14: The Problem with Revelation: Psychedelics and Conspiracies (w/Lorna Liana)
This week we announce and discuss a refinement in our podcast’s direction. Real talk: conspirituality has clearly become both a front and a gateway for the fever-dream of QAnon. As mainstream news outlets wake up to the sordid reality that independent journalists have been tracking for two years, we find neither stream truly conceptualizing answers or methods for recovery and healing. Going forward, we’re going to concentrate not only on critique, but also offering solutions.
Our guest this week is Lorna Liana, publisher of Entheonation. She tells Matthew about the insurgence of conspirituality in the plant medicine and ceremony world. Some neo-shamans, she says, are redpilling plant worshippers during vulnerable states. Julian and Derek chime in with their own experiences of psychedelics.
Show Notes
Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic Powers
How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us about Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence
What Are the Coronavirus Risks with Ayahuasca Ceremonies?
Can Ayahuasca Protect You From Coronavirus?
Is Tobacco Antiviral (& Can It Treat COVID-19)?
Plant Ceremonies and Your Safety in the Midst of a Global Crisis
COVID-19 Denialism is Rooted in the Settler Colonial Mindset
A Neuroscientist Explains What Conspiracy Theories Do To Your Brain
The Danger of Manipulative Love-Bombing in a Relationship
The Certainty Bias: A Potentially Dangerous Mental Flaw
Dopamine, cognitive biases and assessment of certainty: A neurocognitive model of delusions
The Dopaminergic Midbrain Encodes the Expected Certainty about Desired Outcomes
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Thanks, Derek.
So, episode 14.
Wow, we have one for you today.
The Problem with Revelation.
Psychedelics and Conspiracies.
This week we announce and discuss a refinement in our podcast's direction.
Real talk, conspirituality has clearly become both a front and a gateway for the fever dream of QAnon.
As mainstream news outlets wake up to the sordid reality that independent journalists have been tracking for two years, we find neither stream truly conceptualizing answers or methods for recovery and healing.
So going forward, we're going to concentrate not only on critique, but also on offering solutions.
Our guest this week is Lorna Liana, publisher of Entheonation.
She tells Matthew about the resurgence, about the insurgence, excuse me, of conspirituality in the plant medicine and ceremony world.
Some neo-shamans, she says, are red-pilling plant worshipers during vulnerable states.
Derek and I, who have a deep interest and experience with psychedelics, will chime in with our own experiences as well.
Yeah, and in place of this week's Conspirituality for all three of us, I'll just do a little rundown on this slight change in direction, a little bit of refinement as we head into or towards our fourth month, I guess, really.
Now, there's an update published to the About page of Conspirituality.net, and I'll just run that down.
As Julian briefly pointed out, major platforms in recent weeks have finally caught up to what a few independent journalists have been pulling their hair out over the past two years, which is how deeply embedded QAnon has become in American and now international political life.
The public news has come as fast as Q radicalization itself happens on an individual level and analysts are struggling to keep up.
Now, here on the podcast, we've spent about four months analyzing the doorway between wellness, alt-health, and new spirituality communities, and the deepest center of the Q fever dream.
Our focus has been on the bizarre turn of major wellness influencers who would typically track progressive towards right-wing conspiracism.
On the way, we've discovered that conspirituality presents a fork in the wellness road that is tearing many communities apart.
Yoga, naturopathy, we're going to talk about plant medicine today, just to name a few.
The fault lines are moral and political, but most importantly, they're epistemic.
Some of the largest names in wellness and new spirituality are at a complete loss as to how to manage the deepening schism in their demographics.
You can see in these show notes that Marianne Williamson put out an on-brand but possibly vague tweet.
And created a storm of polarized replies.
The tweet read something like, QAnon, by the way, is a dark psychic force.
Well, she got attacked soundly.
And a few days later, a channeler named Magenta Pixie, with 27,000 followers, posted what might be the logical conclusion for those enraged by Williamson.
Williamson is, according to Pixie, A dark worker.
And an even more painful irony is that old-school QAnons to whom wellness influencers are now attracted seem to hate them, as is evidenced by their online chatter reflecting upon the anti-trafficking rallies that were held last weekend.
QAnon might be opportunist enough to suck in new age conspiritualists, but the Alliance may only offer more insecurity and eventually more betrayal.
Now in real life, the conspirituality to QAnon pipeline is destroying partnerships and families.
We're going to link for you to the Reddit that's called QAnon Casualties, which is extraordinary to browse.
The impact on small businesses already teetering on the edge of COVID is yet unknown.
Some commentators are hopeful that Trump losing in November will erode the movement, but we believe that's naive and inconsistent with the cultic dynamics at play.
Those who have spent more time with it are identifying it as a religion, and it's clearly becoming intergenerational.
And so far we've seen almost no progress towards reparative answers to this crisis.
Our contacts in cultic studies and religious studies are deeply aware of this forest fire.
They're deeply concerned and they're at a loss.
And so we want to think about that and we want to start helping where we can.
Derek and I are journalists and all three of us, you know, Julian's a fantastic writer and we're all working on the daily news of these developments.
But other outlets are covering the daily news firehose more thoroughly and with better resources.
And as wellness professionals, we're realizing that our strength is elsewhere.
It really lies in being able to go beyond reporting and criticism.
And towards community health discussions.
So this means that over the next few months, we will be moving towards solution seeking.
We're not exactly sure what it looks like, but we'll keep you posted.
So that's the update from the pod.
As Matthew said, we're going to forego our normal this week in Conspirituality format, which is usually one of us presenting something and we're going to forego our normal this week in Conspirituality format, which is usually one of And we're all going to just have more of an open dialogue both before and after the interview with Lorna.
And I'm going to kick it off because for the past year of my life, besides my paying work and my other facets of life, I've been working on a book On psychedelic therapy.
Now, I just want to bring up two points here, one very briefly, and then just a brief overview of my thoughts on it that we can discuss.
But first off, being that we are all yoga instructors and have been involved in yoga for a long time, there are some very interesting through lines between yoga and psychedelic usage.
Mircea Eliade wrote about it extensively in a number of books in the 1950s.
His student, Wendy Donninger, related yoga kriyas with psychedelics and brought a lot of textural evidence of that.
And there have been many people who have discussed this, but what I want to point out As we move toward a model of psychedelic therapy, which we very rapidly are, I'm finding a lot of the same practices of exotification that have happened in yoga in the past few decades happening exactly the same way in the psychedelic world right now.
I just want to touch upon that point because it's the same community often, but it's also the same ways of thinking.
And one thing that's very important that I always remember Paul Offit, who is a vaccine researcher and developer and doctor, brought up is that there is no such thing as alternative medicine.
Medicine is what works.
So if something works, then it's medicine.
But if it doesn't, then you have to question it.
And that's something that I find in the wellness space is often, you know, it's often binary, which is problematic.
And the word ancient Does not necessarily mean good.
And that's one of the main things that I see between yoga and how psychedelics is developing, that because these are ancient practices, that means they're good.
And that's not always necessarily the case.
Sometimes, absolutely.
But this is a nuanced conversation, which leads me to the second point I want to make before I open it up.
In that, There is a serious problem with the way that we treat mental health disorders, which are basically what psychedelics are being tested right now clinically for usage, specifically PTSD, anxiety disorder, depression, suicidal ideation are some of the main ones.
And they have been used historically for these purposes, ritualistically.
That is absolutely true.
What I realized about a year ago when I started working on this book, it was going to be a memoir.
I've been doing psychedelics since 1994.
I haven't counted, but I would guess I'm somewhere between 100 to 150 times using these substances.
Possibly using them a little too much in college, but now they serve a different purpose.
But what I realized when I started writing the book, which was mostly gonna be a memoir, was that I couldn't really talk about psychedelic therapy without discussing the failure of modern psychiatry.
It started with the best of intentions, but we have to understand today what we call antidepressants, which are SSRIs, SNRIs, antipsychotics, benzodiazepines predominantly, started off as textile chemicals that were used to dye cloth.
And as what happens with a lot of medicine and a lot of chemistry in general is that It was used in a circumstance where they realized it had other uses.
So much medicine we use happens this way.
It's very rare that something is discovered and then is used for what the researchers thought it was going to be used for.
Sometimes this is good, sometimes not so much.
But the 20th century really saw a turning point in our understanding of what medicine is and the reasons that psychedelics are Illegal predominantly has to do with class issues and racial issues.
So as with anything, these are very complex topics.
An interesting fact that I came across is that we often remember the sixties for the psychedelic usage.
The reality is most Americans were on what were called minor tranquilizers at the time.
There was way more usage of those substances than psychedelics at the time, but because of the way that it became illegal in the Nixon administration, which was just a continuation of the Anslinger administration and Project MK Ultra and all of these other Projects that were using psychedelics in varying ways.
We remember that because of the illegality, but Americans have always been addicted to drugs in some capacity.
I've always used them for a variety of reasons.
And right now we are in a mental health crisis, but it predominantly has to do with the interventions that are being prescribed.
Psychedelics offer a very real possibility of overturning some of that damage, but at the moment from what I see, the way it's being handled is being put through the same pipeline that the other pharmaceuticals Are being put through and that's going to bring about its own dangers.
So I just want to throw that out there as an intro.
And then let's just talk about some of these things.
And then I have plenty of bullet points for after Lauren's interview, because she brings up a lot of great points.
Yeah.
What have you been finding in your research for the book that really jumps out at you, Derek, in terms of psychotherapeutic applications?
For me, that's the most fascinating aspect.
The fact that we don't use them?
The fact that we don't use them and the fact that there seem to be a variety of applications that have good supporting evidence.
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, even to this day with all of the pharmaceuticals, pharmacology that we've used, psychotherapy still stands far and above.
Especially with some of the pills in conjunction with psychotherapy, it has good evidence.
The problem is that psychiatrists and general practitioners They're incentivized to prescribe pills.
