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80. Katherine MacLean PhD - Mapping The Psychedelic Mind
27 Plays18 days ago
We’re joined once again by the brilliant Katherine MacLean. Katherine is a renowned psychedelic researcher with a PhD in psychology from the University of California and a postdoctoral fellowship in pharmacology from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where she worked closely with the legendary Dr. Roland Griffiths on groundbreaking psilocybin studies.
She’s also the author of Midnight Water: A Psychedelic Memoir—a powerful exploration of transformation through altered states, which you can find linked in the description. Katherine’s work bridges the worlds of meditation and psychedelics, blending clinical insight with personal experience, and emphasizing deep psychological and social change.
If you missed our first conversation with her back in Episode 35, we highly recommend checking it out.
In this episode, we cover a lot of ground—psychedelics, UFOs, the nature of time, and much more.
https://www.katherinemaclean.org/
Get Midnight Water: A Psychedelic Memoir https://myvermontbookstore.com/book/9798986532479
https://www.instagram.com/katherine.maclean.phd/
Listen to Midnight Water: Dialogues In The Labyrinth https://open.spotify.com/show/74EEyImjfX3ueHMi1DMWcq
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Transcript
Introduction to Podcast and Guest
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Pursuit of Infinity, a podcast where we journey into the landscapes of consciousness and beyond, diving deep into the realm of psychedelics, metaphysics, and more.
00:00:11
Speaker
This is episode 80, where we're joined once again by the brilliant Catherine McLean. Catherine is a renowned psychedelic researcher with a PhD in psychology from the University of California and a postdoctoral fellowship in pharmacology from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
00:00:28
Speaker
where she worked very closely with the legendary Dr. Roland Griffiths on groundbreaking psilocybin studies.
Meditation, Psychedelics, and Time
00:00:35
Speaker
She's also the author of Midnight Water, ah psychedelic memoir, which is a powerful exploration of transformation through altered states, which you can find linked in the description below.
00:00:47
Speaker
Catherine's work bridges the worlds of meditation and psychedelics, blending clinical insight with personal experience and emphasizing deep psychological and social change.
00:00:58
Speaker
If you missed our first conversation with her back in episode 35, we highly recommend checking it out. In this episode, we cover a whole lot of ground, psychedelics, UFOs, the nature of time, and much, much more.
00:01:13
Speaker
But before we get to it, as always, you can visit our website, pursuitofinfinity.com, where you can listen to the podcast through our integrated media player. If you prefer that over one of the podcast networks, Spotify, Apple, Audible, we are on all of them.
00:01:28
Speaker
You can also find all the places you can follow us on pursuitofinfinity.com, and you can reach out to us using our email form or our audio feature, which allows you to record a little audio snippet to send to us.
00:01:41
Speaker
Give us a follow on Instagram at Pursuit of Infinity Pod and head over to our YouTube channel at youtube.com slash at Pursuit of Infinity, where we post all of our episodes and shorts.
00:01:53
Speaker
If you love the show and you want to show us some support, please consider giving us a like, sub, and a five-star rating wherever you listen or watch and leave us a comment or review as these things really help us to conquer the algorithms and spread our conversations far and wide.
00:02:09
Speaker
If you really love the show and you want to show us some extra support, please visit our Patreon at patreon.com slash pursuit of infinity to become a patron. but We appreciate each and every one of you. Thank you so much for listening and I hope you enjoy today's episode.
Perception of Time and Life Events
00:02:39
Speaker
Hey everyone, welcome to Pursuit of Infinity. I'm your host Josh and today I'm rejoined by returning guest Catherine McLean. Catherine, thank you so much for joining me today. Oh, it's great to be back. It feels like time is going very slowly and also every time there's a new year, i it feels like yesterday. So maybe this is what all the old people talk about when time starts to get really funky as you get older.
00:03:05
Speaker
I totally agree. When I think of time, it's often like, depending on what I'm thinking about, it's either it feels like yesterday or it feels like far longer ago than what it was. Like when I think about my childhood, depending on what it is I'm thinking about, it's like, man, that was like just yesterday. But then if I'm thinking about last year, it feels like it was forever ago.
00:03:27
Speaker
Right. Well, it feels like certainly since um since I finally published my book, that was like a demarcation of how time was moving and how time is very different since that point.
00:03:40
Speaker
So like that transition was a very different orientation of time. And now everything before that feels very, very long ago. And everything since that point is like working in a different frequency. It's like at the same time very slow day to day, but like each year seems to just like flip ae Yeah, you know, it it makes me think about like, just time in general and how we think of it as being on a linear chronological timeline.
00:04:12
Speaker
And as we're going to get into, you know, when you've been to, you know, these otherworldly realms through psychedelics or meditation or whatever it may be, you realize that time isn't structured that way. It's almost as if I like to use the analogy of like, if you put your hand on a hot stove for five seconds, it feels like five hours. You know what I mean? It's almost as if time is and is based off of personal and individual experience as opposed to like a mathematical measurement.
00:04:42
Speaker
Yeah. Well, and it's also, I mean, one of the things that I've gotten really interested in and is how time changes depending on well, age for one thing, but also like how close you are to either birth or death.
00:04:57
Speaker
And it's like time really slows down around the two end points of life, like the beginning and the end, and things go really internal. And I think that that's where the psychedelics maybe help us remember that space of birth and death, right? Because it's like psychedelic time, birth and death time feel very similar to me.
00:05:18
Speaker
And so I keep thinking about like, how does time go when someone is getting close to the end of life? It's like very different than folks who are kind of in the middle.
Personal Experiences and Scientific Work
00:05:28
Speaker
Yeah, that's a very interesting observation because we can definitely think back to when we were children, at least earliest memories.
00:05:34
Speaker
And it does feel like time is much slower, dramatically slower. And, you know, just from experiencing like people on their deathbed, I've well often wondered the same thing. Like, what are you experiencing in terms of time? Like, how are your because we think of our days now, you know, I think I wake up, I go to work.
00:05:55
Speaker
I have certain you know external stimuli that kind of dictate what I'm feeling. Time sort of takes the trajectory of the day based on how I'm feeling, and what I'm doing. But when you're dying, as Ram Dass said, like you're busy dying. So what is it like to evaluate time when you're busy dying?
00:06:18
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah.
00:06:21
Speaker
Big questions. But before we get too deep into the into the weirdness of life, um I would like to give the audience just a quick bio ah so they have sort of some context to understand where you're coming from if they haven't listened to the first episode we did.
00:06:35
Speaker
um But the bio I have here is Catherine McLean, PhD, is a scientist and educator known for her groundbreaking research on psychedelics and mindfulness meditation. She conducted studies on psilocybin at Johns Hopkins, exploring its effects on emotional well-being and personality.
00:06:51
Speaker
Her memoir, Midnight Water, blends her scientific insights with personal experiences of grief, healing, and transformation. So why don't we just start by filling in any of the gaps there that you think are ah very important for people to understand about you, what you are, what you do, and you know what you've done.
00:07:09
Speaker
Well, I think the most important thing for folks to know, and i used to kind of back into this answer, but I'll just say it right up front, is that when I arrived at Hopkins, I was primarily driven by self-experimentation. I really wanted to understand how the science of consciousness applied to life.
00:07:31
Speaker
was like kind of a very practical, but also personal orientation. When i had the opportunity to study long-term meditators, I went on a meditation retreat for the first time.
00:07:42
Speaker
Like I needed to know what it was I was studying from a personal perspective. Same at Hopkins. By the time I got to Hopkins, I had already tried a lot of the drugs that we were proposing to study in the grants that we were writing, in the studies that had already been approved.
00:07:59
Speaker
Now I think people are getting into psychedelics and mindfulness who maybe don't have as much of a personal motivation. And i think there's benefits to both perspectives, right? We need some clinicians who don't meditate, have never been on a retreat, have never taken a high dose of mushrooms to be more objective about what they're observing. Maybe they will see things that I have a blind spot for.
