God on Psychedelics

[00:00:12] Speaker A: Welcome to Brain Forest Cafe with Dennis. [00:00:15] Speaker B: McKenna Don Latin is an american journalist who has been exploring the interface between psychedelics and religion in America since the end of the 90s. His books include Shopping for Faith, American Religions in the New Millennium, coauthored with Richard Camino and Josie Bass in 1998. Following our bliss, how the spiritual ideals of the 60s influence our lives Today, published in 2003 Jesus freaks, a true Story of Murder and Madness on the Evangelical Edge, published in 2007 and the Harvard Psychedelic Club, how Timothy Leary, Ram Dost Houston Smith, and Andy Weil killed the 1960s and ushered in a New Age for America. Published in 2010. Changing our minds, Psychedelic Sacraments and the New Psychotherapy. His most recent book is God on psychedelics tripping across the rubble of old time religion. Published in 2023, this book explores the emerging integration of psychedelic mystical experiences into mainstream religious practices. He has been an adjunct faculty member in the graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, and for two decades was a staff writer covering religion, spirituality and psychology at the San Francisco Chronicle. In addition to his published books, his work has been widely published in many U. S. Magazines and newspapers. Don kindly took time from his busy schedule at the map Psychedelic Science Conference in Denver last June to record this interview for the Brain Forest Cafe. Don, welcome to the brain forest. [00:02:39] Speaker A: Welcome. [00:02:40] Speaker B: Very good to see you dawes, it's. [00:02:42] Speaker A: Great to see you again. [00:02:43] Speaker C: And I'm looking forward to this interview and just catching up in general. So you professionally, you've been the religious writer for the San Francisco Chronicle for many decades? [00:03:01] Speaker A: Well, the religion writer, because I'm not necessarily religious, I'm writing about the subject, the religion writer. It's only a few letters difference, but there's a difference. It's a critical difference, actually. Yeah. Because I'm not promoting any, especially when I'm writing for the newspaper, promoting any religious agenda. I'm a journalist, I'm a secular journalist. I haven't actually written for the Chronicle since, as a staff writer since 2006, but I did spend 25 years as the religion writer at the Chronicle. [00:03:31] Speaker C: Okay, and then you went freelance? [00:03:34] Speaker A: Yeah, I basically worked for the paper as a religion reporter from like the 80s, early eighty s to two thousand and six. The great downsizing of american journalism. I took a buyout. They paid the old guys to go away. [00:03:49] Speaker C: Right. [00:03:50] Speaker A: They've slashed the staff of every newspaper. [00:03:52] Speaker C: The ones that actually know how to write. [00:03:54] Speaker A: Yeah. And that they were paying a semidecent salary. Right. But there was a nice kind of way out. They paid us to go away. Yeah. I haven't worked in the newspaper game since 2006, but I've been freelancing a bit for the paper but also for magazines, but mainly been focusing on books for the last 20, basically like 30 years in the newspaper business and 20 years more on meridian books. [00:04:21] Speaker C: And in your career, your faith was important to you and the religious life was important to you. Psychedelics came later. You were writing about religion before you wrote about psychedelics. [00:04:35] Speaker A: Yeah, I wouldn't actually say my faith was important to me as motivating why I was a religion writer. I was really coming at it as a secular journalist. There were just a lot of good stories. So I was writing about all kinds of religions. I mean, I started writing more about new religious movements in the 70s. That was the decade of the infamous cults. Right. Correct word, correct phrases, new religious movements. You're allowed to use cult with like Jonestown and things now, but. Right. Kind of a derogatory word. I like the word myself, but you have to be careful how you use it. So I did a lot of reporting on different new religious movements, including something that came out of the whole counterculture of the 60s. Right. And the Har Krishnas, Scientology, all that. And of course that culated with Jonestown in 79. And I did some of those stories for the paper. [00:05:28] Speaker C: Right. [00:05:28] Speaker A: That was when the newspaper decided that they should have a full time religion reporter again, which they hadn't had for like ten or 20 years. They thought, who cares about religion in place like San Francisco? [00:05:38] Speaker C: Right, right. [00:05:39] Speaker A: People forget that Jim Jones, leader of people's Temple, was not considered a crazy cult leader. He was a disciples of Christ minister. He was at the most integrated, politically progressive church in town. He was the chairman of the housing authority and serenity. He was an inside player. So anyway, that's how they decided to start the religion full time religion beat again. So then I started covering, know from the a, from agnostics to know. I wrote all of it. [00:06:07] Speaker C: So when you started writing about this, this was before you got. You were kind of a late comer to psychedelics? [00:06:15] Speaker A: No, I was a late comer to writing about them. But writing about them, no, I started experimenting with psychedelics in high school, in the sir, you're more or less. [00:06:27] Speaker C: We're contemporary generations. [00:06:28] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I think the first time I tripped was in high school. And I had some real revelatory and terrifying experiences first year of college, which I write about in Harvard Psychedelic Club, and then afterward and in other book, distilled spirits. So yeah. Although looking back on it, I do see that the mystical experiences and some of