From Zen to Psychedelics

[00:00:13] Speaker A: Welcome to Brain Forest Cafe with Dennis McKenna. [00:00:21] Speaker B: Today we are delighted to invite my good friend and colleague Dr. Eric Storley to the braid Forest cafe. I want to read a short bio about Eric before we go into the main part of the conversation, and he kindly furnished me a bio here, which I will read. It says, I entered graduate school at Berkeley in 1962 intending to become a medievalist, but a big cardboard box filled with dried peyote buttons sent from Texas arrived at a friend's house. Then we got vials holding a solution of the mystery medicine LSD. And finally, in 1964, we embarked for Mexico to experience a valada with berea sabina in Watla de Jimenez. We devoted a year to Tim Leary's the psychedelic experience, dropping heroic doses of LSD weekly, assured that this would soon lead to unsurpassed, perfect enlightenment. All this led me to Shunru Suzuki Roshi at Sokoti Temple in San Francisco, where I began a lifelong Zen practice with commitment to exploring the synergies between meditation and psychedelic medicine. I retired from teaching meditation and mindfulness at the University of Minnesota in 2020. For more on these 60 years of exploration, see my two memoirs, nothing on my mind, Berkeley LSD and two Zen masters published by Shambhala Express, and a later memoir called go Deep and take plenty of root, which recounts Eric's experience growing up norwegian in Minnesota. Both of those are available from Amazon if you care to order them, and they are both incredibly interesting reads. So it's my pleasure to invite you. Eric, welcome to the brain Forest cafe. [00:02:46] Speaker A: Well, Dennis, great to be here. Great to see you. [00:02:50] Speaker B: It's wonderful. The biography that you furnish doesn't make the connection, but we met each other at the University of Minnesota back in the aughts. I guess they call it the aughts now. When I was teaching estopharmacology and you were teaching mindfulness and meditation, and that was the connection that we had. But it took a while for us to get to know each other. I didn't realize that you were such a seasoned psychonaut at the time, but it turns out we had a lot in common that way. [00:03:32] Speaker A: Indeed, that was about 22,000 water, too. And at that time there were good reason to be very wary of opening up on these matters. But finally we did indeed, we figured it out. [00:03:52] Speaker B: Yes, well, I've always thought, since I worked in psychedelics, both on a personal level and also a professional level for quite a few years, and I've always felt like if you're working in an area that's forbidden like it was for so long. You're probably on the right track because it's at the fringes of knowledge where discoveries made and psychedelics have always been in that place. [00:04:25] Speaker A: Well, that's what gives me such admiration for Roland Griffiths and regret and his premature passing that he took this bull by the horns and went ahead against all odds to move legal exploration through the various processes of ensuring what human subjects could be involved with this and going through the legalities and quite, just incredible what he has accomplished. [00:05:05] Speaker B: Well, he was certainly a pioneer, and in part it's because of his previous work, he had impeccable credentials and experience. So he was somebody with respect in the field who could come along with this crazy idea to use psilocybin to treat anxiety and the dying. Most of the people, the colleagues, would just dismiss this out of hand, but because it was Roland, he was able to make it seem plausible. And then, of course, he did the work that proved all the critics wrong and basically opened up a new mean. It wasn't a new field, but he reopened the door to clinical studies, human studies. Rick Strassman had made an effort, really took the first step back in the early 90s when he got approval from NiDA to study DMT. But he had no clinical target. It was kind of an observational study. What does it do to the physiology? What is the experience? He didn't have a clinical rationale and Roland did, which this idea that it could be used to relieve anxiety and patients grappling with death. And then of course, that became very much expanded to many other therapeutic areas. [00:06:49] Speaker A: I got to know him a little bit at those Madison conferences that we went to, and I realized that he had come to it in part because of his own meditation practice. [00:07:02] Speaker B: Yes. [00:07:02] Speaker A: And a key part of his finding was that if you had what we could call a mystical opening, the healing was far more powerful for those subjects or patients or whatever you want to call them. So that interest of his fit right in with my interest in the Zen meditation and the psychedelics. [00:07:29] Speaker B: Right. And in fact, as you know, later in some of his work, he conducted these clinical studies with lifelong meditators. Psilocybin, among many psychedelics, but the two that influenced your life mostly was LSD. And then later psilocybin and mine was, well, I think we all cut our teeth back in the 60s on LSD because there wasn't much else. But then mushrooms, as you know, was also very important to me personally. And then my brother and I went to South America on looking for a completely different, obscure hallucinogen that it took a while to find. But we stumbled on these mushrooms, and the mushrooms very quickly rearranged our priorities. [00:08:38] Speaker A: And ironically we discovered when we were talking one day that I had grown my own psilocybin mushrooms from the very clone that you had brought back from La Korea, which I had acquired from Jeremy Bigwood back at the second, an international hallucinogenic conference in Fort Wharton. And must have been about 77, right? [00:09:10] Speaker B: And Tyrone must have been at that conference, right? Or not. [00:09:14] Speaker A: I'm sure he was, but I didn't meet him. [00:09:17] Speaker B: He may not have been. There were a couple of conferences. One I remember at, I think it was a different conference center around 1976 or so, but Paul Stamets was organizing these things back then. So this may have been a conference that he wasn't at. But there were several of these. We did one in San Diego or actually in LA. But when I was in San Diego in 1984 doing my postdoc, we did another one, I think it was in Santa Barbara, called mind molecules and know. So these were some of the early psychedelic conferences that were. [00:10:04] Speaker A: Well, it was remarkable because Lawson was. [00:10:07] Speaker B: There. [00:10:09] Speaker A: Richard Evan Schultes was there, Albert Hoffman was there. And it was very meaningful to me to meet these old men whose lives had been turned upside down by LSD and the psychedelics, which in my life as a young man, everybody was