June 27, 2023 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:35:29
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! | |
| The Joe Rogan Experience. | ||
| Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. | ||
| Thank you very much for doing this. | ||
| I really appreciate it. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| It's lovely to meet you. | ||
| And I really, really appreciate your life's work. | ||
| I mean, I think what you've done has been really remarkable, particularly because of the time period in which you embarked in it. | ||
| I mean, you sort of got involved in psychedelics and psychedelic research at the very beginning of it and when it was extremely controversial and very difficult to do research. | ||
| Well, I actually got involved in it when it was incredible fun. | ||
| I was incredibly lucky with my timing, I think, because I was very attracted to the other side, if you like, the mystical, because I lived in this very, very isolated spot, and one had nothing to do but kind of mooch around in a beautiful place, have mystical experiences, dream of the future. | ||
| Is that your phone? | ||
| There we go. | ||
| When did you first get involved or even interested in what you would call mystical experiences? | ||
| I'll let you show it. | ||
| Sorry, sorry, sorry. | ||
| I don't know how to turn these things off. | ||
| Do you want me to turn it on mute for you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, please. | |
| Okay. | ||
| These wacky kids today and their devices. | ||
| Sorry about that. | ||
| No worries. | ||
| No worries at all. | ||
| How old were you when you first got interested? | ||
| Very young, I should say. | ||
| I grew up in this very isolated place. | ||
| I was very, very close to my father, who came back from the war, a diabetic, and he was a very eccentric person. | ||
| And so, from three, I was his carer. | ||
| Three years old. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which was a lovely role. | ||
| I mean, I was a little pet dog. | ||
| I went everywhere with him. | ||
| I adored him and he adored me. | ||
| And he was a very out of the... | ||
| He wasn't in normal society at all. | ||
| How so? | ||
| He just wasn't. | ||
| He was eccentric and charming. | ||
| Did his own thing. | ||
| Artist. | ||
| A farmer, but not really a farmer. | ||
| He couldn't bear any farming. | ||
| Yeah, anyway. | ||
| And I suppose spiritually I had three. | ||
| My mother was a Catholic, so I grew up a Catholic. | ||
| And then he was whatever, agnostic, atheist, nothing. | ||
| Except a thinker. | ||
| And then his best friend, who was his kind of... | ||
| He picked up as the person who did all his work when he was at university, called Bertie, became a Buddhist monk, a rather famous Buddhist monk. | ||
| So he was a big influence in the absence because he was my godfather. | ||
| And so I had these three influences. | ||
| And so I kind of dreamt of... | ||
| Doing magic, mystical things in the world. | ||
| And had mystical experiences as lots of children do. | ||
| And so then, I'm sorry, I can't quite think how to condense it. | ||
| But anyway, I grew up in an unusual setting. | ||
| And with a passion for altered states, mystics. | ||
| I started studying them when I was probably about 10. Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it became rather a passion. | ||
| And in the place we lived, it got three moats. | ||
| It was very overgrown. | ||
| And in between the moats, there was a... | ||
| A mound, a very beautiful mound, where I had a kind of pet god who lived in the mound. | ||
| And my mission was making this god figure laugh. | ||
| So that was the aim of the game. | ||
| So when you say you studied the mystical states at 10, how so? | ||
| How were you doing that? | ||
| Well, when I started reading, I started reading about it, but I don't know what I meant by that. | ||
| But when I went to church, Catholic church with my mother, and there was incense and all that sort of thing, and I had kind of mystical experiences with Jesus. | ||
| I was very close to Jesus in those days. | ||
| And then... | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| But it was a kind of rather wild, quite a dangerous upbringing. | ||
| We had to do the farming. | ||
| It was a mixture between a rather kind of beautiful setting, but quite a mixture with peasant life of looking after the animals. | ||
| Farm animals, pigs, cows, all of that sort of thing. | ||
| And then at one point I decided I wanted to leave home and I went to a boarding school. | ||
| It was a terrible mistake. | ||
| And a convent. | ||
| And actually I won the Sounds, when I was 16, won the Sounds Prize. | ||
| It was quite clever, but I hated it. | ||
| It lived outside the boundaries of the school all the time. | ||
| And then I wanted books on Buddhism for my prize. | ||
| And the nuns said, no, no, we can't give you books on Buddhism. | ||
| And so I said, all right, I'll leave. | ||
| Thanks very much. | ||
| And educate myself, which is what I did. | ||
| I left school at 16. Really? | ||
| And it was because they wouldn't allow you to study Buddhism? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's what I chose to study. | ||
| And they wouldn't. | ||
| So I said, thanks. | ||
| In the original days of the church, the incense, what they would walk down the aisle with, that was cannabis. | ||
| That was beautiful. | ||
| I mean, the one thing I loved about that convent, there was in the chapel, they had even song, and this Italian nun with the voice of an angel, and it really, with incense, took one into a mystical space. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that was very special. | ||
| That was the high point of it. | ||
| They used to use cannabis and then the host. | ||
| What did the host used to be? | ||
| The host? | ||
| I mean, obviously, originally, it was a psychedelic. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Do we know what psychedelic? | ||
| I think different places are different ones, but kind of based on mushroom or ergot or those sort of things. | ||
| I'm rather keen on making sacred hosts. | ||
| I recently was involved in that. | ||
| Anyway, that's a different story. | ||
| But I would love to hear that story. | ||
| You make sacred hosts? | ||
| No, I don't, but I'm going to. | ||
| You're going to? | ||
| I'm intending to. | ||
| I once actually, the story was very much a shock. | ||
| Probably a Catholic comrade. | ||
| Once I was in Paris and we were walking by Notre Dame on a Sunday. | ||
| And very high and went into the church and lovely Eucharist. | ||
| I hadn't heard all those wonderful songs. | ||
| I love those Latin, 16th century, 15th century chanting. | ||
| And so I experienced having the host again. | ||
| And it was so delicious. | ||
| Spiritually, it was wonderful. | ||
| And so I can absolutely see originally the host was a psychedelic experience. | ||
| And... | ||
| With that music and the incense, it's a beautiful spiritual experience. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm sure that was probably the root of a lot of those religious ceremonies. | ||
| I think so. | ||
| Have you read John Marco Allegro's book, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross? | ||
| No, I haven't. | ||
| No. | ||
| Is that a good one? | ||
| It's an amazing book. | ||
| Right. | ||
| John Marco Allegro was an- Oh yes, I remember his name. | ||
| I remember his name. | ||
| I don't think I ever read him. | ||
| He was an ordained minister who was a religious scholar and an expert on language, and he was one of the decipherers of the Dead Sea Scrolls. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So he worked with that for 14 years. | ||
| They deciphered the Dead Sea Scrolls. | ||
| And then he wrote The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, which was his interpretation of what the Dead Sea Scrolls was really all about. | ||
| And he believed that the origins of Christianity were in the consumption of psychedelic mushrooms and fertility rituals. | ||
| Yeah, I absolutely agree. | ||
| I'm sure psychedelics were the root of all of those spiritual practices and part of them. | ||
| Most likely. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So when you were first experiencing these things, like what year are we talking about when you first got excited about these things? | ||
| Let me just think. | ||
| When was it? | ||
| Well, I first smoked cannabis when I was 16. And funnily enough, the first time I smoked it, Ray Charles was playing. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I felt this is paradise. | |
| Mm, yeah. | ||
| And I bet millions of people had Ray Charles and their first sounding of cannabis. | ||
| But it was wonderful. | ||
| It's amazing what it does to music. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So I was 16, which was... | ||
| I was born in 43, so I know who that was. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Anyway, that's when I started smoking cannabis. | ||
| And I was there at Oxford at that point with a very interesting group of... | ||
| They were older than the other students because they'd been in Korea, so they were much better educated. | ||
| And they were smokers. | ||
| And introduced me to wonderful books like Against Nature and L'Autrement and... | ||
| Well, rather wonderful material. | ||
| And it was a very creative period. | ||
| And at that point, as I'd left school by then, I had somehow got the world's leading Expert. | ||
| Like... | ||
| What was the American one? | ||
| Anyway, on comparative religions and mysticism. | ||
| Someone called Professor Zainer, who's at all sales in Oxford and wrote a book called Mysticists of the Sacred and Profane. | ||
| And he became my tutor. | ||
| So I went and saw him twice a week, which was a very kind of awkward meeting. | ||
| So... | ||
| Because I was very shy and he was very shy and it was in all cells. | ||
| And we both sat there cuddling the cats kind of thing. | ||
| And then finally I decided the best way forward was to bring my very, very handsome cousin who was a student at Oxford because he was gay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Loosen everybody up. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, very smart. | ||
| And then it became very friendly and fun. | ||
| But anyway, he'd written this book, which I actually didn't agree with, which was saying mysticism, sacred and profane. | ||
| And he was the Catholic combat, actually. | ||
| And he thought that he'd had one experience with mescaline, I think it was, and not liked it, and thought that they were a very different bracket to the experience you could get through an endogenous mescal experience, which I don't actually think is necessary. | ||
| I think they're the same experience, but obviously with different qualities. | ||
| I've heard you say that you believe that what psychedelics do is make the mind more fertile for these experiences. | ||
| Is that a good way to... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| That's exactly what I think. | ||
| I think you're at that level where the ego's control has dissolved to some degree. | ||
| And so it's like fertile ground. | ||
| And so if you've... | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| If you're ready for a mystical experience, you're more likely to have it in that experience, in that state of mind. | ||
| So the mind is actually restricting us in many ways through the ego from having these experiences. | ||
| Yes, I think so. | ||
| And what psychedelics do is release those boundaries. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I think that due to the evolution of man, homo sapiens, and taking the upright position, this is a theory I was introduced to in 1966, and actually I think a lot of the details are probably wrong, but in concept I think it's true. | ||
| Which is the ape standing upright. | ||
| One thing people haven't taken into account is, obviously there are hundreds of acids that are standing upright. | ||
| You free your hands, you run faster, you see further, all of that. | ||
| But in the upright position, gravity is against the blood in the brain. | ||
| Because in the brain there are two fluid volumes, blood and cerebral spinal fluid, which is water, basically. | ||
| Which is made in the brain itself. | ||
| So it has, can squat its rights in the brain. | ||
| So when you're in the upright position, gravity is pulling the blood down. | ||
| So I think probably with the upright position we lost... | ||
| A small proportion of our blood supply. | ||
| I mean, some animals, if you tie them up right, a dog, for instance, if it's tied up so it can't get down, it will start howling and go mad. | ||
| It hasn't got the valves to keep the blood up. | ||
| And we've obviously got a certain amount, but maybe we lost some blood at that upright position. | ||
| And as a compensation for that loss, I think we developed an internal mechanism more than any other animal has done it, which is to direct the blood where it most needs to go. | ||
| Obviously, all animals do that. | ||
| They have the power to Send the blood where it's most important to survival or whatever. | ||
| And I think that through the use of the conditioned sound, the word, we learned to control that process more than any other animal. | ||
| And over the millennia, we kind of built up our power to do that. | ||
| So I think that's the secret of why humans, you know, which is a talking ape, got control of the whole game because of our creation of language, which enables us to do all these incredible things we do. | ||
| But it also has a disadvantage that our basic state is slightly low in blood in the dominant organ itself. | ||
| So we have to keep this mechanism of tight control where the blood is distributed. | ||
| And that is evolved with the ego, which is essential. | ||
| I mean, we wouldn't survive without the ego to kind of... | ||
| To direct the blood where it's most needed. | ||
| People who lose their ego, and in the 60s when people took large doses of LSD as it was then, every day, sometimes they lost their ego, they flipped out. | ||
| And there was one occasion of someone we knew who was in Ibiza. | ||
| And he'd flipped out and he put the key in the lock to open the door. | ||
| Someone would say goodnight to him. | ||
| He put the key in the lock and left him. | ||
| And then in the morning he was still there with the key in the door because the head hadn't told him, turn the key to open the door. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow! | |
| We need the words to keep us, you know. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Under control. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, the words have made us what we are, this incredible animal who can, you know, have a nuclear war if we want, or know all the atoms in the body, all those brilliant things we do, which is amazing. | ||
| But we're also obviously a very deeply faulted animal at some point. | ||
| We're... | ||
| You know, neurotic, psychotic, psychote, you know, all of those things because of this shortage of blood and then the dependent on the meaning of the work. | ||
| So if we have a terrible conditioning, which a lot of people do, the separation from reality, Is, in a sense, the meaning of the word. | ||
| So, the danger of our society now, in a sense, is we're getting further and further away from nature, in a sense. | ||
| And that in a way is why psychedelics can be a very useful medicine because they increase the connectivity with the senses, with the internal bodily senses and also the outside perceptual senses. | ||
| So I actually think that We're entering a kind of new possible age, and that's why for fun I call it the psychedelic age, because for the first time we've got or getting the knowledge by which we can actually understand the brain better and understand how we can alter the volume | ||
| of blood in the brain, which is giving the brain energy. | ||
| The whole thing is about energy. | ||
| The more energy we have, the more parts of the brain can function simultaneously. | ||
| And that obviously can be very creative, stimulating, empathic, by just having more of the brain functioning. | ||
| And so I think that the knowledge of psychedelics, and when I say psychedelics, I don't actually mean necessarily psychedelics, because as we all know, one can get these experiences endogenously. | ||
| Through exercise or... | ||
| Holotropic breathing. | ||