They're not incentivized financially to do psychotherapy.
And that's one of the biggest failures.
In fact, I was talking to my wife about this the other night.
It's very interesting that in America, psychiatrists and general practitioning doctors are allowed to write scripts, but psychologists are not.
And psychologists are the ones who are going to go most deeply into psychotherapy.
So if they see, well, long as, as an adjunct with their psychotherapy, a prescription that might work, I feel like they should be empowered.
But when I was put on a benzodiazepine about 15 years ago, my doctor just said, Oh, you're having anxiety disorder.
Here's a pill.
She didn't, she asked me about nothing about my personal life.
Yeah.
That's serious failure.
Yeah, it strikes me as being a variation of the expression on the problem with mind-body dualism, right?
That we can medicalize this pharmaceutical intervention with regard to how you're feeling about your life, but we're going to radically make that discontinuous from an interpersonal exploration of why you may be feeling the way you're feeling.
Do you know why?
Can I just jump in and answer that real quick, Matthew?
The reason is that there's no ideology of depression or anxiety, right?
There's no known causes.
And why all of this happened was because in the 1940s and 50s, The chemical imbalance theory of depression, which has been disproven numerous times, but it was in circulation at the time.
And psychiatrists wanted to be on the same playing field as medical doctors.
Now because of germ theory and the microscope, you can see cancer.
And if you can see cancer, then you can identify it and treat it.
Psychiatrists wanted the same level of respect from the public, which they hadn't had.
So, the chemical imbalance theory perfectly fit in etiology of depression, even though it wasn't true.
It's a multivariate cause.
I just published a piece by some physical anthropologists yesterday, Discussing how many factors you have to take in to really understand anxiety and depression.
It's not just one, but that's the actual reason.
Another interesting fact was in the 1950s, around 1959, the American Medical Association used to be the sort of watchdog, and they stopped vetting clinical trials and started accepting advertising money from pharmaceutical companies.
And when that happened, you had collusion between psychiatrists, The medical industry and the government and the pharmaceutical companies all happened at that moment, and that's when everything changed.
I had a couple of questions, Derek.
One, like, I don't know if you want to go here personally, but 100 to 150 times that you've been in ceremony or you've used psychedelics, but you said that the purpose has changed over time.
What did you mean by that?
I was not brought up with any religion whatsoever.
And when I got to college, uh, around the same time, I started smoking marijuana.
And then shortly after someone introduced me to mushrooms and LSD, and somebody gave, a friend of mine gave me a copy of the Bhagavad Gita and the Dhammapada.
And so not having a religious framework in life, and all of a sudden my first taste is Eastern religions, right?
Not the way, even though I, the Western model is how we think, right?
So you're going to be, Involved in a Christian mindset, but that was really my first introduction and those forces coming together of reading about transcendence and meditation and all of these different ideologies while experiencing them on psychedelics just took over my life for about 15 months and I definitely will say that I did them too much and I'm very fortunate that even though it wasn't in ceremony at the time,
I was very lucky to have good guides, which is essential, because most people have bad trips because they're not guided properly.
And the few that I did have was because of that reason.
But the first few I had, I was guided expertly through them.
And that really opened my mind.
And I don't mind talking anything personally about any of this, because I think it is really important.
It's all stuff I bring up in the book.
But it was just, I was reading about religion and trying to push my mind as far open as possible, and psychedelics were the perfect avenue for that sort of exploration.
Well, just to out myself here, like, I have no zero psychedelic experience whatsoever, I think, because, I mean, I'm wondering why I often ask, like, why didn't I come into contact with That culture.
Why have I always had a kind of fear of substances?
And I think it really comes back to being about 22 years old and going through a series of seizure episodes that were really quite severe and ended up being idiopathic.
But I think I've had this sense since then That any kind of extra alteration or anything unexpected that I would add to my particular mix is just something I'm really wary of.
So I'm just kind of gonna hang back and listen to you guys ask some questions.
Well, let me say one thing and then I want to hear Julian's experiences if he's open to it.
But that is a great decision that you made, actually, because not everyone should take these substances.
You know, Lorna talks about that a little with contraindications with SSRIs, for example.
Right.
These are really powerful substances.
That is true.
And they are not for everyone.
Well, also, I mean, additionally, I had one or two experiences with a good friend in Vermont with some very strong marijuana, and I think it was just twice.
But I think that just with a very small amount, I had a very intense vertigo experience where I felt I was falling to the center of the earth.
There was something pleasurable and something expansive about it, but it was terrifying.
And I felt like this is a substance that people are using a lot and very commonly, and I don't seem to be wired to be able to tolerate it.
Very different chemistry, though.
That should be known, right?
I would say some of the hardest trips I've ever had were from edible marijuana, compared to even mushrooms or LSD.
Like, it's super intense, the effects it has on your nervous system.
Okay, all right.
Yeah, I didn't even bother to find out, right?
I just sort of ran the other way.
Yeah, which may have been the wise thing to do.
I mean, I want to ask both of you, because I think this is really fascinating.
I'm fascinated right now by whatever kind of genetic temperament commonalities the three of us might have, and I can maybe say more about that later or another time, but I'm curious with you, Derek, during that 15-month period where psychedelics and your study of religion kind of took over your life, is how you framed it, Did you find yourself becoming overtly religious?
Did you have experiences that made you go, you know, this religion must be true, or what these texts are talking about must become of central importance in my life?
And did that shift for you over time?
Like, how did that play out?
Surprisingly, no.
I think because On an academic level, I was taking classes in Islam and Buddhism and Hinduism.
I mean, I covered all of the major and a lot of the minor religions in my studies.
And from my perspective, every one of them had cool things to say.
It wasn't so much that I thought, I mean, I still do to this day think that Buddhism has the best track in terms of what it says.
And I'm not a Buddhist because I don't practice any ceremony, but I think the way that I think about things is most informed by Buddhism.
But specific to that question, I did think a lot about transcendence.
And I did believe in a spirit and that of some Godhead that was informing us, that was very much part of it.
And over time, I mean, I've been an atheist for a long time since then.
So that was one of the things I had to grapple with, specifically when I started getting serious about the study of neuroscience and starting understanding why we think the ways that we do.
So, that did change, but there was never any over-religiosity that I experienced.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me.
I relate to that very much as well.
I mean, I think for a lot of us who are drawn to psychedelics, there's this deep curiosity about this potentially being a doorway into authentic mystical experience, right?
Will this show something to me that doesn't require faith?
Right?
That will initiate me into something where I'll go, oh, that's what all of this is about.
Like, might this be the heart of the matter in terms of where religions come from in terms of inspired mystics, right?
Absolutely.
That was, I mean, I think that was the best way I've ever heard it put, right, is looking for evidence instead of faith.
And that's always been my thing, even about my criticism of some religions.
It's why I took to say Sufism, for example, out of all the Islamic orders, because in Islam, it's blasphemous to think that you can come anywhere close to Muhammad.
But in Sufism, you're trying to replicate his experience to know what he went through, which is why they've been outcast Historically, and killed in many countries for that belief.
Well, that's a really interesting segue into me asking Matthew something similar, because there are some people who observe that temporal lobe epilepsy, that there are multiple figures through history who appear to have had temporal lobe epilepsy based on accounts, or in some cases based on actual medical records,
As much as they knew about epilepsy at the time, whereas certain symptoms that they would go through that accompanied their religious visions appear to potentially be temporal lobe epilepsy, Muhammad is actually one of them.
And along with Joan of Arc and Constantine, and there's a whole bunch of them, Ellen G. White, who founded the Seventh-Day Adventists.
But I wanted to ask you, Matthew, given that you've had experiences with epilepsy when you were younger, During those experiences, was there any kind of religiosity?
I don't think so.
Not per se.
It's like there was a nothingness that felt transformative, not because it showed me That I don't know that something would be true, but it showed me that I was missing something or that there was a possibility of being alive in a way that was completely parallel to or outside of my self-conception.
I mean, the seizures themselves are just absences, you know, waking up half an hour to an hour later with all of the furniture and the apartment pulled down, but no memory of that complete, you know, segment of time is snipped out.
That sounds rather terrifying.
Yes, yes, and it was also strange and alienating because I got good medical care, you know, I was able to, I realized I should go for testing and I did that and I did the, I stayed awake for whatever it was for 48 hours so that they could do a sleep test and And I remember just meeting with one neurologist and one lab tech and no real sort of
It makes me realize that had I gone through that within some kind of pre-modern networked community, that there would have been a council, there would have been people to discuss it with, there would have been meanings given to it that might have been intrusive and might have impinged upon my individuality or whatever, but
But it was very weird to have this experience and be alone with it and then go into these small clinical spaces in which they were kind of reading charts and looking at zags on pages.
But I do think there's a relationship between that Those lightning bolts, which is what they felt like, and a pursuit of epiphanic or transformative experiences that came along with the cultic environments that I was attracted to and that I was recruited by.
So there is a connection there.
But I do have to say that those cultures never fulfilled that promise.
And I just wanted to disclose that, you know, when Derek, you're talking about that 15-month period where there's kind of an expansive obsession that is, you know, coincident with, you know, drinking all of this new content in, the most, I think the biggest trips I've ever had have been moments of transformative atheism.
So, I told the story a while back, a couple episodes ago, of how I had a break with my Joe Tisch teacher, and we had a conflict, a personal conflict, and that was very wrenching.
Like, we've repaired, and I love him, and But I loved him, and there was something very similar about us, and I was the one who was saying, I am bringing myself out of this mythological way of living my life.
I don't think that I'm living in the 21st century, and I need to leave.
And I remember leaving him and getting on my bike and riding home and going up and sitting in my office and looking out the window and having a kind of peak experience as though I were on drugs or something like that for about 20 minutes in which there was no realization of oneness, there was no sense of everything is coming together or everything makes sense.
What there was was the absolute peace of having had everything erase Right?