just looking at me and say, you're fucking crazy. And it was very affirming to see, yeah, here are men at the top of their careers whose lives have been turned by this and toward a new kind of awakening and reality. And that included Aldous Huxley and Houston Smith, a great scholar of religion. [00:11:03] Speaker B: So it wasn't all, and it's not that it turned their lives upside down. It gave their lives a direction I think they followed passionately. And it was sort of our story. Now, Eric, we are the old man, we're the elders. Got about ten years on me, but we're very much in the same. And I think psychedelics certainly were important door openers for both of us back in the day and continue to be. We don't necessarily go for the heroic doses and every weekend or anything, my use of it is tapered off. But I certainly keep my hand in it, as you do also occasionally, because there's so much to learn. And I think if psychedelics. If people often ask me, what's the one thing, one lesson that you take away from your own psychedelic experience? And I have to tell people, the one lesson is it always reminds me never forget how little you know. It's something that causes us to push the boundaries of what we think we understand, and that's a fantastic tool. It forces you out of your comfort zone. It forces a different perspective on what it is to be human, what it is to experience. And this essay that you wrote, which I am going to post on the Web with your podcast, if that's permissible. [00:12:57] Speaker A: No, love it. Thank you. [00:12:59] Speaker B: I have to tell you, it's one of the best essays I've ever read about the nature of the psychedelic experience from a person who has lots of experience and meditation experience and spent a lot of time thinking about what is mind, what is consciousness, what is this isness that we find ourselves in? And there were many passages in this essay that I like to talk about. I don't want to necessarily. [00:13:43] Speaker A: Read the. [00:13:44] Speaker B: Essay, but I think what you said resonates so much with me in the sense that in a lot of sense, you talk about how in your experiences, you could observe what the brain is doing. That's exactly right. I think the brain is an instrument for constructing what I often call the reality hallucination. And we are in a reality. Or sometimes, I guess, the technical medical term now is the default mode network. I prefer my term because it carries the flavor of what is actually happening. The brain receives information from the external environment, electromagnetic information in the form of light, chemical information, all of these sensory stimuli. But it takes all this information and processes it in such a way that it's meaningful. It processes it into what becomes experience, moment to moment, second to second experience. And we know from physics and other types of disciplines that what is outside that is just a blooming, buzzing confusion of electromagnetic signals and all sorts of energetics, somehow the brain, through its receptors, takes this and synthesizes a world of meaning, a world of experience. And it may be that that's all there is. I've always thought that experience is kind of the primary data. [00:15:46] Speaker A: Well, what I also like to stress, as I do in the essay, that we can call it a reality hallucination, and yet you and I will share the same one. So it's a very accurate mirroring of something out there, this buzz of quantum reality that comes to rest in a glass of water. And if I handed the glass of water to you, I believe you would have the same perception of this glass. [00:16:20] Speaker B: You would see a glass of water. Yes, this is. [00:16:23] Speaker A: But it would be reflected in the mirror of your mind. It wouldn't actual glass, any more than when you see it in the screen. It's the actual glass. And yet the one I am touching is also a construction of my brain through my fingertips and eyes. So the paradox, it's real and it's not real. [00:16:50] Speaker B: It's real and it's not real. And our realities are separate realities. We're not just in experiential boxes, because we share this commonality of experience, even though it's a totally mind or brain generated landscape, if you will. But it's continuous with what other people are experiencing. And I think that's an indication when you start talking about subjective experience and what's in here and what's out there, these are charged words. Is there really such a thing as out there? Is there really such a thing as in here? Well, we know there's something that's in here. This is the old I think, therefore I am assumption. I'm here, I'm thinking, I'm experiencing, but what am I experiencing? Is there really an outside dimension? The fact that you and I or anyone can be in a room and experience something similar, even though our brains are separate, the reality we're constructing collectively is remarkably congruent between individuals and yet not identical. You can be, for example, if you're colorblind or if you have other types of perceptual anomalies that most people don't share. Maybe you're hypersensitive to smell or you can see ultraviolet light that insects do. Sometimes you're still immersed in this reality that is generated by physics, but the way it's processed is very different. [00:18:39] Speaker A: Yeah, well, and going back to your saying that I always love, we don't know anything. We really know nothing. We have more and more information about this miracle that we dwell in. And it reminded me of the delphic oracle when asked, who is the wisest man in the world? Back in about the 400 before the comedy era, the delphic oracle said the priestess, the Python Pythonists said Socrates. And Socrates conclusion was, well, if I'm the wisest man, because I'm the one who knows how I know. So, yeah, very good and curious. I looked up the delvic oracle and apparently there may have been a psychedelic involved, a crack in the earth through which ethylene, a volcanic emission, was coming which was worded to move the high priestess into an altered state from which he would prophesy. [00:19:55] Speaker B: Right. Not exactly psychedelic, but certainly mind altering. And in some sense, the substance is important and we all know the important dynamics of set and setting and this sort of thing. But ultimately it comes down to how the brain interacts with these things and the reality that it constructs. And I thought the point that you made in your essay, you made it several times. But the point that you made is that LSD is a tool that lets you in some way step away from this processing and examine it almost as though you're separated. You can see how the brain is constructing reality. You can see how it's putting it together because it gives you the ability to temporarily step outside that reference frame. And you're still you. Of course, you