| Holotropic breathing, exactly, or breathing exercise. | ||
| I mean, all the spiritual training all knew that. | ||
| That's what they were doing in the spiritual disciplines, is teaching people how to control... | ||
| Their internal ego and also their sense of consciousness. | ||
| And I think at the center of the spiritual experience is the getting higher and loosening. | ||
| The grip of the ego, so you're more in touch with nature. | ||
| Do you think that in the absence of these psychedelic experiences, one of the problems with words is that we develop narratives and then we use our ego to reinforce these narratives and we sort of deny objective reality? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I think more and more the word can become the reality. | ||
| I mean, in the creation of words, which we all have and have to have and are thankful to have, but nevertheless it does create a slightly different world. | ||
| It's rather like the shadows on Plato's wall. | ||
| One gets one's internal edition of the world rather than the real experience of the world. | ||
| And so I think it's good to be in contact with nature and I think it's a dangerous path that we're taking now where it becomes more and more life is the screen. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| But still, that's where we're going. | ||
| And it has great advantages as well as dangers, I think. | ||
| I do think that the knowledge of getting high has always been central to the human evolution. | ||
| And at the earliest demonstrations of what we've got, of the earliest demonstrations of human culture, say the caves in Chauvet, do you know them? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Which I think they've never been bettered. | ||
| I mean, that artwork, the brushstrokes of those animals, they're alive. | ||
| You can see the movement. | ||
| No one ever did it better. | ||
| And it's like 30-something thousand years old? | ||
| Exactly, 35, 40, something around there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| So, I can tell, because I, in some respects, as an artist, I know those strokes. | ||
| Let's see, pull up some of those images, Jamie, because some of those images are amazing stuff. | ||
| They're just incredible, aren't they? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The movement of animals, the feeling. | ||
| Yeah, they did create a feeling of movement, like the animals were running. | ||
| Yeah, and the lines, I mean... | ||
| Anyone who paints, I mean, Picasso, I think, said without them he would have never done what he did. | ||
| I can't remember quite, but modern art isn't better. | ||
| It gets as good, but not really. | ||
| It's crazy because they're depicting rhinos too, which is really wild. | ||
| There was rhinos in France. | ||
| Yeah, beautiful ones of horses and buffaloes. | ||
| And that's in the bowels of the earth they're doing. | ||
| So it was obviously a very spiritual, because why go into the bowels of the earth if it's just a kind of magical spiritual experience they're having. | ||
| And so I think without doubt they were high. | ||
| How they got there, was it through singing, drumming or singing, or was it through taking compounds? | ||
| Funny enough, I've recently been introduced to a charming man who's an archaeologist in charge of the Chauvet, and I said I'd love to be able to analyse and see if we can find out. | ||
| If there's any remnants of some psychoactive substance. | ||
| And he said, I'm very welcome to go there. | ||
| So I'm very excited about the possibility. | ||
| Are you aware of Brian Murrow-Rescue's work? | ||
| Yes, I knew him years ago. | ||
| He approached me at the UN. Oh, that's great. | ||
| Pro bono lawyer work for me. | ||
| Really? | ||
| But I never took it up. | ||
| Maybe it would help you better if this was on the top of your head? | ||
| How do you do that? | ||
| It seems like it's falling. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like that? | |
| Yeah, there you go. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| That's bad. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| That way it won't fall down. | ||
| Yeah, his work with determining that in Eleusis that they were using ergot and some other psychedelics. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know the book and I know him very much. | |
| And also I know from long ago, Carl Rook wrote the original book. | ||
| Do you know that one? | ||
| No. | ||
| The Road to Eleusis? | ||
| Yeah, I've heard of it. | ||
| Which is a very good book with Albert Hoffman and the banker. | ||
| What was his name? | ||
| Anyway. | ||
| So they know that those people, at least back then, the Eleusinian mysteries, that they were using psychedelics. | ||
| And, you know, it's obvious from art. | ||
| What I think is that one can sense when the civilization had at its source the use of altered states of consciousness. | ||
| I see them as, you know, civilization rather like the cutting of a tree. | ||
| You see the rings. | ||
| Some years drought and other some rain and they are wide and flourishing. | ||
| In culture, I mean that elusis, that Chauvet, I mean they must have been high to produce that incredible art. | ||
| And the same at Eleusis and all of that Greek. | ||
| I mean, it's never taught at schools and things. | ||
| Both my sons did classics at Oxford. | ||
| None of them... | ||
| It was never mentioned to Lucis. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| There at the center of the whole classical world is the mystical experience of death and rebirth. | ||
| Well, Harvard's opened up a field of study about this. | ||
| Yeah, which is quite interesting. | ||
| But I knew a student 20 years ago who wanted to do his PhD in Lucis. | ||
| And Harvard told him, if you do that, you won't get it. | ||
| Yeah, that was a giant problem after 1970, correct? | ||
| Like after the sweeping psychedelic back where they made everything Schedule I, psilocybin, mescaline, everything. | ||
| And when they did that, not only did they ruin... | ||
| The possibility of having those experiences for so many people because it was forbidden, because it was very dangerous, you could get arrested, but also it stopped all the research. | ||
| Yes, absolutely. | ||
| It was 50, 60, 70 lost years, which is a criminal thing actually. | ||
| And the untold suffering of the millions of people who went to prison, usually from minorities, And had their lives ruined by a record for maybe having been caught for a joint three times or whatever. | ||
| I mean, it is horrific what happened. | ||
| Well, there's people in jail right now for that in this country, which is insane. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| And I mean, I started fighting them back whenever, when I started the Beckley Foundation. | ||
| I saw that in order to do research, one had to change the drug policies. | ||
| And the two went hand in hand. | ||
| would help change the drug policies. | ||
| And in order to do the research, you had to change the policies. | ||
| I mean, it was a bit of a catch-22, because until you've done the research, you can't do it, if you see what I mean, because they make it so difficult to do. | ||
| I think what MAPS has done, which is genius, is their work with MDMA and soldiers. | ||
| Soldiers having PTSD. Absolutely. | ||
| When you think of soldiers and you think of people in the military, you generally think of people who are right-wing, who have more authoritarian leanings. | ||
| But yet, these are the people that would be aided the most by these psychedelics, particularly coming back from war. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| So because of that, I believe they've opened up a door to an understanding. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| I think it's very, very important. | ||
| And that's why in the 70s when, because I was involved in it in the 60s mainly, when my passion to change the world started when I first really knew the value of psychedelics, which was probably in 65 onwards. | ||
| And as the door of repression came down, one could see it's a kind of disaster for humanity. | ||
| But I thought the only way we could overcome it is by using the language of the establishment to prove that these compounds can actually heal humanity, not be damaging for humanity as they were advertised as, but actually there are How good to healing and better happiness, more fulfilled life. | ||
| And so I thought that that's why I started doing the science, to try to, with the language of the modern world, which is science, to demonstrate how valuable these compounds are. | ||
| And I think our first... | ||
| That's why I set up the Beckley Imperial Study. | ||
| And the first study we did was using psilocybin. | ||
| And then we saw that I wanted to do LSD, but we couldn't do LSD in those days. | ||
| I had to be psilocybin. | ||
| And no one knows what psilocybin is, how it's spelled, what it means. | ||
| It's not so taboo. | ||
| So we got permission. | ||
| And I wanted to do brain imaging to look into... | ||
| Our hypothesis is that what they do is increase the volume of blood in the brain capillaries. | ||
| And hopefully with MRI one would see that. | ||
| But anyway, what we did see in the first study we did with psilocybin was a decrease of blood in the default mode network, which is a modern expression of the ego, part of the ego. | ||
| And that was very interesting because the default mode network, i.e. | ||
| the ego, is hyperactive underlying psychological conditions like depression or anxiety or addiction or all of those things have a hyperactive ego. | ||
| Saying, I need a drink, I'm so depressed. | ||
| And we saw that psilocybin lowers the blood supply to that part of the brain. | ||
| And so then actually we got a government grant to help us do the next phase of the study. | ||
| So I think it's very important showing how, because as we all know, we're in an epidemic of mental illness now, getting ever more. | ||
| And rather surprisingly, and in a way rather ironically, science, which has been so determined to prove that the spiritual is an old man in the sky, it's just total rubbish, which he finally has done. | ||
| Now, at the very centre of the new healing, i.e., Psychedelic-assisted therapy is the mystical experience. | ||
| And what we showed is the people who underwent what's kind of categorized as a mystical experience, i.e. | ||
| loosening of the ego, a feeling of unity, those are the ones who have the best outcomes of overcoming their depression. | ||
| So it's rather a beautiful little... | ||
| Ironical twist that now suddenly the psychedelics are at the center of this new approach to healing. | ||
| And I think the healing of psychedelics goes much, much farther than what we've touched on so far, which is the psychologically-based conditions. | ||
| I think it can be very, very useful in different doses because what is so wonderful about psychedelics is they have totally different effects in the different dose. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And at the... | ||
| Mini micro dose. | ||
| I'm beginning to have evidence and I'm just starting a study which shows amazing potential results of microdose for Alzheimer's. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Interesting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely amazing, remarkable. | |
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I was watching a video yesterday on cannabis and Parkinson's. | ||
| It was incredible. | ||
| There was a gentleman who had horrible loss of control of his body and the shaking. | ||
| And they gave him cannabis oil. | ||
| And he put it under his tongue. | ||
| And a few minutes later, he's lying back on the couch. | ||
| And then he holds his hands out and his hands are dead straight. | ||
| I'm like, this is extraordinary. | ||
| And my partner, who is the father of my children, he got Parkinson's. | ||
| So I was very well. | ||
| I'm very fond of him. | ||
| Mild Parkinson's, but still it was Parkinson's. | ||
| And so I'd heard how, and I've studied it, how microdosing Ibogaine is very good for minimizing. | ||
| So I'm wanting to do, I'm setting up a research into that. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| Yeah, this is the gentleman right here. | ||
| This is exactly the video that I saw. | ||
| So this guy has terrible loss of control of his body. | ||
| He can barely hold the cannabis oil in his mouth. | ||
| Ah, poor man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, he's struggling so bad. | ||
| But now why? | ||
| It says 1.37pm. | ||
| This is when he takes it. | ||
| And then you see just a few minutes later, they show him lie back. | ||
| And this is at... | ||
| Go ahead, Jamie. | ||
| That's 141. Look at this. | ||
| I mean, not even 10 minutes. | ||
| That is magic. | ||
| And look at this. | ||
| And he's fine. | ||
| He sits up. | ||
| And he's just blown away by it. | ||
| He's like, it's so quickly. | ||
| And look at his hands. | ||
| Incredible. | ||
| No, that is wonderful. | ||
| I have a friend who has a child that has pretty severe autism, and when he gives the kid cannabis, when he gives him edible cannabis, it just stops it. | ||
| It just stops it. | ||
| The kid can make eye contact, communicate. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Well, I could show you. | ||
| The trouble is I can show you privately, but the person involved doesn't want it to go out. | ||
| Of a wonderful old lady of 97 who had Alzheimer's for seven years or something, but she was very bright. | ||
| She was a pirate and was looked after by her son. | ||
| And then he went away for a week and someone else came and looked after. | ||
| And when he came back, she was at a kind of Acute vegetative apathy, where she didn't recognize him, just staring into space. | ||
| And they discussed it before, and she'd said she knew he sometimes took a psychedelic, and so he gave her a microdose of LSD. And an hour later, I've got the photograph, she's a little sparkling old lady with her full contact with him, saying, I feel so wonderful, let's read some poetry now. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| You know, just like that man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then he contacted me and said, what should he do? | ||
| So I said, well, first thing would be to get a doctor to help you. | ||
| I manage it and then continue with the lower doses gets that effect, which was 10 micron, which is 10 millionth of a gram. | ||
| I mean, such a small dose, you would hardly think it could have an effect. | ||
| And that does something which I'm doing research on now. | ||
| I think it's to do with the connectivity between the different brain centers, which I think it sparks. | ||
| And it brought her back. | ||
| And her children said it was just remarkable. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| You know, and I've noticed the same things I'm very... | ||
| I'm in the middle of getting going on the autism study. | ||
| Because I think certainly with level one, they're lower... | ||
| Degrees of autism. | ||
| Microdosing LSD can be enormously beneficial. | ||
| I've got a friend who's had experience of that and wrote a very good book about it actually called Autism and LSD. And so now I'm designing a study, getting his advice on the autism level of things. | ||
| And I think that, what I think is, what I'm fascinated in, and this is where I got this interest right back in 1966, are what are the mechanisms underlying That makes LSD and associated compounds have the effect it has. | ||
| And obviously then there was no brain imaging, so it was very difficult to see inside the brain. | ||
| One could only theorize about it, make hypotheses. | ||
| And so this Dutch scientist who I had a long relationship with had this hypothesis That it constricts, it's a vasoconstrictor, | ||
| constricting the veins, so blood comes into the capillaries, can't get out, the capillaries blow up and squeeze out the cerebral spinal fluid, and then slowly over the hours, gravity pulls the blood down again. | ||
| That's the theory. | ||
| Yeah, and you go back to normal. | ||
| But during that period of more blood in the brain, you have more energy. | ||
| Now I'm looking into, now, how does it make more energy apart from providing more glucose and oxygen? | ||
| And I've got a very, very interesting something which is coming up, which I'll tell you on my next talk about. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| But I'm very excited because I think people, anyone you talk to would say that the psychedelics or indeed cannabis, they all work on the same direction. | ||
