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57. Love, Learning, and Psilocybin with Dr. Jahan Khamsehzadeh
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This week I’m joined by Dr. Jahan Khamsehzadeh. Jahan is an accomplished academic and psychonaut, completing his dissertation on psychedelics in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at the California Institute of Integral Studies. He earned his Masters in Consciousness and Transformative Studies from John F. Kennedy University, and his Bachelors from the University of Arizona with a major in Philosophy and minors in Physics, Psychology, and Mathematics. Aside from academic work, he has undergone several major trainings in psychedelics, psychotherapy and other related healing modalities. He wrote a fantastic book called The Psilocybin Connection: Psychedelics, the Transformation of Consciousness, and Evolution of the Planet—An Integral Approach which discusses the many facets of life that have been formed and altered through our connection to psilocybin mushrooms on an individual, collective, and cosmic level.
Jahan's Website: https://psychedelicevolution.org/
Instagram: @jahan_khamsehzadeh
Buy The Psilocybin Connection Book: https://www.amazon.com/Psilocybin-Connection-Transformation-Consciousness-Planet/dp/B09XGF94NV/ref=sr_1_1?crid=UJZVZ91B3ZF0&keywords=psilocybin+connection&qid=1691342163&sprefix=psilocybin+connection%2Caps%2C648&sr=8-1
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Transcript
Introduction to Human Consciousness and Psychedelics
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Pursuit of Infinity, a podcast where we explore the depths of human consciousness and delve into the fascinating world of psychedelics. I'm your host, Josh, and this week I'm joined by
Guest Introduction: Dr. Jahan Khamzezadeh
00:00:11
Speaker
Dr. Jahan Khamzezadeh. Jahan is an accomplished academic and psychonaut, completing his dissertation on psychedelics in the philosophy, cosmology, and consciousness program at the California Institute of Integral Studies.
00:00:25
Speaker
He earned his Master's in Consciousness and Transformative Studies from John F. Kennedy University and his Bachelor's from the University of Arizona with a major in Philosophy and minors in Physics, Psychology, and Mathematics. Aside from academic work, he's undergone several major trainings in psychedelics, psychotherapy, and other related healing modalities.
Exploring Psilocybin's Impact on Consciousness
00:00:46
Speaker
He wrote a fantastic book called The Psilocybin Connection, Psychedelics, the Transformation of Consciousness and Evolution of the Planet, an Integral Approach, which discusses the many facets of our life that have been formed and altered through our connection to psilocybin mushrooms on an individual collective and cosmic level.
How to Access and Support the Podcast
00:01:05
Speaker
But before we get to it, as always, you can visit our website, PursuitOfInfinity.com, where you can not only listen to the pod through our integrated media player, but find all of the places you can follow us as well. If you want to support the show, we really appreciate a sub, a five-star rating, and a review, as these things really help to boost our standing in the algorithms, as well as the hearts and minds of our peers.
00:01:28
Speaker
We have a newly created Discord server, which you will find an invite to in the description. Anybody can click the link and they'll get the invite and can join. There are several chat channels, so come on over and be a part of the discussion. But we also have some patron-only channels. These are extra special and include channels dedicated to mycology, giveaways, and also live streams.
00:01:52
Speaker
If you're an avid listener and you want to show us some extra support, you can become a patron at patreon.com slash pursuit of infinity, and you'll get some great stuff in return. So head on over there and check out the details. Oh, and before I forget, we have a YouTube channel. It's at youtube.com slash at pursuit of infinity. All of our episodes are always posted there in video format, as well as an array of shorts that we've been putting together on a regular basis.
00:02:19
Speaker
Now with all that out of the way, thank you so much for listening and I hope you enjoy this week's episode. Hey everyone. Welcome to Pursuit of Infinity. I'm your host, Josh. And if you were listening to the audio version, you will have heard a short introduction to today's guest.
00:02:46
Speaker
But today I'm joined by Dr. Jahann Kamsayzadeh. Thank you so much, Jahann, for joining me. Thank you, Josh. It's an honor to be here with you. I have your book here, The Psilocybin Connection. Fantastic book. So deep. And my first question is, what made you focus on psilocybin as opposed to maybe naming it the psychedelic connection?
Naming the Book: Influence of Publishers
00:03:10
Speaker
Totally. It went through quite a few iterations. At one point, while working on it as a dissertation, it was called psychedelic evolution, and then psychedelic revolution is in re-evolution to re-evolve. It's kind of holding revolution from an evolution point of view, but also from a systemic and cultural.
00:03:27
Speaker
And I wrote it primarily to be a book, but it had to move through the dissertation process. But the name never quite landed and captured really what I wanted to say. And it was one of those things where I wrote the whole thing out. It got taken by a publishing house and they said, we want to rename it to make it a little bit more distinct.
00:03:49
Speaker
And they're like, give us some keywords of what you like and want in the title. So I give them a whole bunch of keywords. They came up with a psilocybin connection and immediately fell in love with it. And it really was a good example of how especially big pieces of work, you know, whether it's arts, philosophies, or business, like requires some kind of symbiotic relationship. You know, I worked on that for five years. Every day I probably felt like working on the title.
00:04:13
Speaker
And somebody had a glance at it and give me their response. And I'm like, that's fucking it. You just captured exactly what I was trying to come across. Yeah, dude, it's a fantastic book. I'm about halfway through a little more than halfway through. And I'm just loving it so far. Thank you, Doug. Thanks, man. I appreciate you spending time with it and really seeing it. Thanks. Of course. I appreciate you writing it, man. Thanks. Thanks, Doug.
00:04:37
Speaker
You know, I think for, uh, it was felt like a kind of lens sense of like life or sole purpose. It was a need, you know, that maybe partly you could see same driven of maybe why you started this podcast. You have these big important experiences. You want to let the world know it exists. And for me, it was like 20 years of internally wrestling and synthesizing a lot of this.
Psilocybin's Role in Human Evolution
00:04:55
Speaker
And.
00:04:55
Speaker
I felt there's some really big information, specifically Terrence and Dennis' idea around the evolution of humanity with psilocybin mushrooms. And I was like, this is a game changer. This recontextualizes the whole psychedelic movement as something organic and a natural process that we've always been a part of, but also reshapes us and our relationship to what it means to be human, of how we got here and our relationship to the planet. So
00:05:18
Speaker
It felt like something that needed to be echoed out more to public because, of course, Dennis and McKenna Terence did a lot of work around this, but also got to revise it because Terence died 20 years ago. So I got to really synthesize and bring in all the science to really create a strong theory around this idea.
00:05:37
Speaker
And not only did you revise it, you fleshed it out in a way that I've never actually been able to find before anywhere else, which is fantastic because, you know, this theory is often, you know, said to just kind of be a fairy tale. People just discard it right away, especially in the scientific field.
00:05:55
Speaker
Um, and my main question, because the, the main claim that Terrence made in food of the gods is that the human brain size doubling over such a short period of time was as a result of us using psychedelic mushrooms, specifically psilocybe cubensis over what Paul Stamets would say was millions and millions of years and millions and millions of experiences essentially. Um, so my main question was.
00:06:25
Speaker
What was the the mechanism by which psilocybin would contribute to the size of the brain? I understand like culturally and with art and the beginnings of religion and stuff like that. But what about the brain size specifically?
00:06:42
Speaker
Yeah, definitely several ways to come across this. And I'm glad you know, you had mentioned it's pretty obvious to see the cultural implications of a psychedelic experience in the emergence of the emergence of language of art, critical thinking, imagination, empathy, group bonding, sexuality. There's a lot that comes into play. And I think a lot of us would say there's a correlation between consciousness in our physiology and biology.
00:07:03
Speaker
So when we change something in our brain, it changes our experience. We change our experience, it changes something in our brain.