00:08:23
Speaker
And at the same time, I think we need the psychonaut scientists, the psychonaut clinicians who've gone to these places who, when someone is in a space that a clinician traditionally doesn't understand, it's like the psychonaut can be like, hey, I've been to that territory or I've i've been and been to that location before. you know like let me kind of give you an understanding of where you are right now.
00:08:47
Speaker
And i kind of, so i was very much on the psychonaut side. And studying mindfulness and psilocybin and some other psychedelics was like my way of almost like validating my own experience back to
Understanding Consciousness
00:09:03
Speaker
me.
00:09:03
Speaker
And it felt that there was this like kind of um increasingly powerful loop that got created that the more I studied the thing, the more my consciousness changed, which then fueled the thing I was studying.
00:09:20
Speaker
And when I eventually left Hopkins, I mean, I tell people it's because my sister died of breast cancer, but that was really just kind of like the last straw in a series of very intense and weird experiences I had with my own consciousness that I couldn't understand.
00:09:38
Speaker
So it's like at some point when you think that, you have a good sense of like what you signed up for. You're like, all right, let's play. Let's do this game. I get paid to do cool research. I'm getting to meet really cool people, go with them on this journey, write some grants, you know work with some really amazing scientists.
00:09:59
Speaker
And then suddenly, I realized that this whole game was being kind of played on me. that there was something beyond what I could observe that itself was observing the whole process and interacting with the process.
00:10:14
Speaker
And so ever since I left Hopkins, I've been trying to understand what that is. Like, what is this thing that we're participating in that is self-aware and is also relational, but then there's something outside of the human experience that itself is, I think, impacting.
00:10:36
Speaker
human experience. Some people call it nature, some people call it God. i mean, hell, it could be some other form of intelligence that is just having a ah great old time watching us flounder on earth as human beings.
00:10:49
Speaker
I mean, there's so many theories, but um I think that's the most important thing for folks to know is that once I realized the experiment had shifted, that I was no longer the person doing the science, then I was like, all right, I got figure out what what's happening. And I kind of followed this very different trajectory for the last, now what is it?
00:11:12
Speaker
Over 10 years since I left Hopkins. Yeah, and you know you bring up, I think, the most important point, which is like there is this, at least to me, there is this thing that interacts with human consciousness in some sort of a way, whether it, like you said, be God or nature or the soul, that for some reason we've lost complete touch with until we actively take steps to re-engage with it.
00:11:39
Speaker
um And I think so you you mentioned the the study of or the science of consciousness and how it sort of interacts with life and the way that we're living.
00:11:51
Speaker
Back when you began your research, I feel like this wasn't really a thing scientists were interested in, but it seems like nowadays they are. Is that a correct evaluation, you think? Yeah, so there were people who were starting to study um consciousness directly. And there was one conference that I went to in 2012, the Tucson Consciousness Conference. and Robin Carhart Harris, a famous psilocybin researcher now, he and I were kind of both starting to come up through the ranks.
00:12:21
Speaker
And we both got an opportunity to speak at this conference. And weirdly, as soon as I entered the realm of people studying consciousness directly, that's when I had my own personal major break with like how reality had been.
00:12:37
Speaker
and then reality became something different after that. So even being in the presence of people interrogating consciousness changed me irrevocably. And like it's just wild to me that Is it because I was studying openness and like the the forces that be were like, man, this one's totally primed. Let's just see what happens when these interactions happened. Or is it chance?
00:13:01
Speaker
Is it truly chaos? And I just was one of the lucky ones that, you know, it's like you hit a pin up, um, you know pinball machine and the pinball, like you know mostly it just goes down the drain and you go again. But like am i one of the ones who got stuck in that really cool spot that you got like tons of points all at once and then got kicked out?
Chaos vs. Intelligent Design
00:13:23
Speaker
like That reminds me of, there's a conversation between Ram Dass and Terrence McKenna where they're talking about this type of thing.
00:13:31
Speaker
And they're discussing ah like the chips falling where they may. So is are the chips falling where they may ah sort of by design type of a thing? like Is that the way things are supposed to be, sort of behind the scenes? Or is it chaos? And I think that's a pretty deep question as well.
00:13:50
Speaker
ah Yeah, it's funny. I actually decided, so this um this dress that I'm wearing was actually designed by ah my brother's system that's based on Stephen Wolfram's New Kind of Science, which itself is based on It's based in chaos, but it also is bat based on like continually changing relationships.
00:14:10
Speaker
So like every time one thing changes, everything around that point shifts. And so even though there's no design to begin with, you end up with something that looks intelligent, that looks like it was designed by something intelligent because of all these relationships.
00:14:28
Speaker
And my brother and I have gotten really into like taking an idea or a message or an intention in consciousness, feeding it into his code, this machine, and then like asking, you know, what is the art that gets created out of that? and the funniest thing is you can predict things.
00:14:49
Speaker
something about the rules going in. But like once you have the pattern, you can't predict back out. You can't like look at the pattern and say, oh, I know what the person put into this system. um So yeah, I've gotten kind of into that question myself. I think my brother kind of falls on the side of more chaos theory. And I've just had so many experiences where it's super clear that there's some very intelligent thing with agency that is beyond my understanding.
00:15:20
Speaker
that I'm like, I still, I'm still kind of on the side of some kind of intelligent design. I don't know who or what or what kind of design, but there definitely seems to be less chaos and more of kind of intention in the universe I've been inhabiting.
00:15:37
Speaker
I completely agree. And even when I observe chaos in general, it almost feels like the observation of chaos comes from the perception that my mind or my ego gives it.
00:15:50
Speaker
But when you look at chaos from a broader perspective, like if you think about you know supernovas and stars exploding, i mean that's pretty much the most chaotic thing you could ever think of. But It all happens within like this grand tapestry of the creation of planets, the creation of solar systems and galaxies. So it all seems to have at least a function.
00:16:12
Speaker
Right. Well, and certainly, mean, I keep thinking about the idea of relationship. And the first life form, i mean, it's almost like when life emerged, relationship also emerged. Because like before life, there was physical relationship, but there wasn't like intentionality. There wasn't like, I'm trying to get to something for certain reasons. And then that brings me into relationship with other forms of life in the world.
00:16:40
Speaker
So it's like we shifted from some kind of physical rule to ah more intention-based rule when life emerged. And, you know, obviously a lot of people know this now, but I just want to say it again, because when I heard it, it really hit me that you can't get intelligent life in the universe unless you have a planet that can stay stable for three to four billion years.
00:17:03
Speaker
And the fact that that even happened is like a miracle. And yes, it could have happened many times over. But like, if you really think about the causes and conditions that resulted in human life,
00:17:17
Speaker
it's really unlikely, like highly unlikely that there would be this blip of human intelligence in the midst of like chaos and and like basically an abyss.
UFOs and Consciousness
00:17:27
Speaker
And if that happened again a few other times, like that should be the only thing we care about is trying to make contact with those other forms of intelligent life.
00:17:37
Speaker
It's incredible. um Have you been keeping up with any of this UFO, UAP stuff going on in the and the government with Congress and all these hearings and everything? a little bit. it's So what I actually did is I listened to an audio book by... um ah Her name is, think, Diana Pasulka, but she goes i there's a there's a different name that she goes by when she writes. and she said something, and it's so it's pretty highly researched. She interviewed a lot of people who were involved in um
00:18:08
Speaker
either cover-ups or UFO research or extrasensory perception research. And there was a chapter toward the end of the book, and it's not really a spoiler alert. I don't even know if this is an original idea, but I had never heard of it.
00:18:22
Speaker
She said that if there is ah non-human intelligence, like beyond Earth, or even maybe here on Earth, but invisible to us, it would try to contact us through the the memes and the ideas and the the images that we're expecting. So it would show up as a UFO.
00:18:42
Speaker
It would show up as a gray alien. It would like... It's actually a psychedelic communication. It's like linking up with your consciousness to show you something that you are going to say like, oh, I've seen that in a movie and pay attention.