| I think cannabis and the psychedelics have the same underlying mechanisms, but at different levels of I think the constrictions, the psychedelics are much stronger because you obviously get much higher you can on the psychedelic, but they're going in the same direction. | ||
| And that's what the endogenously A lot of the... | ||
| I'd love to know more about that. | ||
| I will, if I've got time, do that study into the underlying, you know, serotonin, dopamine, all the different enzymes, hormones in the body which can do these things endogenously. | ||
| I mean, we know the saint's got top high. | ||
| Saint Teresa, her description of her... | ||
| of a psychedelic trip kind of thing. | ||
| So it's the same experience, but either got endogenously or through other ways. | ||
| I think one of the things that's very interesting about cannabis too is the difference between eating it and when your body's producing 11-hydroxy metabolite from the eating of it. | ||
| It can produce a very powerful psychedelic experience. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And my experiences with it where it's been very profound are with the sensory deprivation tank. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I have a sensory deprivation tank, and I do it with edible marijuana. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And it's incredible. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I think there's some... | ||
| I've got a friend who grows marijuana, and I think I'm very interested in the... | ||
| He always wants me to work with one of the breeds, he breeds, because it is like a psychedelic. | ||
| And I thought I'd call it the, if I do it, the Beckley brain boost, because he... | ||
| It brings back his memory. | ||
| I think we're only beginning to scrape the top of the knowledge of how these compounds work and how we can use them for humanity. | ||
| Well, it's just very unfortunate that research was stopped for so long. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And we're very fortunate that there's people like yourself and MAPS and some of the other groups that have continued research and really pushed for the legalization of this. | ||
| Yes, and I think now we've got a tipping point where I think we've got enough good research which really shows, without doubt, that we can get better results with using psychedelics to help and cannabis than we can get without it. | ||
| It's really criminal not to throw money at this research so we can get it out to the people quicker. | ||
| Because access is what we need for all those people who have got terrible things they're suffering from, which could be helped. | ||
| And, I mean, I do as much of the research as I can, but I'm a tiny organisation, four or five people. | ||
| And tiny amounts of money we've got. | ||
| And to get a study going takes a year of paperwork, getting permissions, getting the compounds which I'm at the moment doing because I'm wanting to re-civilize LSD because I think LSD is actually the purest. | ||
| And the cleanest of the compounds, and in many ways, the best. | ||
| Not against, I think, psilocybin and other ones are wonderful, and they all have their different characteristics, which are incredibly valuable. | ||
| But it's a complete... | ||
| Madness. | ||
| That the one which is really, in a way, the purest is kind of opening up a magnification of what we are with very little external colouring, I think LSD is. | ||
| And as it is completely non-toxic, you can give it to people Forever. | ||
| It's not toxic. | ||
| They aren't building up toxicity. | ||
| A lot of people are microdosing it now. | ||
| It's a very, very common thing, microdosing of LSD. What they're reporting is an alleviation of anxiety, a heightened state of wellness and of awareness and of being in the moment, clarity. | ||
| Just from a microdose? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I mean, we actually did the first scientific research on the microdose. | ||
| I was collaborating with Maastricht in Holland. | ||
| And we did it on 5, 10, 20, I think it was, those doses. | ||
| And I mean it was amazing the results. | ||
| It increases mood, it increases neuroplasticity, it increases neurogenesis, it increases anti-inflammatory, it increases tolerance to pain. | ||
| Vigilance, you know, all of these very valuable qualities in a microdose. | ||
| And we could be using that with all sorts of indications which need actually more energy to kind of overcome certain deficits. | ||
| And all sorts of therapy applications because you do it and you're essentially completely sober. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| In the sense of you can communicate, you see things clearly, everything is fine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| But you have achieved a very elevated state. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| But you say everyone can do it. | ||
| It's only those very few who know how... | ||
| I come across innumerable people who I know someone who you know. | ||
| Who has terrible migraine. | ||
| And he had a microdose of OST. And it cured it. | ||
| And he has terrible problems in getting it. | ||
| And it's not easy to get. | ||
| So, do you see what I mean? | ||
| And a lot of people don't want to have to go on to the dark web. | ||
| I have no idea how you do the dark web. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And what you're opening yourself up to when you get on the dark road. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| You don't know what the product is. | ||
| I mean, what I've said about the... | ||
| I mean, I spent 10 boring years talking at the UN and places, not totally, but I went there, trying to say we should have a drug policy which is based on SARMs, on harm reduction, on human rights, you know, and cost effectiveness. | ||
| I mean, you know, and not one which is the exact reverse. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, that's sort of the problem is cost. | ||
| The real problem is there's a vested financial interest in keeping these things illegal. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because there's a lot of psychological medications that people are taking, psychiatric medications that people are taking that they really don't need. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And it keeps companies and also prisons were the second biggest industry. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Because it's free labor and a lot of funding coming in. | ||
| It's very twisted. | ||
| It's awful. | ||
| That aspect of it is terrifying. | ||
| It is terrifying. | ||
| And, I mean, I've been at it. | ||
| I wrote a report on the, whatever you call them, the United Nations Convention on Drugs, which is obviously created by America, but 190 countries follow it. | ||
| Actually, if only enough, America's the one which is breaking it, but doesn't allow other countries to break it. | ||
| But not one word has been changed in the last 20 years. | ||
| Which is crazy. | ||
| Which is crazy. | ||
| Especially when considering what we know now. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| About the benefits of it. | ||
| Were you friends with Terence McKenna? | ||
| Did you know him? | ||
| I knew him, yes. | ||
| What did you think of his stoned ape theory? | ||
| What was that? | ||
| The stoned ape theory is the theory that Ancient hominids, when the rainforest receded into grasslands, they started experimenting with different food sources. | ||
| One of the things they started doing was tipping over cow patties to find grubs and beetles and on those cow patties, psilocybin mushrooms would grow. | ||
| And that they started eating those and that it increased visual acuity, it increased their arousal states. | ||
| And that they also think glossolalia and so many different – the formation of language. | ||
| So many things came about from that. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I mean I wouldn't put it exactly the way he put it. | ||
| But I would say that we know animals. | ||
| We know that reindeer eat mushrooms. | ||
| And as mushrooms – exactly. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| As they're toxic, the king reindeer drinks the pee of the drug which has gone through like the big boss of the village would get all the lower members of the village to take the psilocybin first or whatever, and then drink the urine of the king reindeer drinks the pee of the drug which has gone Yeah. | ||
| The cleaned version. | ||
| Well, the reindeer also does that. | ||
| And so animals have taken it, I think that psychedelics were an integral part of Homo sapiens' evolution, if you see what I mean. | ||
| I don't think it's the only feature at all, but I think it's one of the major, you know, the development maybe of the mirror neuron was very important in one or two other things, but I think that's a major lift. | ||
| I think at the center of Human culture is the experience of altered states of consciousness. | ||
| He attributed it to the increase in brain size. | ||
| He believed that, you know, because of the neurogenesis properties also of psilocybin, he thinks that it may have contributed to the doubling of the human brain size over a period of two million years. | ||
| I mean, I definitely think all of those things are showing. | ||
| I mean, he was a poet. | ||
| He wasn't, you know, he expressed it poetically. | ||
| So, I mean, he talked a lot of rubbish. | ||
| I know that because I went to a lot of conferences with him and I knew it. | ||
| What did you think was rubbish? | ||
| Well, I can't remember, but exaggerated things. | ||
| The time zero? | ||
| Whatever, you know. | ||
| Time wave zero. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But at the same time, he's a very good poet and he had a lot of very, you know, deep thinking. | ||
| Well, he was very compelling. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely, and that's wonderful. | ||
| Yeah, and he got a lot of people to be interested in psychedelics because he was so interesting to hear. | ||
| Yeah, and a very good presentation. | ||
| Yeah, an unusual voice too. | ||
| Yes, wonderful. | ||
| Irish. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, yes, yes. | |
| Very, very good. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I think these compounds are integral to where Homo sapiens has got to. | ||
| And I think the disaster is that we started repressing it. | ||
| I mean, obviously, even at the time of Jesus, it was kept secret. | ||
| It was always kept secret, even at Eleusis, which went on for 2,000 years. | ||
| They kept it secret. | ||
| Probably that's why Socrates had to commit suicide, because he had it with his boyfriend at the dinner parties. | ||
| You know, it was only to be used sacredly for the ceremonies. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Which I actually think... | ||
| I mean, so I think that's an incredibly important part of it, the ceremony. | ||
| But I think also, as an elixir, when we get knowledgeable about how to use these compounds, they're just amazing health, mental health problems. | ||
| Elixirs. | ||
| And I think, I mean, I'm obviously, as I get older, very, very interested in how one can hopefully delay the... | ||
| And it's all based on blood, you know. | ||
| As we get older, the blood supply gets worse to the brain. | ||
| So how does one keep the supply of energy as... | ||
| It has topped up, basically, in the most beneficial way for the animal. | ||
| And I think, funnily enough, the cerebral circulation is out of fashion. | ||
| Because we discovered about the cerebral circulation whenever we did 100, 200 years ago, it's considered old-fashioned. | ||
| So modern South really isn't interested in the blood. | ||
| Actually, you know, everyone knows blood goes up, blood comes down. | ||
| But there's very little interest in it. | ||
| I mean, I worked with one of the leading Russian scientists who was on their space program and was the leading world expert on cerebral circulation involving cerebral spinal fluid and the relationship with cerebral spinal fluid and blood. | ||
| We worked together for about six years, and then he died in COVID at 80-something. | ||
| Which was a tragedy, actually, because he also was very interested in The kind of related thing of the possible increase in pulsation brought about by trepanation, which is a very ancient practice, which maybe brings the level of cerebral circulation back to childhood level, which is higher than the adult level. | ||
| We should explain trepanation to people because trepanation is a very ancient practice of drilling holes In one's head. | ||
| And you decided to do it. | ||
| You were in your 20s when you did this? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And what influenced you to do that? | ||
| What was the motivation? | ||
| Well, it was the theory of it which induced me to do it. | ||
| And in a way, I prefer not talking too much about it, not because I'm not in favor of researching it, but because I haven't done the research. | ||
| So I can't say, look, this has been proven by science, which until then, people didn't believe psychedelics worked. | ||
| They would say, that's placebo, fancy. | ||
| Only that when you show in science... | ||
| But anyway, the hypothesis is that when we are born, as we all know, there's the fontanelle, which are holes, which close soon, and you can see the pulsation. | ||
| In the fontanelle hole of the baby. | ||
| You can see the frame passing. | ||
| And then the holes close, but the sutras, the bones, are quite flexible. | ||
| So there's still the full pulsation, the full systolic pulsation is happening. | ||
| Then, as you grow and the bones grow together, slowly, slowly, some of the pulsation is suppressed because it hasn't got the room to explain. | ||
| So, the hypothesis of Trepanation, which has been done now. | ||
| The earliest skull found is, funny enough, the archaeologists at Chauvet told me, near Chauvet, they found a trepan skull of 25,000 years old. | ||
| And you can see if the person lived after the trepanation. | ||
| Because the bone grows. | ||
| Yes, and softens. | ||
| So that's kind of, I think, I haven't been studying it for the last 20 years because I've been on to psychedelics too much. | ||
| But I long to, because it's very close to what I want to do. | ||
| Do we know the origins of trepanation? | ||
| Do we know how it was... | ||
| We know it's the oldest operation in the world, that it's done all around the world. | ||
| It's very much associated with religion, mysticism, religion, Very often the skulls which are trepanned have a special burial. | ||
| They are buried in a pot or with silk around them, showing that they're either priest caste or royal caste or something. | ||
| But they're very present in every culture which is interested. | ||
| Not very present, but present. | ||
| And the biggest Massive Japan scalps. | ||
| Funnily enough, I think it's on the German-Dutch border. | ||
| I don't know why. | ||
| From what time period? | ||
| Pre-history, I'm afraid my memory's back and I haven't been studying it lately. | ||
| But the thing is, wherever you look, there's, I mean, the third eye, the thing in your picture, the third eye, I was told by a high thing, is a visualization of the third eye. | ||
| And one of the high... | ||
| I can't quite think of the word. | ||
| The high aims of Buddhism spiritually is by meditation opening your hole in the skull. | ||
| And that's in beautiful old Tibetan art showing... | ||
| Energy coming in and out of the hole in the head. | ||
| So it's always been, why I think the priest caste was associated with it, because I think that on the whole it was the priest caste which took the compounds to get high, whatever they were, mushrooms or argot. | ||
| And the danger of getting high is when you come down, you have a bad time. | ||
| Maybe flip out, but have a bad time. | ||
| And I think it was probably observed that the people with a fractured skull or wound or whatever it was, a hole in the head, actually slightly kind of rose to the top in the village, in the thing. | ||
| They became the doctors or the shamans or... | ||
| It seems to have an advantage. | ||
| Because like in Mexico, skulls, everyone grows up with skulls. | ||
| You know, they have skulls. | ||
| Like these. | ||
| These Day of the Dead skulls. | ||
| They're not real. | ||