the insights that I had, revelatory moments that I had on psychedelics, did get me interested in things like Zen meditation, which I practiced, and Tai Chi and bit of philosophy. So I got interested in mysticism and religion, partly from experiences that I had as a young man on psychedelics, and also partly because there were just a lot of good stories that weren't being told. Not just the mystical side, but the whole rise of the religious right in the early 80s. That whole thing was getting going and controversy, various controversies in the catholic church. So there was the whole abortion politics, just a lot of good stories to cover. And they really weren't being covered in a systematic way in San Francisco at the time. So there's a lot of reasons why I got into being a religion reporter, but psychedelics were a part of that. [00:07:46] Speaker C: And they were, report to you before you started writing about religion? [00:07:50] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:07:50] Speaker C: Had had experiences. [00:07:52] Speaker A: So on becoming interested in meditation, were. [00:07:55] Speaker C: Your early psychedelic experiences, were they mystical experiences? In that sense, were they religious experiences? [00:08:06] Speaker A: Yeah, at the time, I wouldn't probably have called them religious. I would call them mystical for sure. Connecting to this kind of a nondual. Not sure even used those words back then. But your classic all is one unit of kind of state of consciousness. I had some amazing experiences with tripping with friends and girlfriends and merging and becoming one, and some wonderful experiences with my tribe at the time with LSD, also later with MDA. Not MDMA, but MDA before MDMA and mushrooms and like a lot of us who came of age in that era. And it was mystical. It was kind of an eco mysticism. That's sort of what your brother would call with the archaic revival. Did he coin that term? [00:08:58] Speaker C: I think he probably did, yeah. [00:09:01] Speaker A: Basically it's a reenchantment of the world. That's kind of how I see it. And would you call it. You could call it anivism or whatever, but that sense of that which you've written and thought a lot about. Of course, Dennis, I did get glimpses of also, you know, some very terrifying experiences. And as you know, these substances can fuel that. I can also fuel paranoia and grandiosity and all kinds of delusion, sorts of things as in Hopsley said, they're heaven and hell. [00:09:30] Speaker C: The medicines are not trustworthy in the sense that. [00:09:38] Speaker A: They will tell you a. [00:09:39] Speaker C: Lot of things, but you need to look at it from the cold light of reality. Sober reality. [00:09:46] Speaker A: Exactly. [00:09:47] Speaker C: A couple of days after the experience, does this hold up? Is this delusion. [00:09:54] Speaker A: Right. And also having, like, what's different now with the psychedelic scene is now people are being more skillful and intentional about having a guide or a friend or a therapist who they can discuss these experiences with, including the challenging ones. Or having a community like a psychedelic church or twelve step fellowship that's open to psychedelics, or a men's group or a women's group or what some people start calling communities of discernment where people can discuss these experiences together, maybe trip together, or maybe just talk about it together. [00:10:31] Speaker C: Right. [00:10:31] Speaker A: And that's what I'm writing in God on psychedelics. That's really what a lot of these new groups that are emerging now are doing. [00:10:40] Speaker C: People are having their own experiences, but they're gathering together to share them and process them. [00:10:46] Speaker A: Yeah, or sometimes they're having experiences together. Like one of the churches that I profile in the book is called Sacred Garden Church in Oakland. There's a lot of psychedelic churches popping up. Some are more, in my opinion, legitimate or sincere than others. [00:11:01] Speaker C: Right. [00:11:01] Speaker A: That particular one, I think they have really good tensions and they're very careful and cautious. And people don't just show up and trip. I mean, they get to know you. You get to know them. There's accountability. If there's any kind of an issue with sexual behavior or whatever, there's an ethics counsel mechanism. Yeah. Because of some of the recent scandals in this space, they're very sensitive to that. I mean, making sure people are even comfortable for touching you while you're in an altered state, just on the arm or something because there'd been a lot of abuse of that, of course. So there are all kinds of different communities rising up in the sangadelic space. [00:11:46] Speaker C: Well, it seems like in some ways you've dipped into some of these. You've been a bit of a dileton. You've tried these different. [00:11:57] Speaker A: Yeah, I guess you could call it Dillaton kind of has a negative connotation. [00:12:01] Speaker C: That's true. [00:12:02] Speaker A: But I sort of see it more as, I mean, I'm really coming into it as a journalist, as sort of a sociologist because I do have a degree in sociology from prestigious University of California at Berkeley. Undergraduate. But anyway, no, I see what I'm doing in the book as both a participant observer journalist. I try not to make it all about me. I'm really mostly telling other people's stories. But in order to understand it, I think you have to go there in the way they're going there, like in a community with them or with a therapist. That's what I do in the book. I joined this one church, sacred garden church. I'm not involved in it anymore. It kind of wasn't for me in the end, nothing to do with the church, it's just stage of life that I'm in. But to really get an understanding of how it works. [00:12:53] Speaker C: Right? Yes. I get this feeling from the book that a religion has long been important to