00:18:58
Speaker
And actually has nothing to do with a UFO or a spaceship or a gray alien. It's like they're just trying to get contact. And that once the contact is made, people who've had contact report all sorts of crazy changes in consciousness.
00:19:13
Speaker
No one cares about that. They just care about the spaceship. But if you talk to these people, they're like, no, everything in my life changed after that. And it wasn't about contact with aliens. It was about my own consciousness changing.
00:19:27
Speaker
And that sounds a whole lot more like psychedelics to me than, you know, interstellar travel. So I've had a couple UFO experiences. And when she framed it that way, and I don't even think it's her original idea. I forget the person that she was kind of referencing.
00:19:45
Speaker
um I suddenly was like, oh, like the experiences I've had in psychedelics that feel like I'm communicating with something beyond Earth. the experiences where I think I've seen something in the sky that looks like a UFO, like all those things are the same.
00:20:01
Speaker
It's just like tapping into some other form of communication that if we if we experience the whole thing all at once, it would like, we would just become like jello. Like we couldn't process it all in one experience. So instead it like gets kind of, they pick one person who's a little bit open and then like titrate it over a lifetime.
00:20:24
Speaker
I love this idea so much. And yes, Diana Pasolka, she is fantastic. She's one of the best researchers. remember author name? It's like, ah does she go by like D.W. Pasolka or something? I just want to get it right for people who, if they look her up.
00:20:38
Speaker
I believe it is D.W. Pasolka. I think her middle name is probably something with a W, not 100% sure. um She was recently on the Joe Rogan podcast. Like she's doing a whole bunch of stuff. She's actually getting her name out there, which is fantastic. She's one of my favorite researchers within this subject, but Yeah, that's a very like Jungian idea. It's almost as if it's like a it's a co-creation or like a manifestation of our own consciousness or our own um like connection to myth and symbols, where it's almost as if we're creating the imagery of the way that the thing is presenting itself, whatever it might be.
00:21:11
Speaker
Right. So like two things come to mind as you're saying that one is when I so to continue to tie this back to Hopkins, when I was at Hopkins, there were some psychonauts there who refused to take higher doses of certain drugs because they didn't trust that they would make it back to their body.
00:21:29
Speaker
They had like deep faith that they were actually going somewhere. that was not on earth and that going needed to, it's like the conditions needed to be right to make it back into your body.
00:21:42
Speaker
And I remember having this debate with Roland Griffiths and Matt Johnson about like their faith in our procedure And they were like, well, of course, they're going to get back to their body. And I'm like, I don't know.
00:21:56
Speaker
And like, what if get back to your body means that they're like, I don't know, like they can't function anymore or like a part of them has been lost to this process. Like maybe they're right.
00:22:07
Speaker
And like, yes, they will almost 100% walk out the door alive after any dose of these very safe compounds physiologically. But I don't know what's going to happen to their consciousness.
00:22:18
Speaker
And like, I have to trust that they're saying, this may not be a return journey. So that's kind of like the one thing that always stuck with me that the psychonauts themselves were the ones who really knew the limits of that process, and that we were learning from them.
00:22:35
Speaker
And then um The second thing is there was one other idea in the book that kind of also i really liked, which is that the UFOs that we experience might actually be versions of ourselves.
00:22:48
Speaker
in the future, making sure that we remember certain things and like, don't go down this path, but go down this path. And that's again, where time gets really funky.
Time, Consciousness, and Materialism
00:23:00
Speaker
Cause it's like, well, like how is my dead sister communicating with me, but from like a future vantage point, like how is she existing in some future space that sees more than I can see, but yet she died, you know, 11, 12 years ago.
00:23:15
Speaker
Or like, how did my daughter, when she was born, one of her first memories was of my sister who she never met? Like, where did they meet? And was that through me? Like, is my consciousness emanating these like holograms out into the universe, like a hologram of my sister in the future? like Like my daughter picking up on something in my brain that made her think of my sister and then she creates a memory.
00:23:40
Speaker
I don't know. it's like some people never have these weird experiences. They don't have to worry about it. I have them all the time. so it's like i kind of have to spend some time trying to sort it out.
00:23:52
Speaker
Yeah, these things are hard to think about if you if you're trying to put them into the box of like the physicalist, materialist paradigm, which is what we always try to do because we don't really have much else to go on in terms of like our tools of measurement.
00:24:05
Speaker
But that's where the psychedelics come in because they can really show you that these things, they're they're real. like What you're discussing, what you're what you just laid out there with your daughter and your sister and what Diana Pasalka talks about, like there is a there there. To me, that this stuff is real.
00:24:21
Speaker
Yep. um can i to ah Can I share this cute little anecdote where, um so Roland Griffiths was my mentor. He died about a year ago. He was a huge figure in the field for anyone who knows psilocybin research. He kind of brought it back to life after a long period of coma.
00:24:40
Speaker
And yeah. Even though he had experienced his own psychedelic trips and meditation and had seen everything I had seen at Hopkins times, you know, 10, because he'd been there longer than I had.
00:24:55
Speaker
At the end of his life, he said he still was not expecting anything. He was like, it's going to be nothing. i was like, no way, I can't. like And we had this whole discussion about a year before he died.
00:25:07
Speaker
And I made him promise. I was like, listen, if there's something and not nothing, you have to come back in a way. like Give me some sign that's unmistakably Roland so that I know that you've made it somewhere, some some version of you.
00:25:23
Speaker
So anyway, um this summer is coming up on a year since his death. um I had COVID for the second time in a year, which is just like, i I hate this virus. Some people have only gotten to experience it like once or twice. I keep getting it. Like, it's also weirdly connected with mushrooms for me. So I've just kind of surrendered to like whatever this virus force is and whatever mushrooms are, they're doing some dance.
00:25:49
Speaker
I'm caught in the middle of it. So I'm just like, just help me understand what's happening. So I have COVID and I'm driving to Rhode Island. Why, you might ask? Well, I had already booked an Airbnb for vacation and I couldn't cancel it. So I'm like trying to get to Rhode Island on COVID with my daughter in the car.
00:26:09
Speaker
Not really in the best state, like mentally. And suddenly this car zips in front of me and it's the exact same car that Roland used to drive at Hopkins, but only some of the time. So he had a Lotus sports car, which I've never seen anywhere else other than parked across from our research lab.
00:26:29
Speaker
And Roland gave me a ride in it like once. And it was like the coolest thing ever, but it was like a toy sports car. Like no one has a sports car like this. I think like a hundred are made a year.
00:26:41
Speaker
And it was the same color as my car that came to me in a dream from my dead father. This like bright blue, which is also this like little Ganesh that I have.
00:26:54
Speaker
So like suddenly in that moment, I was like, oh shit, hi Roland. Like it's the Lotus car, it's bright blue. It's like he picked the perfect symbol that I could not mistake as anything other than him.
00:27:09
Speaker
And then, you know, I kept driving and it was just like, yeah, of course that was Roland. And then like later I was trying to tell someone this story and they're like, yeah, kind of just a coincidence. I was like, I don't know.
00:27:20
Speaker
Like if you're not open, then yeah, you might just blow it off and be like, oh, that's cute. That made me think of Roland. But I can't, I can't like put my finger on why for me, it's like I knew in that moment, there he is.
Synchronicities and Meaning
00:27:34
Speaker
Like something happened, not nothing. Well, when you've experienced these types of synchronicities in the past, or you spw experience them all the time, then you can be open enough to understand them. And, you know, you wrote about that, that ride he gave you in the book. So like when you said Lotus, I was like, oh, no shit.
00:27:52
Speaker
Yeah, i'm I'm with you. I totally understand. No, and I think, I mean, you can go overboard, right? Like you could be like every car I see, every license plate means something.
00:28:03
Speaker
It's really not like that. Like this was one experience in over a year since he's died. I haven't had any other experiences where like a hawk flies by and I'm like, that's Roland or like a butterfly or like,
00:28:16
Speaker
But these times when people have these connections, it's usually so specific. And the way that people talk about it, they're not you could tell they're not making it up. They're not trying to like fabricate a cool story about their dead relative. it's like It's almost like shocking. like How could this dead person's consciousness interact with reality so specifically that it would be unmistakable?