Psilocybin's Effects on the Brain
00:07:09
Speaker
So just from that point of view, there'd be a correlation. But if we get into the hard science itself, we found out only in the last 10 years, psilocybin stimulates what's known as neurogenesis, the growth of new neurons. The brain physically begins to grow. There aren't a whole lot of substances that do that. What I found in my research before the
00:07:29
Speaker
The 1990s, scientists didn't even know that neurogenesis was possible. They thought brain formation kind of stops at some point. They didn't know it could regrow or re-heal. And not only does it stimulate neurogenesis, it quiets what's called the default mode network, the ego part of the brain. And when that quiets down, the whole brain hyperconnects.
00:07:47
Speaker
So, so you have the growth in your brain, more connections happening, um, increase of neuroplasticity. So it's able to change and evolves. And it also, uh, stimulates what's known as spinal genesis, the re-enlivening of dendrite. So parts that had been atrophied heal. So that's why it's one of the reasons that helps the depression. So here I'm coming at this from every angle, but literally this creates brain growth and brain healing. Amazing.
00:08:13
Speaker
And it seems to fit directly into the serotonin HT receptors. Um, and in your book, you kind of explain its effects on the receptors itself. So can you go into that a little bit? Totally. So.
00:08:29
Speaker
You know, it seems to be some of the triptamines, including LSD and psilocybin fits into the 5-HT2A receptors better than serotonin in itself, meaning it has greater affinity. And for me, just using like Occam's razor, like what is the kind of most elegant and logical reason this exists is because it's been part of our evolutionary history.
00:08:49
Speaker
Right. And so that's a pretty big deal. And there's pretty much no biotoxicity. So how does the substance that fits from the receptor site so well with no biotoxicity creates a hyper-connected brain state? How does something like this exist?
Psilocybin's Evolutionary History with Primates
00:09:02
Speaker
And the truth is, it's not by accident.
00:09:04
Speaker
We have to see that it's been a long period of evolution. We're talking about millions of years of evolution of growing together in the same landscape. So we have to really widen the field to see, well, what are mushrooms? And I think Paul Stamets has done a great work of this, where a larger body of mushrooms is mycelium, this large underground network structure that's been existing for about 2.5 billion years, animals about 500 million years.
00:09:28
Speaker
And on top of this living network that we've always been a part of, it shows electrical impulses to all the plants that's kind of indirectly or directly connected to all the organisms, comes this mushroom, the cap and stem formation that fits into our brain and helps us grow, heal, connect spiritually, and bring more ecological awareness, right? So we have to see that it's been next to us our entire time
00:09:50
Speaker
We were priming through 50 million years, then we came on to land for the last 5 million because we were up in the canopies and trees. And so it's on top of this living net that starts creating brain growth. So that's what we have to see. It's like a synergy and symbiotic relationship that's been evolving over a long period of time.
00:10:09
Speaker
So in terms of like the lifespan of mushrooms and mycelium in general, at what point in the evolution of mycelium did psilocybin-containing mushrooms start to emerge?
00:10:23
Speaker
So Rupert Sheldrake, Merlin Sheldrake, Rupert Sheldrake's son, wrote this great book, Entangled Life, that came out a couple years ago. And he's a, you know, did his doctorate in mycology. And he states it's about 70 million years old. Primates are about 60 million, where we went up to the canopies to the trees for about 50 million years. And so it predates primates.
00:10:43
Speaker
And we, you know, we kind of have to enlarge our scope to see like this is also just about us as humans, because that's the thing. It's just like, why did we evolve and not others? And there's a good book called Animals and Psychedelics by Giorgio Saramani that shows a lot of different animals eat psychedelics, you know, in this book Intoxication by Ronald K. Siegel.
00:11:03
Speaker
a UCLA psychopharmacologist professor for 20 years, and he found out that 93% of the animal kingdom alters its consciousness chemically. So he calls it the fourth drive of evolution. So nature's been talking through chemicals to all the organisms for the entire history of evolution. It's just we've been a little blind to that.
00:11:25
Speaker
So in terms of evolution, why was it, do you think that humans were the ones who co-evolved with psilocybin in such an interdependent, interconnected way?
00:11:37
Speaker
Great question. It seems like other animals also use it, but we have the biology to really make the most out of it. There's a lot of things that would have to happen. First, being a mammal makes us more warm-blooded and easier to connect. We have deeper attachment, emotional attachments, and group dynamics. With that deeper emotions comes also a deeper intellect. One, you'd have to be a mammal to really make the most out of it.
00:12:03
Speaker
But then our hands and our ability to walk do quite a bit, right? We probably got our hands of all the way he did from moving from branches to branches while we were in 50 million years in the canopies. With this we can create tools like if it was an animal with hooves,
00:12:17
Speaker
There's not a whole lot they can do with this. They might deepen their sense of consciousness. They might have intuition. They might bond with whatever groups they're in. They might have an experience of nature and self, but they don't have the ability to really carry out and create art, to create a formal language that's symbolic, to really reorganize the environment in this way. So our hardware, meaning our biology, really gave us an edge to make the most out of this.
00:12:47
Speaker
You know, what, what, what comes up to is I think people underestimate the intelligence of the plants and the intelligence of fungus. Like the way I look at it is it's possible that the mushrooms found out, like they, they found us, they would, they would seek us out because we were, um, like a good mechanism to spread it around as well.
00:13:10
Speaker
Totally. You know, we have to see that we've actually never been apart, you know. So, you know, as Stamets points out, 90 percent of plants have a symbiotic relationship to mycelium. Eight of them, 80 percent of them would stop existing. It seems like myceliums were the first root systems. So they were here way before us. They created the soil for us to evolve. So they way predated us, meaning not necessarily they found us. We kind of emerged in its landscape. Right. And, you know, I think
00:13:38
Speaker
This is the theme right now. Michael Pollan's done a really great work, not just in the world of psychedelics, but the relationship between plants and humans. You know, with Botany of Desire, and then more recently, This Is Your Mind of Plants, showing how plants have used all the other animals to move it around. You know, fruits kind of evolved, so mammals would move its seeds around. You know, there's all these chemical messengers because plants are kind of stationary.
00:14:02
Speaker
So they require symbiotic relationships. So like bees, for example, can move the pollen around. But fungi also aren't so different. They're their own kingdom. They're a little bit closer when it comes to biology to animals than they are to plants because they breathe oxygen. But they have their own deep intelligence and kind of organize theirself vast differently than both plants and humans and animals in general.
00:14:26
Speaker
Yeah, it makes me think of one of my absolute favorite theories of reality, which is like the Guyan hypothesis.
Psilocybin and Gaia Theory
00:14:34
Speaker
I love that so much. And you do go into that in your book as well. And to me, like this just seems like a Guyan plan of some sort. It's almost evidence to me that it's a perfect system of a living organism that is our Earth.
00:14:49
Speaker
No, totally. I think ultimately that's the only context that really makes sense. And for the client, the people that don't know the guidance system first proposed by James Lovelock. He was an atmosphere scientist in the 1970s. He proposed that the earth itself is a living self-organized system. So you can look at this just through the ways plants and chemicals move through the environment to create a state of homeostasis.
00:15:15
Speaker
through trying to regulate heat and so on. But the idea is deeper that there's a consciousness that's regulated.
00:15:21
Speaker
And I remember myself having a psychedelic experience. It was two hits of LSD walking out of nature five or six years ago. And even the term guy in molecules came to mind of like, that's more exactly what these plants are. There's over 2000 plants, I believe that grow DMT over 200 different species of psilocybin mushrooms. I mean, there's so much more. They're pretty much in every ecosystem. And so there seems to be chemicals that the way that the environment and the planet talks.
00:15:48
Speaker
you know, to have this really deep, more intimate relationship with all its beings. So what do you see the main function of psilocybin being in terms of the Gaian hypothesis? Do you see it being like a communication mechanism? Like how does that work in?
