Amanda Feilding, psychedelics pioneer and founder of the Beckley Foundation, traces her lifelong fascination to childhood mysticism—imagining a pet god and exploring altered states through Catholic rituals and Buddhist influences. She argues The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross and The Road to Eleusis reveal psychedelics’ ancient role in spiritual rebirth, while modern suppression (e.g., CIA LSD experiments) stifled creativity—like a pitcher’s no-hitter under acid or America’s post-1970 car design decline. Feilding’s self-trepanation and Birdie the pigeon’s alleged telepathy suggest psychedelics unlock brain connectivity, but she warns of ego dissolution risks. Both advocate legalization with strict research protocols to harness their potential for empathy, mental health, and even terminal lucidity in Alzheimer’s patients. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
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 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, 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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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...
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.