Like, oh, this system of planets is not going to be my fascination anymore.
I remember just looking in my hand and going, no, this is it and that's okay.
Or just touching the wood of my desk and going, somebody made this for me and this grew in a tree and that's just all it is and that's fine.
And so it was a stripping away of stuff, of ideas and of aspirations that gave me, I think, Like the deepest high or trip of my life.
That happened a couple of times, but that one was normal.
That one really stands out.
I very much relate to that.
I would say some of my most profound epiphanies that were integrating for me have been moments of realizing that without adding any special secret sauce to reality, it was already sacred, and that this was enough, and that I could actually Let go of all different lenses and frameworks through which I was trying to see reality in order to make it sacred somehow.
Right, right.
I suppose that a certain number of religiously or spiritually oriented people would say that we had gotten the point.
Maybe.
Well, that's what Alan Watts always said about psychedelics.
When you get the call, hang up the phone.
That's his famous take on it.
I think now, more than before, there was a sense of searching.
And I honestly think my current psychedelic usage, which is once or twice a year, is more like a reboot.
And there is no more chasing.
It's an opportunity for just kind of stepping out of my day to day and just looking around and seeing where I'm at and checking in.
And I think that It takes a while to get to that point, at least it did for me, but that's where the therapy happens now.
Before it would be this overwhelming experience and now it's just, I honestly, the last time I did it with a friend, we played about six or seven hours of ping pong.
And listen to music and just talked and bonded.
And it was that alone has a therapeutic content.
And Julian, I mean, you haven't touched upon your experiences yet, and I don't know how much you want to divulge, but I'd love to hear what you think about this world.
Oh, no, I have so many.
I have too many stories to tell.
And I have a little section of my closer today where I'm going to go into it a little bit.
But suffice it to say, I mean, in my In my late teens, I was as obsessed with 60s counterculture and, you know, the Doors and Jimi Hendrix and all of that kind of stuff as a lot of kids, you know, find themselves being.
Especially of my generation, especially in the country I grew up in, and I'll talk about why in my closer.
But yeah, psychedelics for me were about creativity and wanting mystical experiences, and then after that, chasing psychological healing and embodiment, wanting to be fully free.
And it's been a wild ride.
Yeah, I think it's a complex and powerful topic.
Yeah, and it's topical for us on this podcast because, I mean, our guest today, Lorna Liana, is going to talk to us a little bit, or I interviewed her about the fact that, you know, the plant medicine community and culture is starting also to be influenced by
Conspiratuality and on up to QAnon influences and so it's becoming increasingly complex and I just wanted to ask both of you have you seen or noticed that psychedelic culture has entered into like a concretely
I mean, I know that it's at the heart of 60s counterculture, but since then has it played a role in movements that have had political import?
I have a number of bullet points that I wanted to talk about after.
The intro was more like just kind of touching, but I do want to address that because I think it is important and we can lead into the interview from this.
You know, in our Slack channel, Julian had said that psychedelics are non-specific amplifiers, which is a term that's been used for a while, meaning that they don't have content in and of themselves.
They just open you up and then the content is the ritual or whatever you're going through.
You know, out of all these experiences I've done, for example, ayahuasca three times, and really what I got out of it every time was lying there and thinking about all the things that I've messed up with in my life, but that I can make better.
And that was the therapy that afterwards, that was very powerful.
Because of that, you know, one thing that Luana says, which I kind of disagree with, is that she keeps referring to the psychedelics community.
Just like yoga, there's not a community, right?
You can call anyone who does psychedelics part of the community, just as you can call anyone who does yoga part of the community.
Yoga works and Bikram and forest yoga, right?
These are very, they're tribal and psychedelics are the same way.
Like I've been involved not only doing them, but in different facets of work in them for a long time.
And you don't come across everyone.
So I think it's more of a tribal thing.
And yes, there are some that are going down this rabbit hole, and then there are other people who not at all.
Lorna Liana is a new media strategist and online business coach to visionary entrepreneurs After six years of traveling the world as a digital nomad, she is grateful to call Ibiza, Spain, her home.
She has over 25 years of psychedelic experience and she tracks the developments in the psychedelic renaissance and global expansion of ayahuasca with great interest and engaging conversations With thought leaders in the field.
Since 2003, she's attended ayahuasca ceremonies with about 30 different shamans and facilitators, seven indigenous tribes, several Brazilian churches, and a host of neo-shamanic circles in Peru, Ecuador, Brazil, Europe, the U.S., and Asia.
Through this widely varied background, she hopes to shed some perspective on the globalization of ayahuasca.
She is the producer of Entheonation.com, And here's my discussion with her.
Hi, Lorna.
Thank you so much for joining us.
Thanks for taking the time.
Thank you so much for having me.
I am deeply honored to be here, especially because I've been binge watching and listening to your podcast for the last few weeks.
Cool.
Well, that's good to hear.
Now, you publish and curate Entheonation.com.
Can you tell us a little bit about the community you serve and some of its history?
Absolutely.
So my audience is comprised of people who are interested in the use of psychedelic plant medicines for healing and spiritual transformation.
They are individuals who participate in medicine culture, which is an expanding neo-shamanic culture, cultural demographic that is coalescing around the globalization and expansion of ancestral plant medicines, like ayahuasca, cultural demographic that is coalescing around the globalization and expansion of ancestral plant medicines, like ayahuasca, peyote, wachuma, which is a psychedelic
Now, you've named some classes of substances that people in your world are exploring.
What types of experiences are they associated with?
You describe, you know, spiritual development or exploration.
What's the general drive behind your audience's needs and interests?
Yeah, so that's a really great question, and what I would say is there are certain key differentiators Between this demographic of medicine culture participants and the greater psychedelic community.
Okay.
So, some of the differentiating factors are, you know, these are individuals who are seeking shared ceremonial experiences.
Right.
So, some of these substances that I, you know, mentioned, these, you know, plant medicines, These plant medicines have, many of them have an ancestral history of use.
Some of them have been, are some of the oldest plant medicines in the world.
They've been used by indigenous peoples for at least a millennium, and typically they're used in shared ceremonial contexts.
Now of course you can use these plant medicines individually as well, but You know, for the most part, the group participation, the shared spiritual prayer, Is an important aspect of this type of communion, so to speak.
Right.
And so, you know, there are songs and chants that go along with the use of these medicines.
And as the culture has been evolving over time, the culture has been adapting to the ways in which people wish to use these medicines.
You know, one of the aspects that you'll see around in plant medicine culture is just this, you know, beautiful cultural renaissance, so to speak, that you might witness among the Indigenous communities.
Where for the first time in, you know, 500 years, there is a genuine interest by Westerners in their culture and in their medicine, in their wisdom traditions.
Wow.
And so that supports, it feeds, it nourishes the indigenous community with regards to their culture, with regards to their own indigenous movement to be able to claim with regards to their own indigenous movement to be able to claim more political power and
Now, I come from the yoga world and this kind of intercultural exchange and the, you know, the disparities and the differences between global north and global south cultures and, you know, histories of colonialism really complicate the disparities and the differences between global north and global south cultures and, you know, histories of colonialism really I'm assuming some of that is going on in what you're describing, and I'm wondering how it impacts
The status of the Shaman or the Neo-Shaman.
Like, who's qualified to lead ceremony?
And how do we know when somebody's making it up?
And how do seekers know the difference?
Like, what are the signs of legitimacy and safety?
Yeah, this is a very deeply nuanced and important Question to ask, and this ties in with the body of work that I've been developing over the last couple of years around helping ceremony seekers connect with ceremony facilitators and plant medicine shamans that are safe, qualified, and good.
Right.
So let's break down what these mean, because it doesn't necessarily mean that indigenous shamans are more safe and qualified, or Western facilitators are more safe and qualified.
And then there's a whole question of what good actually means.
So in the context of the growing neo-shamanic medicine culture, safety has developed certain factors or attributes that may not be safety has developed certain factors or attributes that may not be the same as the use of plant medicines in a traditional indigenous context for whatever that I mean, tradition is always changing, right?
So, it's really hard to pin down what traditional actually means, you know, with a practice that continues to change with the, you know, cultural needs as, you know, time, you know, kind of, you know, passes, so to speak.
So SAFE in the neo-shamanic contemporary context means that the facilitator or shaman will not use their authority for financial or sexual gain.
SAFE also means that the person that is leading the ceremony or organizing it knows how to screen participants for people that might have negative medical contraindications.
Oh wow!
The plant medicine that's being used or the psychedelic that's being used, there are certain drug contraindications, certain health contraindications that can make it very risky for that person to participate in the ceremony.
And so some things might be like a history of bipolar disorder or, you know, having had, you know, psychotic breaks before.
Because those can be very difficult to repair if the person has another psychotic break in ceremony.
You know, some might argue if the person has had a history of suicidal ideation, it may be that, you know, that ceremony may not be the best for them.
If the organizer does not have the support staff, like a licensed therapist, psychotherapist, to be able to offer that kind of ongoing support to the participant.
Because often these ceremonies happen, you know, people go into the ceremony or into the retreat and then it's done and people are just go home and they're off and dealing with the repercussions or the aftermath on their own for better or worse.
Now, is that infrastructure of medical screening and, you know, on-site psychotherapy, is that beginning to develop?
Like, is that becoming robust in some parts of the community?
Only for the high-end ventures.
Because having that kind of qualified staff is very expensive.
So, you know, in some of the high-end retreats that I've attended, there are, you know, The organizers, you know, and one of their selling points is that they have a licensed therapist on staff, or they might have a licensed medical professional, like a doctor on site, or they have a doctor on call.
But most, you know, retreat centers, say in the Amazon, they don't have The budget for that, they don't have the network for that.
It's already enough for them to, you know, be able to run a plant medicine retreat and deliver this to have all the auxiliary support systems in place.
It's difficult, especially if they don't have good internet where they are.