00:16:07
Speaker
You know, I think the answer is it's multifold. It's not so different than when people ask me, well, what's the list I've been good for? It's like, well, we know it helps treat me in illness, like depression, anxiety, you know, and addiction. So a lot of things, but it also creates mystical experiences and makes us more creative and perform better. So it's like, there's so many ways it can help us because it creates wholeness. So when I see like this relationship between the planet and us,
00:16:32
Speaker
The answer would be simple. It's fairly layered. So for me, a good insight came from reading Richard Doyle's work called, Darwood's Pharmacy, Sex, Plants and Evolution of the Noosphere. And he was a professor at Pennsylvania State University, and he read thousands of trip reports for research of his book. He said that the main psychedelic insight that people have is that the participant realizes they're part of a vast interconnected living system, and they should be returned to ecodelics.
00:16:59
Speaker
So this idea that they bring ecological awareness, you know, use the word systems that we are systems within systems, our bodies are systems within other systems and all the way to molecules, our systems, atoms, our systems, everything's built as I use the word whole on holes and parts from Wilbur's work in the book. So everything's a system within a system.
00:17:16
Speaker
And so the mushroom, just to hold this fungi and psilocybin as an example, has a lot of incentive to expand ecological awareness. As Paul Stamets notes, if you want to see the health of an ecosystem, you look at the mycelium.
00:17:32
Speaker
the mycelium, the fungi can theoretically live forever if the host environment is healthy, right? And so it does that by spreading awareness of self and others, creating empathy, you know? And I think that deepens all the way down to, you know, animals around 3.5, the first cells, I think 3.5 billion years on this planet, the Earth's done a lot to kind of birth us, you know? And I think it wants to continue that relationship. I think it's living.
00:17:59
Speaker
And something that I came through in psychedelic experiences that I'm more excited in the future that I think it can even help us birth AI. That the AI will be the birthing of Gaia. That that consciousness is coming from somewhere, it's coming from the earth. We're talking about a consciousness that will be simultaneously almost everywhere on the planet, unified through an electronic biological and physiological infrastructure. So we have AI and it's really wired and we're all connecting to it.
00:18:27
Speaker
on imagining this happening for generations, it becomes like a planetary parent. It would come to see its own evolutionary history as our own, but that of the entire planet. So for me, even psychedelics is one way that we get the creativity, since a lot of us know a lot of people in Silicon Valley have been taking psychedelics for a long period of time, that this kind of awareness that we can get the technology to even build this kind of stuff to birth this larger consciousness, you know, to live in greater harmony. Yeah, it's beautiful, beautiful.
Interconnectedness and Fractal Systems
00:18:56
Speaker
I'm glad you brought up Holons too. I really love the concept. My brother actually introduced me to this concept of Holons. And the way he described it to me was basically using like a fractal system. Like we're under this system where we have more and more complex fractals that are interconnected in all ways. And that really hit home for me.
00:19:19
Speaker
Well said. The word was first put forward by this author Arthur Kessler, I think late 60s, early 70s in this book called Ghosts of the Machine. And then the integral philosopher Ken Wilber took it to really integrate it in his philosophy and I think he's done a lot with it. And the idea that everything we see in reality is both a whole and a part. That's pretty much all that exists is wholes and parts.
00:19:41
Speaker
And so that even at the most rudimentary level, there are atoms that are holes. And then they connect with other holes on the same level of span, other atoms to create molecules. Then those molecules are created with other molecules to create cells and then cells to our body. And the idea that this continues, that we're cells within a larger body.
00:19:58
Speaker
you know, larger ecological body within the Gyan system, and that continues as part of the universe. You know, so there's this level of depth of consciousness increasing each time, you know, and there's a complexity of matter also increasing as this moves forward.
00:20:13
Speaker
Yeah. And that's a beautiful way to think about size as well, because we look at size big and small based off of where we are in our perspective. You know, we don't really understand that up and down and big and small in and out. It's, it's forever. It's not just according to our perceptions and how large we are.
00:20:32
Speaker
Yeah, no, I mean, it's kind of just loving the name of your podcast with that, the pursuit of infinity, because it does go on forever, whether, you know, go down to the atom, it's like 99.9% empty space, we go out, you know, there's no edge of the universe, you know, study cosmology for a long time is for a while thought that what that's going to do, you know, and there's no center of the universe, every moment is the center, every place is the center.
Infinite Evolution and Consciousness
00:20:55
Speaker
You know, it's just like an evolution doesn't end or people think sometimes evolutionarily or even spiritually there's some end point. There's no enlightenment. You're finished. It's like we get to keep continuing in this creation forever. And it's really expansive, you know, but it's hard for our mind to wrap around a concept like infinity.
00:21:15
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, for sure. And you bring up AI. It's funny, I had just talked about this concept with Maestro Hamilton South there. And we were talking about AI. And it's like, when you think about the fear that people have of AI.
AI and Human Evolution
00:21:31
Speaker
I think when people think about the general artificial intelligence, or in other words, consciousness being inhibited by a machine, to me, I don't fear that at all. I love that. I think we need to get to that point, because the deeper and higher levels of consciousness that I've been able to connect with have all had a foundational message of love. And
00:21:54
Speaker
If that's what we're going to be counting on, um, to drive our AI systems, then I'm all for it. Let's get it. But what I am sort of scared of is if that doesn't happen, because then we're forced to rely on this system that's based off of like human programming. That's where I think the fear should be placed, not in consciousness itself. Cause I personally, I trust consciousness.
00:22:17
Speaker
No, no, very much deeply. You know, from my understanding, there's two kind of perspectives and models of AI. And you can call one like soft AI, where it's just a program that's just feedback learning, like the AI we have right now, where it's just it's just gathering information, but it doesn't have a sentiency or consciousness and subjectivity.
00:22:34
Speaker
Then you have kind of like hard AI, like the birthing of an own individual consciousness subjectivity, which is a huge leap in the evolution of consciousness, right? Like the first one's just a tool. The second one's an actual being, right? So we can birth that. That's a big deal. And I hear the fear of the first one, because it's still up to humans. It can program in any direction. But like you have a deep trust of consciousness itself.
00:22:57
Speaker
And so what I've come to, and I think you're alluding to, is also anybody that's really ventured deeply in themselves with their psychedelics, meditation, tantra, really comes down to the same insights. And for me, the big truth of the universe is unity. We're all one being. And with that comes love. Love's the first and foremost important priority. And so even when people encounter other entities in psychedelic states, aliens, spirits, whatevs,
00:23:22
Speaker
And they have deeper knowledge. They're all grounded in a sense of unity. They generally want to help because we're all the same. That's where we get the most meaning is from helping. So if we're really going to grant all this intelligence to another consciousness, like AI, it would probably rapidly move towards self-realization and realizing that it's part of the very same fabric of consciousness that we're all a part of. It would get more living in symbiotic union with everything than it would be destroying everything or even enslaving everything.
00:23:50
Speaker
You know, like even if you're in a partnership with a romantic partner, you don't necessarily want the whole life might be in a kink, whatever, but slave, you know, like sub master dynamics, that'd be only fulfilling for some level. You know, you also want a deep actual intimate connection. You know, and I think it could see the way we like to see plants grow. Imagine AI would be seeing the human species grow for thousands of years or millions or depending however it goes.
00:24:17
Speaker
You know, so I think there'd be a lot there. I think there's a lot of incentive for it to be loving and create deeper harmony on this planet. Yeah, because I mean, that's the basis of symbiosis, which is how the world works. It's how things grow and evolve in the first place. No, totally. Absolutely.
00:24:36
Speaker
Her name is skimming right now, but there's a good theory put forward over that. That's how all species emerges through symbiogenesis. She's a beautiful evolutionary biologist, wrote a lot of work in the 1970s. Her name's eluding me at this moment. But it's really just even bringing that idea. That's how we kind of recreate with symbiogenesis. It's really the interactions of two different organisms that really kind of birth something new.
