50.240 --> 01:06:52.240
He accepts it or resists it.
01:06:52.240 --> 01:06:57.240
He moves it or it moves him.
01:06:57.240 --> 01:07:03.240
My feeling of self is no longer confined to the inside of my skin.
01:07:03.240 --> 01:07:08.240
My individual being seems to grow out from the rest of the universe, like a hair from
01:07:08.240 --> 01:07:20.240
a head or a wave from the ocean.
01:07:20.240 --> 01:07:23.240
Is everything okay, mister?
01:07:23.240 --> 01:07:25.240
Oh, I'm sorry, my mistake.
01:07:25.240 --> 01:07:27.240
I thought you were somebody else.
01:07:55.240 --> 01:08:18.240
I find that in ordinary consciousness, I'm habitually trying to wring myself off from
01:08:18.240 --> 01:08:25.240
this totality, that I'm perpetually on the defensive.
01:08:25.240 --> 01:08:28.240
But what am I trying to protect?
01:08:28.240 --> 01:08:32.240
For the most part, I'm defending my defenses.
01:08:32.240 --> 01:08:36.240
Rings around rings around rings around nothing.
01:08:36.240 --> 01:08:44.240
Guards inside a fortress, inside entrenchments, inside a radar curtain.
01:08:44.240 --> 01:08:50.240
The military war is the outward parody of the war of ego versus world.
01:08:50.240 --> 01:08:53.240
Only the guards are safe.
01:09:14.240 --> 01:09:26.240
The general effect of these drugs seems to be that they lower our defensive attitudes
01:09:26.240 --> 01:09:28.240
without blurring perception.
01:09:28.240 --> 01:09:34.240
We become aware of things that we normally protect ourselves against.
01:09:34.240 --> 01:09:49.240
Of course, there's death as well as life, because energy is a pulsation, and just as
01:09:49.240 --> 01:09:55.240
waves have to have crests and troughs, the experience of existing has to go on and off.
01:09:55.240 --> 01:10:01.240
Basically, my friends, there's simply nothing to worry about, because you're the eternal
01:10:01.240 --> 01:10:05.240
energy of the universe, playing hide and seek with itself.
01:10:31.240 --> 01:10:40.240
He realizes, of course, he himself as well is just a fraud.
01:10:40.240 --> 01:10:48.240
But the real forgery or the fraud in all of this is that we are actually divine.
01:10:48.240 --> 01:10:56.240
It's like we're having this cosmic bluff, we're putting forward this persona as an
01:10:56.240 --> 01:10:59.240
identity to hide the fact we don't know anything.
01:10:59.240 --> 01:11:05.240
Hiding behind that is the idea that we know everything, that we are completely cosmic
01:11:05.240 --> 01:11:10.240
divine beings, which is a kind of meta-level cosmic joke.
01:11:10.240 --> 01:11:13.240
It's great.
01:11:15.240 --> 01:11:17.240
That would blow your mind.
01:11:17.240 --> 01:11:23.240
You're trying to get a train in the morning, and there are thousands of people all waiting
01:11:23.240 --> 01:11:24.240
for the train.
01:11:24.240 --> 01:11:34.240
If you were to perceive them all as fellow beings of light on a permanent basis, brilliant,
01:11:34.240 --> 01:11:41.240
but it's unlikely that you'd navigate this hard and fast material world particularly
01:11:41.240 --> 01:11:42.240
effectively.
01:11:42.240 --> 01:11:45.240
So we need a certain inertia.
01:11:45.240 --> 01:11:56.240
So we need a certain sort of hiding of the divinity in order that we can navigate our
01:11:56.240 --> 01:12:00.240
way through the humdrum.
01:12:00.240 --> 01:12:06.240
Spiritual experience, whether arises spontaneously, as it sometimes can for people, or as the
01:12:06.240 --> 01:12:14.240
result of dedicated meditative development, or it would seem from what we hear from what's
01:12:14.240 --> 01:12:20.240
and others that can arise also through the use of psychedelics, spiritual experience
01:12:20.240 --> 01:12:27.240
can and often does have the effect of taking ourselves outside or taking us outside of
01:12:27.240 --> 01:12:29.240
the familiar and the known.
01:12:29.240 --> 01:12:32.240
And this is actually scary for most of us.
01:12:32.240 --> 01:12:37.240
It can be that the first response for many people to their mind becoming quiet is not
01:12:37.240 --> 01:12:39.240
great, my mind has got quiet.