still have your identity, but you can examine this process and you can examine other things too. I'm very interested in the use of. I often tell people what psychedelics do is they bring the background forward. They give you the tools to look at what is going on in a less focused way because we are very much conditioned, particularly us in the west, and based on, influenced in large part. [00:21:42] Speaker A: By. [00:21:46] Speaker B: We'Re, we're trained to look at what's right in front of us. Whether it's a book we're looking at or a saber tooth tiger coming to attack us, our attention is focused. Psychedelics give us permission to soften that and open up to a wider sensorium. I'm sure you've had this experience, whether stoned or not. If you just go into nature and sit quietly and pay attention, you see things that are going on that normally you don't pay attention to. You're not aware of them. That doesn't mean they're not important and it doesn't mean they're not going on. I think this kind of unfocused or apprehension is something that children have, and that's why they're so open and something that indigenous people have in their relations with nature that haven't been corrupted by western perspectives, I think. So in some ways the psychedelics can be instruments or examining phenomena in ways that you've never looked at them before. So in a sense, they're lenses to understand nature. They're a kind of psychedelic scientific instrument in some way. [00:23:10] Speaker A: Well, for me, the perfect situation, the perfect set and setting, is indeed in wild nature on a high overlook or a place I always used to go to with friends for an acid trip. In the Sawtooth mountains we called the crag, where the whole world was spread out before us, the mountain ranges endless and deeply healing, just as nature being there without a psychedelic is healing, but the psychedelic augments this. So at some point very early on, I moved away from an idea of recreational psychedelic experience to, well, this is a sacred moment. These are opportunities like a week in the mountains alone or like a retreat or like anything where the busy monkey mind can slow down and let this wider awareness open up. Yeah, I mean, that was the first thing that the psychedelics did for me was to open up. I realized, wait a minute, I'm living, so to speak, in a tunnel and it's not a very good one. Lots of opiates and methadrine and alcohol and too much grass and just kind of getting narrower and narrower rather than what I was hoping would happen. Having read all the beatniks and wanting to be a beatnik ten years their day. [00:24:51] Speaker B: And you're old enough that there were no hippies back when you were doing this. [00:24:56] Speaker A: No, they came along kind of with the flower children. By then, though, I was in my mid twenty s and you were 15. And so I was a little skeptical then of, I like the idea of we'll bring world peace and leary turn on, tune in and drop out. But then we began to see the train wrecks that happened with many people who experimented and got hurt or were too naive and were taken in by con artists, et cetera. [00:25:39] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think that goes really to the heart of the matter in terms of the proper, and by that I mean the most beneficial way to approach these substances. Leary got it right with this concept of set and setting. I mean, he got lots of things wrong, but he was right about that. [00:26:04] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:26:05] Speaker B: And you have to have the proper set and setting and people. There are other variables that are often not mentioned. I think people talk about you must have set and setting, but there are two other variables that you should not neglect. One of them is what is the medicine? Because it's different. And what is the dose? Right. Those are important variables. And then the setting is obvious in the sense that it should be a place that is conducive to these kinds of experiences. Probably the freeway is not the place to do this, or even a rock concert if you're really comfortable there, guess that's okay. But then the set is what you bring to it. The set is you. People often say the set is your intention for this experience, but it goes way beyond that. The set is everything you bring to it, your life experiences up to that moment, who you are at that moment, that you have the experience. That's the set. [00:27:20] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:27:20] Speaker B: The set is always changing as you grow and learn and evolve and age and so on. [00:27:26] Speaker A: Well, I think a very good grounding for the set is what I've taught my students. If you can do it, if you're motivated, create what I would call a foundational spiritual practice of kind. Some kind. Mine is meditation with some yoga and wilderness and art. But if you come into a psychedelic experience with that kind of grounding, oh, my God, I still may be terrified, but I've led up to this with lots of experience of connecting, so to speak, with something bigger than the usual distractions of our world and all of my various neuroses, which can begin to play, they can begin to settle down in meditation. But you've got. You've got to do it year after year, day after day, month after month, year after year. So it's second nature. That doesn't have to be meditation. It can be some other kind of practice that gets you out of the default mode network and the world that creates it. [00:28:47] Speaker B: Right? Yeah. Regular meditation or whatever your spiritual practice is. This is another way to disengage from the day to day from sort of the tyranny of the default mode network. You can just. I'm going to turn the volume down on that. I'm going to sit in a quiet place and pay attention. And I think psychedelics are the same thing. And obviously you don't need psychedelics, but psychedelics in that context to take, you can facilitate some insights that may not come without them. And I think you mentioned earlier that psychedelics, your experience with psychedelics saved you from these addictive, self destructive behaviors. All these substances you were involved with, alcohol, methamphetamine, too much grass, obese, those sorts of things. And as we know from the clinical work that's been done, psychedelics are among the most promising substances to treat these kinds of dependencies. And I think that comes back to being able to step out of this reference frame, these habitual behaviors that build up during the. In the default mode network. It's almost as though you need to reboot your computer. And it's much like that. It lets you step away from that reference frame, look at these self destructive behaviors, your addictions, your trauma, your depression, whatever it is that's keeping you down. And just that perspective is enough to