| No. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, I've seen, I mean, because I was interested in, I've seen quite a lot of scowls. | ||
| In fact, I've even got one, which is, I think it's, I can't quite remember, 400, 700 BC. An Irish chieftain is meant to be. | ||
| And it's got actually six holes in it. | ||
| And why anyone wants to do six holes, I have no idea. | ||
| Some of them are quite large, too. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| But I think, I personally think that the change happens with one whole. | ||
| All you need is for the membrane to be able to expand on the heartbeat. | ||
| And I think what the restoration at the point of trepanation It's allowing that expansion on the heartbeat to the full expansion of the systolic pressure, which the child has until it starts to close over, kind of 13 onwards, the child comes down, 21, the average, the skull closes. | ||
| And that's often when the mental problems start after 21, psychosis and all of those things. | ||
| You're just at a slightly lower level in terms of energy for the brain. | ||
| And what I want to do, it's very easy research to do, trepanation, because people are doing it in hospitals every day, by the thousand. | ||
| If there's any brain operation, first you have to trepan the skull. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So it's happening all the time. | ||
| So we could very easily, actually. | ||
| I work with some very top-level scientists in Mexico, and I want to get that study going again, and particularly doing it for headaches, migraine, because it used to historically, in my father's encyclopedia, | ||
| which is, whatever, 1912, I can't remember when it was, something like that, It said trepanation has been done throughout history, and it is still currently being done with apparent success for the treatment of mental conditions, migraine, and da-da-da. | ||
| So, until in the First World War, they did the first lobotomy. | ||
| And that stopped trepanation as just an old wives tale. | ||
| So in a sense, they threw out the baby with the bathwater. | ||
| And I think that there is something... | ||
| It's quite easy to do. | ||
| So I'm... | ||
| My... | ||
| I'm trying to find the possibilities and I really want to do this research with trepanation. | ||
| Funnily enough, years ago I was at Burning Man and I had a campaign What was it? | ||
| Barlow. | ||
| Barlow was an old friend of mine and he got a lot of rather important people to sign up that they wanted to be trepanned. | ||
| And we were going to do, you know, so getting people trepanned legally in a research program. | ||
| But it never happened. | ||
| But what I want to say is that, for instance, Jamie, my husband, got trepanned. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How long ago did he do that? | |
| How long ago? | ||
| How long ago did he do it? | ||
| A long time ago. | ||
| I mean, soon after we got together. | ||
| And very difficult to find. | ||
| We were looking for someone in Egypt and found a wonderful surgeon there actually who did it, who was very interested in the kind of mathematics of pyramids and things. | ||
| And he had terrible headaches all his life. | ||
| He lost a day or two a week on headaches. | ||
| After his trepanation, he doesn't have headaches. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And I think it just gives back to the body and the brain that extra pulsation, which means... | ||
| I mean, you have it from all that exercise you do, so constantly you're getting that extra blood to the brain through your exercise. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| But for those of us who don't do all that exercise, it's good to have alternative ways of keeping the blood going. | ||
| That's got to be a big factor in the runner's high. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because in runner's high, they achieve these states of elevated consciousness. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I met one, I'm sure you've met plenty, but who runs, I think he said 140 or some enormous number, 100 miles or something. | ||
| And he said at a certain point he had a breakthrough where he got into a kind of real altered state of consciousness. | ||
| And I'm sure one day we can do all these things endogenously. | ||
| I mean, obviously that's what meditation is doing. | ||
| It's training you to do your own way of getting high. | ||
| And monks and people, they productively spend 30 years of their life doing it. | ||
| And I think that's wonderful. | ||
| But for those of us who would like a quicker technique, I think there's nothing wrong than learning to use a non-toxic substance to help us get up there. | ||
| And so, I think, funny enough, I think the new... | ||
| How I look on it, it's all about feeding the brain with enough energy, mitochondria, working away, to produce that mental cell energy, so that we can keep our function close to the optimal. | ||
| That's what we want. | ||
| Or, anyway, not allowing it to drop too low. | ||
| And that's what I think is the purpose, in a way. | ||
| Not the only purpose at all. | ||
| I actually think psychedelics have Value in a lot of different non-specific areas. | ||
| One is self-realizations, experience, beauty, love of beauty, love of sound, love of people, love. | ||
| I think it increases compassion and empathy and nature love and all of those rather good human qualities. | ||
| So I think it has... | ||
| The sensible use of the psychedelics, and by that I also mean cannabis, I mean the consciousness-altering techniques And I think those people who do it purely by meditation are to be very much admired because it's wonderful not to need an outside thing just to be able to do it within your own self. | ||
| Like a hot bath and a freezing bath or any of those techniques obviously change your level of consciousness by bodily reactions. | ||
| But also I think the use of Of the psychoactive compounds, we can, you know, tune it. | ||
| So it's a very, very carefully regulated, I mean, self-regulated operation. | ||
| You can dial it in. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You can control it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I feel very grateful for many things in my childhood. | ||
| But one of them was that I was my father's companion and he was a diabetic. | ||
| And he was an artist, so he didn't like his sugar level going high because then you lose your sight. | ||
| And his terror was going blind. | ||
| So he always kept his sugar level low. | ||
| So every day he was getting short of carbohydrates, falling in a ditch. | ||
| If he was driving a car, he drove over the centre of roundabouts. | ||
| You know, he did all sorts of funny things. | ||
| When he was short of carbohydrates, my job was putting the sugar in his mouth. | ||
| And so I got a very good relationship of knowledge of how the glucose level controls your level of concentration, if you like. | ||
| And how important it is. | ||
| So when Bart, this Dutch scientist, told me his hypothesis of psychedelics increasing the volume of blood in the brain capillaries, and particularly if you're doing a cognitively demanding activity, you use a lot of glucose and the sugar level falls. | ||
| Therefore, you need to keep the sugar level normal by increasing the intake. | ||
| And actually, all those years before it was legal, we lived on LSD. When I say live, I meant on big doses every day. | ||
| We really lived. | ||
| And I psychoanalysed myself. | ||
| I was doctor and patient and read the whole Freud, Reich. | ||
| Did you make notes? | ||
| Did you take a journal during that time? | ||
| Not a journal, but I did diagrams of, you know. | ||
| And I watched myself. | ||
| I overcame, for instance. | ||
| I was very tall as a child. | ||
| I hated being taller than everyone else. | ||
| So at about 13 I started smoking cigarettes behind the bushes. | ||
| So I was pretty addicted by the time I met Bart when I was 22 or 23, I can't remember. | ||
| I was pretty addicted. | ||
| And he said, what a horrible habit it was, mine, smoking. | ||
| So then I said, well, I'll give up. | ||
| And so I took a trip of LSD with the intention, I'll stop. | ||
| It's a horrible habit. | ||
| Just give it up. | ||
| And I never smoked another cigarette. | ||
| Do you remember when you did that, when you took the LSD with the intention of giving up cigarettes? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Do you remember what happened to you? | ||
| Do you remember? | ||
| Yeah, I do. | ||
| I remember smoking a cigarette during the trip and thinking, yak, it's disgusting. | ||
| I remember when I was a child, young child smoking, made one feel a bit sick. | ||
| One had to repress the feeling of sickness. | ||
| And then I realized, gosh, it makes me feel sick. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it's horrible. | ||
| It's making you sick. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So I gave up. | ||
| And 40 years later, whenever, when I was talking to Roland Giffith, funny enough, I had, I think it was $10,000 to do a research program. | ||
| So I went to Roland at that time, said, I've got this. | ||
| He said, oh, what would you like to do? | ||
| What would you suggest? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So I said, well what about overcoming nicotine addiction? | ||
| I did that. | ||
| With LSD, we could do it with psilocybin try. | ||
| And that was the basis of the study. | ||
| I mean, I remember the first lot was 80% success rate. | ||
| Yeah, 80% success rate. | ||
| I don't know what it is now. | ||
| But it's extraordinarily successful because actually nicotine is more difficult to give up than heroin because you're always repeating it. | ||
| So I experimented in those years when we were living on LSD. We worked. | ||
| That was our passion. | ||
| We were studying the human brain. | ||
| And the self. | ||
| And the t-shirt I've got for you is, the motto is, know thyself. | ||
| And that was what one was doing, trying to understand how we work better at that level and how we can enhance our working. | ||
| And I just think There's a lot more to be learned about how we can, if we concentrate more on giving the brain the energy it needs to function optimally, how can we help that happen? | ||
| Obviously exercise is one. | ||
| I've always slightly avoided the exercise route, being lazy. | ||
| But I have to say, you know, there are alternatives which can be used to the health of the person. | ||
| And I think it's a tragedy. | ||
| That one can't talk about things more openly. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's not easier to carry out research, because I know, having done it for now over 20 years, or over 50 years, trying to do research into psychedelics, how difficult it is. | ||
| I mean, in order for me to do it, I realized I had to stop being Amanda Fielding. | ||
| No letters after my name, no money, so who am I? And become a foundation. | ||
| Funnily enough, it was a very clever conceptual artwork. | ||
| Because in England, it's very kind of liberal England. | ||
| You pay whatever it is, and you become a foundation. | ||
| A thousand pounds, I think, or something. | ||
| Suddenly you're a foundation. | ||
| You don't have to have any money. | ||
| You're just a foundation. | ||
| Registered. | ||
| In Scotland, I'm registered. | ||
| And then I got the top scientists in the world, 10, 15 of them, including Albert Hoffman and Sascha Shorgan. | ||
| But the more important ones were the established ones like... | ||
| I always forget his name. | ||
| He was wonderful. | ||
| Colin Blakemore, who was a kind of top neuroscientist in the world at that point. | ||
| And he very much backed what... | ||
| We were going to start a centre at Oxford studying it, but that was going to cost four million and we couldn't get it. | ||
| And various other high-level scientists. | ||
| I had a very impressive advisory board. | ||
| And so then I gave a series of seminars at the House of Lords where I had presidents and blah, blah, blah. | ||
| All the head of NIDA, head of the Russian people, asked themselves if they could come. | ||
| So 70 invited people came to discuss global drug policy. | ||
| That made quite a difference. | ||
| That went on for 10 years or something. | ||
| And then I went to the whatever national, what would you call it... | ||
| Anyway, I advised certain governments and things on drug policy. | ||
| The United Nations went there regularly trying to change things. | ||
| So through this foundation? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If you don't mind, when you had your own personal experience with trepanation, what was that like? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What did it do for you? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was—sorry, can I do my drive? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I remember, I mean, no one wants to drill a hole in their head on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon. | ||
| I can tell you, it is not something I'm a very cautious person. | ||
| And so I had a deep interest in it because I had a very deep understanding of the hypothesis of blood supply. | ||
| And I was interested in researching it. | ||
| And then my partner, Joey Mellon, at that time, he was very keen on Japan himself. | ||
| And he was a second son, so he was a bit more casual, cavalier about it than I was. | ||
| and so had quite a few missed shots before he finally got through. | ||
| And, funny enough, then I did notice a difference. | ||
| And the difference is Very subtle. | ||
| You really have to know a person to notice it. | ||
| But how I'd express it is it slightly lowers the neurotic characteristics, if you see what I mean. | ||
| They become, I mean, they don't eliminate them in any way, but it lowers it. | ||
| And so having seen the difference, because Bart was Japan before I knew him, so I never experienced a change. | ||
| But when I saw the change in Joe, I thought, well, it does make a difference. | ||
| So I had thought I'd find a doctor. | ||
| So I'd spent four years looking for a doctor to tell me. | ||
| And I had people who said they would nearly, and then they said, I've got man dust to have a hole in his head. | ||
| He would have given us one. | ||
| Or, you know, it could be bad for my career on Harley Street if it came out or if you died or, you know, whatever. | ||
| And so it didn't happen. | ||
| So then I thought, well, I'm a sculptor. | ||
| I'll sculpt my own skull and see what happens. | ||
| So I really studied it because I'm a very, very cautious person. | ||
| And in London, strangely, there... | ||
| The shop was called Down Brothers. | ||
| It's off Harley Street and has all the instrumentation for trepanation. | ||
| Very old shop, actually. | ||
| And charming staff there who showed me in detail how you trepan because I went in as an interested observer. | ||
| And so I... Learned how to do it very cautiously. | ||
| There are three layers of bone, etc., etc. | ||
| I learned how to do it. | ||
| So I felt competent to do it. | ||
| And that took quite a long time, deciding I was competent and confident I could... | ||
| No, do it. | ||
| So I decided to make a film of it because I thought that would kind of separate me from the unpleasantness of doing such a silly thing. | ||
| And so I made, funnily enough, my great aunt just died and given me £70 and I bought a lovely little movie, Super 8 camera, and set it up. | ||
| And I had my beloved Birdie always with me, so he was an observer of this thing. | ||
| There's all sorts of stories, which I won't waste the time, which was amazing because we were asked to a party by a rather kind of guardian journalist, top journalist in England, for the Saturday night. | ||
| I had been planning on doing it on the Sunday, but I moved it forward. | ||
| So I thought it would be good publicity for the movement if I... Anyway... | ||
| I moved it forward. | ||
| And then there was an electricity strike in England. | ||
| So if I hadn't moved it forward, the electricity would have been cut, which was just a kind of good little trick or beating fate to do it. | ||
| So anyway, I did it very, very carefully with a hand to pan in the mirror. | ||
| Perfect little operation. | ||
| Was it a drill? | ||
| Drill. | ||
| Electric drill. | ||
| But I used a ball with a flat bottom, so it couldn't damage the membrane, because obviously... | ||
| What one's frightened of is damaging the membrane surrounding the brain. | ||