Right.
I wonder, I mean, like, I suppose in areas with less infrastructure that the screening process and the safety procedures would have to be more conservative, because I can't imagine that there's a lot of You know, strong evidentiary science around the impacts or the intersections between like San Pedro and bipolar disorder or peyote and a heart condition or something like that.
Is there a tendency towards conservatism when there isn't, you know, qualified medical staff around?
This is very difficult, you know, so when you think about the Worldview, the plant medicine healing worldview, there's a whole different medical wellness framework, right?
This is why we're talking today, and this is why we're talking, yeah.
Yeah, and so, you know, as part of the culture, you know, you have to understand that one of the prevailing philosophies is that your work with these master plant teachers Is healing.
So there's also kind of like this belief that these master plant teachers can heal anything.
And then there's also the financial or the fiduciary relationships between the center and the participants.
I mean, they're not really motivated to screen strictly because that's a source of income for the center and for the shaman facilitator.
So, you know, it really takes a very, you know, high integrity, ethical and, you know, aware and educated facilitator to really, you know, seriously consider whether or not the person's going to be harmed by the ceremony or helped by the ceremony.
And it's difficult to make that decision when, you know, the whole foundation of your worldview is that these medicines help everyone.
Wow, okay, well that brings us to sort of how we connected, which is that I posted a call out for comments on the possible intersection between the usage of psychedelics and what we're calling on this podcast the conspirituality mindset.
Which would be a tendency to, in sort of high-intensity form, combine conspiratorial themes of, you know, authoritarian governmental control with the promise of spiritual transformation coinciding within the same kind of narrative arc.
And that question that I had, that I just sort of opened up on Facebook, came from anecdotes that I've heard from reliable sources that there are major conspirituality influencers whose awakening to, for instance, the pandemic being a hoax, came in the context of psychedelic usage.
So you reached out and said that I was on the right path.
So how did that strike you when you saw that comment?
Well, first of all, I was immediately, I was like, Oh my God, thank God they picked up on this.
This is something that, you know, many of us in the plant medicine community that tend to lean towards evidence-based frameworks for understanding the world.
This can, you know, this has been something that we've been witnessing, the tragic polarization and fragmentation of our communities between, you know, folks that are a lot more conspiratorial in thinking and folks that, you know, want to, you know, explore, see the value of the intersection of science and Uh, these more, um, holistic ancestral forms of healing.
Right.
Now, what does that look like, that tension?
I mean, it's also coincided with, uh, worldwide lockdown.
So I imagine there are a lot of events that have been canceled or postponed.
Um, has that entire discourse been playing out online and has that been very difficult because people who would otherwise You know, be more, I don't know, copacetic or polite with each other?
Aren't in each other's presence?
Like, what's that looking like?
Okay, so it's looking problematic in a number of ways, right?
So, first of all, worldviews, okay?
So, in the traditional worldview, especially, you know, with regards to ayahuasca culture, you have a modality of healing that involves Cultivating alliances with plant spirit teachers and going on dietas with those plant spirit teachers by means of consuming tonics made of those specific medicinal plants.
And then going into a practice of, you know, meditation and fasting so that you can open up a spiritual communication with those plants.
And so when you sit with a more, with a shaman from the Amazon, you know, they will often speak about healing from those frameworks of understanding.
Now, where do you draw the line when you have a Western facilitator who claims that in their psychedelic ceremonies, in their ayahuasca use, they have perceived that Donald Trump is a 5D warrior and saviour of humanity?
No, is that a composite?
Is that a direct quote?
Is that an example?
Like that's actually happening?
It's happening.
I've seen it.
And it's really problematic because it's like, okay, where do you draw the line between the traditional You know, framework of understanding healing in medicine and, you know, this alternative reality that's being presented by somebody who is non-Indigenous and not from the Amazon.
Yeah.
Now, are they, are they saying, are they saying that, uh, the, my, the, the, the vision given by the plant medicine directed me towards Donald Trump or that the truth of ayahuasca points me, uh, or I, I mean, I, I guess I, I don't really understand if, is there some sort of, Misunderstanding on the basic premise of what the, of what the plant is offering.
That I, it's a little bit fuzzy for me.
Yeah, I guess.
Okay, yeah, go ahead.
Okay, so when you work with a highly visionary psychedelic plant medicine like ayahuasca, in the visionary state, it's very different from LSD or magic mushrooms or peyote.
Every psychedelic plant has kind of like a different effect, a different range of effects, and also energetic signature and consciousness, if you will.
Right.
And so often what happens is, you know, your sense of 3D reality will completely dissolve and you will find yourself navigating alternative realities.
Now this is very much a part of the practice of working with a plant medicine like ayahuasca.
Like, being able to navigate, being able to interpret what you're seeing.
And so, you know, then there's a question of, you know, is what a person's seeing, is that objective or is it subjective, right?
And so when you're, you know, when you have a demographic of people that are high in empathy, And that have like, you know, very porous boundaries and are, you know, very open towards, you know, alternative realities and alternative, um, uh, expanded consciousness experiences, then the, the line between objective and subjective becomes very fuzzy, right?
It's a psychedelic amplifying what they're seeing in their, in their mind, you know, and of course, you know, many, People will say that, oh, you know, the plant medicine showed me, and that goes into your question of, like, you know, what is a qualified facilitator or shaman?
Many of the Western facilitators that are offering plant medicine ceremonies have never been initiated in a, through, you know, an unbroken wisdom lineage, you know, with actual, like, like plant medicine master teachers that they have been apprenticing with over a number of years.
They may have drunk ayahuasca or had this powerful mind-expanding, life-changing experience in the Amazon, and they decided on their own, you know, ayahuasca showed me that I was ready to offer this plant medicine to other people.
Like, it's a firm conviction in their minds, and maybe it was real for them.
And I would say, you know, it's like every person who is offering plant medicine ceremonies probably had that experience in a, you know, deeply personal way, you know, where it's like they received that message, and then now it's like, okay, how do you respond to that call?
Right.
So in a similar way, you know, if somebody is, you know, experiencing multidimensional realities around the current pandemic or the current political system, you know, who knows, like, if it's real or not real?
Well, I guess, yeah, maybe that helps me focus my question a little bit more, because I'm just guessing here, but my gut says that, you know, a pre-modern Indigenous understanding of
The, you know, the visionary experience coming out of a plant medicine would probably not be related to the story of geopolitics that you were engaged in in the outside world.
That you would... I mean, it sounds... To me, when I think of the possibility of a plant giving me a vision, I imagine it would be something very personal to my life.
Something about, you know, my family lineage, something about my pathway, something about, you know, so I guess what I'm wondering is when a person trips this way and they immediately connect their peak experience with a very grand and abstract narrative around a geopolitical situation like
Does that sound like it could be a traditional usage of the material?
Well, this is where critical thinking comes into play, right?
So where exactly do you draw the line?
On one hand you have a A medical system that has been passed down through a lineage, right?
Understanding how the plants work and there's a certain cohesiveness around that, you know, healing modality.
And then you have somebody who's having an individual experience in their mind, right?
And so this is where it's important to just kind of like take a step back and, you know, ask yourself, Is what this person is saying intrinsically true, from an objective perspective, from an objective viewpoint?
And that's something that I would invite everybody to ask, because what can be problematic is you have people who are facilitating psychedelic ceremonies, and then Pushing, sharing, you know, conspiracy theories to their captive audience of ceremony participants after the ceremony is over when all of them are in a very suggestible psychedelic state.
Now, have you seen that happen in ways that suggest that, you know, communicating the theory to the suggestible audience is, you know, somehow providing a hook for further communication or further exploration?
Is there Is their marketing involved with that?
Are facilitators who are doing that, are they earnest in their belief that their QAnon bit of data is really useful for everybody and so they should just share it with the world?
What's the angle?
Oh, there's multiple angles.
So, you know, this is where the intersection of Western psychotherapy is really valuable.
Because, you know, within like Western psychotherapeutic models, there are certain types of abusive behaviors that, you know, these, that, you know, Experts in this discipline are trying to curtail within the shamanic community, for example.
Right.
So, you know, when you have organizers who are not familiar with that code of ethics, then, you know, you have these aspects where, you know, the indoctrination might have a financial driver to it, which is you kind of, like, present a
Experience that people should be having and if they don't have that experience and they need to come back for another retreat or ceremony.
Or if they do have it they can build on it.
Yeah, if they do have it, they can build on it.
And then, of course, you have people who earnestly believe that what they've seen through the plant medicine around the geopolitical reality or the pandemic is the truth.
It's real for them.
And so they feel this earnestness around sharing it.
And that goes into this whole question that I think you raised in your previous podcast about the natural Pathy Sector and Christiane Northrup and all of that, which is, you know, a lot of the people that are offering plant medicine ceremonies, they do not have solid medical training.
Right.
But then they're dispensing medical advice, so to speak.
And so this becomes problematic because then if the person is As a means of informing themselves, relying on information that comes from, you know, David Avocado Wolf, or Collective Evolution, and, you know, other, you know, fringe sites because they believe that mainstream media is all manipulated and has been compromised, like,
All the news channels in the world are tools of the evil satanic cabal, and the only body of information that they're allowing themselves to consume are Social media, unsubstantiated social media updates, YouTube videos galore, you know, fringe blogs, that kind of thing.
So it feeds this confirmation bias.
Right.
You know, one of the things in the notes that we exchanged before that you mentioned was that in addition to, you know, a kind of And cultural antipathy towards conventional medicine, and in addition to a kind of rebellious anti-authoritarian mindset, there's also some therapeutic beliefs that are very strong within this demographic.
You wrote that they believe first and foremost that illness arises from uncleared emotional trauma and that fear lowers the immune system.
And that sentence You know, alone could sort of stand in as a mantra for a lot of the thematics of conspirituality.
But I'm just wondering, like, how does that play out?