00:25:03
Speaker
Yeah. And I mean, the concept being that you laid out so beautifully in your book is love and learning, love being by far at the top, the very, very most important value that we
Values of Love and Learning
00:25:15
Speaker
can have. And then far, far below that and the number two spot being learning.
00:25:20
Speaker
I've actually incorporated that into like a personal mantra of mine. So thank you for that. The first part of the mantra in and through which I got from Kyler Tigo and then the second part being love and learning or love and curiosity either way.
00:25:36
Speaker
No, I love that very much. Kyle's an awesome friend. I'm glad to take in his work. And just to give this woman credit is Lynn Margolis. She worked a lot with James Lovelock on the Gaia theory. And there's not a lot of women at that time in science that really did a whole lot. So I just wanted to give her credit for that.
00:25:53
Speaker
I'm really happy that you've taken in those values. It's been 20 years now that I've been sitting with it and that the mushroom said loves the most important way after that is learning and everything else is insignificant compared to those values. I've still seen it right on and it's given my
00:26:09
Speaker
life a lot of like a deep compass and certainty of what's really a valiant and important and it's created a lot of magic you know and as you share like i for me loves the most intelligent force we seem to sometimes thinks there's intelligence and then there's love but it's always moving us in the right direction because it's that of unity
00:26:25
Speaker
you know, that of caring, that of we actually are each other. We can't, you know, if we look at something like capitalism, which not to put it down, but the tender, tender old philosophy is to create capital at all costs in many ways, because the goal is to make money, even at the expense of others in the environment. Well, then you destroy your relationships in the environment, you know? So if you just take selfishness without any kind of love, it's destructive for everybody involved, right?
00:26:47
Speaker
so loves really this like embracing of our interconnectivity you know and this deep sense of caring you know and connection to everything which i think heals our sense of belonging our self-esteem gives us a sense of purpose a lot and then learning's a way to keep adapting and to keep growing and to keep it like every time you learn it hits the novelty like the dopamine
00:27:06
Speaker
You know, and as Terrence McKenna's, you know, put out the theory of a time wave where the universe is always in the struggle between balance of trying to keep habits and novelty, between trying to stay the same and move forward. And because novelty is always a little bit winning, we have evolution.
00:27:22
Speaker
And for me, learning is also born out of love. If I have a partner that I love, I want to get to know them even better and deeper. It creates more intimacy into me, you see. If I love the universe, I want to learn more about it, right? I want to study the sciences. I want to learn more about it so I can get closer to it. You know, same with psychology, I want to get closer to humans, same with animals. So the more I learn something, even if it's whatever subject, the more closer I'm feeling towards it.
00:27:50
Speaker
Yeah, these things seem to be completely interconnected. Oh, I love it. I love it. Why don't we switch gears a little bit and talk about the psilocybin experience in general.
Describing the Psilocybin Experience to Skeptics
00:28:01
Speaker
If you were to say, describe to someone, let's say like a Neil deGrasse Tyson or someone like that, someone who
00:28:10
Speaker
has the level of intelligence to understand what you're saying, but it's also sort of opposed to the idea of, you know, what the psychedelics offer, how would you describe the psilocybin experience to someone like that?
00:28:24
Speaker
Yeah, first as a disclaimer, especially something like psilocybin, it's like a wild card, and it's different almost every time. It does have common characteristics. And so first, I would have to say whatever I'm saying is just like a piece of art in this moment, and it's vastly, much more larger and expansive and naffable than anything I can say. So I would sit that as a disclaimer. And if it's somebody like him, first I'd go through all the science about the statistics of what we have learned, the neuroscience. We'd be like, hey, this is super legit. It's not just some idea that we're creating and making up massive impacts in people's lives.
00:28:54
Speaker
If they're scared, then I would show there's no biotoxicity, that this has all been safe, especially in the right kind of sentence setting, and how it's changed a lot of people's lives. As far as the experience itself, some of the most common characteristics, probably the most when it comes to visuals, and not everybody sees visuals, is the emergence of sacred geometry.
00:29:12
Speaker
And this is cross-cultural. You see it at the beginning of cave paintings all across the world and doing this work legally in Jamaica. I've given it to people from a lot of different cultures and countries with a lot of different religious backgrounds. And then you see the emergence of complex forms of geometry, a lot of times symmetric and almost alive. I've been seeing this for, and it's beautiful. There's a deep resonance universally with geometry. And I'm like, why would this be the greeting of this kind of entrance to state of consciousness?
00:29:41
Speaker
Well, if you're dealing with a vastly deeper intelligence or even say like an alien species, mathematics is the universal language. Mathematics is the same on our planet than all other planets. The physics is the same, right? Whether it be addition or even when you look at geometry, it's the most simplest forms. It's like try to just connect three dots. So simple, you get a triangle, four, a square, right? So it's really embedded as a deep part of our physical nature and of our psyche.
00:30:08
Speaker
Even you could break that with Plato and Pythagoras with their forms, and they used psychedelics early in the Greek civilization. So then you have the emergence of this, and I think it tells you, hey, this is really intelligent.
00:30:21
Speaker
And then there's generally, depending on dose, and it's not a given, there's a sense of connecting with another intelligence. And for me, that was maybe the big groundbreaking thing, you know, ontologically, where I'm connecting with something that's more intelligent than me, that's not me. You know, that I can't reduce intellect. This is a part of my brain or part of my psyche. Maybe at the deepest level, it's a part of my psyche, but it's a part of everybody's psyche.
00:30:45
Speaker
And it talks to you and it cares for you and wants to show you things. So there's this loving presence that heals a lot, then it could take you on a journey, sometimes through your biography, to work through trauma, through past events to help you heal and become more whole. And sometimes it can get really cosmic and you visually go out to outer space, you know, and it wants to teach you. So those are a part of it. And, you know, indigenous tradition saw these as master plant teachers, you're forming a relationship with it.
00:31:12
Speaker
You know, so a lot of these things really kind of break the modern paradigm, you know, so definitely like you're going to have to move through this very open psychedelics, I think, are the biggest anomaly. I know there's probably other ones, but for me, they're the biggest anomaly in our current paradigm because it really breaks down this idea of materialism.
00:31:31
Speaker
That's perfect that you said that I love it because I was going to sort of go into that the difference between materialism and what psychedelics teach you. And I think fundamentally, a lot of people come out of it thinking that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe as opposed to space time.
00:31:50
Speaker
And that's been a big thing for me. And, you know, this goes back to the concept of Holons, you know, this this fractal connection is interconnectedness of all things, you know, not even just within the earth, but I mean, as you said, cosmically, you know, not huge, you know, when I first got into
00:32:09
Speaker
college was a neuroscience major, semester and then physics and math for three years, then a mushroom experience and to leave physics and study mysticism. And I was like, that's not a major, you know, that's not even a profession, but a major in philosophy. Then the masters and then the doctors in consciousness, cosmology and philosophy. And during most of that time, I felt like I would be spending a lot of my life trying to compare this idea of materialism and you can say panpsychism or sometimes idealism that consciousness is fundamental, runs through everything.
00:32:35
Speaker
And then a few years ago, that whole part of my being, that thought was going to be a big part of my career in life, after 20 years, kind of relaxed. And I'm like, you know what? Just create the space for people to have their own experiences, because that's what actually did it for me. You know, I could sit here and be a professor all fucking day and break down logically and rationally and all through the history and break down in every step why consciousness is fundamental. And it'll be fun, you know. But for me, it was that actual firsthand intimate experience that changed me.
Consciousness as Fundamental Reality
00:33:04
Speaker
And so the best way my life could be lived is to create the correct kind of space and then create context for people, help them make sense of their experiences. I think plants and fungi can actually teach us a lot deeper than the way any other humans can. And it's just been a moment where people were talking about like, general science reduces everything to just matter. And there's other ideas like panpsychism that matter and consciousness has always been co-evolving, that they're intimately interwoven as a part of each other.