diffuse it in some ways, to take its power away and effectively go away, make it go away or diminish it significantly. It may not always go away. [00:31:00] Speaker A: Well, that's exactly what happened to me in Berkeley in 63, where suddenly we got access to LSD. And I took some with my african american girlfriend at the time, and we drove to Tilden park, where I think you also had an early LSD experience. [00:31:21] Speaker B: My first LSD. [00:31:23] Speaker A: Well, this was my first. And it was like this great wind blowing all this shit out of my life. And I saw the beauty of the cypress trees and the beauty of my girlfriend and just everything was magnificent. And it was like being suddenly liberated from young, despairing depressive. The world is bad. Nothing is worth anything. Kind of existential angst. [00:31:57] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:31:58] Speaker A: All of a sudden, what a miracle, what a gift. And I had various friends who had the same kind of experience. I couldn't have got. No one was going to persuade me to go do a seven day or a three month retreat of some kind to try to achieve this. I was totally secular and I consider all of that bullshit. And it probably wouldn't have worked. I wouldn't have had the patience to sit down at some meditation retreat. So the LSD and what a gift. What a gift. [00:32:37] Speaker B: Yeah, an incredible gift. And yeah, I would be the same way. I mean, I'm still the same way. I wouldn't go to a meditation retreat. I'm probably not the kind of person that could focus every day for our city, but I'm glad that you can do it. And I get my own spiritual, non psychedelic kicks from going into nature, which I wish I could do more often. I try to do it every day. I've got my little slice of paradise here close to where I live, a trail that I walk every day. And it is so meaningful. But this realization that besides the perceptual insights and the spiritual insights and all that, I think an aspect of the psychedelic experiences is what's been called portentiousness. And to me that means a perception of how meaningful things are, personally meaningful. I don't know if they're universally meaningful. I don't know if meaning as a thing is built into the structure of reality, but it's certainly built into the structure our perceptions. And in this essay, several places you talk about how the very fact that this can go on is a miracle, the fact that the universe is out there doing its thing, and yet this incredible mind, our brain, supported by our mind, can take that information and synthesize that into a profoundly meaningful experience. The experience of being just is this. And beauty and beauty, joy, beauty is probably a quality that we bring to it. It's true. That cliche is the beauty is in the buy of the beholder. And I think that's probably true. Beauty is an attribute that we might project onto something in the, again, provisionally external world. We don't even really know if it's an external world. But you get into that. But what would you think about that? Or is beauty inherent in nature or is beauty inherent in human? [00:35:23] Speaker A: You know, at one of those Madison conferences, we edged around this question of why. Yes, I'm based in science. I believe in evolution. I have no question about this wonderful tool called science, where, as I think the father, one of the Huxleys, said, there's nothing more delightful than to see a hypothesis smashed by an ugly fact. A beautiful hypothesis smashed by an ugly fact. So science does that and religion doesn't. Religion is a huge problem in that regard, as we see all around us with the wars going on. But the universe has given rise to us with this amazing consciousness, perception of beauty, experience of joy and ecstasy. And I'm stunned that this is true. And to catch it in word nets or intellectual formulations is inadequate. And that's what I like about Zatn, which is more this is a teaching beyond words. This is direct experience, and we experience this joy, beauty, wonder. And as Einstein did, we said, this is the root of real science, the wonder at our existence. And this. [00:36:59] Speaker B: Certainly science is what you said. Science is one of the few intellectual endeavors that humans have created where questioning everything is built into the enterprise. You create hypotheses, and then if you're an honest scientist, you do everything you can to smash those hypotheses or to see what the inadequacies are. What does it explain? More importantly, what does it not explain? And then you refine the hypothesis or you shit can it completely and you try to come up with a new one. Religion doesn't do that. And that's a major problem, in my opinion, with religion. Religion gives you a set of precepts. Dogma says, this is the way it is. You must have faith. And then you're saying, but what about this? Shut up. Don't question it. [00:38:00] Speaker A: But then psychedelics gave to science this huge. But exactly, the secular atheist. I had this experience that I could only compute in terms of something mystical, and yet I'd had mystical experience as a boy and a young man in nature, but I never thought of it as religious. But now here's the psychedelic experience, which demonstrated to me through direct experience many of the truths in the Tao, in Buddhism and HInduism, in the mystics of Christianity and Islam and Judaism. So suddenly I'm having brain wobble. Wait a minute. I've had these psychedelic experiences now that don't fit my framework at all, but they also didn't fit the scientific framework. That was the dilemma of leary. How do you do a scientific double blind when everybody knows who took the drug? [00:39:13] Speaker B: This is fantastic, Eric, you have exactly put your finger on this. Psychedelics throws in the face of science this question of spirituality. And, you know, I often say in my lectures, that's why I think the scientific investigation of psychedelics that we're seeing now was prohibited for so long because science was afraid of this area. And in some ways it still is. I mean, you see a lot of the science that's being done, not that it's not good science, but in some ways it kind of is missing the point. It's all directed toward most of it, toward developing some therapy. The problem still in that is the therapists are not taking the medicine and they need to take the medicine. And I think that what Roland triggered or what psychedelics have triggered, psychedelics have challenged medicines. Psychedelics have reintroduced spirit into medicine, into healing. Medicine has been trying to exorcise spirit for 150 years. Psychedelics come along and say, we're not just machines and it's not meaningful. You have to have this spiritual aspect. And that was the beef I had. I guess I can take a moment to criticize our former employers since we don't work for them anymore. But