you since before, maybe even before psychedelics. And the community that comes from religion is what seems very important to you. And so when you're doing psychedelics you're sort of exploring these different communities that they use psychedelics, but the attraction is for you that it's a community that fit your preferences. Have you found what? Or have you come to the point. [00:13:35] Speaker A: No, that's not exactly accurate what you said. I'm really coming into it more as a journalist I was open to the possibility that this might be a church that I would want to continue to be a member of. [00:13:50] Speaker C: Right. [00:13:51] Speaker A: But it wasn't because actually I'm not a joiner. [00:13:54] Speaker C: I'm not a joiner. [00:13:55] Speaker A: I'm not a joiner. I do have, I think a spiritual group. I have a meditation group. Nothing to do with psychedelics, right. That I'm involved with and have been for. It's a small group of people for more than ten years. So I have that. But that's really nothing to do with this. It's sort of a mix of Zen Buddhism and christian mysticism, the way we structure it. But I might probably the only one who'll even talk about a psychedelic experience in that group. So that's really if in terms of my spiritual practice I have or a community. And I write about that in the end of the book, even though it's nothing to do with psychedelics, I was sincerely open to it. And a lot of the psychedelic exploration I've done on my own, the other has been on my own. And so I was open to trying it in more of a group context in a decidedly religious or kind of churchy way just to see how that would feel. [00:14:57] Speaker C: Right. [00:14:58] Speaker A: And to describe it in the book. [00:15:00] Speaker C: Do you feel that a psychedelic experience is validated by being a mystical experience? You can have psychedelics that are experiences that are not mystical experience. [00:15:12] Speaker A: Sure you can. You can have psychotic experiences, you can have paranoid experience, you can have grandiosity, you can have all kinds of experience. [00:15:20] Speaker C: You can have other positive. [00:15:24] Speaker A: It can even be boring. [00:15:25] Speaker B: Even boring. [00:15:28] Speaker A: That might be a side that you've done it enough when it gets. Starts getting gory. [00:15:31] Speaker C: Right. [00:15:31] Speaker A: What do you think? [00:15:32] Speaker C: Well, if it's boring you should probably increase the dose. That takes care of that. I guarantee you it won't be boring. Double the dose, you'll have lots to pay attention to. Easy for me to say to hand out. I'm not a reckless user. [00:15:52] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm not either. I'm actually pretty cautious, partly because I have a background as I read about the book and other books of being in recovery and know history of being alcoholic and cocaine addict and. I love to get high, Dennis. I mean, I'm not going to deny it. I love it too much. [00:16:07] Speaker C: That becomes pretty clear here. Yeah. [00:16:10] Speaker B: You enjoy your alternate? [00:16:12] Speaker A: I do. [00:16:13] Speaker C: That's okay. [00:16:14] Speaker A: Well, it's not for me. It's actually not okay. I'm not judging other people, but if you have an addictive personality or you've gotten in trouble before, I think you have to be even with psychedelics. You have to be careful. You have to be cautious. Speak for myself. I have to be careful. [00:16:31] Speaker C: It's hard to imagine getting addicted to a psychedelic. They do say, I guess that ketamine can be kind of reinforcing. [00:16:38] Speaker A: I think ketamine has probably the highest abuse potential. Yeah, typical mushroom. People get into doing MDMA a little too much. [00:16:47] Speaker C: I think possibly, possibly that. But you seem like you're a seeker. You've had the experience of psychedelics, but you're looking for the appropriate vessel, ritual vessel. That's satisfying, too. Have these things happen? [00:17:07] Speaker A: I mean, part of the bigger picture that I'm trying to. The bigger story I'm trying to tell in this book is about this kind of shift in the religious landscape. Forget about psychedelics for a know. The fastest growing religion in America are the nuns. Not the N-U-N-E-S. It's the. And these are people who know spiritual but not religious religious. And these are often people who have fallen away from the religion of their ancestors or their parents or their childhood and are not interested in doctrine and dogma and denominationalism, but they still may believe in God or higher power or cosmic consciousness or over the ground of being, however they want to describe it, and are looking and are sort of seeking and are more interested in spiritual experience than religious belief. That's the biggest trend in american religion right now. And I guess I kind of fall into that category myself. [00:18:12] Speaker C: You're spiritual but not religious? [00:18:14] Speaker A: Yeah. I actually call myself a skeptical universalist. [00:18:18] Speaker C: Okay. [00:18:18] Speaker A: And by that I mean someone who believes that there's wisdom in all religious traditions and all major religious traditions, but there's also a lot of corruption and hypocrisy and divisiveness and grandiosity and using religion as a means of social control. That's all true, too. That's the skeptical right in the book. I try to be open to and understand mystical experiences in all faiths and also looking at how the psychedelic experience can inform that. I mean, there's so many people as you know, in the psychedelic world who were maybe interested in Buddhism or shamanism or various forms of like Hinduism who may have been brought up as Christians and Jews, and they've dropped that and they're not even aware, many people are not even aware that there's a mystical tradition within Christianity and Judaism that could inform or help people understand these