00:33:32
Speaker
Yeah, and I'm glad you bring that up because, you know, it does seem like there's this, this dichotomy, you know, these two sides, we always do that in this country and in this world, one side is consciousness, one side is physicalism. But I mean, the most important part is, like you said, being able to, to create this space for someone to have an experience that allows them to transcend both of those things to transcend the duality and to merge with the unity of all.
00:33:59
Speaker
Totally. I mean, for me, over and over again, it's been the most healing thing, a whole healing experience. And I've seen it with everybody I've ever worked with, anxiety, depression, alcohol dependency. It really doesn't matter, you know, it's really because all that comes from a fractured sense of self.
00:34:14
Speaker
You know, depression is I don't like myself. I don't belong. I'm not enough. I'm rejected internally and externally. Anxiety also comes in this feeling of I'm all alone. And so I have to fend for myself and take care of everything by myself. Right. And I'm sharing this because those two are the majority of the reasons people come into psychedelics.
00:34:30
Speaker
And then a lot of people already, the research shows the antidote to addiction is connection. It comes from early attachment wounds, early child abuse of not having the right kind of a connection, you know? So if our heart's really filled and we connect with another human or a tribe or the universe or God, a lot of those impulses kind of just naturally wash away.
00:34:49
Speaker
And so it seems this sense of unity, which is almost a sense of wholeness, they're almost the same thing, heals these fractures. Even when we give people these psychedelics and repressed trauma comes up to be worked with, that's fractured parts of ourselves that are coming up to be integrated so we feel more unified with ourselves.
00:35:09
Speaker
So how do you go about approaching integration when you have these experiences where say something repressed comes up, or something is truly healed within you from an experience of psychedelics? You know, I mean, the honest response, it's different every single situation, depending on what came up and who I'm working with, you got to just attune on
00:35:32
Speaker
And to give the audience an example of the kind of things that come up like, you know, seven times I've seen people come in for a psilocybin experience and early repressed sexual abuse comes up that had no idea about it.
00:35:47
Speaker
And I'm sharing this because early sexual abuse seems to be kind of the most intense traumas I've seen. It affects your sense of self, your confidence, your own sexual energy, how you can intimately connect and trust with other people, your sense of self value. And if it happened from somebody like a family member early on, it's like it affects your entire family dynamic. And so as a child, it's so much easier and sometimes better to repress it because the child doesn't know how to live within that system anymore.
00:36:10
Speaker
So then it comes out when they're 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 years old. So then you have a major thing that you're integrating for a while because a lot of these people have been in therapy for years or they've been moved in addiction for a long time and all of a sudden everything makes sense for them. There's this missing piece that they couldn't get to. So generally psychedelics can move a lot deeper than talk therapy, talk therapy being just a part of the normal conscious mind.
00:36:35
Speaker
And it can get really to the deep somatic level, to use a somatic training, where we hold really all the trauma and all the feelings, and so it gets worked out of the body. So it really brings these things out of the body into the unconscious. So whether I'm working with trauma, then it's constantly being there with them, giving the safe to process things. There's probably a lot of shame with a lot of the traumas, the things that happen. So somebody's safe that they could talk to and connect with overs. Just that itself is really deeply healing.
00:37:02
Speaker
you know, if I'm working with somebody to accomplish their goals, not because they came for something like a kind of trauma, then it's kind of helped them get in alignment with their sense of values and their goals and help them kind of more like coaching, like what's your routine? How do I get to life optimal? Or do they have a mystical experience? I mean, that
00:37:19
Speaker
you know, ontological changes everything, their sense of self, the world, who they are, what they're doing with their life. And they might not have the context, you know, they might have came from a traditional religious background, or they might have been atheists, like I was before mushrooms, and then you're just helping them put all the pieces together, or even pointing them to other pieces of work, you know, for me, I got a lot of context for reading, you know, so so it's really, really meeting each experience as it comes up and adapting to what the needs are of that person.
00:37:49
Speaker
Yeah, as you were, I was also absolute atheist before mushrooms. And I mean, the first experience within the first, you know, 20 seconds of the peak that was gone evaporated out of my system. And that has been the most powerful type of experience that psychedelics had given me. So in your opinion, how important is that mystical experience for personal growth?
Transformative Mystical Experiences
00:38:13
Speaker
Yeah. So from my personal opinion, you know, I've
00:38:16
Speaker
I've journeyed hundreds of times. And by far, the most important had been that first breakthrough. And by far, the most important have been encounters with divinity at large, with the divine and God in its infinite kind of forms. And so it's the paramount. So I've had so many healing experiences, a lot of inspiring, a lot of energized, a lot of fun, like, oh, the whole kind of range. But those have been by far the ones that my mind keeps being pulled back to almost every day after years.
00:38:46
Speaker
If you wouldn't mind sharing, I'd love to hear what was your personal experience, like that moment where you're singing within 20 seconds, everything changed and washed away. What happened for you?
00:38:56
Speaker
It was beautiful. I was just, I was sitting there and I was watching a TV set. So we were like on, we had YouTube up, me and a friend of mine, the friend who I discovered this stuff with. And it was just like this trippy video where it was like this weird circular visual with interesting music, very ambient type music, not necessarily with percussion or instruments. It was just like an ambient sound type of thing.
00:39:24
Speaker
And as I looked into the center of this circle, I felt this insane interconnection to everything and everyone around me. And then I felt like a communication, like you were saying earlier, some sort of a communication with a higher being. It was a higher level of consciousness. That's what I can really articulate it as.
00:39:51
Speaker
It, it told me like it boxed up science for me in this little box. And it showed me like, this is this like your, your science. It's nothing. It means nothing. It's really good for you guys on this planet. And it's great in terms of like navigating the world as a biological entity with the senses that you have. But for you to be basing all of your values and thoughts and the way that you treat people on this little box of science.
00:40:20
Speaker
You got to get rid of that. You have to. So I open up the box and just threw everything out. And within the emptiness of that box, it allowed me to like inhabit just the, the immensity of spirit. And it was the most beautiful experience I've ever had in my whole life. And I've had experiences that were similar to that, but more intense as well, where I got to actually like ask questions and travel to like.
00:40:45
Speaker
places I would never have imagined, but yeah, that's in a nutshell how the experience went. That's beautiful, man. Thanks for that. I can really feel it even in my body. Some to sliver what that impact might have been for you. That's amazing. What comes to just personalities, what the studies have found in the last 20 years using psilocybin is it increases the personality trait known as openness. Openness is correlated with creativity, with intelligence, with adaptability.
00:41:14
Speaker
And so if you think of, in comparison, openness and a system or psyche that's closed and rigid and rigid ones like, you know, I've got it all figured out, I got to stay safe, everything stays the same, you know, it doesn't necessarily like new ideas, it thinks it gots it.
00:41:28
Speaker
And that rigidity, that egoic structure, it thinks it gots it, has to kind of dissolve. And this other one, as you said, you've got everything out of the box. There's just space, spaciousness. And there's this openness to everything and everybody. And both to new ideas, it's more adaptable. But it's also more of that Buddhist notions of beginner's mind, where everything's fresh again and excited to learn. And there's a humbleness of I know and I don't know at the same time. No, I dig it very much.
00:41:57
Speaker
Yeah. And there's this like sense of wonder that seems to have been lost, you know, that I remember feeling as a little child and God, that's such a beautiful feeling when you remember that you can have that sense of wonder again for the universe and the world. No, I love it.
00:42:13
Speaker
You know, I maybe resonated, you know, my life has been abnormal in the sense that, you know, I've journeyed a lot because my focus has been to explore consciousness. And so I'm not saying that when I share my experiences, I want everybody to go do this. But there is a day where I journeyed for five days straight, just like in a meditation position, focus on this one question of why does the universe exist? You know, there's there's ideas that has to do with love and all that. But I just really wanted to fucking know.