00:28:41
Speaker
And like, if we get that when we die, like, is that but how fun it is? Like, is that like the moment where you become this like grand artist? you're like, oh, I can't wait to send like that person this one thing.
00:28:53
Speaker
And maybe there's like failures, like you're trying to send them a sign, they just don't get it. And when you try to describe some to to somebody that, like it's impossible to convey the most important part of it, which is the feeling that it gave you. Because all they're hearing is just the words that you're using to describe the situation, but they can't and and understand the feeling. And that's, I think, the most important part of it because you feel that presence. Yeah.
00:29:18
Speaker
Well, okay. And so this also ties back to both Pasolka's book and the psychedelic experience, right? Because if you just talk about UFOs or extrasensory experiences or high-dose psychedelics, or you read about it, you're like, oh, that's kind of a cool phenomenon.
00:29:37
Speaker
Like, I'm hearing these words, I'm hearing these stories, but like I'm safely maintaining my materialist reality. Right. until you're the person experiencing it, it's very easy to stay objective.
00:29:49
Speaker
But like once you've occupied that base it's, you can't just deny other people's stories, you know, near death experiences. Suddenly it's like this whole realm of experience opens up and it's very hard to say, well, like this experience I had is valid, but this weird thing you're describing is not valid.
00:30:10
Speaker
And so I think that's the part where I i just, I continue to think that having psychonauts as part of the research and as part of the development is crucial because, know,
00:30:21
Speaker
You know, there are a lot of doctors walking around thinking they understand, i don't know what nine out of 10 pain is, and they don't. Or what psychosis is, and many of them don't, you know, there's so many ways in which we devalidate or, on you know, unvalidate someone's experience because we haven't had it.
00:30:40
Speaker
And the best thing about psychedelics is like, you can just have
Shamanic and Clinical Approaches to Psychedelics
00:30:44
Speaker
the experience. It's like, here you go, here's the pill, here's the mushroom, whatever it is, like, you don't have to like wait for a near death experience. and Yeah, you know it does seem for some reason that the two viewpoints are, I mean, they don't need to be mutually exclusive, but they seem to be in a lot of these circles. so like The the ah shamanism aspect of it, which I think goes along with the psychonaut and the exploration sort of intention, and then like the clinical healing intentions of it.
00:31:11
Speaker
I don't know how you bring those two together without... you know, stepping on potential cultural appropriation and things like that. But I do think that there needs to be, like you said, need there needs to be a psychonaut in the room or a shaman in the room.
00:31:26
Speaker
Right. It's interesting. So I didn't know this, but I just read that Colorado's whole psychedelic program that they're finally rolling out next month, like, or two months from now, 2025, they actually have two paths for facilitators. One is a clinical path where you're already a doctor or a psychologist or a therapist, and you're just adding on like a extra certification.
00:31:50
Speaker
And then there's this other path for people who've already been facilitating psychedelic experiences to prove to the state that they have the same training as the clinicians got. And I was like, you know what, that's actually really cool because it's not it's not saying the clinical is better than the shaman or the shaman is better than the clinic you know approach, but they're acknowledging that people have experience that has nothing to do with therapy, has nothing to do with medicine.
00:32:18
Speaker
It's a totally different skillset. um So that was like a kind of little check of like, all right, that makes me feel well positive that like someone's moving in the right direction. you know But then here in our state of Vermont, they convened a working group of mostly mainstream medical folks, a few who are more open minded than typical, but mostly mainstream folks.
00:32:41
Speaker
And lo and behold, they decided Vermonters aren't ready for legal psychedelics. And was like, well, maybe you're not the ones who get to decide whether we're ready. And I don't know if you've been paying any attention.
00:32:53
Speaker
to like Vermont in the last 50 years, but everyone here has already been experimenting with psychedelics or knows someone who has. So it's like, it's just hilarious for the system to say like, you're not ready. And meanwhile, these people have been doing it for lifetimes.
00:33:09
Speaker
And that's even in white culture. Forget about indigenous culture. It's just such a slap in the face. I feel like for this like little group of people to say like, we don't, we've decided you're not ready. It's like, based on what?
00:33:23
Speaker
And these are the same people that are going to support it wholeheartedly when there becomes like a massive, you know, ah money incentive, a monetary incentive for them to commodify these substances, which...
00:33:36
Speaker
I don't know, I am just back and forth on that because I think, and I was thinking about this the other day, i think that one of the main, because like I've, I mean, obviously I've talked about on this podcast and with conversations with friends and things on like the problems with commodification of psychedelics, but I think one of the real benefits of the commodification, at least and maybe in my hopeful mind, is the aspect of abuse.
00:34:04
Speaker
Because when the market decides who the customers go to, the market seems like it would naturally sort of sift out the people who are um you know committing abuse, which I think is a big, big problem in this space.
00:34:22
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, we can hope. And I think it does happen in other fields. So like, I kind of keep my, like a little pinky on the pulse of some of this stuff, like gymnastics doctors.
00:34:33
Speaker
There was just recently this urologist in New York who had been abusing boys and men through his practice for like, you know, his whole, his whole career. And it's like you see, or like that guy who was like an anesthesiologist and then using the drugs he could get as an anesthesiologist to rape women. So it's like, it's not a psychedelic problem. It's a, it's like a people in positions of authority who have access to drugs, deciding to use that to assault people. Right. So it's like,
00:35:02
Speaker
I would love to just kind of take a bigger view of that and be like, all right, what percentage in different fields of people is this happening? You know, how many people in anesthesiology or in dentistry or in obstetrics, like how many, and is it a, is it a worse problem in psychedelic therapy or is it actually kind of the similar, you know, problem across medicine?
00:35:26
Speaker
and So that's only in the clinical realm. And, you know, eventually people get caught, but not without, you know, a body count, not without like a lot of victims. It takes so long and so much evidence to bring someone to justice.
00:35:41
Speaker
And would hope the psychedelic community can do a better job of it. You know, it's just like clearly mainstream medicine is only catching the worst of the worst after decades of abusing people.
Cultural Shifts and Abuse
00:35:53
Speaker
And, you know, we're starting to kind of bring that up to the surface. So maybe we're getting better at it as a whole, but I still think we have a ways to go. I still think it's like abuse in general of children and vulnerable populations is like the final secret, the final taboo, the final thing that like,
00:36:15
Speaker
You know, Trump's choice for district attorney has a ton of evidence of having paid girls underage to have sex with him and like party with him and do drugs with him.
00:36:29
Speaker
And we're having a debate about whether this should be public knowledge. And it's like, wow, America, we really need to look at our own shadow around this. Like, why are we still debating whether this person should have power over other people's lives?
00:36:44
Speaker
And so, you know, it's like there are so many examples of that, that where the ethics are just so egregious, and yet will kind of like defend the person until it's proven undeniably that they harmed people.
00:36:59
Speaker
Yeah, not to mention the Epstein situation, the p Diddy situation that's happening right now. it just For me, it seems like it permeates our culture. like Is this type of thing a problem in the Amazon? Is this thing a problem in quote-unquote underdeveloped civilizations throughout the world? it it just seems to me like this is like a ah Western problem, and we have to get to the bottom of what's causing us to to act in this way. I just...
00:37:28
Speaker
Yeah. Well, you know, I've obviously thought about this a lot. I've worked with a lot of people who've been survivors of ah abuse as adults, like from psychedelic therapists, but then almost, I would say over 90% of those people were also abused as children.
00:37:45
Speaker
And so there is this kind of victimization of certain types of people that starts in childhood and then continues through adulthood.
00:37:56
Speaker
And it's very, um you can't fall into the trap of being like, well, that person brings about some reaction that warrants abuse. It's like, no, the person is probably vulnerable for lots of different reasons and abusive people pick up on that. And then it results in you know, assault.
00:38:14
Speaker
Um, But I don't know. I also think that across human history, maybe one of the biggest advances in Western culture is the increasing age of consent.