Does it mean that when people go into ceremony, they expect that they're going to be excavating, you know, deep, dark truths about themselves or about the world?
And is that part of the linkage to To the conspiracism that can enter into ceremony?
So one of the aspects of plant medicine ceremonies, especially certain kinds of plant medicines like ayahuasca, peyote, wachuma, you know, if you eat enough psilocybin mushrooms you'll also have the experience of purging.
Right.
And so the purging, the physical, the act of vomiting, you know, the act of having bowel, like, strong bowel movements and, you know, clearing, you know, the physical toxins from your body.
Right.
There's also an aspect of emotional and psychological release that comes with it that is, you know, what makes these ceremonies so healing for people.
Because as they purge, you know, I, you know, through one end or the other or both, you know, often what happens is what's getting purged out are, you know, negative thoughts, like psychological, you know, patterns, past traumas.
So all of those things come out at the same time.
Right.
And the person experiences after that is a sense of relief that they, that this thing that has been dogging them for so long or like creating pain for so long, wherever it was lodged in the body, they finally just had the opportunity to release it.
And that's what makes these plant medicine ceremonies so powerful because they can help people really, you know, move some of these emotional and psychological blockages in really powerful ways that allopathic medicine cannot address.
And so if you believe in the intersection of, you know, psychological, you know, disease or unwellness and physical disease and unwellness, then, you know, it's quite logical.
It's quite plausible that the release of one is going to improve the condition of the other.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, this is a recurring theme throughout the podcast is that we have this gap in service.
We have misdiagnoses.
We have the silencing of trauma survivors.
And all of these things come together to really create some extraordinary efforts at self-expression amongst people who either do spiritual ceremony or who...
You know, work in the wellness community.
And then we try to follow that discourse and how it develops into, you know, the more inflated or flowery forms of conspirituality that we see.
One thing that I wanted to ask was, you know, not knowing anything about substances myself, not having any real experience with substances.
I suffered from epilepsy for about a year when I was a younger person.
And so I never wanted to go near anything that would alter my, you know, neurology at all.
I've just had sort of a mortal fear of it, actually.
And so I'm quite a neophyte.
I do know enough to know that there seem to be some substances that make people extraordinarily confident About what they want to do in the world.
And there are substances that have, you know, the opposite effects.
And one of the things I wanted to ask was, have you noticed with certain participants in ceremony, a kind of drive to evangelize with their realizations after they come out of, you know, however they've experienced?
Absolutely.
So one of the shadow sides of psychedelics is that psychedelics can amplify what's already happening within an individual.
So if an individual already has narcissistic traits, the psychedelics can make them more narcissistic or even a raging narcissist.
And this can be problematic, especially if you have facilitators that already have narcissistic tendencies that are being inflated.
And then they're offering psychedelics to other people, often vulnerable people who are gravitating towards the ceremonies for healing.
This can easily shift into something that looks a lot like cult abuse with the use of psychedelics.
Wow.
In the sense that the charismatic facilitator might be attracting somebody who is in need, as you say.
I guess I'm just rephrasing what you're saying, but on both sides of the equation, the imbalance is increased by the substance.
Absolutely.
And so you have an individual then Who is, you know, operating very much like a cult leader where, you know, they might have apprentices or other helpers that are, you know, essentially,
You know, keeping the organization going and, like, they might employ tactics like gaslighting or, you know, certain kinds of, you know, abuse tactics in order to suppress any type of open dialogue around, you know, the person's practices.
The individual might engage in fraud.
They might You know, actually physically harm other people and justify that the person actually needed it.
Were the numbers for Entheonation, is it a membership site or do you have a newsletter?
I think I saw the number 150,000 somewhere.
Is that numbers of readers or regular visitors?
Yeah, so my website currently reaches between 90,000 to 100,000 unique visitors a month, just the actual website itself.
I also have a large Facebook community.
I have I started a podcast a while ago, it has not been yet updated.
And I also host online virtual summits around shamanism and psychedelics.
So that's just my audience, but I mean, the audience of psychedelic users is pretty large.
I mean, given that if you're including people that consume LSD, MDMA, up in a whole range You know, lab-made psychedelics, you know, since the 60s, you know, that's a very, you know, tens of millions of people, you know, probably engage in psychedelics in some, you know, way.
In terms of the plant medicine community, I'm not really sure how big that demographic is.
I don't think anybody's really done an official census, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was like seven-figure, you know, population demographic.
Right.
Well, I guess I'm asking because I'm just wondering about the kind of fire you're going to draw and speaking so openly about, and sort of from a critical perspective about problems with ceremony and problems with critical thinking and problems with leadership.
Are you going out on a limb here?
Well, my mission has always been, To raise awareness of the benefits of psychedelics, especially the use of sacred plant medicines, with respect and responsibility.
And so having discernment and being able to navigate the complexities of this world and being able to have difficult discussions is an aspect of that.
Because, you know, spiritual bypass is dangerous.
You know, if you have Facilitators and, you know, shamans, mostly, you know, white Westerners who are engaging in these practices and then endorsing for, you know, the rejection of face masks because they are dangerous for you, and claiming that COVID is a hoax, and then, you know, sharing unproven conspiracy theories with a
captive audience of participants who are in a highly suggestible psychedelic state, actually continuing to run ceremonies, which are very much a COVID transmission vector.
Right.
You have people that are projectile vomiting, people that are sharing, you know, blow pipes and like, you know, blowing tobacco snuff into each other's noses.
You know, there, we have no scientific evidence that tobacco snuff or ayahuasca is, you know, anti-microbial, anti-viral and Are people claiming that?
Oh yeah, that's the justification.
Oh wow.
It's not just that the herbs are anti-viral, there must be something else around.
This is a sacred practice and the space itself is protective and we couldn't possibly be hurting each other if we're so deeply into spiritual transformation.
Yes, and you know what?
If that were indeed true, then why are the COVID rates in the Shipibo communities in the Amazon so high?
Oh, and this is in Brazil.
I don't know much about it, but the infrastructure is terrible, and the federal response is really lacking, isn't it?
Yeah, and so if these plant medicines truly protect you and heal you, then why are the master plant healers getting sick and struggling for their lives?
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's really distressing.
So what would you love to see happen with regard to, I mean, you've given a mission statement and it's powerful and it's aspirational.
If you had more power than a publisher does, if you could wave a magic wand, what would you want ceremony culture to look like going forward in the next five years or so?
What would you promote?
What would you disallow?
Oh, that's a very big question.
I don't necessarily, you know, I've been thinking about that a lot.
Like, you know, how would a person, you know, really create the safest container for somebody to experience plant medicine healing?
And I would say it's very difficult because, you know, like different styles of yoga, there are different ways of hosting or holding plant medicine ceremonies.
Right.
You know, some modalities are going to be more effective for certain kinds of people, you know, with certain kinds of needs and conditions than others.
I would like to see, you know, more Integration between, you know, science and plant medicine healing.
Right.
And, you know, there's value in both.
And there's a beautiful inter overlap between, you know, both, both modalities.
And, and so I, I know it's probably It's difficult because when you look at how these practices are conducted in the Amazon, you know, it's very much a spiritual, religious type of culture.
So, you know, it's difficult to overlay the science over it.
Right.
Any number of churches, you know, that sing hymns to the Holy Trinity, you know, praising, you know, Jesus and Mother Mary and all of that, or like, you know, calling the Orishas, and they have a certain kind of work.
And so, you know, how much science can fit into that paradigm?
It's difficult.
So I don't know if I have a good answer to that question.
I would, you know, what I've endeavored to do for my audience is I try to empower them with as much research as possible.
Understand what safety means to you.
Safety of worldview is important to you.
If you don't want to have contamination of your worldview by somebody who has undue influence over you in a psychedelic ceremony, Um, then, you know, ask, be sure to ask the appropriate screening questions that you need to ask of the facilitator, which is, you know, do you talk about unsubstantiated conspiracy theories, you know, as part of... Those are difficult questions to ask.
Tell me about your feelings.
What do you believe about QAnon?
I never even thought they would have to add this training module to the programs that I offer on my website, but witnessing everything that's happened around COVID and
You know, the spiritual bypass, the COVID denial has really caused me to question like, wow, you know, what are some of the additional safety, personal safety protocols that a seeker needs to implement for themselves in order to connect with a ceremony provider that they feel safe.
Wow, I mean, I just have to say, coming out of that, some of the accounts that Lorna was giving of abuse and of just ways that cultic dynamics can be enacted in circles around psychedelics, that was very disturbing.
I hadn't heard accounts like that before.
Well, again, what I said before about the non-specific amplifier, if you are with someone, sometimes... There are two threads here that I'm thinking of to reply to that.
First off, one thing that has happened in the crossover I was talking about earlier was that I have a good friend who took four years under tutelage of a shaman to become a corandero to distribute ayahuasca.
I watched him go through a year diet, right?
And numerous diets, but a one-year diet on one plan.
I saw the rigor that goes in and, you know, Julie and I at least live in Los Angeles.
And what I've noticed here is that some yoga instructors have a couple of ceremonies and then they call themselves shamans.
And that, so if you don't have the proper training, That is going to be its own problem.
The other thing, and this is really what I wanted to dive in when I hinted at before, I have a friend, I was involved as a DJ for a long time in the Indian American community in New York City, and I DJed a lot of the parties with and toured with people like Kirsh Khale, Chubby Sabah, the Meeble Pundits, spent time with them.
And then there was DJ Rekha, who is a Bhangra DJ.
And I remember talking to her one day and she said that she hates the happy natives story about Bhangra.
This idea that there was a time when Bhangra was a celebration of field music, agriculture, and everything was great.
And she's like, it doesn't represent what India actually went through.
And that's the same feeling I get about how psychedelics are being presented, not specific to Lorna here, but talking about the bigger question of when these cultic dynamics come into play.