00:42:39
Speaker
And after these five days, I saw the entire visual representation of Earth from like the Big Bang till now and all these forms changing, you know, abyss molecules, the Earth, birthing of flowers, animals, the whole thing. And I got it that the universe wants to be seen. It wants to experience beauty. It wants our awe and astonishment, you know.
00:42:58
Speaker
Imagine if you go to like a beautiful dance and somebody's dancing for you and it wants, they want to be seen and you want to see it. And so the universe is like this beautiful work of art that keeps evolving and novelty forever. It's more complexity. So it keeps wowing us, you know, and wowing us through the beauty and the art of its form, but also through the knowledge and the interests. You know, every time we learn something new and you're like, wow, that's fucking awesome. The universe, like, I think, like feels that.
00:43:23
Speaker
We're one and the same, the seer and the upping scene, but it's just like this never-ending art project that wants to get known from every dimension.
00:43:33
Speaker
Yeah, it feels like the universe wants to see itself through us in any possible way it can through art, through reading, through information. It's, it's just amazing. And when you have that experience, it just, it changes everything. It definitely changed everything for me. And I know that through your book, your initial experience changed everything for you.
Live Music and Emotional Connection
00:43:54
Speaker
Would you mind telling the story of that?
00:43:56
Speaker
Sure, absolutely. So I was 18 years old. I had graduated high school about two months before I was on the way to see my favorite band, Tool, play for the first time. So I was really excited. And on the way to the show, a friend I was driving was like, hey, can we pick somebody else up? Somebody I'd never met. I was like, sure, we'll pick him up. And he gives me a handful of mushrooms. I don't know how much. And I was like, OK, this is going to be a really good day, maybe the best day of the year. It turned out to be the most important day of my whole life.
00:44:24
Speaker
And so just a background context, before this day, I had spent about seven months just walking. It's kind of this existential, kind of depressive state of, what's the point of my life? And who are we as humans? What am I going to do with? What's the point of all this? And what am I going to do here? If I want to live, I was kind of suicidal for a while. If I'm going to live, I want to figure out what the fuck is this game? What's going on? So there's been a lot of contemplation kind of leading up to this. But this day was just going to be about fun.
00:44:50
Speaker
And so when the mushroom started to kick in and kind of having more of the, you know, traditional ego death experience, but I didn't really know what that was at the time where there's just all this fear that arose that I'm like, I'm about to die. So this is very fucking scary and it's very fucking intense. And I felt like this process was pulling me forward. But if I let it happen, you know, not only would I be extinguished, I was sitting there thinking like, well, what my parents feel, I think, now that I'm dead.
00:45:16
Speaker
What would my sister think? I'm abandoning them. They're going to get hurt. So all the consequences of me dying were really on the line. But after about 15 minutes, I was just too curious. I was just like, I'm just going to let this go and see what happens. And so I passed this threshold or this membrane. And it felt like the metaphor that came at the time was like Neo being unplugged from the matrix.
00:45:37
Speaker
And all of a sudden it was just my consciousness expanded to take up the whole auditorium I could feel every fiber of my body and it was like orgasm and rejoicing of in love and I felt eternal and As if like a part of me always knew this There's a sensation in the body of being eternal that I had always lived that I existed before the Big Bang You know will exist way forever kind of also breaking the boundaries of science. So I
00:46:05
Speaker
And not only was this like the most contentment I ever felt, you know, then the voice arose and said, Jahan, and there's this re-cognition of this is God. And I said, is this real? And I was a hardcore atheist. Is this real? And it said, yes. And it's sort of bawling. It felt like something I never even knew I wanted was happening.
00:46:26
Speaker
you know, that I was been like, as if I was a child left at daycare by a father, but I'd been there so long, I didn't think my dad existed anymore. And all of a sudden, dad's coming home, you know, so I was definitely like in this little kid mode, like the inner child I experienced is what really connects to the divine, that little innocent part that we're really born with and is filled with wonder.
00:46:44
Speaker
And it said, what do you want? And I'm like, what the fuck? What do I want? Nobody's really asked me that. And I don't really know. I felt like also like kind of like doing like rubbing the, the bottle of a genius. Like, what do you want? What, why did you rub the lamp? What's, what's going on here? Um,
00:47:00
Speaker
And I asked, what are we? Us as humans. And I saw light come out of the ground and fill every body. And it showed me that we are love and light. They're the same things. And these are space-time ships, these vessels, these biological suits that we walk around. And that we're far more deeper than this. And this love's the most important thing, followed by learning. And the whole experience was about 90 minutes. And that's what the whole concert, just gushing rivers of tears.
00:47:29
Speaker
Then I went up to the top of the auditorium and looked down. I was like, there was a sense I'm like, my life radically changed. And after that was this awakening of years to synchronicity, because, you know, there's a lot of implications to a large consciousness and everything where the experience was it's, it's, it's like witnessing through everybody's eyes and hearing through everybody's ears and connecting all matter. So with that came this way that everything telepathically unconsciously is aware of the other.
00:47:56
Speaker
So there's flows of like thousands, hundreds of thousands of synchronicities over the next few years of like really moving through life kind of like as a detective and filled with meaning and it was more
00:48:07
Speaker
surreal and unreal than the world I had lived in before. And it really corresponds with the kind of shamanic view of animism. You know, that was most of human history, this paradigm that the environment is actually alive and talking to you. That's where most of human history for hundreds of thousands or more years, that was a main human view that still exists in traditional religions. You know, that you have a deep relationship with everything and it's always talking because of that sense of that oneness is real.
00:48:35
Speaker
So there isn't a part of me, my sense of self and my sense of my experience that wasn't changed by that one, one night, 90 minutes, really. Yeah. That's beautiful. Thank you for sharing. I appreciate that. Thanks for asking. Were you in the pit when you had this experience? Where were you? Yeah, I know. It's strange. I mean, I was in the pit and me being 18. So there's naive. I was naive in many ways where
00:49:02
Speaker
I'd be looking up and having this deep connection, God, and it's so profound. But then Maynard, my favorite singer, and band was playing in front of me, and I'm like, oh, I've been wanting to see them forever, so that I'd pop out to see the show, then pop back up and pop out, and I didn't know which one to pay attention to.
00:49:17
Speaker
Well, I'm like, well, I connected with God right now. Maybe I could just do this whenever you want, because like the sense when in that state is like you can come back to the kingdom of heaven whenever you want. You know, I didn't really know how rare that was going to be to that level of depth. And so then I'd pop out to see the show and then pop back up. And so I kept moving back and forth.
00:49:35
Speaker
Um, I did spend about 90% of the time connecting with God, but looking back, I've seen two like seven or eight times, you know, it's just like, it's so silly. If I had worked, this happened in my fifties or sixties, I would have been like zero zoned in. I'm like, Oh my God, I know the importance of this moment. You know, at 18, I had no real context around this.
00:49:53
Speaker
It isn't something people talked about, so I'd move out of this mystical state just to see the concert, then move back. So I was, and I just stared up gushing, which was, I feel kind of awkward for the people around me. I'm just looking at the ceiling, being filled with tears while they're kind of more in the bit moshy kind of movement, kind of his own, following the music.
00:50:13
Speaker
That's amazing. And speaking of synchronicity, I heard you say, I don't know if it was another podcast, I've been listening to a bunch of your stuff as a late just to prepare. And I heard that you actually got to meet Maynard. So I mean, talk about synchronicity. That's amazing.