00:38:27
Speaker
So if you look in, there's a woman who has basically nullified and made illegal child marriage in oh, what country in Africa?
00:38:39
Speaker
Where it was like super common that like nine-year-olds were getting married to like 40-year-old men. And so she just kind of came in and she's like, nope, we're not doing that anymore. And she went across the board and was just like, this marriage is not is not a real marriage. And she just went boom, boom, boom, boom. boom And so if you increase the age of consent and you make illegal child marriage, I think that that starts to shift the biological drive that the culture says is like, okay.
00:39:10
Speaker
I mean, we could go really deep into this and ask like, why is that biological drive even there? But I think culturally, we are kind of moving in a different direction than hundreds of thousands of years of human history.
00:39:25
Speaker
Now, the real question is maybe in America, where we have long had a practice of the age of consent being at least, you know, 15, 16 years old, in some states it's 18, why is it still a problem?
00:39:40
Speaker
You know, it's like I could understand different cultures that are trying to catch up because they've allowed child marriage for so long. They're just kind of starting to get to shift that. um
00:39:52
Speaker
But yeah, I... Beyond the age of consent and like child marriage, I can't, it's like there's a part of my brain that doesn't want to like understand too much more about the roots of like why that drive is there. um And I still wish that someone with like more objectivity could understand from a scientific perspective why it is that some people want to want to take advantage of children.
00:40:20
Speaker
um If they could crack that case, I think they were there would be a huge amount of healing for a lot of people, including perpetrators. I mean, it's it's not like, obviously, if um if people like P. Diddy and Jeffrey Epstein and Matt Goetz or whatever, if they were proud of what they did and they didn't think it was a crime, they wouldn't be trying to hide it.
00:40:41
Speaker
So it's like they also know it's a crime. They know that what they did is really unforgivable.
Iboga and Healing
00:40:46
Speaker
And so that's got to be a level of suffering that I would want to get rid of if I could, if I could just wave a magic wand.
00:40:55
Speaker
Yeah, there there there could be an aspect of addiction as well that comes into play because addiction can manifest in many different forms. So I almost think of it as, you know, like the mind of an addict where, you know, they're doing the thing that they're going to do and they're going to continue to do it because they're not addressing the internal issues that are causing them to do it.
00:41:15
Speaker
But at the same time, they're going to do everything they can to hide it from everyone around them. Yeah, it's interesting. I remember talking to, there was a woman who um is a steward of Iboga. and she told me that in her, in the Iboga tradition that she was um initiated into, because there are different ones, that that pattern of abuse is like a it's like a virus or like a sickness that kind of comes through different families, different relationships, but it's, it's something that actually can be healed, but we don't understand
00:41:59
Speaker
Like it's not a medical issue. It's not a psychological issue. It's like a deep and spiritual isn't even in the right word. But she said iboga can show people the roots of even something like that. And she called it like a sickness or a virus.
00:42:13
Speaker
But we have to be willing to understand the answer. And most people don't want to understand the answer. They want it to be like, there are bad people and good people and I'll avoid the bad people and punish them.
00:42:25
Speaker
But she said, and I haven't experienced iboga, so i I don't know, this is just what she said, that iboga will show you the real roots of why that behavior manifested. And that's why for a lot of people, it's um it's more than they can take. And it takes so long to integrate because it's not an easy answer.
00:42:44
Speaker
Yeah, iboga is a pretty crazy one. I haven't experienced it either, but I have heard some amazing stories of healing. um One really quickly was I heard of this guy who went down I think it was Mexico or something to do iboga, and he was a heroin addict addict, and he was real bad, and he went down went through his journey. And as he was in the middle of one of his journeys, he remembered that he had put, he had like stashed with him a needle with heroin in it, in his bag.
00:43:16
Speaker
So he went to the bag, he grabbed the needle mid experience and he shot up heroin. And what ensued was just an absolute spiral into the darkest, the deepest darkness he could ever have imagined.
00:43:32
Speaker
And it essentially like that experience in itself was the agent of healing for him to get off of the heroin. And the next day when the experience was done, or maybe it was the next two, cause it takes a while.
00:43:47
Speaker
yeah um He realized that he never packed a needle with him. That was a complete, like I don't want to say a fabrication, but just that was total visionary experience. He never actually physically did that. whoa That's so cool.
00:44:05
Speaker
Yeah. A couple years ago, I really wanted to go experience Iboga. um i you know I got the EKG. I was all ready to go. And then It's weird, actually. I started having experiences that I don't even think I can put into words, but it felt like Iboga was already showing me the answer that I was seeking.
Personal Psychedelic Experiences
00:44:28
Speaker
And I got a glimpse into like the true like grandness of the answer, but it was just kind of showing me like a tip of the iceberg. And from that g glimpse, I was like, you know...
00:44:41
Speaker
maybe right now when my book is about to come out and I've got two little kids and I've just moved back to the States and we're still kind of coming through this pandemic, maybe I don't need the full answer right now. And it felt so nice for a medicine to like give me that heads up.
00:44:57
Speaker
And when I told the woman that I was going to go take it with, she was like, yeah, that iboga does work that way. Like as soon as you ask for its help and you set that intention, you know, you may not even need to ingest it right right away that moment. But it's like, to me, it feels like Iboga has been, um I have another friend who takes very high doses of mushrooms, but he said when Iboga calls, he hangs up the phone.
00:45:19
Speaker
It's just like, I feel like Iboga and I keep having these long distance phone calls where I'm just like, I'll see you someday. Like you're like a distant relative. And it's just like, maybe when I'm like 80, but like for now, I just like, it gives me these quick little tidbits and I'm like, that's good enough for now. Like but maybe next lifetime.
00:45:39
Speaker
I have the same relationship with ayahuasca. It's the same thing for me because, you know, I'm studying under a shaman right now. Like, I know ayahuasca is so interesting to me. It's of deep interest, but I just, I haven't done it yet. And I just, I haven't pulled the trigger. And like you said, it's almost like it's giving me these little signs and we're having a little, little powwow, but haven't pulled the trigger yet, but eventually think it'll happen.
00:46:02
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I've only had one experience with ayahuasca. um It was very unusual because I wasn't in a group setting. um I was in the United States. I wasn't you know in a place where um there was the cultural kind of backdrop for the whole ceremony.
00:46:20
Speaker
um i was super depressed at the time. My sister's death had happened a year ah year before And um It felt like ayahuasca was like kind of pissed that I had showed up.
00:46:33
Speaker
But like once I had showed up, it was like, fine, let me like actually show you what's really going on here. So it's like the answer was really a hard answer, but it was enough to kind of shape maybe 10 years worth of other decisions I made after that.
00:46:50
Speaker
And then since then, I've never felt called to do it again, ever, like not even remotely. And so like my experience of ayahuasca was like, it was very, it was a very harsh teacher, but but it was almost like,
00:47:06
Speaker
Like, why have you been playing around with your life expecting things to work out for you? And like, I'm just gonna sit you down right now and show you like, this is bad for you. This is what's really happening here in your family. This is how you're avoiding this. This is what you do because you're in pain. And I was like, oh my God, like what a bummer.
00:47:26
Speaker
was like mushrooms are so much nicer, you know? Or it's like LSD is just like, let's have fun. And I was like, all right, here we go. Like another one of those showed up and I have to like, you know, slap her around a little bit and get her to like actually pay attention.
00:47:41
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. but Mushrooms can be that way too. Oh man. Sometimes like I go in and i'm like, oh, this is going to be a nice, fun, happy trip. Like last time. And then it's just like, oh, you think that's going to happen this time again? You're going to try to recreate that beautiful God experience. I'm just going to slap you down and show you what's going on. And oh man, it can get rough in there too.
00:48:00
Speaker
All of them can be rough. Yeah. Well, the way I have re-friended or re-befriended mushrooms recently is... um As I talk about in my book, there was a period of time where after my son was born, um so I had these three experiences, um two before my daughter was born, one before my son was born. And then after that, the mushrooms like kind of stopped working. And every time I would take some, I would just feel like nauseous and drunk and like spinning and just like weird visions, but it was just so um it was not cohesive at all.