at the center for Spirituality and know, the center for Spirituality and Healing, when Mary Jo founded that, that was a very bold move. She got a lot of pushback. What is this? What does spirituality have to do with healing? What are you trying to do here? What are you, some kind of a hippie nutcase? But she persisted. But then when I came along, to a certain extent, when you came along, they asked me to teach a course in ethnopharmacology, and I did. And we used to have, I wouldn't call them arguments exactly, but kind of spiritual discussions. I would say if you're really interested in spirituality and healing, you cannot ignore psychedelics. You can't pretend that these are not important. If you look at all the indigenous traditions, religious traditions and so on, psychedelics are absolutely at the heart of spirituality and healing. We have donors, they're very conservative. They would like this. So fortunately, I was able to teach a lot of heretical stuff they did too closely. [00:42:23] Speaker A: So was know. In Mary Jo's defense, she looked over her shoulder at all of the rural legislators and right wing legislators who would go ballistic. The good news now is that the school of psychiatry, the medical school at the U, and Jessica Nielsen are actually opening this up and working with. [00:42:53] Speaker B: So they're now doing. Yeah, yeah. This is after the threshold's been crossed. [00:42:59] Speaker A: Yeah, that's right. Well, I think Jessica had to fight hard to cross the threshold there. [00:43:05] Speaker B: But was crossable, which wasn't. I don't want to dis Mary Jo or the center for Spirituality and Healing. She was courageous to do that, but in some way she unleashed a certain thing. There was a certain aspect of it that she didn't really want to bring front and center, and I was always pushing to bring it and so on. But yeah, it definitely had an impact, this idea of spirituality. And Mary Jo. Well, it's worth mentioning perhaps that. I don't know if it means anything, but this is where Roland Griffiths got his start. He was at the University of Minnesota. Yeah, long before any of this was going on, but something in the water. [00:44:05] Speaker A: Or something I think he was involved with at that time. I forgot the researcher's name, who was working with LSD, perhaps with the animals, and another old friend that's for a lab too, back in the early sixty s or late 50s. But back to healing. I mean, yes, it's all of these indigenous peoples, like the Mazdak, Maria, Sabina. These substances are integrated with a whole religious world, worldview and life. And it's all part of a seamless web. And of course, much shattered in so many of these indigenous communities by everything that's happened ever since the Europeans moved in to the so called new world. So a big job for this psychedelic community is to, I think, observe those traditions and then figure out how do we make, what's our tradition going to be that creates something like the peyote circle or something like the ayahuasca circle with a bunch of people who can read and write and are highly literate. [00:45:28] Speaker B: I think this is what you're seeing now. We're borrowing heavily from the religious, the indigenous traditions, which is okay because we don't have any other template, but we have to synthesize our own postmodern psychedelic spiritual practice. I wouldn't say religious practice. In fact, we need to keep religion out of it because psychedelics and spiritual practices as such are based on experience that you can have. And those experiences are undeniable. [00:46:07] Speaker A: That's what was attractive in the, in the Bay area and around the country in Zen, because it was the teaching beyond words. It was not a set of dogmas. Now, we were very naive. Kerouac and Snyder and Ginsburg and all of us, and leary too were very naive. And as we came to practice it more fully and see the asian teachers come in. Oh yeah. Oh my God. This has a whole set of powerful beliefs and rituals and rivals rivalries among different Zen groups or among different buddhist groups. So all of that stuff is there. But still, unlike the religions of the book, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Taoism and Buddhism and Hinduism had a kind of aversion to dogma for its own sake. A lot of it was about the practice. It's about the practice. It's about what's happening right now in this consciousness that you're having of the moment of the world. [00:47:21] Speaker B: We are developing. Some are developing. I wanted to ask you, though, in light of our previous discussion, and probably you've thought about this right now, psychedelics are big business. There's lots of investors. Everybody's trying to figure out how to patent something and get some kind of a position on it. Think of the people that are trying to develop analogues of psychedelics that are not psychedelic. [00:47:57] Speaker A: Well, I wondered if you'd ask that question. I was thinking about that, and I hate to see corporate capitalism reach out its grip and take control of any. [00:48:13] Speaker B: Of this is going to happen, and. [00:48:16] Speaker A: It'S going to happen. And that's for analogs that don't make you high. That eliminates the very thing that Roland found was so valuable in healing. So I think, well, more power to them if they can make an analog of the LSD molecule that helps someone with their depression, someone who's afraid to take, have the experience, fine, go ahead, do that if it helps someone. But don't forget that the real healing has linked to this mystical spiritual experience that we can all have, so to speak, natively, just by going into the woods for a week in beauty and the beauty of nature. But as with my experience and that of my friends in the ongoing, this is like a catalyst for that experience. So it's the scientific proof that what the Zen people were reporting was not just fantasy. I quote Aldous Huxley, who says, before taking my dose of mescaline, there was a Zen coon that I considered simply a piece of pregnant nonsense. And the coon was the monk comes and says to the master, what is the buddha? And the master says, oh, it's the hedge at the end of the garden. And the monk can't get it. Makes no sense. And Huxley says, after his masculine experience, it was as plain to me now as you could. Everything that I can witness, everything that I can see, is the miracle right there unfolding in front of me. But my default mode network is usually strangling that perception. And Oxley said, for the first time in my life, I had a direct experience of what the mystics and Hinduism and Budhism had called oneness or enlightenment awakening. [00:50:36] Speaker B: This attempt to develop non psychedelic psychedelics. I mean, if they're not psychedelic, by definition they're not psychedelics. Yeah, but this is another attempt to, again, exorcise