| I mean, I don't want to go into detail with it at all, but all I can say, I did it, I knew the second I was through, because the second you're through, there's no resistance. | ||
| And it had a flat bottom, so it couldn't. | ||
| I mean, it's not something one wants to do at all. | ||
| But it's kind of like people go skiing, people go horse riding. | ||
| Just the same danger. | ||
| You know, it's a danger. | ||
| Possibly infection is the only danger. | ||
| That's the danger. | ||
| And I always say no one should do it themselves. | ||
| It's a foolish thing to do. | ||
| But then when I'd finished, I bandaged up. | ||
| We went out and had steak for dinner to replace the lost blood and then went to this party. | ||
| And the photograph, which I don't know if you know, the birdie on my shoulder was the evening that came out of the Super 8 movie. | ||
| So... | ||
| I've seen the images. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But I haven't seen... | ||
| Apparently you never released the video. | ||
| I never released it. | ||
| And the person who made the film actually, as always, conned one. | ||
| So I had forbidden to let the images out on public thing because I didn't want anyone doing it. | ||
| And funnily enough... | ||
| Why did you not want anyone doing it? | ||
| Because I don't think self-travelation is a good idea. | ||
| But you did it. | ||
| Yeah, but I'm me. | ||
| You know, I took trouble not to. | ||
| And funnily enough, when I did an artwork in New York about it at PS1, because at that period I was trying to educate the world through art. | ||
| And I had this exhibition at PS1 of the slides. | ||
| Norm was great. | ||
| It was like an Egyptian tomb. | ||
| It was lovely. | ||
| Norm's womb they gave me. | ||
| Apparently people were queuing up, including people like Warhol and Bernardo Bertolucci couldn't get in, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| It was a kind of quite a hot movie at that point. | ||
| And people fainted, it said in the papers, like ripe plums falling to the ground. | ||
| But then 60 Minutes did a film of it, of me, and wanted to film me back at Beckley. | ||
| With Birdie, who was my pigeon, who was never in a cage, who was always free. | ||
| And so they flew me home on Concord, because I was pregnant with my oldest son, Rocky, to fill me with Birdie. | ||
| And Birdie was a very strong sense of justice. | ||
| And I'd broken the cold of love by going away. | ||
| So if I went away, he punished me Until the punishment had been done. | ||
| So when they flew me back from Concord, he wouldn't come down from the house top. | ||
| Anyway, they made this film, and he was very pleased, very nice director. | ||
| And then it was, as always, when one did something which was well done, it was... | ||
| Not allowed to go out. | ||
| Because the lawyers said there'll be an epidemic of people traveling themselves. | ||
| Were you worried about that? | ||
| Were people copying you? | ||
| No, not really. | ||
| Just too crazy. | ||
| Yeah, too crazy. | ||
| What was your personal experience like? | ||
| What was it like after it was over? | ||
| Sorry, you asked me that. | ||
| How I described it at the time... | ||
| It was like the tide coming in. | ||
| There was a kind of stillness in the brain, that internal, endless internal conversation of basically the ego. | ||
| Calm down. | ||
| Of course, one can explain all of those things could happen anywhere just from relaxation of having finished it, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| So, what difference does it make? | ||
| I would say it makes a slight difference. | ||
| It's slightly like the energy. | ||
| I mean, I watch children. | ||
| Children have that extra energy. | ||
| You know, they do those leaps and rounds and play around and that energy. | ||
| Adults don't. | ||
| Energy is a more difficult thing. | ||
| And when I became twenty-one, I'd had one of my trips to Egypt where I lived very wild. | ||
| And I thought I got Bill Hartz here, which is a worm you get and drains your energy. | ||
| And I went, when I got, I was 21, I went and got myself tested thinking I'd caught it, but I hadn't. | ||
| Then I realised that that was adulthood. | ||
| It's a slightly lower level. | ||
| And very often that's when people have their first schizophrenic experience or some mental thing after that. | ||
| It's a down. | ||
| It's a slight down. | ||
| There's a slight down. | ||
| Exuberance. | ||
| And that's what I noticed after. | ||
| But the difference is so slight, I couldn't swear on it at all. | ||
| How long did the difference last? | ||
| Well, you only notice the difference. | ||
| You don't notice the change. | ||
| Do you see what I mean? | ||
| So now I can't say, have I got any advantages? | ||
| Is my hole closed? | ||
| Is it open? | ||
| I can't say. | ||
| Have you ever got it looked at to see if it's closed? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| I tried to, actually, and it was very difficult to do. | ||
| I'd like to do that. | ||
| It's a very small hole, though, right? | ||
| Well, it was that big. | ||
| Okay, so a quarter of an inch, a couple of millimeters? | ||
| It was wide enough. | ||
| All you need is for the heartbeat to express itself. | ||
| It's all about the expression of the heartbeat. | ||
| And it takes half an hour. | ||
| If it was shown to increase cranial compliance, which is what I worked on with this professor, Yuri Boskalenko, who was a leading professor in those things, he thought, yes, it increases cranial compliance. | ||
| And that's just a slightly healthier state to be in. | ||
| And so it takes half an hour to do it. | ||
| In hospitals, the nurse does it. | ||
| The surgeon doesn't have to do it. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| It's a nothing operation. | ||
| So if that can slightly raise the level of energy going to the brain for the rest of the life, it's a valuable thing. | ||
| But do you think that these people that have multiple holes in their head, is there like a point of diminishing returns when they're doing it? | ||
| I should think they had big grain or some terrible thing which went on. | ||
| And they were trying to alleviate it. | ||
| Yeah, I think something like that. | ||
| Because I don't see the logic of it says you only need one to get the expansion back. | ||
| But that's why I actually don't talk about it now because it sounds so crazy. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's the problem is the optics. | ||
| Yeah, it sounds crazy. | ||
| Yeah, it's not good optics. | ||
| Until you've got it proven, which I actually seriously want to do, because what I do is on research with people with headaches, migraines, headaches, whatever, some form. | ||
| Because that's one of the things that all cultures who did it, one of the things they did it for was headaches and insanity. | ||
| In the old days, they said, it's letting devils out. | ||
| And the other indication is letting light in. | ||
| Because often people in the mythical tradition were trapanned. | ||
| So I actually, before I hit the bucket, I would really like to have done that research because maybe no one else will be motivated to do it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Has anyone been motivated to do self-trepanation that you were friends with? | ||
| Yeah, I know quite a lot. | ||
| Not a lot, but a few. | ||
| I mean, and then they started saying, oh, I certainly wouldn't Japan anyone. | ||
| I wouldn't dream of it. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| See, that's why I found a very good surgeon, brain surgeon and team in Mexico who did it. | ||
| So he did it for certain people. | ||
| And people wrote back saying it had altered their life. | ||
| You know, I think... | ||
| If I was asked, do I think it has effect or not, I would say I wouldn't be humiliated if it didn't, but I think it does. | ||
| That's my opinion. | ||
| For instance, it changed my dream pattern after I'd done it. | ||
| I used to have very anxious dreams, which very often were about Birdie, my beloved Birdie, getting killed in some way. | ||
| After the tribulation, I didn't have those anxious dreams. | ||
| So that's something which I couldn't control. | ||
| Anyway, I think it makes a difference. | ||
| So I'm in favor. | ||
| But we need to do the research. | ||
| Yeah, it's a fascinating subject. | ||
| It's just fascinating that it's existed for so long. | ||
| Yes, and very much associated with religious practice. | ||
| Basically, whatever, you know, very often, funny enough, there's in Mongolia some Japan skulls, and nearby is a very beautiful, this is very early, I forget, BC, long, 700 maybe, a little beautiful basket. | ||
| With cannabis, rather high THC cannabis in it. | ||
| I mean, I think they go together. | ||
| The trepanation, you know, like in Mexico, there are lots of trepanations. | ||
| And they went with... | ||
| The kind of spiritual practices. | ||
| It's very fascinating to me that from the moment human beings have discovered altered states of consciousness, whenever that was, that it's always been a part of this desire to sort of escape the confines of modern consciousness or of natural consciousness. | ||
| Yeah, it's to kind of slightly expand. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Slightly get back the childhood experience. | ||
| Yeah, joy, wonder. | ||
| Yeah, joy, wonder. | ||
| I do think it's that. | ||
| And I think it's still that. | ||
| And I think that's a very healthy... | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And I think, therefore, we should... | ||
| I really seriously think we should do research on trepanation, which I can very easily do. | ||
| It just needs ethical approval. | ||
| That's the only problem. | ||
| Do you think that it's warranted... | ||
| Do you think that the use of psychedelics and psychedelic therapy can replace that? | ||
| That it's not necessary? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| No, I don't think it replaces it. | ||
| I think they're, as they were in the ancient times, they're complementary. | ||
| They're both moving in the same direction of trying to increase the energy supply to the brain, basically. | ||
| And I think that's very key for... | ||
| Our future survival, because at the moment I think we're at a very... | ||
| Critical time because artificial intelligence is getting greater than our own, etc., etc. | ||
| There's all sorts of forces which kind of build the danger up. | ||
| So we need internal growth to balance that technological growth. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's such a strange contradiction that today, in a day where that growth is so necessary, these substances are so demonized. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| It's a tragedy. | ||
| And I really think it's a time. | ||
| It's a force which forced it upon us for all the wrong reasons and we all know it and America knows it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was during the civil rights movement. | ||
| They were trying to arrest the Black Panthers and the civil rights activists and all the anti-war activists and that was one of the ways they could do it. | ||
| And it's the way to enter any country you want to, like Afghanistan or Latin America or any country you can go and raid and spray and kill and capture. | ||
| You know, it was wonderful. | ||
| The CIA loved it. | ||
| And, you know, and so it was... | ||
| Which is so ironic considering that they did so many LSD experiments. | ||
| Yeah, and then threw the people who were troublesome out of the window and said they wanted to fly. | ||
| You know, that's such a typical... | ||
| I mean, it's a tragedy, the history of altered states. | ||
| I mean, like... | ||
| The midwives used psychedelics to help stop bleeding. | ||
| They realized the vasoconstrictive property of these compounds. | ||
| So they were used in childbirth. | ||
| And the midwives, they were very often the people who were burnt for witchery. | ||
| And the ironic thing is, when the witches were burnt, Then the villagers got a plague. | ||
| They called it the witch's curse of St. Vitus' dance where you shake and then you finally die. | ||
| And that's ergot poisoning because the witches went out with their hats at the full moon and their hats would show the glow of the ergot from... | ||
| The light of the moon on the ergot. | ||
| How did the hats do that? | ||
| Well, they hid them. | ||
| I mean, that's, I think, where the hat story came, because they collect the ergot by night because it's phosphorescence from the moon. | ||
| And then the burning of the witches, which was part of the Inquisition, basically, Then they had these awful plagues of St. Vitus' Dance, which was called the Curse of the Poor Old Witch, who had been using their medication to help childbirth. | ||
| So it's quite ironic how... | ||
| The authorities translate it wrongly. | ||
| I mean, basically it was because the witch wasn't gathering the ergot off the wheat, so the villagers were eating the poison and therefore getting sick from the bread. | ||
| Yeah, that was, to me, one of the most fascinating things about the Salem witch trials, is that they found out that there was a late frost, and when they examined whatever crops that they could find back then, they did find ergot in them. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| And they think that that was partially responsible for that whole hysteria. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, and it was very much intermingled with the Protestants, the inquisition between the religions and the whole thing came at the same time. | ||
| So there's been a kind of tragedy. | ||
| I mean, the point is, those in power actually don't want other people taking these compounds, like the Americans didn't want their soldiers taking acid. | ||
| Because it made the soldiers say, gosh, actually, I prefer to be in the park with my girlfriend than in some bloody wood far away getting shot. | ||
| It's pretty common sense. | ||
| Yeah, they didn't want common sense. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So... | ||
| It's a tragedy of the human fate. | ||
| I mean, the tragedy of humanity, us, is that we've developed this compensatory mechanism which has made us the genius that we are and we can do all these brilliant things we do. | ||
| But it also has made us this psychotic animal which is capable of great self-harm. | ||
| And somehow we need to balance it. | ||
| And that's why I rather like the phrase, The psychedelic age. | ||
| In the sense, I don't mean everyone taking psychedelics and having a party. | ||
| I mean learning the art of how do you control your level of consciousness and then how do you control that level so you can keep your concentration. | ||
| I don't go in for Leary, you know, turn on and drop out. | ||
| I say, turn on and drop in. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You know, do, be creative. | ||
| Yeah, that was the problem with Leary, that his philosophy and what he was espousing to people was, people felt like it was dangerous to civilization, that people were going to ruin their lives, they were going to drop out, and they were going to become part of these hippie communes. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It was all bad publicity, badly played. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And in those early years, in the mid-60s, when I started taking psychedelics seriously, we took it for working. | ||
| I mean, the Stones would be playing about half a mile away from our flat where I lived and still live in London. | ||
| We didn't bother to go to them because we were having such fun doing our work which studying the brain on acid. | ||
| I don't know, Hugo, my bother. | ||
| So, I think that the use, I'm sure you and millions of other people know, how incredibly inspiring for work the use of psychedelics can be. | ||
| You can see things you never saw before, you see, because suddenly having more of the brain simultaneously active, as our images showed, the two circuits, you can see this is the ordinary brain, this is the brain on psychedelics. | ||
| I've got those beautiful things came from our study. | ||
| The circuits, do you know the ones? | ||
| I've got a picture of it in my back. | ||
| You can see the difference in the brain. | ||
| And that can be used for whatever you're doing, for whatever creative, thoughtful process. | ||
| You've suddenly got all that extra brain power to dedicate towards what you feel passionate about. | ||