experiences they were having. So I'm looking for those kind of people in this have. The first two chapters are about this interesting study at Johns Hopkins and NYU, which hasn't been published yet. Roland Griffith is leading that study to take religious professionals and give them two supervised, relatively high dose psilocybin trips. And these are people who are psychedelically naive, who've never tripped before, right. To see how it affects their, well, their personal life and their belief about the Almighty, their God, and how they practice pastoral care, how they minister to their flock. It's a really interesting idea and while it's not been published yet and it's been taking a long time, I did go out and interview three or four of the participants who were willing to talk about it and I profiled them in the book. Two of them have started organizations to promote psychedelic experimentation within Christianity and Judaism. Two different organizations. [00:20:24] Speaker C: It's interesting that many of the people in this book that you talk about are, they're religious professionals, but they reached a point in their career where it's not satisfying in some ways. And then they have their psychedelic experience and then they seek, they go to another phase where they try to merge the two. They try to develop some variation on their practice that includes psychedelics to enrich it. But then also something that comes up in this book and comes up many times is this perception that psychedelics are inferior in some ways to genuine religious experience. Like they're not genuine. [00:21:14] Speaker A: Right. [00:21:14] Speaker C: Psychedelics can open the door toward a genuine religious experience, but they in themselves are not a genuine experience. [00:21:23] Speaker A: Yeah, that idea is certainly out there that it's too easy or it's a shortcut or that it's not in a broader context of a tradition or philosophy. I mean, the famous line about that is from Houston Smith, who worked with Leary and Alpert in the early. He was a Methodist minister. He was a claimed author of comparative religion. But he'd never had a mystical experience. He'd written a lot about it in different faiths. So that's why he was working with Leary and Alpert. And he became very disenchanted fairly quickly with that whole scene in the early. But you know, his conclusion was that, yes, these experiences are authentic. The actual experience of the mystic. Mystical experiences are authentic. But the question is kind of what do you do with it? The difference between altered states and altered traits, altered states of consciousness versus altered traits of human behavior, are these experiences making you a more compassionate, aware, loving person? [00:22:30] Speaker C: Do all that outside the context of a religious community? I mean, you can take what you learned, sure, in psychedelics and change your traits, change your behavior, and it can be like almost a secular thing. It does not have to be a religion. [00:22:45] Speaker A: That's true, of course, but one of the things he was looking at, and I'm kind of asking that same question here, is more like in a community setting, is this a real authentic quote, church? [00:22:56] Speaker C: I think this notion, the perception that somehow psychedelics are a shortcut, that it's the easy path to enlightenment, I really think that it may be, but I think in some cases that's a misunderstanding. If you look at ayahuasca shamanism, if you look at what it takes to become a curate, Darrell, that's not an easy path. [00:23:24] Speaker A: No, not in that context, no. [00:23:26] Speaker C: I mean, the experience of ayahuasca is central to it, but it sure is not an easy shortcut. It requires a lot of discipline. So I think that religious people, not necessarily you, but religious people are quick to devalue the psychedelic experience and point out, well, this happened, but it wasn't in the context of faith or religious practice. Although many people have psychedelic experiences and they take up Buddhism or meditation or other practices, it leads them to. And maybe that arises from this intuition that maybe there does need to be something more. There's something be. There has to be a structure or a, I think, you know, to continue the mean. Then you see these churches or these religious type structures growing up around psychedelic experience. As Leary of Alper told us early on, it's all about set and setting and that's part of the ritual vessel that you create for these experiences. [00:24:40] Speaker A: There's obviously a lot of suspicion and distrust of psychedelic experience or drug experiences among organized religion, Christianity. I mean, going of course the cross and the sword and the colonization and the repression of that's obviously there. But it's not just about psychedelics or sacred plant medicines. I mean, organized religion is afraid of mysticism. No matter how it's generated, people get their own ideas of the divine or prophecy, and they go off into each other. That's how religions evolve. I mean, that's what Jesus was a. There's. There's a life cycle of religions, and, like, there's an expression that mysticism, that the critique from the organized religious standpoint is it begins in the mist, it has I in the center, meaning it's selfish, it's self centered, and it results in a schism, which is true. I mean, all history of religion are prophets rising up, challenging the authorities and starting their own jaguar. [00:25:42] Speaker C: The encounters with the mysterio tremendous is almost by definition, that's going to be disruptive. [00:25:50] Speaker A: Exactly. [00:25:50] Speaker C: And it does seem that many of these established religions, the last thing they want you to do is have a genuine mystical experience. This is not encouraged. [00:26:02] Speaker A: Right. [00:26:02] Speaker C: That's up to the priests, and they don't have them either. But they could