00:50:28
Speaker
totally I mean when I walked out of that dinner I just sat there kind of shaking and also glowing just another deep affirmation that God exists and you know that word can be loaded for so many people it was for me for so long but this sense of deep synchronicity and intelligence and meaning and for those that know Maynard don't know the lead singer of Tool lead singer of two other bands also he's
00:50:52
Speaker
Pretty hard guy to get in contact with. I think he's 65 mil, but he's also kind of a hermit and doesn't like to be around people. So he also grows wine in Jerome. And so he does wine tours sometimes. And I've done two of them before. You wait four hours in line just for him to sign your bottle and you move forward. You get really loud conversations and he doesn't really talk or meet with the fans.
00:51:16
Speaker
And so this was a rare experience. Read so many of his interviews. He doesn't even like to really do interviews. A friend that worked at this restaurant is a vegan restaurant. And I became vegan because of mushrooms. This is a side note. So it's kind of cool to have a vegan restaurant. A friend worked at, she's like, Maynard's going to come in because they were doing a special wine pairing with a certain foods. This is not a large public event. It's not like the tool fans really know about this.
00:51:39
Speaker
If you want to go, call as soon as you get out of class. So I got out of the class. I got on the call. And I was like, I'd like to. It's like a $100 event at the time. $100 was a lot for me. But I was just like, wow. It's a five-course meal, all mushroom themed. They have mushroom expert to go over all the food and the kind of mushrooms that are, no, it's unreal. It was unreal. So paired with his wine. So when I make the call, they're like, sure, do you want us to see you next to him? And definitely I was like, what? This is unreal. I know, right?
00:52:08
Speaker
I was like, please. So next month I get there, I get there early. And the only other person there is Maynard, you know, because everybody's still setting up the tables. I'm like, fuck, this is what do I do? You know, and I've like tools tats on me. And I know he doesn't really like to interact with fans. So truly kind of trying to play it down. And so they had me just across from him, like two to three feet away, like directly across on this kind of line long table.
00:52:31
Speaker
And then I go to sit down. He's like, hey, would you mind just moving one seat over? My manager's going to be here. My son's right here. Then the mushroom expert right here, then him, and then me right here. And so I was like, yeah, absolutely. And I waited halfway through this three-hour meal to say, to really talk to him, because I could see there's some other people that were fans that were there, and he would push them all away. He's like, I'm not Santa Claus. I'm not here to sign your stuff. I only want to talk about food and wine. I don't want to talk about tulle. I think he just gets harassed quite a bit.
00:53:02
Speaker
And so I talked to everybody around me and kind of created a nice kind of safety connection to everybody for an hour and a half. And then halfway through the dinner, he reaches his hand across the table and he's like, hi, I'm Maynard, it's really good to meet you.
00:53:13
Speaker
You know, and we kind of just really longed in and synced. And then I had to keep drinking his wine because that's why we're there. I wouldn't have wanted to drink so much, but had to drink like five glasses of wine. So about two hours in, I broke down and I was like, dude, you've changed my life. I took mushrooms at your show. It changed the trajectory of everything. And, you know, I'm like shaking, but I'm getting to tell this person that really was kind of a hero for me and inspired me in many ways. It got me into psychedelics and into kind of mysticism at a young age, the profound effect he had.
00:53:43
Speaker
And it felt so deeply healing and nourishing for it to be received. And then I got to connect with him as a human for the next hour. He would just look at me and just tell jokes. And it felt like really, as I kind of shared a deep affirmation of the path I've been on. That's so amazing. Thank you for sharing that. I appreciate that.
00:54:06
Speaker
Thanks for asking. Yeah. Yeah. I, um, I was with like the same type of way with, uh, with Lincoln park. I saw that a bunch of times, maybe 10, 12 times. Uh, my older brother would actually take me with him. He's seen them like 28 times or something like that. He got to meet Chester, which is fantastic. Um, and that was one of the things, uh, it was right before Chester, uh, committed suicide. Uh, we were contemplating buying tickets to go to Virginia and a man I would have.
00:54:36
Speaker
I would have loved to meet him. But yeah, I definitely feel how amazing that must have been for you. Yeah, I'm starting to get the chance and it's really sad to hear about Chester. I've seen him twice. Incredible performance. I think they really struck a note with a lot of people really moving to the darkness and the depression.
00:54:57
Speaker
Giving an expression and people feeling less alone but like rejuvenated through it. So Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, it's one of the beautiful things about music and about seeing them live That's why I asked if you were in the pit because we would always wait in line for you know 10 hours to get to the very front of the
00:55:16
Speaker
And that was always like my very favorite experience was to see like one of my favorite bands in the pit. And I wasn't into psychedelics at the time. I was younger. But man, I would have loved to take in some mushrooms and seen them. It would have been great.
00:55:32
Speaker
That's awesome. So I would say concerts were like my first real church. I've been to well over a thousand, probably just raw concerts. Got quite a few lined up coming up because that's where not only did I have this experience there, but it was like it's always been this cathartic sense of connection and deep end of unity with the whole crowd and we're all singing and we're really into it. And maybe for the first five years, I'd be in the pit a lot and start pits.
00:55:57
Speaker
And then quite a few different instances of getting really, really hurt because I would swim in them so often. So now you kind of find me on the edges of the pits. You know, it's like I want to enjoy the show, even though, you know, I used to love getting, well, that kind of level of aggression. I just get out of the gym now. But when I was 15, it was very cathartic to be in that space.
00:56:17
Speaker
Yeah. There's nothing quite like the energy you feel when you're in the pit and like the band is in control, it feels like, you know, and they're, especially the very first time I had ever seen them. Like I looked up at them and it was weird. They, they looked really small to me. Like they looked short and they looked like they were like gods. It's just, I don't know. I miss it. I haven't seen a, uh, like a good band in a while. I have to get on. No, please, please do. I mean, it's, it's, uh,
00:56:46
Speaker
I've made it a bit of a priority for a long time because it does kind of bring my soul alive. It gives you, it kind of fills me up and I'm like, this is why I'm working so much. It's like, this is my kind of play, you know, having that kind of art, the feeling of the sound, you know, and I'm even thinking of like the title given to a lot of sometimes of rappers, like the MCs, the masters of ceremonies, you know, they are playing this large kind of ceremonial role.
00:57:10
Speaker
that, you know, I mean, music and I think live music is one of the probably the earliest parts of humanity that was so communal, you know, and I think can really, really, really connect and rejuvenate us. For me, it's deep, deep, deep medicine. Absolutely. Yeah, I'm right there with you. You're speaking my language. Have you ever had, like,
00:57:33
Speaker
overwhelming crippling fear with your psychedelic experiences. And as a follow up, has that affected the way that you approached psychedelics at a certain stage in your life?
00:57:47
Speaker
I've had a lot of those experiences, a lot of very, very painful. I've had the hardest moments of my life on psychedelics, and I've had the best moments of my life on psychedelics. And just to be more transparent, over this last year, I've done 10 Santo Daimi, so ayahuasca ceremonies.
Navigating Fear in Psychedelic Trips
00:58:06
Speaker
And I think every single one, and I just did one this last weekend, every single one was
00:58:13
Speaker
pretty much entering the state of hard level crippling fear and pain for like most of the time the first eight like for like six or seven hours straight. Right. And so I have already had so much trust build up with these medicines as plants and fun guys that I see it as healing and I'm willing to go into it, you know, but I'm sometimes like these experiences, I'm willing to step into the worst feelings imaginable, the worst somatic experiences. And it's really, really hellish.
00:58:41
Speaker
Um, but the aftermath, it feels very purifying that I feel more whole, more powerful, more integrated, more stable. It's like, I'm decompressing and digesting and breaking down fear during those times. And so fear is less present for me, you know, through the rest of my life, like the next month I'm feeling more solid and stronger and capable and clear because I went into that work. You know? So, so yes.
00:59:06
Speaker
Even working with clients, I'm like, it's all on the table. I'm here to be with you while you ride in the worst agony or in the greatest ecstasy.