This idea that there's this unbroken chain of purely beneficial medicine up until a certain point, and it's the ancient way, and then it can cure all of these diseases, and it can do anything, is just not true.
And, but that's what happens when we get removed in time and space from something is that we can apply whatever story we want to about it.
And that is something, especially when you're in that state of vulnerability after a psychedelic experience, because when you're going through it and you are that emotionally open, and then in the recovery phase, the sort of what Campbell called the return of the hero, the moment where you're integrating the lesson.
You are very open to whatever your guide is going to tell you.
And while I did preface before, most of my experiences being with Good guides.
It's not only guides, it's whoever you do them with.
And I've had some experiences with people that were just not mentally well.
And my only time I've ever done peyote was an absolutely terrible time.
And fortunately, I had enough training with other medicines that I didn't get that thrown off.
But if that was my first experience, I probably would have never done psychedelics again.
And what was being presented was a cultic sort of vibe at the time.
And it really, I can see how people can very easily be pulled in any direction, given how open they are.
So that ceremony in particular was centered around the leader and their particular needs?
Is that what you're referring to?
Yeah, there was more of, I guess it's also because I think critically, even in those states, I'm able to still think, you don't lose consciousness, right?
That's the thing.
You're bringing whoever you are to the ceremony.
And it was more of just a lack of coherence.
I don't think he was trying to create a cult of personality around himself in any way, so that's not the right thing.
But there was a lack of coherence, and I actually think that one person was having some sort of psychotic breakdown in the ceremony, and he was actually feeding it.
And watching that happen in front of me, I actually didn't trip and he dosed me with twice the amount that anyone else was on because I wasn't feeling it.
Because you were hyper-vigilant with regard to this other person?
Yes, because I couldn't take my attention off of what was happening and the crazy thing was at the end of the ceremony around 4 30 a.m.
They were going back into the woods.
We started the ceremony with a sweat lodge and then we took the medicine and they were finishing with a sweat lodge and I was like, I'm going to my room to sleep.
And they were all like, no, you have to finish the ceremony.
I said, no, I don't.
And I went to my room and when I got to my room and laid down, I had one of the craziest trips, just lying there for hours.
But it took that because Somehow, because I was focused on that, it just didn't affect me in that way.
But I did watch in real time how somebody could get converted or at least have their psychosis fed, which was what was happening.
Yeah, it sounds like you were prepared enough based on having navigated altered states in the past and having good guidance and also just being who you are, that you were able to sort of resist and hold your center in the face of that until you got somewhere safe and then you were like, "Okay, I'm going to trip now." Yeah, that was my experience.
It's really interesting.
I feel like one of the topics that Lorna was sort of referencing from different angles at different times in that interview, Matthew, was exactly what you started off talking about, Derek, which is this sort of
How do we make sense of the relationships between tradition and culture and how people are trained and the intersection with colonialism and with perhaps cultural appropriation and people who are trying to make a name for themselves as spiritual leaders?
Retreat leaders who are like, oh now we're gonna do ayahuasca and I've done a couple ceremonies and you know, the plant medicine told me that I should bring this to the yoga community, right?
How do we make sense of all that?
And I think where I end up with it, because just like you Derek, I'm profoundly skeptical of what I see as a kind of, you know, with yoga it's Orientalism, right?
It's exotification, it's a kind of It's a kind of positive stereotyping of the other culture as being this sort of perfect repository of wisdom and grace and connection to the ancient wisdom, which obviously must be true because it's ancient.
I think that can be problematic as well as the other things I was just saying.
It makes me wonder
If part of what happens in these rigorous long-term apprenticeships, like you just described with your friend, if part of what happens is a more interpersonal and community-based process, where over time, in ways that are not necessarily as didactic as we would imagine professional training in a Western context or a more technical context is, that there's a process the person goes through where all of the rookie mistakes kind of get weeded out.
Where all of the ego inflation kind of gets calmed down and the person comes to a place where now you are a qualified facilitator, meaning you've matured enough in relationship to this experience that you can be a safe guide.
It's such an individual basis.
I mean, everything you laid out is, is perfect and it's how it should happen in terms of the, the tamping down of the ego.
And it's actually what I watched with my friend's teacher and him.
And that's why I feel, you know, one thing I want to point out real briefly is that, you know, as always on the podcast, we're being critical of certain things, looking through ideas, but the psychedelic experience changed my life numerous times and helped me sort through some very difficult periods and I will return to the ceremony for that reason.
But I think it's especially important now with so much money flowing into psychedelics that we understand what it takes to actually be a facilitator.
And organizations like MAPS are doing it right, right?
Because they've been doing it since 1985.
They've been trying to get this to happen.
And under those sorts of guidance and regulation, It can really be powerful for people.
The problem is, this is something Lauren addressed, where she's like, you know, I'm talking about these situations, I don't know what's currently happening in research.
Well, I'll tell you, a company just got $30 million in funding, right, for these MDMA and ketamine trials.
And the ketamine trials, the reason it's, ketamine, first of all, it's a disassociative, it's not classically a psychedelic, so it kind of gets grouped there, but that's, That's a problem is that it was rushed through the FDA process.
So we're putting the car before the horse again.
And if you don't have proper guidance, so you have someone like MAPS who's doing the right work, but then you have other organizations who just want to patent Certain substances, which they can skirt around by taking the original chemistry and changing one molecule.
That's what they're doing, essentially.
And then they can patent it.
And a lot of that is happening right now.
And we're going to be in the same problem that we are with antidepressants throughout the 20th century.
Right.
I'm glad that you picked up that thread because I wanted to, you, you had mentioned that in your opener, Derek, uh, and that, that helps me understand that a little bit better.
Um, you also, uh, opened with, um, and, and Julian, you've built on this, uh, the comparison in exoticizations between, uh, yoga culture and its globalization and now the globalization of, of plant medicine.
Now, My modern yoga history, you know, is I think competent enough to understand that the way in which global yoga globalizes is through this really complex colonialism based interaction between
Indigenous practitioners who want to modernize but also want to broadcast their, you know, their natal wisdom into the public sphere.
And the techniques they use are Recombinant, they borrow from, you know, settler culture, but then they also reassert themselves as being traditional.
And there's always this appeal to ancient unbroken lineage that in some cases is as much of a reconstruction as it is something that can be actually found.
And so I'm wondering, I think that what's given real clarity to that in the yoga world is really good scholarship.
So, you know, when Mark Singleton traces back the origins of modern postural yoga through his yoga body study, or Elliot Goldberg, or a number of other scholars do the same thing, we can see, we can start to see daylight between people claiming that something is ancient and unchanged
And realizing that sometimes the claim that something is ancient and unchanged is as much of a, you know, a marketing or an aspirational language as anything else.
So is there a layer of scholarship or sort of like informed investigation into the various plant medicine lineages now that is Able to start to find, you know, what the difference between what is reconstructed in the shadow of colonialism and then exported and perhaps exploited and what has been more or less intact.
Because, you know, I think people's experience and their drive to do these things is really tied up, it seems, with, well, this is the way it's always been and I'm going to do this Time-tested practice, and I'm going to be reassured by the eternality of things.
I don't think there's a ton.
I was thinking about oral storytelling, which is a lot of these traditions come from the oral storytelling tradition.
It's not written down like a lot of traditional religions.
Now, I don't know if you remember when we were in nursery school and kindergarten, we would play the game of telephone.
Yes.
20 people in a line and somebody starts it.
I don't know if there was ever a successful game of telephone where the message in the beginning got through to the end, right?
And so imagine now extrapolating from people in the same room trying to pass a message and then layer that across millennia.
And that's one of the problems is we can't know what the ancients were thinking and experiencing.
Right.
So in terms of scholarship, there is a good amount of scholarship, but not a ton, but there is in psychedelics.
I mean, I've been reading all of the books for this book.
Michael Pollan's book is an, I wouldn't call it scholarship, but it's an excellent book as an overview of where psychedelics are at and Plants of the Gods by Schultz.
Schultes and Hoffman.
It's a fantastic book.
It traces all 200 plus psychedelic medicines.
It does exotify a little bit.
It was also partly when it was written in the time, but it gives a very great sort of pharmacological overview of what the chemicals are and how they interact with the actual cultures that it's one of the best resource manuals that I have.
Well, just one pushback against the telephone game as an analogy.
You know, like my understanding of Vedic parampara that winds up training people to be priests currently in Brahmin orders is that, you know, they're being given
Memorization tasks from the time they are four years old, and it's a patrilineal system where it would be call and response to the point where somebody would be able to, from memory, just like with the Homeric hymns, they'd be able to recite one, two, three, or four of the Vedas all the way through.
And so there's a Something, you know, it ties into what you were saying about the discipline that your friend went through.
You know, oral culture is oral culture because it is incredibly disciplined.
Because the interactions, the interpersonal interactions have to hold the cultural memory or else it disappears.
So I'm just wondering, I'm just wondering, there's got to be various levels of that in The plant medicine story as well, you know, people who have heard the sacred song exactly as is, or at least, you know, seemingly exactly as is from time before mind, and then other people who have kind of heard echoes and snippets and they've pieced together what they could.
And who's going to be able to tell the difference?
As I was saying that, in my head, I was thinking about how to memorize a hundred thousand shloka.
Right, exactly.
So again, it is layered because you always have to bring up the Vedas, Matthew.
You always have to bring up the Vedas.
But also, there are layers, right?
Even the Vedas.
But I mean, also, there are layers, right?
So rote memorization of text and interpretation of text and how that interpretation is nested within metaphysical belief structures These things are, they're definitely very layered.
Well, and also to be clear, the memorization process isn't about interpretation.
In fact, those practices are separated out because if you mingle them, you might lose one or the other, right?
To spend time interpreting the text that you're basically becoming a human tape recorder to hold.
That's not the point.
And I always love that about oral culture in general, especially coming out of Indian wisdom tradition, is that, you know, the thing doesn't exist unless it's being spoken.