believe that they do. But they don't want people to have these genuine encounters with the other. They want it to be an encounter with something that's sort of codified. [00:26:21] Speaker A: But that's changing. Dennis, the reason it's changing is the churches are in freefall, the attendance and affiliation is in freefall, and the people that are open, the religious professionals, the clergy, the rabbis, the seminary professors, who are open to this, it's not necessarily that they're trying to fill the pews again. I mean, they may be thinking about a post institutional Christianity, christian mysticism. So there's some very interesting things. It's not as simple as it used to be that they're just against it because of these reasons we've talked about. [00:26:51] Speaker C: Right. [00:26:51] Speaker A: And it's just the beginning. It's this avant garde of clergy doing this. This book is about ten years ahead of its time. It's just starting to happen. But it's happening. It's happening. [00:27:04] Speaker C: I mean, there are a number of things that are happening now that are. I mean, people wonder, or at least I have wondered, why is membership in churches? Why is it followed so precipitously? Why are people turning away from the faith? I think they're turning away from it. My own perception is they're turning away from it because it's spiritually hollowed out. [00:27:29] Speaker A: Yeah, it's lifeless. [00:27:31] Speaker C: It's lifeless. It's bereft of meaning that people long for meaning. [00:27:35] Speaker A: Yeah, that's true. I mean, it's not lifeless for everyone. A lot of the churches that we maybe consider more conservative, like the Pentecostal christian churches, they have powerful spiritual experiences and they may be interpreting that ways that we don't necessarily appreciate sometimes. So you can't generalize. I mean pentecostalism is certainly an alivening spiritual experience, right? That's true. That's not the only reason though. I think that's a factor. But a lot of the reasons that religion is declining is because it's a generational thing for one thing. But there's always been generational shifts, so that doesn't quite explain it. There's just so much divisiveness now in the culture and in the churches. So the churches are arguing about abortion. There are people on both sides in churches, right? Women, feminism, gay rights. The whole culture war thing is dividing churches like it's dividing the larger culture. So people are just, they don't want to go to church and hear that, right? So they're know, like everything from the southern Baptist to the just they're fracturing because of the concern. There's that part of it. And also the scandals, like in the catholic church, of course, the scandals over sexual abuse of children and teenagers and the COVID up by hypocritical bishops and brellites. I mean that has alienated a lot of Catholics. There's all kinds of reasons that people are. [00:29:09] Speaker C: As a Catholic, as a first born Catholic and raised Catholic, I rejected Catholicism around the age of twelve, which is, I think when many adolescents come to the. [00:29:23] Speaker A: I did too. It was presbyterianism, but it was the same thing. [00:29:26] Speaker C: Yeah, this just doesn't hold water. But even more so, I feel like the church partly very much because of the scandals and all that, as well as if you look at the history of Christianity, Christianity mainly Catholicism, and Christianity as a whole has to accept responsibility for essentially the genocide of indigenous people. I mean somewhere between 100 million and 800 million people died because of the doctrines of the Catholic Church. And when I sort of appreciated that, I felt this institution doesn't have any moral authority at all. Why shouldn't they be telling me what's good or bad? These people are? [00:30:20] Speaker A: But I think you have to differentiate between, there's the church, right, and then basically the church becomes part of the power structure, right, with the roman empire, right, adopting Christianity. So I think maybe you would have a different view of that if you went back and looked at what Jesus was actually saying, or you looked at some of the gospels of like the Gospel of Thomas, which is a very mystical expression of which part of. Right, of course, because we were talking about before it challenged back then. And what was the first century challenged the powers that being. But those teachings are still there and are available to people that want to reexamine it. So maybe part of it is, do you throw out the baby with the bathwater? I think it was really empire you're talking about with the genocide. Yeah. The church was certainly part of that. The cross and the sword were together, but it was really more the empire. The corruption of the message of religion. [00:31:21] Speaker C: Right. It was a corruption, but as a result, I think religion has lost much of its attraction for people because it's some widely mistrusted institution now, and it's lost much of its moral authority. Another issue I've had with religion in my own process of kind of rejecting it, there's always been this dynamic oppositional relationship between faith and science, between faith and knowledge. Religion insists that you must have faith. To my mind, as a person, we inclined towards science, faith is like, okay, faith is. You're being asked to believe something without any evidence. Basically, you're not supposed to question it. And yet the scientific stance is question everything. I mean, you construct theories, you construct hypotheses, you don't believe them. They don't become articles of paper, don't demolish. [00:32:24] Speaker A: Don't people do the same thing when they go down to South America and they have an ayahuasca trip and then they just latch onto all those ideas? Absolutely, they do. [00:32:36] Speaker C: And this is a mistake. This is one of the problem with the globalization of