spirit out of medicine because spirit is. They're reluctant. We like our old model where we're just complex machines and if you apply the right molecular monkey wrench, it'll fix you and it's effortless. You don't have to put any work into it. You don't have to have these spiritual experiences or psychedelic experiences which are now characterized as adverse reactions in this school that's trying to develop these. I mean, it's not going to work. It's doomed to failure. I would bet just about everything I have that none of these non psychedelic, which isn't much, so it's not a big match, but that these non psychedelic psychedelics are not going to have any lasting effect. [00:51:44] Speaker A: If they find any that work, then they can prescribe them daily. So big pharm has all of this income, which will be quite wonderful, and the doctor can be the prescriber. But a key part of the psychedelic experience that involves great learning and self reflection is the hell trip. The trip where you realize how fucked up things are going for mean. My first LSD experience was filled with wonder and beauty and joy and my girlfriend and Tilden woods and what a joyous time. But then later in that leery, we'll do it once a week. We'll do a big dose. I began to have to really look at my life. Here I am, age 23. I'm in many ways disconnected from my parents. I've drunk since age 15, way too excess. Then I moved into drugs that we all thought, oh, we don't believe them when they say they're bad. But in fact, what good is methadrate and opiate as an addictive feature in your life? They're tools. They're useful at times. But there was a lot of painful awakening in the psychedelic experience that people will have to go through if they want the healing to happen. Unless they've already solved all their problems, fine. If they've already dealt with their shadow side, maybe nothing will come up. But I think that doesn't happen. [00:53:36] Speaker B: People. It's interesting that we all grew up in a time when, and we still exist in a time where we're immersed in drugs. We're a world that there are all kinds of drugs. I am often fond of saying there's no such thing as a bad drug, but there are plenty of bad ways to use drugs. And that's the difference. I think that there's no moral quality inherent in any technology, which is basically what drugs are. The moral quality is in here. It comes from within our heart. Choices that we make, the things that, the choices that obviously things like methamphetamine and heroin and these sorts of things, they have applications, they have uses, they have medical utility, but they're not something. But with rare exceptions, you cannot form a beneficial relationship with these drugs as you can with something like psychedelics. And when you choose to use a drug, you're choosing to have a relationship with it, and you should not have toxic friends and you should not have toxic drugs. Friendships can be toxic too. So it's the choices we make. Do they uplift our spirit or do they diminish it? I guess that's the difference. [00:55:14] Speaker A: Well, the opiates are a blessing for us when we're in pain. The first time I had methadrine, I sat down and read poetry with great attention and joy. Later it just became abusive as we experimented more, and there was no gain, just loss. But do you think that the psychedelics, you say they're just neutral, they're just technology, but I still tend to believe that there's something inherent in the mushroom or the LSD molecule that wants to manifest what's good in us, that they're not just nothing triggering a bunch of brain activity, that they are symbiotic with us in a way that opens this mystical experience, it's meaningful experience? [00:56:21] Speaker B: In that sense, yes. In that sense, I do. I think that these are substances and they have particular pharmacological properties. And when they interact with the brain, they interact in a certain WAy. Like, for example, psychedelics are not religion in itself, but psychedelics can stimulate religious sensibilities. And what that tells you is, for one thing, there's a whole neural architecture up here that these psychedelics can stimulate your experience of spirituality. So in that sense, and when you're talking about the natural psychedelics particularly, I don't know about the synthetics, but the natural psychedelics, like psilocybin, there is some element or ayahuasca or some of these things, there is some element of a symbiotic relationship. These mushrooms particularly have probably coevolved with us. My Thesis is potentially millions of years, and that's what Fungi do. They form symbioses and they communicate. I mean, the more grizzly side of that, the less appealing side of that in a sense, is when we look at a fungus like cordyceps, which are the ant parasites, the insects, they just actually invade the brain of the poor insects, and they direct its behavior. PSILOCyBIN doesn't have to. The psilocybie mushrooms don't have to invade our brain directly because we're delighted to consume them. And they create this molecule that has all sorts of benefits, good experiences, and therapeutics. So it's a much more benign symbiosis. The problem with the cordyceps ant relationship is the ant loses all different ways. The ant becomes a vessel for spore dispersal. Well, we become vessels for the dispersal and propagation of mushrooms. But it's a beneficial thing because the psilocybin and the mushrooms brings benefits to us. And the mushrooms, I think their agenda is PRETTY simple. They just want to grow and SPread. That's what FUNGI do. That's what a lot of things do, and we facilitate that. So in that sense, it's a beneficial symbiosis. Everyone wins. [00:59:13] Speaker A: These various indigenous peoples who have them at the center of a religious tradition have them there because of the kinds of experience that they open up, and they open up something that, I don't know a better word than mystical, although I think no word is adequate to describe the miracle that we're just sitting here looking at computer screens and having this conversation and tracking each other with our eyes and ears and so on and so forth, and having a brain that is giving rise to consciousness, whatever the hell that is. All we know is we experience it. What is it? How is the brain generating this experience we're each having? No one knows. I don't know if anyone will ever know. [01:00:09] Speaker B: Well, yeah, I mean, the problem is that we can study it to death using all these instrumentations of science, neural imaging technology, all of these things, pharmacology and so on. But at the end of the day, we're opening the window and looking through it. You can say, well, the guy's on psilocybin, and this part of his brain is very active, and this part is. But you're still standing outside looking in. We haven't got the machine yet, and