Like it's not, it can't be in the book.
It can't, you know, if you printed out the symbols that represent the mantra of Of the Vedas themselves, and you put them on the shelf, that's not the Veda.
The Veda is the process of it being recited and heard in real time.
And so when I've looked a little bit at Ayahuasca culture for this episode, especially through that Unwell episode, and I realized, oh, you know, they're going in and they're getting songs, right?
They're getting healing songs, and I'm like, oh, okay, yeah.
I was going to bring up on, well, I have a question for you, Julian.
So you saw it as well?
I haven't watched the Ayahuasca episode, unfortunately.
Oh, okay.
Well, the question will still stand, though.
There's a moment, which that series, for anyone who hasn't seen it, is excellent, by the way.
I mean, the way they look at these topics, I really think it's some of the best work I've seen, period.
It's a little bit biased, the Ayahuasca one, because I think they're practitioners themselves, the directors, because it was the least critical, I think.
Yeah, but I still think they did a pretty good job showing the seizure section as it happened.
I think that was you know, that was that was yikes ballsy and necessary to just go so I think they were pretty balanced on that but one thing they brought up was that Traditionally and this isn't just in ayahuasca cultures goes across all shamanic cultures or a lot of them at least is That the shaman would take the medicine.
Yeah the participant right and the reason that It has changed is because Westerners are not going to spend thousands of dollars to go and be sober.
And watch somebody else take plant medicine.
They want to get in there.
You get in there.
You make that plant medicine about you.
The question I have though, if you think about it, is if these Chemicals.
We've talked about this a number of times over these episodes that any plant is chemistry.
If they are going to work, that means you have to take them.
And so therefore, I'm not discounting the shamanic healing at all in certain capacities the way it was traditionally done, but it would have to have been placebo.
And that's my question.
Have you thought about placebo in terms of psychedelics?
I have not.
It's interesting because psychedelics are so potent.
They're so powerful.
You can intentionally or unintentionally dose somebody else without their knowledge, and they're going to trip.
Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, because I think we're setting up a dichotomy here that I want to poke at, which is the plant has chemistry and that's material and real and it's going to have an effect, but the song that the shaman finds through the plant medicine experience, that's not material?
That won't have a measurable effect?
That that would be placebo itself, or if it healed somebody?
Oh, that's interesting.
From a sound vibration.
Okay, I understand what you're saying.
From the sound healing perspective, possibly?
I'm still thinking in my sort of, what I remember of my own sort of pseudo-Vedic education, is that the sounds themselves were material objects, and that they had their own life.
Yeah.
And that they were cognized as well by the Rishis, right?
And the Rishis were in deep meditation when they heard the mantra.
Well, and the thing that I'm itching to Jump in here and say for the last few minutes is that we have pretty good scholarship that that the the Vedas come out of Amanita Muscaria mushroom rituals.
there's all sorts of interesting scholarship that's been done on that.
And that what you had was a group of people engaging in ritualized mushroom consumption, which over time eventually transformed for geographical and actually geopolitical reasons, to use the word that you used in the interview, as they were driven south away from the areas where the mushroom as they were driven south away from the areas where the Right, and there's this idea that the sounds or the songs themselves are cognized, They come from beyond human ken.
Yeah, I don't believe that.
Right, I mean?
I don't believe that.
No, I know you don't believe that, but I think that's essential, because when I heard that little clip in the Unwell episode about how The shamans were retrieving the sacred songs from their experience, that rang a bell for me.
And, you know, it seems that, you know, whether it's coming from the beyond or not, the notion that it is, and that it is, so it's wholly other, it's information from something that is unknown and unknowable, would seem to be a key aspect.
That brings up why I mentioned placebo.
I want to bring up a study that is a few years old now, but it was, I forget what country it's from and I apologize for that, but basically they looked at two different hospital wards of people getting the same surgeries and half of the ward faced, the windows faced a forest and the other half faced a brick wall.
And what they studied and what they found out was the people whose windows face the forest got released from the hospital on average a day earlier.
Yeah.
Because of that.
And that, I mean, you can, you can argue it's placebo, but it's also a very real phenomenon of being, feeling connected to the world.
So when you are in an ayahuasca ceremonies and the arcaros are sung, I can't even explain the effect it has on your consciousness as you sit there and it's just it's a very sharp language in the Shipibo tradition at least.
So it feels like it's puncturing you with those staccato rhythm that's coming at you and there is a sense of just If you think it's healing, and you have these chemicals coursing through you, or not coursing through you traditionally, but you think it's healing, I can completely imagine.
That is one of the most transcendent experiences I've ever had, is having the Ikaros sung to me.
Yeah, although I agree with that and I don't think the facing the forest thing is placebo.
I think that's evidence of psychoneuroimmunology and how a specific type of experience is going to have a beneficial impact on your healing prognosis.
But I think My guess would be that you have to be on the chemicals.
And then what I'll say about that is, once you're on the chemicals, because psychedelics are so incredibly potent, set and setting, as the early research showed, is so important because you have a heightened experience of whatever is happening.
So if you're in a safe container and beautiful, If carefully chosen music is being played or sung for you, you will be experiencing a level of appreciation for that and multi-dimensional kind of richness for whatever that is that will be absolutely extraordinary.
If there's a ritual going on that you have been primed to associate with a certain kind of healing and sacredness and breakthrough, whatever the case may be, The fact that you're on psychedelics will amplify all of that, and I think in those ways, yeah, it's undeniable.
Okay, so just a 101 definition.
I've heard this phrase, set and setting, a number of times.
Can one of you just give the lowdown on that?
Sure.
Timothy Leary coined it, but it's been studied and examined over time.
The set includes your mindset and your intention of using the substance, and the setting is the physical location and the people you're doing it with.
Okay, right.
Yeah, and the reason, you know, part of the reason for that being is that there's a huge difference between being in a safe, sacred space that's held by a guide that you trust and being, you know, in a warehouse rave somewhere you don't know with a bunch of people you've never seen before.
In terms of what is going to happen when you start to be taken on the journey in ways that you don't really have control over, right?
So if you start to get in touch with your shadow material and the setting is right, that can be an incredibly positive opportunity for healing and growth.
You start to get in touch with your shadow material, your unprocessed trauma, your deep emotional terror, And you're in a setting where there's no container and there's no guide.
And in fact, there may be people around you who you realize you don't trust.
That's an awful experience.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now, speaking of, like, we're on this topic because I proposed on Facebook through the Conspirituality page, but also my own author's page that, and this came but also my own author's page that, and this came from thoughts published by Julian Field of QAnon Anonymous,
Linking opioid usage to red pilling amongst some of the more devoted QAnon members.
And it got me thinking about the sort of grapevine hearsay that I've been exposed to around wellness influencers who are migrating further and further into conspirituality.
Speaking about their plant medicine experiences as being related to their worldviews.
And so I know that Julian, this week you came across a video monologue of Mickey Willis talking about how he did a plant ceremony and what did he discover about himself?
It set him on a mission or something?
Well, the way that I interpreted that particular, or the way I understood that particular aspect of his monologue was that the peak of this experience, or the aspect of the experience that he wanted to share, had to do with his marriage and this very, very difficult, I think 15 year long relationship he had, and how he believed at this point he had forgiven her.
And he was going through this whole process as part of his ayahuasca experience of recognizing the ways in which he had mistreated women, And grieving that and wanting to be a different type of man and then getting to the point where the plant medicine said to him, what about your wife?
And he said, oh no, you know, I'm good with her.
Everything's fine.
And then through the continuing process, he came to another perspective on the relationship and on how the difficulty of the relationship and a lot of her qualities that were really, really hard for him to deal with in the relationship
Ultimately were revealed to him as preparation as as him being someone who had chosen to incarnate at a particular point in time when the world was in need of transformation and that through this relationship he was being sent the most powerful teacher through this very difficult wife so that he could then become This great figure, he could reach his destiny.
And I couldn't help but hear that in terms of like, oh, and now here he is, the messianic conspiracy filmmaker who is living out his destiny as someone who is going to change the world.
Wow.
Now, did that resonate with the people that you have run, with anybody that you've run into in psychedelic communities who just take this and run with it?
They have some sort of transcendent experience and they believe that it's given them a mission or something like that.
I mean, Derek, you mentioned that people are doing two ceremonies and believing that they can be facilitators, but going a little bit beyond that, You know, doing plant medicine and then realizing that you have some essential purpose to serve on your social media platform.
Like, is that happening?
What really changed for me was I was doing a lot of combinations of substances.
And I'll just leave it at saying that I was humbled one evening.
And humility is a very important part of the psychedelic experience.
Yes.
If I had not had those experiences, but I just had a few of the blissful transcendent ones, I understand how I very easily could have thought that I had been chosen to be on a mission because that sort of thinking did come around in the earlier stages.
And the reason for that for me was that I had grown up a certain way and then all of a sudden I grew up in a very small white suburban community and then all of a sudden I'm on an extremely racially diverse college campus with thoughts and ideas and music and the cultures of so many different people.
And my mind was being blown open anyway.
And then here you go with these substances and you're just feel this sense of transcendence and overwhelmingness.
And I can understand how people think they are sent on a mission or something of But when you were saying that about Mickey's experience, Julian, all I could think was part of what the psychedelics do to your brain is they turn off the centers of your brain that have to do with ego.
And so, which is actually kind of ironic given you think you're on a mission, right?
But That's usually after the fact that you think that when you're going through the experience and what I think is what is happening is that you have all these memories and whether trauma or whatever you've gone through, all of a sudden that part of you that says it's this, it's this, it's this is quieted down and then you just become open to new avenues of thinking about things.
And when that happens, oh, maybe I'm not resolved with my ex-wife.
Maybe there was something else.
So you've opened up this avenue of thinking about things in relationship that you haven't thought of before.
The problem is in the integration process, do you, are you humbled by it?