the ayahuasca. We're not indigenous people. And however much attracting the beliefs, there are round ayahuasca and the ritual and so on. I'm not a Peruvian. I'm not even a mestizo. It would be ridiculous for me to try to practice in that traditional sense. I think that there is an emergence of a neoshamanic ritual, you might say, may borrow religious elements from indigenous shamanism or even Christianity, and incorporate them into something new. [00:33:23] Speaker A: Yeah. You know more about this than I do, but it seems to me that there's such a sort of a ridiculous romanization of indigenous spirituality. Yes. And really an exaggeration of the extent that maybe sacred plant medicines played in the larger sort of native american spirituality. As you know, the shaman was the one who would take the medicines and interpret for you. It's been sort of like the way Americans took at Buddhism. Right. A serious meditation practice where in Asia the laity aren't meditating. There's this appeal of the exotic, and I think there's as much blind faith in that as there is in Christianity. [00:34:17] Speaker C: Right. I agree. But I think the beautiful thing about psychedelics is many beautiful things. But the thing is it doesn't demand belief. [00:34:30] Speaker A: It blows away belief. [00:34:32] Speaker C: It blows away belief. [00:34:33] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:34:34] Speaker C: What it demands is courage. You have to have the courage to trust yourself and the medicine and the circumstances enough to take that leap to smoke the pipe or drink the brew or whatever and then surrender to it. Let it happen after you've taken every step you can. [00:34:56] Speaker A: That actually reminds me of one of the stories in God on psychedelics is one of the research subjects at John's. Hoffman was a lutheran pastor in suburbs of Omaha, one of the most conservative areas in the country. Right. Evangelical Lutheran church in America. He took the psilocybin and he says, and in my interview with him in the book, that it blew away his belief in some ways. Right. He experienced such a larger vision of the divine. It didn't fit into this little box, this little small box that he'd made. And then he had what he called a crisis of faith after the study. How could he go back and just do the same old thing, preaching the doctrine of the lutheran church every Sunday, right. And it was something that he really struggled with, but he actually turned it around, I thought, in a kind of a beautiful way. He said now he feels, and he didn't actually tell his congregation about this. He didn't preach about it. He kept it private. Right. But in his own mind this was happening. Right. He said he felt more like a chaplain because a chaplain is someone who has to be who ministers to people of all faith or no faith. Right. [00:36:08] Speaker C: Right. [00:36:09] Speaker A: So he felt more like a chaplain, that he was more interested in hearing what his congregation thought about the divine than telling them, this is what God teaches. It made him more open minded, which I thought was a beautiful story. And he stayed in the church. He's working in the church. He's not become a psychedelic evangelist by any means. Most people in his congregation, even though he's named in the book, I don't even know he did this. Right. So to me that was really interesting. And if there's a way that psychedelics can be a source of revival or renewal in the church, that's, I think, a good example of it. [00:36:45] Speaker C: Yeah. And this may point the correct way to integrate psychedelics into these christian oriented religious practices or even Muslim or Judaism, that this chaplaincy idea is interesting because it doesn't have to be even denominational. [00:37:06] Speaker A: Right. By definition, it's not denominational. [00:37:09] Speaker C: So you can minister, like you say to people of all faiths or no faith, you meet people where they're coming from. You can use your psychedelic insights to genuinely help them and maybe assist them through psychedelics to gain insights. Even though they may not even be, they may not think of themselves as. [00:37:31] Speaker A: Religious because chaplains are helping people in the midst of the real traumas of life. I mean death, hospice work, people getting divorced or in the emergency room at the hospital or whatever it is. [00:37:46] Speaker C: So this may be the model for the modern day post psychedelic shaman priest is some kind of a chaplaincy like role. [00:37:58] Speaker A: Yeah. Like I say, a lot of the mainstream clergy who are interested in this, they're sort of looking at a post institutional church in some way and that's already happening obviously. [00:38:13] Speaker C: Moron. Can you have a church with. [00:38:15] Speaker A: Well no, it's happening. I mean the whole, the small group movement which includes house churches, small groups of people, it also includes men's groups, women's groups, Bible study groups, twelve step fellowships and yes psychedelic churches. Right. [00:38:32] Speaker C: But are these churches? [00:38:33] Speaker A: Well they are fellowships of. Yeah, it depends how you define church but yeah, they are what I said, what's called communities of discernment. [00:38:42] Speaker C: They are communities of discernment. [00:38:45] Speaker A: They're people who are getting together to explore these experiences together. And some would say that's really what the early church was or might have been. Who knows? [00:38:54] Speaker C: Right. What do you think? I'm interested, shifting the subject a little bit. Psychedelic experiences are probably more ancient in human experience than any religious experience. Would you agree with that? Well in other words, psychedelic, I think mystic or there were maybe had to create religion in order to deal. [00:39:24] Speaker A: Well I don't really subscribe to the whole. Was it your brother who came up with the stoned