01:12:39.240 --> 01:12:43.240
It's like, oh my God, or help, or what's this?
01:12:43.240 --> 01:12:44.240
Where am I?
01:12:44.240 --> 01:12:45.240
Who am I?
01:12:45.240 --> 01:12:47.240
And actually a lot of fear.
01:12:47.240 --> 01:12:52.240
It takes some time for most people to realise that it's okay, that it's safe to be outside
01:12:52.240 --> 01:12:54.240
the familiar territory of the mind.
01:12:54.240 --> 01:13:03.240
And so stepping into the more immediate, the imminent, the present, the direct experience,
01:13:03.240 --> 01:13:10.240
much as we're drawn to it, in the first encounter with it, we are often uncomfortable and pull
01:13:10.240 --> 01:13:11.240
away from it.
01:13:13.240 --> 01:13:18.240
And so it takes a number of times to enter that territory, to get to know, to realise
01:13:18.240 --> 01:13:24.240
actually although it's perhaps unfamiliar and therefore scary, it's not actually dangerous.
01:13:25.240 --> 01:13:33.240
Enormous experiences like psychedelic experiences sometimes are necessary for breaking through
01:13:33.240 --> 01:13:44.240
the layers of defence, as Alan Watts describes it, the layers of disconnection, the onion
01:13:44.240 --> 01:13:51.240
we're in that separates us from our true essence and our great potential.
01:13:51.240 --> 01:13:58.240
There's a lot of experiences that we have when we're a child, when we're early, before
01:13:58.240 --> 01:14:02.240
language, that once we start learning how to talk and learning words and languages,
01:14:02.240 --> 01:14:09.240
those experiences kind of fade into the background, but they are often what drives us the most,
01:14:09.240 --> 01:14:11.240
these unconscious emotional drivers.
01:14:11.240 --> 01:14:15.240
And so psychedelic psychotherapy is about getting deep into those layers of the mind,
01:14:15.240 --> 01:14:20.240
even pre-verbal, and trying to bring that again altogether and then have them something
01:14:20.240 --> 01:14:27.240
that we can look at with our adult eyes, that when we were a child it was just either too
01:14:27.240 --> 01:14:32.240
painful or too difficult or just too happy, too blissful, but beyond words.
01:14:33.240 --> 01:14:39.240
So there's definitely a role for psychedelic healing, especially when you consider that
01:14:39.240 --> 01:14:45.240
the Western medicine I was trained in is so woefully inept of helping people heal,
01:14:45.240 --> 01:14:48.240
especially from psychic wounds.
01:14:48.240 --> 01:14:54.240
Our method is to diagnose people, label them with a diagnosis as if they had a disease
01:14:54.240 --> 01:14:59.240
of some kind, and then hand out medications that they have to take virtually forever
01:14:59.240 --> 01:15:01.240
to suppress the symptoms.
01:15:01.240 --> 01:15:05.240
But that healing is possible doesn't occur to us.
01:15:05.240 --> 01:15:10.240
Under proper psychedelic guidance, I'm saying healing is actually possible.
01:15:10.240 --> 01:15:15.240
Is it a panacea? No. Is it for everybody? No. Nothing is.
01:15:15.240 --> 01:15:22.240
Does it offer us something that otherwise is not available? Absolutely.
01:15:22.240 --> 01:15:29.240
We got a 67% success rate in people who had been treatment resistant for 18 years on average.
01:15:29.240 --> 01:15:32.240
They were the ones who nothing had touched.
01:15:32.240 --> 01:15:39.240
And after a week these people were still depression free, and after three months,
01:15:39.240 --> 01:15:42.240
I think 42% were still depression free.
01:15:42.240 --> 01:15:48.240
That's a very high success rate for a very small input of energy.
01:15:49.240 --> 01:15:59.240
And what I think the psychedelics can do is they reboot the setting.
01:15:59.240 --> 01:16:07.240
And what happens in our conditioning, particularly if we have traumatic upbringings and horrors to overcome,
01:16:10.240 --> 01:16:16.240
the setting, but it happens with everyone as well, the settings become rigid, hyperrigid.
01:16:16.240 --> 01:16:22.240
So we get set in a thought pattern and behaviour pattern, which becomes us.
01:16:22.240 --> 01:16:27.240
So we can't kind of break out of it. It becomes the dominant voice in the head, and it's always there.
01:16:27.240 --> 01:16:32.240
And every cue which elites it, re-elites it, and resets it, and there we are.