we may never have it, and I kind of hope we never have. Where I can take my subjective experience and project it onto a screen, share it telepathically with you, you can experience from within. We may never come to that, and it's okay if we don't, or we may. It's not clear, but this is the thing. We can study the experience from the outside, and we can characterize the pharmacology, the neural networks involved, everything that's involved. And yet that doesn't get the essence of what is this experience? And as you put so well in this essay, this ability to watch what the brain is doing, to step away and watch it do its thing, which is to generate experience. This brings up a conundrum for me because, or question, and I guess guys like us, since we're well along in years, we start thinking about those things, what happens after. And it just seems to me that since experience is so dependent on this neural machinery that generates it, so that kind of suggests that the idea of an afterlife is probably a comforting delusion, would you say so? [01:02:39] Speaker A: Well, that's how I grew up as a unitarian skeptic and my family tradition, and I always think of Einstein, who would never say, there is no God. So when quantum mechanics disturbed him, he said, God does not play dear Alta, the old one does not play dice with the universe. But he would never say that there was any kind of overarching thing in the universe that took any of us personally, that was worrying about whether Dennis McKenna had a soul that was going somewhere right now that has always left me with a feeling that probably each of us is like a wave on the ocean, and we'll hit the beach and the wave will go back into the infinite and another wave will come. So I'm not expecting anything after death, and yet I've had an occasional kind of experience of, I think of my daughter when her grandmother died at one evening, and my brother and I were with her all through those days, and I came home after she died the next day, and I said to Katie, who was perhaps at that point, twelve or so, she said, well, how is grandma? I said, well, she died about eleven. Katie said, 1043, and that was the actual time. And Katie said, I heard grandma say my voice or my name at 1043, so I knew she had died. Of course, it's fascinating to me to have a personal experience where I just don't write all that off as well. We can all imagine things, but still, at bottom, I'm kind of with Einstein. When my wave hits the sandy shore or the rocky cliff, it'll just go back, and will I be, as the tibetan book of dead suggests? Will I then be in cosmic awareness? But then where would my personality be, my sense of Eric be if I were just part of the ocean? So to me, I don't have a clue. Fortunately, being raised Unitarian, I'm not afraid that I might end up in a hell, nor do I anticipate that I might end up in heaven. And I've had so many friends who grew up in religious traditions who really were agonized by this early training and fear of heaven and hell. So that's a gift of Unitarians, that you don't necessarily have that belief set deep in your mind when you're tiny. [01:05:55] Speaker B: You were lucky I was raised Catholic, but it took me a long time to get over that. But unitarianism is exactly right. I like your idea. I think knowing what we know about this intimate relationship between neural architecture and perception and the creation of this reality bubble, this reality model or hallucination, you could call it, knowing what we know, and basically the fundamental component of that, or the one side of that is, yeah, you have to have a brain if you don't have a brain. But then maybe some of the work that's going on, and there's this sort of resurgence now of Hammeroff's research on quantum consciousness and so on. So maybe there's some kind of cosmic standing wave, some kind of quantum wave that we're part of. And for a brief period of time, it's like you say, it smashes on the beach, and we have this sense of a pointed, centered consciousness, but it's ensod back into the quantum wave, and we, as Eric or Dennis, we don't exist. But there may be that boat of consciousness somewhere that's no longer us, but that maybe at some point participated for a nanosecond of cosmic time in individuality, and then it's soon back into the quantum fold, or whatever you want to characterize it as. [01:07:50] Speaker A: In the eastern view, consciousness would be as real as gravity. Western scientific view, it's just an accident of evolution and molecules bumping together. But why would we think consciousness just accidentally emerged as opposed to it's as real as gravity, space, time, energy, a factor, an intrinsic piece of existence. And so when it rises up in us through millions of years of evolution, and suddenly we've got a brain big enough to be conscious, that wasn't an epiphenomenon, but rather it was the universe making me. I am now the eye of the buddha. When I witness nature and beauty, I am simply the universe opening its eye. [01:08:55] Speaker B: Now, I agree totally. I think this idea of, the idea that consciousness is a fundamental property of reality is built into reality as gravity or electromagnetism or the Planck constant or any of those things. I think that consciousness, whatever we mean by that, maybe awareness or. I don't know, the words are not adequate, but I'm basically a panpsychist. I agree that that. But that said, I think that. And when you talk about these things. Everything you say has got to be provisional, because, again, it comes down to the fact that we don't know fuck all. Yeah, we really don't know. But I think that consciousness like ours, that is related to this complex brain, has evolved over time, is in some ways an accumulation of as systems become more complex. I guess that's what I'm trying to say. Consciousness can be experienced as an emergent property, and an amoeba has got its own consciousness. I'm sure. I'm sure that what is important in the amoeba's world is just as important as what's important to it, as what's important to you or I. But the amoeba probably doesn't think of it in the same way it probably think as such. What we can say is it experiences. [01:10:44] Speaker A: Well, there's a british physicist whose name I forget now, who argued that the mitochondria are the seed of consciousness. [01:10:54] Speaker B: This is the Penrose hammer off idea. Yes. [01:11:00] Speaker A: So we think of it. Oh, well, it's just a computer. We put together enough interconnects, enough transistors or chips, and then here's consciousness, where, as he would argue again, it's something that's right there and self generative in the universe, hence evolution, which is very different than the notion of evolution as blind and simply accidentally creating this. [01:11:37] Speaker B: I can't buy that. I think the darwinian idea of natural selection in