| It's a superpower for stand-up comedy. | ||
| For stand-up comedy, so many of my comedian friends use it to write. | ||
| Yes, absolutely. | ||
| And I have an intimate relationship with Jamaica and the deep, deep divers. | ||
| There's someone on the beach who said the one who wins that prize is his best friend, and she can stay down there much longer than the best friend can. | ||
| Because he smokes very heavily before he goes down, cannabis. | ||
| And he said that enables him to stop breathing for a much longer period. | ||
| You know, so I think whatever... | ||
| You do. | ||
| You've got more passion or energy. | ||
| So here's the imagery. | ||
| So that's the adult brain. | ||
| On the left. | ||
| On the left. | ||
| And what are these lines representing? | ||
| It's connectivity between different centers in the brain. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| So this is when you're on a psychedelic. | ||
| It doesn't matter if it's suicide but on LSD. When you're on, you've certainly got this much more intimate connection between the different parts of the brain. | ||
| And so I think it needs training to learn to... | ||
| Control that increased... | ||
| It's like riding an incredibly powerful horse. | ||
| You have to learn how you control it. | ||
| The brain is the same thing. | ||
| If you just go and take that, you can have a wonderful experience looking at the stars or having a love affair or listening to music. | ||
| All of those things can be wonderful. | ||
| But if you want to use it for cognitive discipline, which actually uses a lot of glucose because it's very late in... | ||
| In development. | ||
| So it's not part of the autonomic nervous system. | ||
| It's a part of the cognitive nervous system which burns glucose to get the energy to concentrate. | ||
| And so that's the importance of taking the vitamin C. And keeping the sugar level normal. | ||
| Can I ask you a question about that? | ||
| What about ketones? | ||
| I know many people, they get on a ketogenic diet and their brain produces ketones and they feel like intellectually that's a superior fuel. | ||
| I think probably it is a very good fuel, yeah. | ||
| I think there's a lot more we'll constantly be learning about how you can energize the brain in better, healthier ways. | ||
| But I think a secret, a basic secret, which I feel I was given the key to in 1966 when I learned about... | ||
| How one can increase the blood supply to the brain and therefore give it all that extra energy to have all the brain functioning. | ||
| And then is a whole new art. | ||
| How do you use that productively? | ||
| But I mean, that's like being a magician. | ||
| Brilliant magicians aren't. | ||
| They have to practice. | ||
| So it's a skill. | ||
| I always say, to take psychedelics, you have to be much more disciplined than not to take them. | ||
| It's much easier not to take them in a sense. | ||
| I agree with that. | ||
| I think people have a misconception about what you're doing when you're taking psychedelics or when you're taking, including cannabis. | ||
| I think the common misconception is that you are avoiding reality and that you are somehow or another giving yourself a crutch. | ||
| I don't think it's that at all. | ||
| And I think that with discipline, the use of psychedelics with discipline, it allows you to experience these states and get something from them and pull something from them and apply it. | ||
| I totally agree. | ||
| Normal consciousness. | ||
| I totally agree. | ||
| It gives you an extra power, like riding a more powerful horse. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You've got in your brain power, there's more there. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And so, I mean, I find if I'm in a really beautiful place, if I'm in Egypt or all those wonderful places with incredible beauty, it's almost an insult to the place not to be at your optimum. | ||
| LAUGHTER I say that all the time. | ||
| I say that because when I go to art galleries, I never go to an art gallery sober. | ||
| No, I quite agree. | ||
| Yeah, I always get on it. | ||
| No point. | ||
| I also feel that, I mean, people don't like this, but I'm going to say it anyway. | ||
| I like to be high around my children. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Because when I'm around my children, I'm fascinated by them. | ||
| And things that maybe would be frustrating, perhaps, if I was sober, instead are charming, and I find them interesting, and I'm fascinated by their mindset and talking to them. | ||
| And you have much more in common with them, because you're on the same wavelength. | ||
| So you stay in contact with them. | ||
| I adored having my children. | ||
| The greatest pleasure. | ||
| And I remember being at one of those conferences in Palenque or something, psychedelic conferences, and I think it was Terence McKenna's wife actually was giving a lecture, or giving a talk, very nicely, and how when she was pregnant, she gave up everything, right? | ||
| And I couldn't... | ||
| I hate public speaking. | ||
| I remember putting up my finger because I wanted to say, well, actually, when I was pregnant, I didn't because I actually think it's good for my health. | ||
| You know, I've taken enough of it that I really think it's actually good. | ||
| It's not like alcohol or cigarettes. | ||
| No. | ||
| And my children, I'm proud of my children. | ||
| And, you know, they are children of... | ||
| Parents who understood the benefits of altered states of consciousness. | ||
| Yeah, I've had those conversations with my children, my youngest, who are 13 and 15, and they're at that age where, you know, children want to experiment with alcohol, they want to experiment with drugs, and I have conversations with them about ones that you should avoid. | ||
| And the dangers of things that may be contaminated with fentanyl. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| And that these organic compounds, as long as you know the source that you're getting them from, whether they're psilocybin or particularly marijuana, they're not what everybody is telling you they are. | ||
| And that's what's criminal, and I do think criminal, about the government, because all the governments, the knowledge is out there. | ||
| These are non-toxic, the ones which are non-toxic. | ||
| And like in England... | ||
| People on the mass can only buy... | ||
| The illegal market in cannabis is taken over by certain breeders who breed only rubbish stuff. | ||
| An insensible person would never dream of smoking. | ||
| Very high THC cannabis, which is shit. | ||
| And it's not good for young people to smoke that. | ||
| And it's the authorities which are forcing the young people into that if they choose to smoke. | ||
| And I did a paper for the government saying that if they, as I hope they do, regulate cannabis, they should... | ||
| Make very low tax for THC-CBD balance. | ||
| And as it gets more and more strong, tax it more, because that will incline people to stop smoking this extremely high THC. You think there's dangers in smoking a very high THC? I mean, not for grown-ups who know how to handle it and things. | ||
| But I think it can be dangerous. | ||
| I believe so, too. | ||
| And I think there's also some correlations between that and schizophrenic breaks, that people who perhaps have a tendency towards schizophrenia when they have high doses of THC, they've had very traumatic experiences. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I think it should be encouraged a nice balance of THC, CBD. Yeah. | ||
| Well, that's one of the good things about the legalization in California in particular, because They've relegated these edibles in particular to 10 milligrams, which is a very sensible dose. | ||
| It's just comfortable, not too bad, you know, and especially in conjunction with all the cannabinoids with CBD. Yeah, wonderful. | ||
| And that's such a wonderful step forward. | ||
| And it's wonderful. | ||
| It's happening in America, but also quite ironic that America is still forbidding the rest of the world to do the same thing. | ||
| And it really does need to change because it's holding up humanity in a sense. | ||
| Well, I'm hoping that with education, the younger people are realizing what it actually is. | ||
| And as these people go into public service, they will go into public service with this new understanding. | ||
| Yes, absolutely. | ||
| And I think I absolutely commend you on the wonderful information you give to people by having such a wide reach. | ||
| And letting people who you think are right say what they think and slowly, slowly... | ||
| It will seep through and come to the top and be the dominant. | ||
| Well, there's a propaganda narrative that's just very unfortunate that has permeated our society, and it's incorrect. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| That narrative of the brain, LSD, cooking the brain in the frying pan. | ||
| Yeah, this is your brain on drums. | ||
| I remember once having lunch with Peter Thiel and he was saying he was grown up with that and couldn't get over it. | ||
| I mean, what rubbish. | ||
| Rubbish. | ||
| A thing which is complete. | ||
| There isn't another compound, I think, which is so powerful, which is less toxic. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You can't kill. | |
| Well, it's fascinating to me that that all took place during the 80s. | ||
| And the 80s, culturally, some of the worst artwork and music that the American society has ever produced during the influence of the Just Say No era. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| And the 60s, We're a period of cultural growth and change. | ||
| And people always put down the 60s. | ||
| But actually, all the things we love, not all the things, but a lot of the things we love came out of the 60s. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Spirituality, Eastern spirituality, yoga, health, music, comedy. | |
| Even the automobile design. | ||
| And it was all on LSD. It was fueled, that change. | ||
| And so I promised Albert Hoffman, I said, I'll, I can't remember what the word, but I'll reinstate your favorite child. | ||
| You know, LSD is a wonderful creation because it's non-toxic. | ||
| It's so controllable. | ||
| You know, if the governments were doing what a government should do, which is basically looking after their citizens like a good mother or father looks after their children and therefore teaching them what they need to know, like our children... | ||
| I'm never frightened my children might become addicted because they know. | ||
| They're from an earlier stage. | ||
| They know. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| They've been educated. | ||
| Don't. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Don't. | |
| You know. | ||
| Silly. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And also they benefit from you discussing like your addiction to cigarettes and how you got over it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And they saw how one When one did, when it was legal, use e-compounds, one was productive with it. | ||
| And it increased one's passion. | ||
| I mean, I'm a workaholic. | ||
| As am I. And I'm a user. | ||
| It makes one want to Achieve the work one can do. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| I'm fascinated with American automobile design. | ||
| I collect old cars. | ||
| And there's a time period between 1965 and 1970 where there's some of the most amazing cars Oh, really? | ||
| How interesting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ever. | |
| And it directly correlates. | ||
| How interesting. | ||
| It drops off a cliff after 1970. How interesting. | ||
| It's fascinating because those cars from 1965 to 1970, to this day, are the most cherished collector's automobiles and the most beautiful designs. | ||
| Yes, that's very interesting. | ||
| Funny enough, in this talk I'm giving a few days' time at Denver, I'm saying you can see... | ||
| And the markings of civilization, you can see which civilizations had integrated altered states of consciousness and which hadn't by their creativity production. | ||
| Rather like in a tree, you can see by the rings which are the years of drought and which are the years of rain and sunshine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And that's exactly it, what you're saying in that, in the peak of beauty in cars. | ||
| I want to show you something, just so you can see this. | ||
| Jamie, pull up a 1969 Mustang, and then I want to see a 1980 Mustang. | ||
| The difference is so stark. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| And it's so clear that that time period directly correlates with the sweeping psychedelics acts of 1970, where they stopped people using these things. | ||
| They made them forbidden and dangerous. | ||
| And that is a 1969 Mustang. | ||
| It's one of the most beautiful things that anybody's ever designed. | ||
| It's gorgeous. | ||
| I mean, I look at that thing and I'm like, my God, it's perfect. | ||
| Artwork. | ||
| Now, show me a 1980. Now this is just disgusting. | ||
| Look at that clunky piece of shit. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| What the hell is that? | ||
| Imagine that you went from that to that. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| What the hell happened to us? | ||
| Something's wrong. | ||
| Something's very, very wrong. | ||
| And people attribute it to so many different things. | ||
| And one of the things they attribute it to is like gas Yeah. | ||
| Being, you know, more efficient gas vehicle. | ||
| But not true, because you could still make it beautiful. | ||
| And that is not beautiful. | ||
| That's an ugly piece of shit. | ||
| You're absolutely right. | ||
| And I think that's such a beautiful – and I think you can tell it in a culture. | ||
| I mean, like, whatever, in – well, the beautiful cultures. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| You can see they were high. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| They had that – those lines in Chauvet. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Couldn't have been done by people who weren't high. | ||
| You know, it's too intuitive. | ||
| It's an intuitive expression. | ||
| I think one of the things that psychedelics do is increase the intuitive part of the brain. | ||
| And now, I've got a new program at the moment I'm doing, which is Looking at LSD, both in high doses and micro doses, in the best and latest technology in the world can give. | ||
| So in the high doses, I'm wanting to do a research on the mystical experience. | ||
| And anomalous experiences. | ||
| And it will be the first research to use a Tesla 7, do you know what I mean by MRI? Yes. | ||
| It's usually a Tesla 3. All the research I've done is with a Tesla 3. Is this fMRI? | ||
| Functional MRI? Yeah. | ||
| And then one does whatever, how many people, let's say 20, and one averages the results between the 20. What I'm going to do in this other one is use a 7 Tesla and personalize the data. | ||
| So it will only be person by person looking at the data. | ||
| And then it will be 7 Tesla and a Meg. | ||
| The Meg is the one which does that. | ||
| Electrical, you can see which centers of the brain are communicating with each other. | ||
| And then we'll have a very deep psychological one. | ||
| So you'll know... | ||
| When the person has some expression of the mystical experience or some other experience, and you can see what's happening in the brain waves and the blood and markers, so one will have it much more carefully analyzed than ever before. | ||
| Because apart from just pure fascination, interest, It's valuable to know how do we encourage people who are having a psychedelic-assisted experience to overcome treatment-resistant depression or whatever. | ||
| To have that mystical experience. | ||
| So the more we can learn about how does that grow, how does one help the fruition of that experience, the better. | ||
| And then, well, that's at the top level, looking at those experiences. | ||
| I mean, it's going to be so exciting, which parts of the brain to look at. | ||
| And the whole different areas, the hemispheres, the blood supply, which parts of the brain are activating in the highest way in that experience. | ||
| I once did an experience with a very high-level Indian meditator lady. | ||
| And she really wanted to help me, and it was an omega, one of those ones, Herdra. | ||