00:48:37
Speaker
And um i felt like the mushrooms had kind of like given up on me. And they were like, come on, we showed you all this amazing stuff. And now we've moved on. Like we're, we're too busy, like trying to I don't know, get Compass Pathways to spend a hundred million dollars on legalizing us, whatever.
00:48:55
Speaker
And then a friend brought a small dose to me when I was living in Bermuda. And I got like nervous because I was like, oh, no, I can't believe she brought this through customs.
00:49:09
Speaker
But then i couldn't I didn't want to bring it back. So i was like, i have to take it here. And I assumed it wouldn't do anything. But it was amazing. And then I was like, the joke was that like the microdosing protocol that I had been kind of poo-pooing because I had always been trained in the macrodose Now the microdose is like my best friend.
00:49:27
Speaker
But not only that, it's not even a microdose. I can't find a microdose because I detect the psilocybin no matter how little there is. And so in a funny way, because of my relationship with the high dose mushroom experiences, now I can take just a tiny amount and get this like...
00:49:46
Speaker
as much out of it as I used to get out of this huge experience. And so it's almost like it feels like the mushrooms met me like way more than halfway. They're like, all right, lady, like you've got two little kids, you've got a busy life, you don't have eight hours now and like two weeks to integrate and like the whole
Microdosing and Integration
00:50:03
Speaker
shebang. So we're just gonna, you know, have these like little, like we'll come over for tea, you know, and hang out for a few hours and then you can go about your day.
00:50:13
Speaker
You know, I so relate to that relationship. I feel the same way because having done a lot of the high doses now, like I haven't done a high dose in years. It's been a really long time.
00:50:27
Speaker
I just do low lower doses now. And, you know, there were times where after the high doses, I would try to do what I would normally think is a low dose and just do something to have fun and have and and absolutely like horrific time.
00:50:40
Speaker
because all the mushroom wants to do is just bring me back to that place, but just on a lower dose. And I feel like that is persistent ah you know among even my lower dose experiences. it's It's almost like when you open that door, you don't have to push as hard to open it again. yeah Yeah, or the way that my friend who has done, um she's actually living in Jamaica now, but she trained under Kalindi, the like original high dose, you know, kind of like superhero. That was his whole mentality. Like, why are you guys playing around with these low doses? Like you're supposed to become like superhuman, like kind of get with the program.
00:51:16
Speaker
So with her training with those super high doses, she said that she has seen this before, that like the mushrooms, she's like, oh, you're like inoculated. Like they've colonized you.
00:51:28
Speaker
So now your body recognizes psilocybin and it's like it doesn't require such fuel to like get the whole thing going.
00:51:39
Speaker
And feel like this ties back to what we were talking about in the beginning, which is like this agency, right? Like, what is it in this chemical, in this mushroom that can adapt to human intention?
00:51:54
Speaker
Like, that goes against all of the science I've ever learned, like dose response curve, and like, you need more of something to get more of an effect. And if you take too little, you won't, you know, get any of the benefits.
00:52:06
Speaker
But in a weird way, it's like, And I don't know how common this is. So if I were still in science, I would want to be studying people like me or you or like other folks who say this happens.
00:52:19
Speaker
And is it a physiological sensitivity? um Rick Strassman, when I was telling him about it, he said it's like heavy in learning. It's like what fires together, wires together.
00:52:30
Speaker
So if your brain practices the space of psilocybin enough times that like the tiniest little bit of the chemical will trigger the whole brain network anyway, and you don't need the amount of fuel you used to need.
Intention in Psychedelic Use
00:52:44
Speaker
But again, that's just a theory. Like that would be actually really cool if it was true. People wouldn't need five grams. They would just need, you know, maybe one or two big sessions in a controlled setting.
00:52:56
Speaker
And then after that, never need a high dose and all of the risks that go along with it. Like that's a super sustainable model for our modern lives. Yeah, absolutely. And I think for the medical model, that seems perfect because you don't necessarily want to, like I know some people can claim to be miraculously healed in one or two experiences, but then if you're able to sort of supplement them every few every six months or so with a smaller dose to maintain the benefits of their large experience. I think that would be a you know a beautiful ah way to go about it. But it does seem that, and this is, I think, the most important part of any psychedelic experience is the intention.
00:53:39
Speaker
What's your intention? If your intention is to heal from trauma, that might be a really great way to do it. If your intention is to, as Kalindi would say, explore the realms of legend, then 50 grams might be the way to do it.
00:53:52
Speaker
Right. um I forget who it was that said this originally, but I kind of also very similar to how these aliens show up. So like, what if the mushroom similar to whatever this alien intelligence is needs to show up in a way that you think you need?
00:54:10
Speaker
So like originally for me, it showed up as five grams because five grams I knew from Terrence McKenna was like the hero's dose. Five grams was what we were giving people equivalent at Hopkins.
00:54:22
Speaker
So it's like when I had my five gram experience, even though it wasn't as intense as I thought it could be, it was enough to produce access to a very different space that I had never accessed before, right?
00:54:37
Speaker
And then maybe the mushroom is like, all right, like we got her hooked with that vision or version of us that she would recognize. And then we're going to give her a little break.
00:54:49
Speaker
she can think about it, contemplate it, live her life, integrate, and then will kind of show up in this different form that she's also kind of heard about but made fun of, like microdosing, that's funny, haha. And then they show up and they're like, look at us, we did it this way too.
00:55:03
Speaker
And so I get super interested in that too. It's like, You know, like, well, say in my book also that I think every version of another reality needs to first show up in a form that you can recognize.
Personal Fulfillment and Nature
00:55:20
Speaker
And for me, it was always in a particular, like, package. So mushrooms, five grams, like God as Ganesh, this Hindu God, right? That was like a lot more accessible and interesting and kind of cool compared to the God I grew up with.
00:55:37
Speaker
jesus i mean he's also pretty cool like if you didn't know about christianity and jesus showed up you'd be like this is a really cool god like how did i get this guy but for me that would have been like you know bland boring so instead i get ganesh but then the thing that showed up as ganesh like what is that
00:55:57
Speaker
who is that
00:56:01
Speaker
A great question. And you know, yeah you you bring up your book. And as we begin to sort of reach an hour here, i want to be respectful of your time. But I want to discuss. I know we can just go on and on. People are gonna be like, what is this conversation even about? i have no idea.
00:56:14
Speaker
Oh, they're going to love it. I promise. But your book, Midnight Water, a psychedelic memoir, um fantastic, by the way reads like a novel.
00:56:26
Speaker
So after reading that book, it it just it seems like your life has been a series of like unwelcome but valuable initiations into the underworld.
00:56:39
Speaker
um Would you characterize it as that? And also I love it. No, and I mean, it's, it's funny, because it's like, it's just now that I'm spending a lot more time alone.
00:56:51
Speaker
um I spend most of my days looking at trees, not humans. I see like right now, there's a bunch of turkeys out in the field, it's raining, but I'm not seeing other humans around me.
00:57:03
Speaker
It's like very much the world of non human intelligence. Yeah. And then I thought back and I was like, you know, when I was 10, my mom actually is the one who um pointed this out. Cause my, we're talking about like the social stuff girls go through in middle school and late elementary school and how it just really wears on some people's psyches. Like who am I friends with? Am I cool? Am I accepted?
00:57:27
Speaker
Boys go through it too. And she said, well, Kath, you just kind of avoided all of that. And I was like, well, how? And she goes, cause you were just always in the woods by yourself. It was like you and your one best friend. And I was like, oh my God, like I'm finally living my fantasy that I had when I was 10 years old to be like mostly in the woods in nature by myself, exploring these realms of consciousness.
00:57:51
Speaker
So it's, it almost feels like the story that I wrote in Midnight Water was like the end of like ah a life that except for a couple of years in middle school, I had really deviated from my purpose.