ape theory or the. I don't know if there's really. [00:39:33] Speaker C: I conspired on it. We'll give him credits for the bad part. [00:39:38] Speaker A: Well that's an interesting know. I don't think it's really, and the whole pagan continuity theory which Brian Murrowski writes about in his know, I don't think it's so simple. Know religions came out of know gobbling mushrooms. I don't think it's that simple. I think mystical experiences however they're generated. Right. I think one of the things that people in the book who are open to the idea of psychedelics, they think they resent this idea that all mystical experiences have to be explained or reduced to psychedelics. There are all kinds of ways that have mystical experiences that have nothing to do with psychedelics which led to the creation of communities and then churches. Doesn't have to really be. Then it all started with mushrooms or something. That could be a factor in some cases. But there's actually very little evidence of a continuous tradition of that. Yeah, I mean that there's a secret kind of tradition that's been going on. [00:40:36] Speaker C: No, I don't think that necessarily. [00:40:39] Speaker A: Speculative archaeological evidence. Oh, we found a little possible trace of ergot in this thing that shows that the original commune. [00:40:49] Speaker C: Jesus. [00:40:51] Speaker A: That's the popular idea. [00:40:53] Speaker C: That's the popular idea. But I don't think. [00:40:55] Speaker A: And it's insulting to religious christians because it reduces it all to drugs and it's mysticism. It's mysticism, however it's generated, is what inspires these early movements. [00:41:08] Speaker C: Yeah, right. And some of those mystical experiences are psychedelically they could have been. [00:41:14] Speaker A: Yeah, they could have been. [00:41:18] Speaker C: We're not really here to unpack the stone date theory, but I do think that based on what we know now about. I'm not saying that religion came out of it necessarily, but what we know now about the climactic conditions in northern Africa two to 3 million years ago, there were cattle there. We know that from fossil evidence. There were hominins there because we know that from fossil evidence. And so this triad between the cattle and the people, the people that lived there were probably eating the cattle, herding the cattle and eating mushrooms that grew out on the cattle dog. If you go to any particular, any warm tropical pasture in anywhere in the tropics where there were cattle and lots of rainfall, you'll find psilocybin commences. This is just part of the ecology. So these things were probably there. [00:42:19] Speaker A: But we don't really know. We know they were there, but we don't know that that is what led to the rise of what religion or conscious. I mean, obviously people had these experiences that were revelatory and transformative then like they do now. I mean, that's pretty obvious. But reducing religion to it is what some people take issue with. [00:42:44] Speaker C: Yeah. Religion is much more complicated. [00:42:48] Speaker A: Much more complicated involving social fact, all kinds of things. [00:42:53] Speaker C: Right. But psychedelic sacraments can be at the center of religious practices or you have to build them around. [00:43:01] Speaker A: Yeah. And that's what's so interesting and what I write about in the book is that people are starting to do that and find new ways of doing that, both within the mainstream churches and these new churches that are like the sacred garden church in Oakland, which is kind of rising up at the church of no dogma. You can believe whatever you want in this church. Basically you just have to be open to the possibility that psychedelics can open you up to divine presence however you want to define it. There's that, there's the mainstream clergy that are open into can psychedelics be a source of renewal in the churches and the synagogues? And if so, how? And then of course you've got, you know a lot about, know the syncretic movements, know Santa Daime and UDV which are their own kettle of fish. Right, right. And they're coming up here and they're all connect. I mean that's what I try to do in the book, look at surveying this vast kind of arising of some kind of a new spirituality, new communities around this. [00:44:00] Speaker C: Right. What do you see this going in say 50 years? What's the landscape going to look? [00:44:08] Speaker A: I have no idea. I really don't know. [00:44:10] Speaker C: Okay. [00:44:11] Speaker A: And I could pretend to know, but I don't. [00:44:13] Speaker C: Fair enough. What would you like? [00:44:16] Speaker A: I'm not a prophet. [00:44:18] Speaker C: What would you like to see? How would you like to see this evolve? Well, I think people are going to keep having religious think religion in whatever form will continue to be a port people. Yeah, psychedelics will be a port to people. They basically separate things. [00:44:35] Speaker A: Much what I'd like to see, but I think what is happening is this arising of new forms of community and you can call it worship, you can call it exploration that are open to the use of psychedelics and something will emerge out of this collapse and there could be another religious revival and we could be back up to the levels of church affiliation attendance that we had 50 years ago. That could happen too. That's probably most likely thing to happen. If you look at the history of Christianity, the ebbs and flows, people forget that the 1950s were an unusually religious decade. Right. [00:45:16] Speaker C: An unusually. [00:45:17] Speaker A: Yeah, that's not like religion was climbing and then in the, then the 60s had all collapsed. It's been up and down, up and. [00:45:26] Speaker C: Down in a cycle. [00:45:27] Speaker A: Yeah. And then that'll probably continue. And how psychedelics are going to get thrown into that mix, who knows? But now that we have the