| And she told me after she came out beaming, she'd had a most wonderful mystical experience while she was in the machine. | ||
| She said, the best experience I've had with God for a long time. | ||
| And it showed a great burst of gamma in the right cerebellum. | ||
| Which is very fascinating because everyone thinks the cerebellum is just nothing, basic balance and all those sort of things. | ||
| But actually, I think it's a very highly, much more fascinating than that. | ||
| And so a mystical experience is rather like a toad in the sun, sitting on the sun in a state of blissful happiness. | ||
| You know, it'd be very fascinating to actually know about more... | ||
| These different experiences that we can as humans experience and how hopefully we can map them and therefore learn how to get them more. | ||
| One of the things I was fascinated about with you is your discussions of your experiences on LSD playing Go. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's very interesting. | ||
| Which is really interesting because you said it made you a better player. | ||
| And Go is an incredibly complex game. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And that's why for the last 50 years I wanted to and I will do research on Go. | ||
| But it's very difficult to find Go players Who are used to functioning on a high-level LSD. Do you see? | ||
| Because people don't on the whole. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But I've got that in place. | ||
| Because Go, as you know, is a pattern recognition. | ||
| It's an intuitive game of pattern recognition. | ||
| I've never played it. | ||
| It's a wonderful game. | ||
| Once you get into it, you rarely get addicted to it. | ||
| Because it's behind everything. | ||
| You can play life on the Go board. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| And you have a handicap, so you know exactly where you are with the person you play against. | ||
| A numerical handicap? | ||
| Yeah, the better player plays with white stone. | ||
| So the worst player has black, which is slightly more obvious, so it's a better visual, but it's slightly less good psychologically. | ||
| And then they have handicaps. | ||
| Every three games you win, they get one stone. | ||
| Put down on the board first. | ||
| Advance. | ||
| So anyway, we played passionately in the early 60s when LSD was legal. | ||
| And at the end of day, you know, we were doing brain studies all day or whatever we were doing. | ||
| And then Go was there. | ||
| And we wrote down every game we played so we knew who won and what the score was. | ||
| And anyway, I was a slightly better player than my opponent. | ||
| If I was an NSD and he wasn't, his handicap went up from three to six. | ||
| So that's winning nine games. | ||
| That's a big change. | ||
| And then it would come down again as he saw the patterns because it's a pattern recognition game. | ||
| And it's a wonderful game. | ||
| But I gave it up because you have to be passionate about it to keep playing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Very taxing, right? | ||
| Yeah, very taxing. | ||
| There's a similar result with psilocybin and the game of pool, pocket billiards. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You have more feel and you know where the ball is going more. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And you can understand angles and patterns. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And I think sportsmen, I mean like Joe, the father of my children, he loved cricket. | ||
| And he said he was the better bowler. | ||
| Have you heard of the pitcher who pitched a game on acid, a no-hitter game on acid? | ||
| No. | ||
| Who was that again, Jamie? | ||
| It's a very famous story of a guy who made a mistake and got just too high. | ||
| It didn't wear off and he went to the game. | ||
| Here it is, Doc Ellis. | ||
| He took acid and pitched a no-hitter. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So no one could hit his ball when he was on acid, which sounds so crazy. | |
| That's exactly it. | ||
| And do you know that picture of the spider, which came out in the 60s? | ||
| The spider's web. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I'm trying to recreate that study. | ||
| See if you can find that. | ||
| They gave the spider LSD. Yeah. | ||
| And, you know, the caffeine one was absolutely chaotic. | ||
| It was so bad. | ||
| Look at it. | ||
| The cannabis one started off rather well then you're chaotic, just like cannabis does happen. | ||
| But look at the LSD one. | ||
| And the LSD one was perfect. | ||
| Better than perfect. | ||
| Well, look at the normal one, though. | ||
| The normal one's pretty amazing, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But funny enough, now I know the leading web person in the world is a Don at Oxford who I've been talking about six years now to do this research. | ||
| But you wouldn't believe it. | ||
| To give a spider LSD, one has to get ethical approval. | ||
| Oh, that's hilarious. | ||
| That's funny. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And for six, eight years, we haven't yet got the ethical approval. | |
| There's nothing ethical about being a spider. | ||
| I know. | ||
| You can't believe it. | ||
| Their whole existence is unethical. | ||
| They're trapping other insects. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Anyway, so far we haven't done it, but I really want to do it this year. | ||
| Because, I mean, maybe they were pulling our legs. | ||
| But it's a very interesting concept. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| That even at the spider... | ||
| It improves function. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It would make sense that caffeine would be all over the place too. | ||
| The heart rate would be jacked up or whatever, their central nervous system. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| But it's very... | ||
| There's so much we could do. | ||
| And that's why I actually feel having lived with these... | ||
| Substances is my passion for 50 or 60 years, and particularly LSD, because I think it's the cleanest and I know it the best. | ||
| I've got a very good instinct how to do it. | ||
| I've designed several studies I haven't talked about because they shouldn't come out. | ||
| But I can see how it can help, like the old woman with Alzheimer's. | ||
| Which I'd like to just show you, not to go on, but to show you. | ||
| Because the difference is so big. | ||
| When I showed it to the professor of geriatrics in Switzerland, Within an hour, he said he wanted to do collaboration with me to do an Alzheimer's study because you can't fake someone's expression. | ||
| So from deep apathy, it goes to a sparkling little old lady. | ||
| And there's nothing conventional that would replace that. | ||
| There's no conventional medication that has the same sort of apathy. | ||
| And actually I'm working with one very nice man who's the CEO of the biggest care home in England, which is a national health one, and he'd heard about my research and is very interested. | ||
| He says 70% of his residents have Alzheimer's and there's nothing you can do. | ||
| And the suffering it causes them and their relations and their carers is devastating and it's getting worse and worse as we live longer and longer. | ||
| And it's stunning that there's something available. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And, well, after I'll show you because it is miraculous. | ||
| And so I've also got a very, very good concept for... | ||
| The perfect place. | ||
| Because what I would like to do is, with these conditions, like I'd like to do Alzheimer's, I also want to do autism, also Parkinson's, you know, I want to be able to fast forward these researches with the best doctors available, scientists, you know, I can design them. | ||
| I know them. | ||
| I know how they go. | ||
| And what I can see is it's very similar to a condition which we know historically, which is called terminal lucidity. | ||
| And I've been studying that for the last year or two. | ||
| It's a well-known fact that people quite often just before death who are in coma or paralyzed or one of those conditions out of the picture for years, Suddenly we'll come back and just before they die and make jokes about when they were in the nursery and people, you know, who know them know they're there at the shop. | ||
| And I think what can happen with a microdose is that you light up the connectivity between these different brain centers so suddenly the brain is functioning again. | ||
| I mean, not probably functioning like this old lady. | ||
| She came back. | ||
| Her children said it was remarkable. | ||
| It was getting our mother back. | ||
| She had her wit, her love, her attention. | ||
| She said, I feel so wonderful. | ||
| Let's read some poetry, you know, from having been this... | ||
| Vegetative state. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think we can now get that going. | ||
| And what I want is the freedom to design, to make the care home called the Beckley Harbour, where people can go and be treated with these compounds to see if it suits them, see if it has the same effect as it had with this old lady. | ||
| I would have wonderful trained doulas who entertain them and make it a wonderful place to be. | ||
| We'd have dogs and children and it would be like home. | ||
| That sounds incredible. | ||
| You know, it would be like being at home with lovely people who look after your emotional humor and da-da-da-da and you're given a microdose personally fitted to suit you. | ||
| And what a superior experience that would be to the traditional nursing home. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then we'd find out, does it suit? | ||
| And then one could collect in a year in not a very big nursing home. | ||
| And this wonderful man in England said, so long as it's legal, he'll give me the nursing home to try it. | ||
| So I want the permissions to be able to do this. | ||
| And then one could get a lot of people coming through and then one would give them home care. | ||
| So one would have someone visiting them at home as much as they need to maintain a safe and good place. | ||
| Anyway, we could do that, you know, this year. | ||
| But it needs, one, the regulatory passport to do it, and two, the funding. | ||
| And both are there. | ||
| I mean, there's so much money around it. | ||
| You know, and everyone's getting old. | ||
| Either their parents are or they are. | ||
| And, you know, we should do these things speedily. | ||
| Not wait 10 years until... | ||
| You know, it takes two years even to get the paperwork done for this research. | ||
| One year. | ||
| I wanted to talk to you about near-death experiences. | ||
| And there's a lot of speculation about what happens in the brain during near-death experiences because many people report things that are very similar to what is like a breakthrough psychedelic experience. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Well, what I think is... | ||
| Near death, the body is in a state of extreme turn-on, and it naturally, endogenously, Let's out these compounds, | ||
| oxytocin, you know, all the different compounds in the body, which DMT may be, you know, they're probably more than we've even discovered, which give a shot of something, serotonin, which is very similar to a psychedelic. | ||
| And that's why people can suddenly come out of a vegetative state shortly before death. | ||
| And that's what I'm saying. | ||
| I think that what I'm doing with microdosing is creating that effect without having to wait for the person to die, poor person. | ||
| Right? | ||
| One can do it on a protocol. | ||
| And that's what I'd like to research now. | ||
| That'd be amazing. | ||
| You know, it's obvious. | ||
| I've got proof of the thing that it happens. | ||
| You can't fake it. | ||
| You can't fake someone coming back to life again, in the look in the eyes. | ||
| So it's there. | ||
| Just let's get the space so legally, I could set it up with the best people. | ||
| I can set it up and we could do it. | ||
| And then if we get successful data, we can open clinics, care homes, services, and then hopefully the people can take the treatment home with them. | ||
| One of the more bizarre things that comes out of psychedelic experience is contact with entities. | ||
| Contact with what seems to be some other form of consciousness. | ||
| What do you think is going on with that? | ||
| I love your entity flashing across the ceiling. | ||
| Oh, that's a shooting star. | ||
| I have to tell people about that, especially people that have had psychedelic experiences. | ||
| They think they're having a flashback. | ||
| Sorry, I didn't warn you. | ||
| But what do I think? | ||
| Certain compounds create it more than others. | ||
| DMT, much more. | ||
| LSD doesn't really produce entities, strangely. | ||
| I think it's... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But psilocybin does. | ||
| Yeah, but that's got DMT in it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| LSD. That's why I love LSD. LSD, I think, is more like a flower opening up, i.e. | ||
| it's more of yourself. | ||
| Whereas DMT, whether it's ayahuasca or psilocybin to a lesser degree, has this slightly Boom, boom, boom. | ||
| Slightly dominating sound. | ||
| I don't really like the colours as much. | ||
| You don't? | ||
| Not quite. | ||
| Those kind of mauves and browns. | ||
| I prefer the LSD colours. | ||
| You see mauves and browns when you do DMT? Well, I'm not a DNT person. | ||
| I mean, I've done it, but I don't... | ||
| Because I've seen very bright, vivid colors. | ||
| I've not seen mauves and browns. | ||
| Haven't you seen the darker colors? | ||
| I find it slightly dark. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| I mean, I was once quite recently in a room of a session when people were doing it. | ||
| There were only ten people in the room. | ||
| Three of them! | ||
| We're in a battleground. | ||
| A poor boy had had too much and was screaming and yelling and getting burnt. | ||
| And the person who looked after him was a very practiced person in these things. | ||
| He then said to me, well, actually, I was in a massacre myself. | ||
| A massacre? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, do you know, he was, while he looked after the person, but he's very well contained with his massacre, so he still managed to look after the young. | ||
| But I actually thought, I don't really, sir, choose compounds which bring... | ||
| The tendency of those sort of experiences. | ||
| But I know people have wonderful experiences. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I've never had those negative experiences like that. | ||
| No, my experiences have been very vivid and bright. | ||
| Right, yeah. | ||
| And enlightening. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, and the entities are very colorful. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Bright colors and wild, beautiful, loving experiences. | ||
| Right. | ||
| How lovely. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, that's... | ||
| That's very lucky because I know people who've had horrible ones too, but I mean obviously they come and they go. | ||
| Do you think that that's people struggling with the experience and trying to control it? | ||
| I'm sure trying to control it. | ||
| Is not a good... | ||
| Detrimental. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think people are very lucky who've never had a really bad experience. | ||
| I had a really bad experience with someone right back in the first year of my taking LSD, someone who had actually turned Leary on to LSD, who was a kind of freak, not a nice person at who was a kind of freak, not a nice person at Anyway, he had a vinegar bottle of Sandoz Vitamin C. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And he offered me some. | ||
| I said, thanks. | ||
| I didn't want it. | ||
| Anyway, I didn't want him around. | ||
| And then he poured it into my coffee. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| Without telling me. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| And thousands of trips. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| And so I had... | ||
| A dying experience. | ||
| It was a really bad experience. | ||
| And, you know, once you cut a thing in the soul or the body, you retain that fear. | ||
| The pathway. | ||