Or do you think that because you've acquired this little bit of knowledge that now all of a sudden you've been gifted something to go bring about on the world?
And I think it can go either way.
Amazing, yeah.
Julian, I have one other question for you.
I know you have to get to your closer, but now you're a dad.
Yeah.
And, okay, so I have sort of this inborn fear of these substances, and I feel that that's been heightened by the fact that I'm responsible as a parent now.
Has anything changed for you?
I mean, obviously we have less time, But is there sort of an added risk involved?
Would there be in experimenting with these substances or using them now?
You know, my experience is that I took all of my psychedelics in my late teens through my late 20s.
All right, so you're kind of done?
Yeah, I haven't felt the urge to go back at all.
And in fact, I wouldn't recommend anyone take psychedelics the way that I did.
Because I think I put myself at great risk on multiple occasions, but I'm glad I did it because here I am now.
Yeah, so I don't have the motivation to do them now.
I feel like I got the message and I hung up the phone.
Every now and again, I'm a little bit curious.
But, you know, I think a deeper question for me would be like, okay, what if one day my daughter wants to take psychedelics, right?
My little baby girl who I have right now.
And I feel like It's not something I would advertise to her or sort of guide her towards.
But if her temperament meant that she was really curious about altered states and curious about that whole domain of psychology and philosophy and contemplation, mysticism, and that was really what she wanted to do, I feel like I would want to participate in making that I feel like I would want to participate in making that as safe and beneficial an experience for And I wouldn't shut it down.
I want to introduce the word dopamine into our conversation. - Thank you.
Dopamine functions both as a neurotransmitter and a hormone, and it's very involved in what is called our reward system, which is why most people think, perhaps, they will think of dopamine as being implicated in addiction.
Addictive drugs tend to create huge bursts of dopamine and inhibit the body's natural rebalancing and reduction of it.
But dopamine is not just about pleasure, it's also about anticipation.
Addictive behaviors are driven by a dopamine surge that anticipates pleasure and focuses our attention such that we find the potential source of that pleasure supremely interesting.
Our topic today is psychedelics, and while this class of substances is not addictive, its capacity to chemically create mind-blowing, fascinating, revelatory, ecstatic experiences in the human brain that can remake our belief systems and self-concepts is indeed the stuff of legend.
But let me talk about Parkinson's disease for a moment.
Parkinson's has to do with reduced levels of dopamine, to some extent, disrupting motor nervous system function.
And those typical jittery symptoms and other movement issues can be reduced by administering something called L-DOPA, a dopamine precursor.
But in the first few waves of these drugs being on the market, some people had alarming side effects.
Picture, if you will, senior citizens who develop a new tendency to pull all-nighters glued to one-armed bandit slot machines, or who are suddenly obsessed with frequent anonymous sex.
Excess dopamine does strange things.
It's also heavily implicated in psychiatric conditions like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.
Interestingly, studies show that people who are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories have brains that tend to produce more dopamine.
Think about the level of focused obsession with connecting the dots we see amongst conspiritualists.
This is related to our capacity for pattern recognition, an ability that evolved because of its great survival value in terms of navigating the natural world, It helped us to see camouflaged predators, or understand the behavior of our prey, predict basic weather patterns, and even make sense of the seasonal cycles we saw patterns.
As an aside, seeing patterns could also lead to, say, tearing the beating hearts out of virgin sacrifices atop pyramids as an offering to the sun god in exchange for good harvests and victory over our enemies.
So, this skill can be overactive, and see patterns that are not there.
Rational people usually think of that type of pattern recognition as superstition, but give a rational skeptical atheist L-DOPA under laboratory conditions, and they will perceive patterns more frequently than they normally would, even when there's no pattern there.
Because recognizing and learning from patterns is linked in a very ancient way to emotions and instincts around literally living or dying, there's a convincing shot of dopamine that we get when we believe we see an important pattern.
And that strengthens pathways in turn associated with learning new information or skills.
There can also be a potent fearful resistance to believing we could be wrong about this new insight because of its connection historically to survival.
And finally, when people are in situations in which they feel stressed, helpless, or afraid, many of us will tend to see non-existent patterns and make decisions based on superstitious hunches as a way to try to regain control.
Now this is particularly interesting to me in terms of the massive stress and helplessness of trauma.
But it also makes me think about intensely altered states in which fear, amplified sensory experience, and the physical urgency and suffering around purging poisons from the consumed plant, a process that then combines experientially with emotional release.
If you already were prone to overactive pattern recognition, situations that invoke fear and loss of control would amplify those tendencies even further.
And one expression of that could be conspiracy reasoning, especially if then introduced by an authority figure right after the ceremony when you're at your most suggestive or suggestible.
So my hypothesis is that when people already prone to what Michael Shermer calls patternicity, take drugs that induce both fear and revelatory dopamine spikes, we may have a perfect storm that prepares the fertile ground of our brains for any number of belief systems from the transcendental to the paranoid.
I took LSD for the first time when I was 18.
I'd been drawn to experiment with consciousness expansion by a fascination with American 60s counterculture, given that the 80s in South Africa were so similar.
We had protests, a fight for civil rights and against the brutalities of apartheid, a military Of white boys being drafted for a war in another country, as well as to maintain apartheid internally, and a vibrant, rebellious, artistic, and intellectual scene.
I was especially drawn to spiritual claims of direct revelation via sacramental drugs that in some ways might validate the claims of Eastern philosophy and contemplative practices.
There are too many stories here to tell, but I will say that over the next 10 years I took LSD another seven or eight times, psilocybin mushrooms about four times, roughly the same for a San Pedro cactus.
I spent a wild four days in the Huichol Desert of south of Mexico City harvesting and eating peyote cactus.
I once participated in an ayahuasca ceremony, but I remain unconvinced that what we drank was really what they claimed or what they were selling.
And of course, I've taken MDMA or ecstasy at least 20 times.
It's a good one.
Through that 10 years, I was meditating almost daily, practicing yoga several times a week, and for the latter half of that decade, I was in deep psychotherapy using the holotropic breathwork that Stan and Christina Groff developed as a way to mimic some of the aspects of psychedelic states.
Now, there was a time in there in which I believed that the most healing thing I could have done for my family was to slip them some ecstasy before Christmas dinner.
Or that the world really would reach a different level of consciousness if we could just somehow dose the water supply with enough acid.
I chased the revelation, constantly seeking the enlightened sacramental states that for some reason was hidden from everyday consciousness, but that I hoped I could become one with and bring into my everyday life.
During my early LSD trips, I interpreted what I had experienced as evidence for the possibilities of universal mind, paranormal abilities, past lives, and time actually being an illusion.
When I took ecstasy, mostly with a very wild girlfriend, I believed we were soulmates.
Primordial expressions of Shiva and Shakti who had been dancing together since the spiritual orgasm scientists called the Big Bang shazammed us into physical form.
On mushrooms, I felt the deep stomach cramps as my body reacted to the toxins as being a somatic manifestation of my internalized self-hatred and rage.
I will suffer your presence no longer, I yelled, throwing up the negative energy of my past.
On peyote, I saw visions of snakes and shamans wearing cloaks with the distinctive circular cactus patterns all over them.
But I also lay there for an hour, puking, as sick as I could ever remember being and thinking to myself, stupid fucking white people trying to have a spiritual experience in the desert and just poisoning themselves.
On one full moon mushroom trip alone in my apartment, I kept waiting for the magic.
And all I got were visions of plastic Santa's elves draping the room in cheap tinsel and Christmas lights and laughing at me for taking my spiritual quest so seriously.
It's like they were saying, it's all just neon flashing lights and plastic, buddy.
I started to notice how many of my psychedelic friends were preoccupied with patterns, synchronicity, numerology, and reading the world around them as a set of signs from the universe dictating everything from which breakfast cereal to buy, to what color shirt they should wear in the morning, to whether or not to go on that date.
It seemed like a lot of anxiety and superstition to me, and the trips weren't helping them, they were making it worse.
Over time, I came to see that I was kind of a big experience junkie, chasing the revelation, hoping that the next big breakthrough would be the one that changed everything.
Don't get me wrong, plenty of good work happened, and plenty of fascinating and life-enriching perspective shifts, insights, and emotional catharsis really did shift my psyche in ways I'm grateful for.
But it was also a radical type of escapism, a commitment to denying reality, a conviction that the deep knowing I had in my special altered states was a portal into absolute truth about the nature of reality, my ultimate and important destiny, and the final meaning of life itself.
The concept I came to learn that helped me the most was spiritual bypass.
We can define spiritual bypass as the tendency to try to use spiritual beliefs and experiences as a way to bypass, avoid, deny, or escape emotional pain, trauma, alienation, or dealing with the real world in honest and grounded ways, even when claiming to be doing deep emotional work via powerful altered states.
This type of spiritual bypass can also manifest as a psychedelic-fueled denial of science and insistence on supernatural or paranormal claims believed in by the kind of confident knowingness now described in neuroscience as the certainty bias driven by the dopaminergic circuits activated when on drugs, being in love, bombed by a cult, a love-bombed by a cult, excuse me, falling in love, or being indoctrinated into new beliefs.
It wasn't until I found a legitimate therapist in his 50s, with a lot of psychedelic experience and knowledge, that I could begin the process of interpreting, integrating, and indeed recovering from how I used psychedelics as a form of escapist spiritual bypass and experience chasing, that my life actually did start to get better.
And I started to deal with the real world in more grounded and yes, eventually rational ways.
Now, I know that under the right conditions and with the right guidance and correct dosage, psychedelics can be incredibly beneficial and helpful, but they have to be approached with respect and appropriate caution.
They are rocket fuel for the mind, and under less careful conditions can indeed amplify and fan the flames of grandiose delusions, spiritual bypass, messianic grand narratives, and inflated dogmatic certainty and self-importance.
Thank you for listening to Conspirituality.
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