clinical trials and the opening to using these therapeutically and even more so the decriminalization campaigns. So it's a really interesting time. There's a lot more opportunity to do this exploration in places like where we are right now, Colorado or Oregon or all these cities around the country that have decriminalized sacred plant medicines. I mean it's a really interesting time to see what's going. [00:46:01] Speaker C: It is opening up on the local level. That's where the change is going to take place. I agree. I would like to see more of that kind of thing. The decriminalization movement has their problematic aspects to it. [00:46:22] Speaker A: Sure. [00:46:23] Speaker C: Such as peyote comes up as one of these that is over harvested. And perhaps the decriminalized people should step away from that and just say, okay. [00:46:37] Speaker A: There'S a real split in the move over that. [00:46:39] Speaker C: Yeah, there's a split over that. But I think that decriminalization creates the opportunity for a lot of these quasi ceremonial shamanic wellness whatever they're into. Sanders operating under the radar because they're illegal. If those can come out into the open and decriminalization will make that possible, they could come out into the open. So then effectively every community could have. You wouldn't even necessarily call it a psychedelic center, but it would be a spiritual community center or wellness center improvement, self improvement center, among which different practices might include taking psychedelics. But you could use what they offer without ever consuming psychedelics. You can go there more meditation or yoga, nutrition. [00:47:35] Speaker A: Yeah. Kind of like you have now with places like know. Yeah, early on in Esalen, psychedelics were part of the mix. And then for various reasons they kind of downplayed that. Yeah, they're opening at least to talking about it. But that's the model. I mean, that's what Rick Doblin is talking about with maps or retreat centers. It's already happening. It's here. [00:48:03] Speaker C: I would like to see these things sprout, know, in North America so people don't have to go to South America. [00:48:11] Speaker A: Well, it's happening in Oregon. It's happening in Colorado and California. There's a bill that's already passed the state senate. Of course it did last year too. But if they can get through the assembly and it's happening, California could be next. [00:48:25] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:48:26] Speaker A: And then it's sort of like what happened, of course, with marijuana state by state. [00:48:31] Speaker C: Right. So ultimately you think this is a healthy thing. It certainly seems healthier than the authoritarian. [00:48:39] Speaker A: I do. I mean, there's the shadow side. There's the corruption, there's the money. There's the sexual manipulation. There's the power trips. It happens in all religions, including psychedelic religions. [00:48:50] Speaker C: But yeah, not just psychedelic religions. It's not about psychedelics. It's about human nature. [00:48:57] Speaker A: Exactly. Although when people are taking some of these drugs, they are more vulnerable. Suggestibility, manipulation, in some ways easier. [00:49:08] Speaker C: Sure. [00:49:08] Speaker A: And we're already seeing some of that. [00:49:11] Speaker C: Yes. [00:49:12] Speaker A: And actually that's why it's good for it to come above ground. Because when it's underground, as we've seen in some of the scandals involving some of the underground therapy training folks. Right, right. When it's above ground, there could be some kind of accountability. That's one of the things that I think the psychedelic movement can learn from mainline churches is that they do have more accountability. There's some oversight. Of course. They have their scandals too. No, they have their scandals too, of course. But at least there's a structure. [00:49:45] Speaker C: More lip service paid to accountability. But how accountable are they? All this know, the catholic church has gone to great lakes. That's true. Supposedly there are mechanisms for accountability, but they're imperfect. I guess by their nature they have to be imperfect. Comes down to the fact that we're monkeys. We're halfway between apes and angels. [00:50:20] Speaker A: Right. [00:50:21] Speaker C: That's the thing. There are a lot of good things about the spirit line of very dark elements of human personality. Well, I hope that this book is well received. [00:50:40] Speaker A: Well, thank you. It's a small publisher, but we're trying to get the word out. God on psychedelics tripping across the rubble of old time religion. From apocryphal press, available where fine books are sold. Yes. [00:50:53] Speaker C: And we'll put it up as a podcast and maybe that'll get you ten or twelve additional sales. [00:51:02] Speaker A: I'll get you your 10%, Dennis. [00:51:05] Speaker C: Sure. Thanks a lot. That and $4 will be a good late in most places, right? [00:51:14] Speaker A: It was great talking to you. [00:51:15] Speaker C: Yeah, very good talking to you too. I wish you all success with this. [00:51:19] Speaker A: Likewise with your new academy and your podcast. And I love the title Brain Forest. [00:51:26] Speaker C: You like that? [00:51:27] Speaker A: I love it. [00:51:28] Speaker C: I can't claim it. And that came up with. Okay, yeah, you can't claim it, but. [00:51:34] Speaker A: You can ride it. [00:51:35] Speaker C: Yeah, for sure. Well, we hope the podcast guest will be successful. We're just rolling it out. The pesticides will come out. They're just. [00:51:47] Speaker A: So. Is there anything we didn't. No, I think we covered. I think we covered it. Yeah. [00:51:52] Speaker C: Okay. Very good. [00:51:54] Speaker A: Great. [00:51:54] Speaker C: Thank you. Thank you. [00:52:09] Speaker A: Thank you for listening to Brain Forest Cafe with Dennis McKenna. Find us online at McKenna Academy.