| Yeah, that pathway. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So, I think people who've had really bad experiences and have got pathways cut are more likely, if they're given a psychedelic, are fearful of getting down that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Do you think that's a memory retention? | ||
| Like perhaps they remember the bad trip and then they start manifesting it? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And I think they definitely remember. | ||
| The question is whether they can remember it in, what do you call it, I've forgotten the word, epitogenics, which says maybe you can go on for generations of memory of trauma, but I don't know if that's... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I quite agree with you. | ||
| I mean, if you're someone who's never had a really bad experience, you're much less likely to have it, and that's a great gift, and that's what we want everyone to be like. | ||
| Most certainly. | ||
| What do you think you're encountering, especially on DMT? What do you think the entities are? | ||
| Do you think that's a figment of the imagination? | ||
| Do you think it's the consciousness expressing itself in different ways through the visual cortex? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or do you think it's actually an entity? | ||
| I know Shaman, a ayahuasca chair, and he says he always considered in the Senti Diami Church, they consider entities a deflection of attention. | ||
| It's better not to go into the world of entities. | ||
| But a lot of people love the entities. | ||
| My son once had an entity experience with ayahuasca. | ||
| The entity told him, why do you have so many, such a collection of sneakers? | ||
| He has a sneaker head? | ||
| Yes, which he does. | ||
| He's got a passion for sneakers. | ||
| Oh, that's funny. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'm not an expert on entities. | ||
| I always wondered if maybe that's your own consciousness, recognizing that you're obsessing about a thing. | ||
| Yeah, I think there's that element about it. | ||
| I'm hoping this research I'm doing on the mystical experience I think anomalous experiences like telepathy. | ||
| Telepathy, I know, happens to my own satisfaction. | ||
| I'm in no doubt. | ||
| How so? | ||
| Because with my pigeon lover, we were lovers for 15 years, passionate lovers. | ||
| Wasn't Tesla in love with a pigeon as well? | ||
| Yes, I think he was. | ||
| Why pigeons? | ||
| Well, it just so happened that his mother died on the window ledge. | ||
| And Joe went to collect her body. | ||
| We were trying to feed her. | ||
| And there was a little day-old fledgling without any feather. | ||
| Oh, so you raised it. | ||
| And he shouldn't have lived because he didn't at that age, but I fed him warm milk and wheatabix on a paintbrush. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And he became, I mean, he was, he became just obsessive and he became the boss. | ||
| And Jerry said to me, let's get rid of this pigeon, this creature. | ||
| We're going to have him, I insist, let's put him out because we're going to have him forever. | ||
| And then I thought, I'm not going to put him out, my beloved little papa. | ||
| And I went and brought him in again. | ||
| And sure enough, we had him forever. | ||
| How long did he live? | ||
| He lived for 15 years. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| But he was then killed. | ||
| I always knew he'd be killed somehow. | ||
| And the interesting thing, I won't tell the story because it's too long, but I knew before he died, And I said out loud to him as he flew by, I said, Birdie, I love you more than anything else in the world. | ||
| And that was the last thing I said to him. | ||
| And then he died, and I knew he was dead. | ||
| I was painting a picture, I was on acid painting a picture, and I suddenly had this thing, Birdie's dead, Birdie's dead. | ||
| And so I did what I had never done, I stopped painting and went down to look for him. | ||
| Anyway, it turned out my father, who was also very kind of in on those sort of things, but he was very fond of, had lost his temper with the old cowman we had for 50 years and told him to go and cut these effing nettles somewhere. | ||
| And in the nettles was Birdie's still warm body. | ||
| So I knew before it happened and he knew within ten minutes of it happening... | ||
| I mean, how many dead birds do you get? | ||
| See, hardly ever. | ||
| I mean, birds are dying all the time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They get eaten. | |
| You'd never trace them. | ||
| Birdie. | ||
| And then once we took Birdie camping, years before that. | ||
| Anyway, it's another story. | ||
| But he flew off. | ||
| And then I did a national... | ||
| I got on English BBC. News. | ||
| I said he was a hero, Antonioni's new film. | ||
| Because I put adverts in the Times and everywhere looking for a beloved grey London pigeon. | ||
| I got thousands of people saying they had him and we went all over England collecting these wretched pigeons which were meant to be birdie. | ||
| LAUGHTER And then I went up to the television and did this petition for Buddy on the television, on the news, because I said he was the star of Antonioni's new film. | ||
| I asked Antonioni if I could do that, and he said yes. | ||
| And so the BBC was jammed with telephones, seeing people finding Buddy. | ||
| And then I was really upset because they said they never introduce... | ||
| Whatever, people who ring in to people looking for fear of something. | ||
| Anyway, so I was incredibly sad because I thought, what the point of the whole thing? | ||
| The whole point was to get Bernie back. | ||
| And then there was one telephone call which came through, which came from the police station. | ||
| And because Birdie had landed on a washing line of a man who didn't have a telephone, so he didn't do his own telephoning, he sent his son to the police station saying he had Birdie. | ||
| And because it was the police's line, it got through to me. | ||
| And that was Birdie. | ||
| Do you see what I mean? | ||
| Multiple things of telepathy. | ||
| And other things. | ||
| I mean, I'm in no doubt that telepathy exists. | ||
| Are you or not? | ||
| I think it probably does in some way. | ||
| I think it's an emergent property of human consciousness that's not quite fully formed. | ||
| I think it's there, but because of our egos, we don't sense it. | ||
| I mean, because animals know when there's going to be a tsunami. | ||
| No animals die in the tsunami. | ||
| They all go up the mountain. | ||
| Well, humans don't have that sense. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Because we've got too much noise in the brain. | ||
| So I think we've got the sense, but we don't use it. | ||
| Or don't know how to use it. | ||
| So I think it's there. | ||
| And I love those sort of things. | ||
| I'd love to know. | ||
| I think they work with the same senses in the brain as their mystical experience. | ||
| So by learning more about the mystical experience, one can hook on to learn more about anomalous experiences. | ||
| You know, like I know a Buddhist monk who can shoot electricity. | ||
| I mean, strange things which are unexplicable at the moment, but it'd be very interesting to find out. | ||
| So you think that these are probably abilities that we have, but they're stifled by ego. | ||
| They're stifled by noise. | ||
| They're stifled by anxiety. | ||
| I think they're probably skills that you have to design I mean, it is a funny thing that animals Aren't ever killed by his army. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| They just have the instinct to go up, out of the way before it happens. | ||
| That they have some understanding. | ||
| Something, some sense. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think things like telepathy happen with two things. | ||
| Passion, love, love, passion, i.e. | ||
| connection, and threat. | ||
| I think they put the The tendency, the sense of more likely to sense it if it's like that. | ||
| I mean, that's why I had passion for Bernie. | ||
| And it was when he was in danger on several occasions I found him when his wings were trapped. | ||
| Do you see what I mean? | ||
| Right, like you sensed it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You had this connection with him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I've had it with humans too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But it's usually... | |
| A threat to life, a kind of adrenal threat, which obviously sends a message if you're there ready to receive it. | ||
| One of the things about ayahuasca was when they were first recognizing it, they tried to call one of the compounds of it telepathine. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah, but then they realized that it had already been named. | ||
| It was already Harmin. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| We did the first, I did the first research with Harmin, with someone called Jordi Reba, who's a wonderful Spanish I'm a scientist on Hameen and On neurogenesis. | ||
| We showed that it increased neurogenesis. | ||
| As does psilocybin, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's interesting. | ||
| We're going to find out so much. | ||
| And he committed psilocybin, sadly. | ||
| Which is a tragedy, because he was a great scientist. | ||
| But, yeah, there is so much to understand. | ||
| And I think we're at such an incredibly interesting Sphere of investigation. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Because these things are all on the cusp of where we are and where we can go to in the future. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I think that's why it's so wonderful that someone like you is out here with this passion for doing this research. | ||
| And wonderful that you're spreading information about these things to people because it has to get out there that people are actually interested. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And then force our politicians... | ||
| In a nice way. | ||
| But you know, to change. | ||
| To release it. | ||
| It really needs to be changed. | ||
| It does. | ||
| Because I do think... | ||
| I mean, I think the use of cannabis and psychedelics can enhance one's relationship with one's partner. | ||
| One can help see the other viewpoint, help kind of get over difficult periods. | ||
| I think it can do that with warring countries. | ||
| I think, you know, empathy, it increases empathy, it increases the possibility, we know from research we've done and other people have done too, that the amygdala is lowered, particularly with MDMA, the fear, so you can approach things which are fearful, like trauma, better. | ||
| I mean, there's so many different pathways that these compounds can Help enable humanity to get to their healthier, nobler, more creative expressions of themselves. | ||
| I mean, the number of people I know, and I bet you know many more, who've said it changed their lives, their experience. | ||
| Changed mine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, and mine, and mine. | |
| I mean, I don't think... | ||
| I know I couldn't have done what I've done without what I got from these compounds giving me the extra energy and understanding, and that's what I think should be there. | ||
| I passionately think psychedelics are a gift of the gods in inverted commas. | ||
| It's a natural It shouldn't be expensive. | ||
| We must keep it so it's affordable to the poorest and the rest of the world. | ||
| And that shouldn't be difficult to do. | ||
| They cost nothing. | ||
| I started, I've twice started a legal, a Beckley Labs, to make top-level compounds, which I did. | ||
| But both times something happened. | ||
| I never had the money to have a legal, so I never had a legal agreement. | ||
| So actually the person always did the dirty on me when he just got going. | ||
| So it never happened. | ||
| But I want it to happen because the purpose was to keep it low price. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I mean, people have to make money getting a... | ||
| A compound through phase three costs hundreds of millions. | ||
| So, as governments aren't paying, one is very lucky to have people who invest money to do it. | ||
| But then one wants to try to make sure that the investment doesn't stop Other people being able to have benefit from it. | ||
| Right, but they don't have monopoly over it. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So how we work out how you do the research, get it done, and the whole thing is maintained in an ethical sort of way. | ||
| So it's not going to be a sport of the rich people only. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's going to be... | ||
| And that's the benefit of the rich people as well. | ||
| And the rich people are the ones who hopefully are those who take the risk of, as the governments don't do it, of putting their money in to make the studies happen. | ||
| But really, governments should be Encouraging. | ||
| I mean, to give the British government, they did fund our depression study, second time round, to give them their two. | ||
| And I know that NIDERS is now funded. | ||
| But, I mean, it's a pittance one's needing. | ||
| A lot of money to allow. | ||
| I mean, I do studies. | ||
| I do them fantastically cheap. | ||
| I think since I started the Beckley 25 years ago, I think she said I've had about five and a half million pounds in total. | ||
| For 25 years. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I've done a lot of the breakthrough research. | ||
| But I'm now the age I am. | ||
| And you know, I can't go on forever working 15 hours a day. | ||
| And I would like to be able to do what I can do now, which is a lot, because I know the compound so well. | ||
| I know, well, their strengths, where to use them. | ||
| Do you know? | ||
| And it's such fun doing it. | ||
| It's like playing Go. | ||
| One loves playing Go. | ||
| And it's a much more interesting game because then maybe one can help Deal with Alzheimer's. | ||
| Maybe one can help. | ||
| There's all these conditions, which I think these compounds can help. | ||
| Just elevate humanity in general. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| And not only for treating people, but elevation. | ||
| I think that's absolutely as important. | ||
| And that's why it has to not have to be only be a medicine. | ||
| It's a medicine, which is essential. | ||
| But it's also an elixir to make the human animal, the upright talking ape, a bit less of an idiot. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| I think that's a great way to wrap this up. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| I really, really appreciate you being here. | ||
| And I really appreciate everything you've done. | ||
| It means so much to the whole world. | ||
| Well, thank you very much for asking me. | ||
| If someone wants to learn more about your research, where should they go? | ||
| Well, to the Beckley Foundation, but I have, we have, you know, we're a tiny organization, so we can never, I mean, I hardly ever look at the website. | ||
| Do you see what I mean? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| What I would, they can help, because I can do a lot of wonderful research. | ||
| I've got a very good, tiny team, but I want to do more research and make things happen. | ||
| So you want people to contribute. | ||
| So there's a donate button. | ||
| If you go to thebeckleyfoundation.org in the upper right hand corner, there's a donation button. | ||
| You can support psychedelic research. | ||
| You can donate from anywhere in the world. | ||
| UK tax-deductible donations, US tax-deductible donations. | ||
| Donate via bank transfer, cryptocurrency, Apple Pay. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| Well, I've never seen it, but well done. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There it is. | |
| It's really comprehensive. | ||
| But it'd be lovely if it starts to work because it's particularly difficult now that business – because people think, why put money in a bottomless well when one could put it in a well which can sprout? | ||
| But I think there's an advantage in philanthropy because one's not guided by profit at all. | ||
| One's guided by the knowledge we can get. | ||
| That's it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you very much. | |
| Thank you for being here. | ||
| I really appreciate it. | ||
| And thank you for asking. | ||
| My pleasure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. |
Export Selection