aspects, it's correct, but it's inadequate to explain what's going on. And if you introduce symbiosis into the equation, then that's a game changer. I think it's symbiosis more than competition, survival of the fittest and so on. It's the formation of aggregates of different species, whether those become bacteria that eventually end up as organelles and cells or whatever. Symbiosis is what drives this complexity of evolution, and there is a direction. There's no designer in that sense, like the idea of design. It's designing itself. It's its own designer. The universe is its own designer, and it tends toward complexity. And as complexity accumulates, consciousness could emerge as a property of these extremely complex systems. And the brain is about as complex as it gets. So that's my own perspective on it, which is obviously inadequate. But it's comforting. What can I say? [01:13:12] Speaker A: It's using our word nets to try to capture the moon. [01:13:17] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. [01:13:19] Speaker A: There's the old european story of the silly peasants who saw the moon, were lying in the water of the pond, and they got all their nets to try to rescue the poor moon because it was drowning. Of course, the moon slipped right through the nets. And this whole image that has obsessed me with our whole brain is like a great mirror reflecting everything. And if we think we can capture it in a net, the brain can't make a net big enough to capture the very brain that's trying to make the net that gives rise to the capacity to think. So computer is so smart that it. I don't know how to put this. Could a computer ever understand us when we're the complexity that makes it in the first place? But anyway, we're in debts, which always bring me back to your saying, we don't know shit. Right? [01:14:26] Speaker B: At the end of the day, we don't. But it's good to talk about all this. This has been great conversation. I would love to go on, and I'd love to have another one sometime, but is there anything that we haven't touched on that you want to be sure to mention? [01:14:51] Speaker A: Well, I think we've covered a lot of ground. [01:14:57] Speaker B: I think once we sign off, we'll think of these five things we should have talked about. [01:15:04] Speaker A: Of course, I think mainly just emphasize again that the potential for beauty and happiness and ecstasy and opening up beyond the default world. The default mode. [01:15:23] Speaker B: Default mode. Network. [01:15:25] Speaker A: Network. So just the beauty of the psychedelics and any kind of spiritual practice is to embrace something, fear than that, to have access to it. [01:15:38] Speaker B: And maybe that is it. We can ask questions. We can try to figure things out. We can look for quote unquote answers. We could look for the answers. I think ultimately we come to the conclusion there are no final answers. And maybe the purpose of life is not to look for answers, except to the extent that that's an enjoyable activity, you can think about it, but shouldn't delude yourself that we're going to find the answers. We're not going to find the answers. As you say, the rewards of our existence here on our planet is enjoyment, beauty, of ecstasy, of other people, of ideas, of all of these things. We're put on this earth to have fun, basically. [01:16:36] Speaker A: Appreciate. [01:16:37] Speaker B: Yeah, appreciate it. [01:16:39] Speaker A: Appreciate. [01:16:40] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:16:41] Speaker A: And praise. Praise the ocean. [01:16:44] Speaker B: Whether it's meaningful inherently or not, it doesn't really matter. It's meaningful to us. [01:16:50] Speaker A: You might ask the old Tong dynasty Zen master, what's the meaning of life? And his response might be, have a cup of tea. [01:17:03] Speaker B: Right, exactly. Or I think the other one is what was asked? The master was asked, what do you do? He said, what is the meaning of life? What do you do after enlightenment? And someone said, well, what do you do in life? And he said, chop wood, draw. You do after enlightenment? Chop wood, draw. [01:17:30] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [01:17:31] Speaker B: But you do it in the light of the perception of what you're doing and that's the difference. [01:17:37] Speaker A: Now Ben Franklin was asked as he grew very old whether he did indeed believe in the divinity of Jesus, who would save him. And he said, well, I'm not worrying about it because I'll know so soon. [01:17:56] Speaker B: Exactly. And that's a good attitude to have. Yeah, sooner or later everybody's going to know. And if what's after death is oblivion, then we won't care because we'll be oblivious. Oblivious. And if there is something there, well, good enough, I'm ready for whatever the next thing is, assuming it won't be anything and so you don't have to beat yourself up with all this guilt and all the bad things you've done and so on. Of course, you know, Christianity, particularly Catholicism, is all about guilt and taken me a lifetime to get over that. [01:18:46] Speaker A: Well, when Thoreau was dying at the very young age, young 40s, he was surprised everyone by being so calm and accepting tb, the curse of those years, those centuries, and he was asked by a starchy old relative, well, have you made your peace with God yet, Henry? And Thoreau said, I didn't know he'd ever quarreled. [01:19:11] Speaker B: He said what? [01:19:13] Speaker A: I didn't know he'd ever quarreled. [01:19:16] Speaker B: Right. [01:19:17] Speaker A: And then, please, one world at a time. One world at a time, right? He is living and is dying and he'd find out soon enough. [01:19:31] Speaker B: Soon enough. Soon enough, yeah. Well, thank you for this. This has been a wonderful conversation. [01:19:40] Speaker A: Thank you. [01:19:43] Speaker B: I hope that you'll come back. We're starting something with this podcast. We're starting to get started and we having conversations about inviting people like yourself who do podcast with us. Then come back and we'll have a fireside chat. We'll invite some other folks in and kick these ideas around after they digested the podcast. Would you be open to that? [01:20:12] Speaker A: Oh, that'd be great. That'd be lots of. [01:20:15] Speaker B: Okay, well, thank you so much, Eric. You're a marvelous person and a good friend and you're a wise man. [01:20:27] Speaker A: Well, we know nothing. [01:20:30] Speaker B: Exactly. We know nothing. That's how I know you're a wise man, that you know enough to know that you know nothing. I think that's Socrates had it. Will, I'll sign off and we'll be in touch. [01:20:51] Speaker A: Okay, thanks again. [01:20:53] Speaker B: Love doing, thank you. [01:21:10] Speaker A: Thank you for listening to brain Forest. [01:21:12] Speaker B: Cafe with Dennis McKenna. Find us online at me.