01:16:32.240 --> 01:16:38.240
So someone can go to a therapy for 30 years and talk about this and that, but they're talking at this level.
01:16:38.240 --> 01:16:43.240
Whereas what a psychedelic does is get to that level, and it shakes the whole setting
01:16:43.240 --> 01:16:49.240
by losing the ego's habitual constrictions, and so they're loosened.
01:16:51.240 --> 01:17:00.240
And in that loosening, a new kind of setting, a new realisation, a new feeling can come in and take place.
01:17:03.240 --> 01:17:08.240
And that's very magical.
01:17:08.240 --> 01:17:14.240
These are not dangerous drugs. By far the most dangerous drug is alcohol, followed by cigarettes.
01:17:14.240 --> 01:17:20.240
And this is not just because they're the most available, but because they actually are particularly toxic.
01:17:20.240 --> 01:17:26.240
So it's not on our radar, the psychedelic drugs, as toxic drugs.
01:17:26.240 --> 01:17:32.240
But when we use them and when people use them, we need to use them with caution and care.
01:17:32.240 --> 01:17:39.240
And so I would not be preaching a gung-ho attitude, but then I wouldn't preach a gung-ho attitude to paracetamol or heart surgery.
01:17:39.240 --> 01:17:46.240
These are things that can be done safely, and it's a travesty that doctors are not allowed to use these.
01:17:46.240 --> 01:17:50.240
Why shouldn't we be allowed to use the psychedelics in our practice?
01:17:50.240 --> 01:17:53.240
Imagine telling the surgeons they can't use morphine.
01:17:53.240 --> 01:17:58.240
You know, we have capabilities to use these drugs safely, clinically.
01:17:58.240 --> 01:18:05.240
And the idea that a sociopolitical agenda that labels all recreational drugs as unhelpful or dangerous
01:18:05.240 --> 01:18:09.240
is allowed to dictate medical science and research is outrageous.
01:18:09.240 --> 01:18:18.240
We absolutely need to be looking at these substances as the safe and malleable tools that they are to improve the lives of people.
01:18:18.240 --> 01:18:23.240
This is fundamentally a human rights issue.
01:18:23.240 --> 01:18:28.240
It's been pitched by the dominative powers of our society that they are looking after us,
01:18:28.240 --> 01:18:32.240
that they are protecting us from the dangers of psychedelics.
01:18:32.240 --> 01:18:37.240
That is absolute and utter, unmitigated bullshit.
01:18:37.240 --> 01:18:40.240
That is not what's going on at all.
01:18:40.240 --> 01:18:45.240
We are being controlled rigidly to serve the interests of the people.
01:18:45.240 --> 01:18:51.240
We are being controlled rigidly to serve the interests of small groups within our society.
01:18:51.240 --> 01:19:01.240
And in order to serve those interests, every aspect of the human creature that really matters is being shut down and enclosed and controlled.
01:19:01.240 --> 01:19:03.240
And this has been brought to the surface.
01:19:03.240 --> 01:19:08.240
It's been made obvious by the way that our society has reacted to psychedelics.
01:19:08.240 --> 01:19:14.240
Because honestly, if an adult takes a psychedelic while doing no harm to others,
01:19:14.240 --> 01:19:16.240
why should society be interested in that at all?
01:19:16.240 --> 01:19:26.240
I mean, why should they seek to control that, let alone make it the subject of really draconian criminal penalties?
01:19:26.240 --> 01:19:31.240
What is it that society is afraid of and what society is afraid of is the free adult,
01:19:31.240 --> 01:19:40.240
the free thinking individual who can make up his or her own mind on everything that really matters.
01:19:40.240 --> 01:19:47.240
The plant medicines that are used in a sacramental fashion,
01:19:47.240 --> 01:19:57.240
such as ayahuasca, such as mescaline, such as peyote, such as tobacco, such as iboga,
01:19:57.240 --> 01:20:04.240
were not discovered by pharmaceutical researchers looking to make a book.
01:20:04.240 --> 01:20:15.240
They came from shamanic cultures, where the shamans themselves would go through the process of deeply immersing themselves into the experience
01:20:15.240 --> 01:20:22.240
with all their imperfections and all their pain and all their dysfunctions and all their woundedness.
01:20:22.240 --> 01:20:30.240
So in other words, they would undergo a self-transformation, which then allows them to come back and help others.
01:20:31.240 --> 01:20:41.240
So those substances that grew up in shamanic cultures, at least whose use developed in shamanic cultures,
01:20:41.240 --> 01:20:46.240
were never meant to be used alone apart from shamanic practices.