00:58:10
Speaker
And I had ah had great versions of purpose. you know I was a very successful academic. I was a very successful athlete. um I made it onto faculty at Johns Hopkins. um I was even really good at helping my sister die.
00:58:23
Speaker
But it's like all of those things weren't actually aligned with the thing that made my heart really full, which is just being in nature and playing and exploring that world without the need for it to be anything other than being what it was.
00:58:40
Speaker
And so it kind of feels like, yes, I had all of those unexpected but intentional experiences. that kind of like shook me out of like a rut that I was in that I didn't even know was a rut.
00:58:58
Speaker
It shook me just enough, each one, like the death of my sister, the even before that, the dissolution experience when I was meditating, where everything blew apart, the death of this young man in Nepal, eventually my dad's journey with cancer and his death.
00:59:14
Speaker
It's like, man, I needed a lot of jolts to get out of that rut. Um, and even now I find myself starting to like accidentally find my way back into that rut and like a jolt will happen and I'll be like, thank you universe. God, I'm so stubborn. Like, thank you for jumping me out of that rut again. Like, why do I keep wanting to fall back in there?
00:59:37
Speaker
So yeah, it's like yes, I love the underworld and also like, I think I'm trying to relate to it differently now where I don't need to like, it doesn't need to like shock me to get me to remember what I really care about.
00:59:55
Speaker
Yeah, i think one of the but really intense parts of all the events that happened in your book where all these ruts were taking place is a lot of them overlapped each other, happened at the same time.
01:00:09
Speaker
i mean, you didn't mention you know the the birth of your children as well, like going along. like It's just there there were a lot of successive things that happened to you that I understand put you in these ruts. It's a very common thing.
01:00:22
Speaker
I feel like I don't know if it's an American thing or if it's a westernized thing, but we just we seem to be like magnetically attracted to falling into these ruts. And it's it's nice to have some outlets and some things, especially if the universe is looking out for you, to break you out of those outlets.
01:00:38
Speaker
Well, so, okay, so I really wanna, I mean, Midnight Water, you know, speaks for itself. i In so many ways, I feel like it's perfect. It couldn't have been better. It couldn't have been different. I'm so proud of it.
01:00:49
Speaker
And it's, the reason it reads like a novel is because it's about a person who's no longer in existence, right? It's like, I get to be somebody else now. But interestingly, ah soon as I published my book, ah I was on the local school board.
01:01:04
Speaker
I live in a very rural part of Vermont. um There's a lot of economic hardship. It's pretty conservative. um But a lot of people are also very like libertarian. like called you know It's like, come to Vermont, do what you want. It's very like, live free or die, even though that's the New Hampshire motto.
01:01:22
Speaker
um And the principal asked me to teach math. And I was like, sure, I can teach math. I love math, right? And so I'm back in a high school environment for the first time in 20 years.
01:01:34
Speaker
And everything is different, right? the um the The cell phones, just the total lack of um interest or respect in like what elders and wise people, adults have to say.
01:01:49
Speaker
um it was like a big shock for me to realize that like not only can I not go back to my own past, But like the world that I left is not any better since I left it. It's gotten way worse.
01:02:03
Speaker
And so I really trudged through and I felt like that savior complex, like I'm gonna teach these kids math. I'm gonna get these kids to graduate. And there were triumphs for sure. But toward the end of the school year, something happened and I'll you know i'll protect people's privacy, but you know um like who I am as a psychedelic researcher came head to head with who a lot of the folks in this community are.
01:02:31
Speaker
And it it was this moment of conflict where I was like, I could keep pushing to keep myself inserted in this role, or I could take this as a big sign from the universe. It's like, hey, you're a little too much the way you are and what you stand for, for this culture that is in many ways, you know many decades in the past.
01:02:54
Speaker
And they'll catch up to you, but right now they can't see what you're bringing. They can't see the form of intelligence that you have. And it's fine. It's like they're allowed to be who they are and you can retreat back into that weird underworld, crazy place that you occupy that most people don't want to occupy.
01:03:14
Speaker
But you don't have to keep inserting yourself back into mainstream culture to try to fit in or to try to prove yourself. um Which is not to say that it was easy. It's like when it was happening, I was really upset.
01:03:27
Speaker
There was like still a part of me that thought, oh, I'm just taking a detour from regular life and I'll just pop back in when I'm ready. Like I'll just be an ordinary person again. It's like, no,
01:03:38
Speaker
It's like, this wasn't a detour. This wasn't like a rest stop and you're back on the highway. This is like a totally new path. And people have walked it before, but maybe not so many people who look like me were born into a culture that I was born into.
01:03:53
Speaker
And you now don't get back on the mainstream. You get to like forge your own path. And so hopefully, eventually, other people can walk that path. But like it's not going to be easy. like Sorry. you know you're You're in the wilderness now. And you're doing a great job, but like you can't go back.
01:04:11
Speaker
ah So ultimately, do you think that it's a positive thing just in general? like it's It's not a negative. it's It's more of you're going in the correct direction.
01:04:23
Speaker
I don't if there's a correct direction. I think for each person, given their tolerance for both risk and new experiences, finds their edge.
01:04:35
Speaker
Like what's the edge that that person can handle? And i just think I have a very high risk tolerance. I have a very high openness to new experiences. And because of my past experiences with death, it's like, man, even death is only like scary, like 2% of the time.
01:04:53
Speaker
It's not zero yet. So like, I'm just, I think i'm one of the people who gets to forge that other path. And there are plenty of people forging equally challenging paths that um like, you know, people in education,
01:05:09
Speaker
that's a really hard path. And it was ah humbling for me to have to admit that like I had done all this hard stuff. So I figured how hard could it be to be a math teacher?
01:05:19
Speaker
Hard, really, really hard. Cause it's not my purpose. It's not where what I'm here to do. Yeah, and you know kind of you reminded me of one of my favorite quotes from your book. It was pretty close to the beginning, I believe, and you were talking about your work at Hopkins, and it was, ah be careful when you're climbing the ladder of success because you might get to the top and realize it's leaning against the wrong wall.
01:05:43
Speaker
and And that hit me hard. I was like, damn, that is a great quote. Yeah, and you know who said that? So the woman who told me that was a woman named Julie, She was on the trip in Nepal with me that I, so just a little bit of backstory. I went on a retreat with Joan Halifax at her Zen center in New Mexico because for all of 2012, I was existing in this like kind of psychotic, psychedelic, spiritual space where reality was very different than consensus reality.
01:06:17
Speaker
and went to Upaya. met Joan. She like really helped me get my brain back in some very sane kind of clear, straight and narrow path. And then kind of like casually said, you should come to Nepal.
01:06:31
Speaker
And then my sister dies like a month later. And I reached out to her because she's the missed, you know, being with dying person. And she said, you can come to Nepal.
01:06:42
Speaker
But the real question is, are you going back to Hopkins? And like she she could tell that the trip to Nepal was like the jumping off point. And so when I got to Nepal, um it felt like a death. I had shaved my hair off.
01:06:56
Speaker
um I was carrying my sister's ashes. And I was like, i don't know if I'm coming back, even though my mom made me promise I would. But like it really felt like I was saying goodbye to everything I know i knew.
01:07:08
Speaker
And one of the first people I met there was this woman, Julie. And she was a palliative care doctor. And um she had made tenure at University of Virginia, I believe. And she thought it would be this like moment where she could say like, you know, it's very hard as a woman to make tenure in these old institutions.
01:07:26
Speaker
I think at Hopkins, the the ratio is like one to a thousand of women to men who've made tenure. And she said the moment she got tenure was like one of the emptiest moments of her of her life because she nothing that she thought she would get came with that designation.
01:07:44
Speaker
And she was the one who told me that quote. So fast forward a little bit. She was the person who fell into the river at the end of our trip, who my friend Tsiring and her friend too dove in to save her life.
01:07:59
Speaker
And you know it's like they traded places. But it's like all that got emblazoned on my brain because it's just like, this woman is telling me you can do everything right and still feel empty at the end.