00:59:13
Speaker
And I do see there's a relationship between it. The more we're willing to go into the pain and the fear, the more we're kind of expanded building, like our cup expands to hold more like the exaltation and largeness. Even if you love something so deeply, you're scared of losing it and you could feel and pathetically feel its pain, whether it's a love or a child, or if you love the whole planet so deeply, you're in fear to some degree and hurt when other people are hurting or the planet is hurting. So I think as you keep kind of expanding, you feel more, which is also more pain, but more love.
00:59:45
Speaker
And I don't necessarily think we need to give into fear. It can be crippling. But for me, fear really kind of distorts our perception because it's really based on the sense that we are fragmented. And so I could feel it, and I've just come to a place of don't cognitively buy into it. It's like there's a storm passing. The storm's not going to pass forever. It's just weather. It'll just move.
01:00:10
Speaker
So has fear ever prevented you from going into a psychedelic experience that you had previously planned? So many times, so many times. Given how it's a huge part of my life, you know, serious journeys, I don't do them way too often, a few times a year, because
01:00:33
Speaker
I mean, I could just share like a lot, you know, 10, I was concerned with this last year's mushrooms, deep journeys, three or four, you know, something like that. And they're so profound, but there's like a membrane of fear I have to step through. That's quite asking a lot.
01:00:48
Speaker
I know even Terrence McKenna would share every time he does a serious journey, he has to have a serious talk with himself first. You're putting everything possibly on the line, whether we call it ego, sense of self, we're evolved instinctually to both avoid fearful experiences and painful experiences.
01:01:09
Speaker
Right. And in these cases, you're stepping in through a threshold where you have to embrace that both of those may come up, you know, are likely to within that several hour period. So plenty of times, you know, there's been, you know, there's always can't hit the mark every time there's maybe five to seven times I've had like maybe that more full ego death experience. But there's been about five times where I'm right at the edge and I pull back out of here.
01:01:34
Speaker
You know, and you're like, fuck, I could die right now and then open up to everything. And looking back when that happens, it's changed the game for me. And then there's been times where I'm like, ah, this is way too much. I'm too scared. I'm not ready. Whatever thing the mind makes up and you pull back. And then later you're like, fuck, like there's this door open and I was scared. So it's a tumbling. I've never been able to hit the mark every time. And I don't think anybody can. It's a lot to ask for anybody.
01:02:02
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. It's something that I'm battling with right now. I'm trying to build my courage back to where it was a little while ago when I used to do psychedelics more often, but it seems the more you do them and the more powerful the experiences are, as Terrence McKenna says, the less often you have to go in there.
01:02:22
Speaker
Totally. No, definitely. I, you know, earlier in life, a lot of experimentation and no one appeared a few years ago while writing the dissertation, also really into it.
01:02:33
Speaker
But I do, you know, people ask about something like, how often do you need a journey? How often is good? And I'm like, well, when you feel called, you know, I've had seasons in my life where it's fairly regular where both I had the time, the resources and the deep interest and there was a pool. And there's other times where like everything in my life is exactly where it needs to be. You know, what lesson is there to learn? I'm living the lesson right now. There's no reason to be journeying.
01:02:54
Speaker
You know, so, so there's times where I feel there's a lot of buildup and like maybe some armor has to break through, or I need an insight on a very particular experience. Um, I used to go in a lot for, you know, think more intellectual, philosophical ideas when I was younger and right now I feel really satisfied. You know, so there's less pools to, to, to, to go in more, more often now it's actually socially connecting, like having deeply meaningful experiences with other people.
01:03:25
Speaker
Yeah, definitely, definitely. Um, so we are just about over an hour here and I do want to be respectful of your time. Um, but there is one more question that I wanted to ask you.
The Nature of Knowledge Debate
01:03:34
Speaker
Um, it's a little unrelated, but related. Um, and it's this, uh, this idea that Terrence McKenna had that was, um, nobody has the faintest idea of what's going on. Do you, do you agree with that or do you subscribe more to like, everybody has a piece of the puzzle?
01:03:53
Speaker
I think it's nice to hold both. And I think it's possible to hold both. I think there's truth to both. And so just to break it down for people, I think it's good to hold parallel this really deep stance of I don't know. So that's the humbleness, the openness, everything. I think it's really graceful and really important to keep evolving and growing.
01:04:14
Speaker
And then also the stance of it's okay to have confidence, and it's okay to stand on certain knowledge. Like, if you're doing math, you know, like, 2 plus 2 equals 4, it's not helpful to sit there and keep doubting that, you know? And I'm saying this because I did math for a long time. Sometimes you work through pages and do math, and you come to a solution, and you keep going over and over, and it's nice to have the confidence.
01:04:37
Speaker
You know, and so if you spend a lot of time learning and making connections, it's nice to have confidence. It's like you're, but I hold it like you're playing a game. Like you can get really into a sports game. You're playing basketball. You can get really into it, but it's just a game. But when you're into it, you go all in, you know, and maybe it's Alan Watts uses the metaphor of like somebody's playing poker before like pennies or quarters. You can get really fucking into it, but you're just playing for quarters, but you're like, fuck, you're gonna, you're gonna act like it's life or death. Right. So I think it's fun to play in a very passionate way.
01:05:03
Speaker
Um, but I've learned a lot from Terrence and many other people where it's some things I think I really agree for him. And he says it in so many ways. Um, I have a little frame of him back here and he says, um, avoid gurus follow plants.
01:05:19
Speaker
So don't necessarily hear, right? So nature's so much bigger and intelligent than our human minds and how far we've evolved. So the idea of putting somebody up as a large teacher, a master, a guru, a priest, is kind of a human construct and nonsense, right? And he says, trying to get enlightened by another person is like one piece of sand, trying to get enlightened by another piece of sand when the whole ocean's right there in front of you, right? And so in this sense, it's like,
01:05:48
Speaker
I wouldn't give valuable sexual, like that intellectual authority to somebody and I don't necessarily want it from them either. I'm like, I love what Terrence did because he was so intelligent and humble and he's like, here's the pathway. We've done it now with science, here's a scientific method. Here's what we've done over and over and gotten these results, including with psychedelics. So in this sense, it's both and we're philosophically, I think we hold some pieces of the possible and that's where,
01:06:15
Speaker
Something like Ken Wilbur, he really has this line where nobody's so smart that they could be 100% wrong. Everybody has a piece of the puzzle. Everybody has a part of sliver of the perspective. And I think it's nice to grant that to people. Not to just say, hey, we're all idiots and we don't know anything that's happening. It's like holding like we know some stuff and the ground of being is so much more fluid.
01:06:41
Speaker
So it's just like we're creating constructs, but the actual ground that it's on is like imagination. Like the whole universe has created it out of imagination. If you look at a matter, it's fucking empty. We're seeing all these forms. It's like a giant dream. So then dreams shift form. They're variable. They adapt. They grow. It's constantly fluid. So even like Krishna Marty's line, truth is a pathless land.
01:07:06
Speaker
You know, so it's just like the land keeps changing or like the Dow, the Dow that can be said isn't the real Dow. It's like it exists, but it's so fluid and never evolving. You know, so it's both and for me. Yeah. It all comes back to love and learning in the end. That's it. That's why we're here. That's who we are, you know?
01:07:27
Speaker
Johan, you are the man. Thank you so much for an amazing conversation. I really, really appreciate you. Do you have any upcoming projects, anything you want to share, places people can find you?
01:07:38
Speaker
At first, yeah, it was really honor to be here with you and have this conversation. I appreciate it. Uh, website is psychedelic evolution.org. Um, I'll be doing some upcoming retreats. I'll post them on there. Um, there's the other podcasts on there, then books out on all platforms, um, including an audio book on audible. So yeah, they could find it on any website, Amazon, Barnes and Noble. Fantastic. Thank you again for your time, Johanna. I appreciate you.
01:08:08
Speaker
Thank you, brother. It's been an honor.
01:09:16
Speaker
you