01:20:46.240 --> 01:20:49.240
There's a deep tradition behind that.
01:20:49.240 --> 01:20:55.240
We can be arrogant Westerners about that and say, well, I don't need that. I just need the substance. Just give me the substance.
01:20:55.240 --> 01:21:01.240
Or we can say, well, yeah, we have something to learn from these people and from their ceremonies and their traditions.
01:21:01.240 --> 01:21:08.240
And in other words, we can trust their age-honored experience.
01:21:08.240 --> 01:21:18.240
So many people who take ayahuasca or other psychedelics, but ayahuasca, the current cultural context,
01:21:18.240 --> 01:21:23.240
which seems to be one that carries the message particularly strongly,
01:21:23.240 --> 01:21:34.240
come away from these sessions realizing this complete re-understanding of nature and our relationship and how out of balance we are.
01:21:34.240 --> 01:21:41.240
The information we have out there is that we've become a very destructive part of that ecosystem,
01:21:41.240 --> 01:21:47.240
a very narcissistic, spoiled and destructive part.
01:21:47.240 --> 01:21:57.240
And what Alan Watts says is that there's divine potential in us and we really need to unlock it.
01:21:57.240 --> 01:22:00.240
It's essential that we unlock it.
01:22:00.240 --> 01:22:07.240
Otherwise the damage that we are doing and can continue to do is irreversible.
01:22:08.240 --> 01:22:16.240
Something like 20% of my sample of people have taken psychedelics and changed their careers to do something more ecologically oriented.
01:22:16.240 --> 01:22:23.240
So, you know, they may well have a very serious role to play in literally saving the planet.
01:22:23.240 --> 01:22:26.240
This is no small act.
01:22:26.240 --> 01:22:35.240
As a corollary to that, they also seem to have a facility to help people with their psychogenic disorders,
01:22:35.240 --> 01:22:40.240
with depression, with anxiety, with addictions, all of these kinds of things.
01:22:40.240 --> 01:22:46.240
So I think that the potential benefit of these substances shouldn't be underestimated.
01:22:50.240 --> 01:22:53.240
You know, and this is a reflection of a coevolutionary process, right?
01:22:53.240 --> 01:22:59.240
We are coevolving with these substances, have been as long as we've been around.
01:22:59.240 --> 01:23:02.240
That's what these molecules do in nature.
01:23:02.240 --> 01:23:08.240
They're, you know, they weave the ecosystem together and we're part of that.
01:23:08.240 --> 01:23:17.240
There just happen to be certain molecules that talk to, you know, the big brain stupid primates more effectively than others.
01:23:17.240 --> 01:23:20.240
But that's what's going on.
01:23:20.240 --> 01:23:29.240
A lot of people who reject psychedelics say, when you say to such a person, psychedelics can be liberating, their reaction is that's too easy.
01:23:29.240 --> 01:23:34.240
No, it's not too easy. It's not too easy at all.
01:23:34.240 --> 01:23:36.240
That's when the work really begins.
01:23:36.240 --> 01:23:44.240
When you begin to integrate into your life the lessons that you've learned as you've stood for a moment on the outside and seen the wider reality.
01:23:44.240 --> 01:23:46.240
That's where the work really begins.
01:23:46.240 --> 01:23:49.240
The work isn't in gaining access to that reality.
01:23:49.240 --> 01:23:59.240
It's adjusting to that wider reality and making it part of our daily practice in the lives that we live at this physical level of existence.
01:24:02.240 --> 01:24:10.240
Thomas Merton, the Catholic monk and spiritual teacher, talked about gaining possession of ourselves.
01:24:10.240 --> 01:24:18.240
Now, say in the healing of addiction, we talk about recovery and the word recovery means to find something.
01:24:18.240 --> 01:24:21.240
And so what is it that we find when we recover?
01:24:21.240 --> 01:24:23.240
Well, we find ourselves.
01:24:23.240 --> 01:24:33.240
And Merton says in his autobiography, Seven Story Mountain, that in order to gain possession of ourselves, you must have a taste of victory.
01:24:33.240 --> 01:24:37.240
And we must like the victory better than defeat.
01:24:38.240 --> 01:24:49.240
And so in relation to the psychedelic experience, glimpsing the true self, glimpsing a deeper, more inclusive, more connected reality is a taste of victory.
01:24:51.240 --> 01:24:59.240
I mean, we must like that better than the resignation of the disconnected, isolated, egoic self.