Death, Rebirth, and Life Transitions
01:08:11
Speaker
And by the way, also, you might die tomorrow. And this young person might die instead of you. And so it's like it all just like, whoa, it hit me. Like, I better get off this fucking ladder.
01:08:25
Speaker
like I don't know. What else more do I need, right? Wow, what a teaching. Yeah, there's so many aspects of that that are just like so poignant. Yeah. And I, you know, I think for someone hearing this for the first time, they're just like, did all this stuff really happen? Yes.
01:08:41
Speaker
I can't explain why it was one after the other after the other of these like epic life lessons. Yeah. I mean, truly, like these the death of some, like watching people die one way and then another way and then another way. And it's like everywhere I turned, it's like there's no hiding from this. It's everywhere. Okay.
01:09:04
Speaker
And then it's like birth. Birth is one way, but it's also this other way. And pain is this way, but it's also this other way. so it felt like that 10 years was like this like compacted,
01:09:17
Speaker
like um tutorial in human life. They're like, all right, we're just going to like load her up with all of this stuff. And then once she gets to a place where she can just settle, then we'll get to see the impact of those lessons.
01:09:33
Speaker
Yeah, and it it seems like also it's a lesson in attachment as well because you're attached to death as one way and then it presents itself in another way. You're attached to birth as though as in one way and then it presents itself in a whole other way. like Man, incredible.
01:09:50
Speaker
Well, so I also have to share this other funny, it's not funny, but it's a synchronicity. And it's just so weird that this happened right now before we had this conversation.
01:10:02
Speaker
So in 2012, I had this experience where i was meditating, everything, the whole universe blew up, there was nothing left. And then I kind of got to be um reincarnated on earth and just see the amazingness of life.
01:10:19
Speaker
um Right after I had that experience, I went back to Hopkins and got pneumonia. And I got pneumonia probably because I was stressed, probably because I picked up some bacteria or virus, but also because I was doing this really intense energetic work with people on psilocybin.
01:10:37
Speaker
And so a lot of the recovery in 2012 was not just psychic. It wasn't just spiritual. It was also in my body. Well, i got pneumonia again at the end of writing Midnight Water.
01:10:49
Speaker
Again, out of nowhere. I went from finishing the book one week to like the next Tuesday I had pneumonia. I was in the ER. Again, healing, going slow.
01:11:00
Speaker
Well, I just got pneumonia again couple weeks ago on election day. And yes, it is kind of an ending for me, but it's also this ending for a lot of people, right? It's like, what is coming next?
01:11:15
Speaker
And so I just feel grateful that I've had these experiences of like death happens, everything gets annihilated, and yet you still you start over.
01:11:26
Speaker
And you start over with what you've got, and you make the best of it. And I also feel grateful that my body knows to make sure that I slow down at these moments and don't just keep like shoving forward with whatever prior ideas I have.
01:11:42
Speaker
And so I'm just like, I don't know why pneumonia and I are like, it's like COVID, it's like mushrooms. It's like pneumonia is another friend of mine that like comes about to demarcate these transitions and like everything to go slowly.
01:11:58
Speaker
So I just, you know, now that I'm out of it I don't feel like I'm going to die, I think it's funny.
01:12:05
Speaker
Yeah, you know, as we become, ah you know, we start to come to a close here, I kind of feel called to share a little synchronicity of my own. um So when I was reading your book, as I was finishing it, um so after work, generally, I would grab the book, read it uh until my fiance comes home from work and then you know i would stop and we'd hang out and do our thing as we always do ah but the one night i was reading it she came in and i just decided to keep to keep reading and she sat down and ah was nearing the end of the book and you know she just pulled out her phone just to unwind and she's just kind of scrolling through instagram looking at reels and you know normally
01:12:47
Speaker
she's got the sound kind of off or like really low, but this time the sound is pretty high. And I get to the point in the book and like, even thinking about it, it's kind of crazy to me. I get to the point in book in the book where you start to describe how you listened to the song Crossroads by ah Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, which I've always loved Bone Thugs-N-Harmony ever since I was a little kid.
01:13:09
Speaker
And right as I'm reading the words, On her phone, she starts blaring, see you at the crossroads. And I was like, what the hell? Like, no way.
01:13:20
Speaker
Like, of all the Bone Thug songs, too, and that one comes on the second I'm reading that sentence. It was it was just it was wild to me. And I'm sure to her, she was just like in Instagram mode. So it's like the synchronicity was maybe interesting because you experienced it, but she didn't. So it's like moving on. but Yeah, I stopped. I closed the book and i was like, do you know what just happened here? And I mean, obviously, like being with me and like understanding, you know, we've taken journeys together and all that. um You know, she she understood it. But yeah, to me, it was it was just wild.
01:13:53
Speaker
Whoa. That's so cool. I'm so glad you had that experience. I mean, I've definitely had people reading my book have some form of like a psychedelic or synchronous experience and then be like, what is this thing?
McLean's Book and Community Plans
01:14:08
Speaker
Like, what is this book? And I was like, it's not a book. It's a drug.
01:14:13
Speaker
Absolutely. And that being said, can you share where people can get the book, where where people can find you, anything you might want to promote? Yeah, so I, over the last several months, I did a really intentional job of drawing in most of the energy from the book to the place where I live, which is the land that I'm on in southern Vermont called The Being Ground.
01:14:36
Speaker
So I got all the print copies back here in my house. So now every order that someone makes on my website, I physically send it out, which just feels like super intentional and awesome to me. And then I get to actually read the names of the people who it's going to. and it feels so much more in alignment than like people buying stuff off Amazon, even though it's great that that's accessible.
01:15:01
Speaker
So that's super easy now. And my rural post office just gets such a kick out of me. I come in with like my five books and I'm like five more media mail. And they just are like, who is this lady? know um So that's super fun. And um there's also some other kind of stuff for sale on my website, more just the stuff that my artist friends or like my brother and i kind of craft together and we're like, maybe somebody is interested in this. So that's all at CatherineMcLean.org.
01:15:31
Speaker
um I did make the concession to keep and the ebook and the audio book on the Amazon, you know, affiliate. So Kindle and Audible. The audiobook is coming back out, I think, in about a month.
01:15:46
Speaker
I want it to be December 12th because it's like such a cool date, 12-12-24, and I'm going to try to make that happen, but I think Audible also may have some procedure where they slot it in and then you hope for the best.
01:15:58
Speaker
um And yeah, otherwise it's like I'm here in Southern Vermont in the middle of nowhere. i want to start having gatherings on my land and I just am trying to decide how to do that, when to do it with intention, how big to do it um so that it really lasts and it has a big impact.
01:16:22
Speaker
Yeah, and i love that you've read the audiobook yourself because if someone else would have read it, it just wouldn't have come across the same way. Yeah. And also your podcast too. Oh yeah, so um this project that we've worked on together, we I've recorded maybe four episodes with Eileen Hall, who was the artist who did the cover art for Midnight Water.
01:16:44
Speaker
and we kind of approach these topics that ah come through the book, but are not really developed in the book with people who are kind of connected to me or Eileen in the world, but are not necessarily, their stories aren't in Midnight Water.
01:17:00
Speaker
So we've got um we've got this one fellow, Charles Lawrence, who's the only 90-year-old I've ever been friends with. He just turned 90, which is amazing. um And he's this awesome elder shaman and pipe carrier ceremonialist.
01:17:16
Speaker
And his um his episode is called Thunder and Lightning because he's been struck by lightning twice. And then we've got this amazing death doula, Rebecca Dawn, who I met at a mushroom conference. Just like lots of kind of eccentric folks who've been in these underworld spaces and these liminal spaces.
01:17:35
Speaker
And yeah just kind of waiting for that next person to materialize as we do more episodes. But it's like a very slow burn kind of podcast. Yeah.
01:17:46
Speaker
So let's see, that's on all of the basic channels, Spotify, Apple, everything. It's called ah Midnight Water Dialogues in the Labyrinth.
01:17:56
Speaker
Very fitting name. Catherine, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate you coming back on the show and would love to do it again. Yeah, was super fun as always.