Program Notes
Guest speaker: Roland Griffiths
Today’s podcast features a talk given by Roland Griffiths, who is a professor in the departments of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science, and Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins Medicine. In addition to describing the current psychedelic studies being undertaken there, he also goes into detail about exactly what characteristics researchers consider when evaluating whether a person has actually had a spiritual experience. Among the research participant’s comments that he read, one of the most common themes was the interconnectedness of all things and beings. Also, he spoke about their research into the character of one’s personality in regards to how a psychedelic experience affected their openness to the experiences of life. Another interesting thing that his research group is investigating is the intersection of psilocybin and meditation, a discussion of which takes up a significant part of this talk.
“Psilocybin is a pharmacological tool that helps people recognize how it feels to embody the present moment. And that’s exactly the same of meditation. It’s about bringing yourself into the present moment.”
-Roland Griffiths
Johns Hopkins University Psilocybin & Spirituality
Current Psilocybin Research Projects
Previous Episode
384 - Sex, Aging, and Psychedelics
Next Episode
Similar Episodes
- 148 - Grand Rounds_ Psychedelic Psychotherapy - score: 0.80872
- 406 - Psychedelic Research Discussion Panel - score: 0.80719
- 088 - Status of Psilocybin Study at Harbor-UCLA - score: 0.77612
- 687 - Psychedelic Summit – Santa Cruz 1992 Part 2 - score: 0.76475
- 131 - A Model for Sustainable Psychedelic Therapy - score: 0.74562
- 013 - Cancer Anxiety Study Tests Psilocybin - score: 0.74468
- 100 - Psychedelics and Spirituality Conference – 1983″ (Part 1) - score: 0.73825
- 557 - Updates on Psychedelic Research - score: 0.72984
- 172 - The State of LSD in 2003″ - score: 0.72537
- PODCAST 694 – The Art of Dying - score: 0.71209
Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic
00:00:22 ►
salon.
00:00:23 ►
And with me virtually today are my co-hosts, who happen to be some fellow salonners who either made a donation to the salon or who contributed to my Pay What You Can audiobook project,
00:00:36 ►
both of which will help offset some of the monthly expenses here in the salon. Salon. And these fine souls are David V, Jesper J, Bradley M, and Frank N. And for what it’s worth,
00:00:51 ►
Frank, I don’t plan on stopping anytime soon. So thanks for the encouragement, and thank you one
00:00:58 ►
and all for your support of these podcasts. Now today we’re going to listen to another one of the Planque Norte lectures
00:01:06 ►
that were presented at last year’s Burning Man Festival, and it’s a talk that I’ve been wanting
00:01:11 ►
to hear ever since I first learned that it was scheduled. The speaker is Dr. Roland Griffiths
00:01:17 ►
of Johns Hopkins Medical, and his is a name that I’m sure you’re already familiar with.
00:01:23 ►
But for any of our fellows and honors who
00:01:25 ►
aren’t already familiar with Dr. Griffith’s work, all you have to do is conduct a quick internet
00:01:30 ►
search and you’ll soon discover that he is one of the preeminent researchers in his field.
00:01:36 ►
And as you’ll hear shortly, Dr. Griffith is, well, more or less the front man for what I think is
00:01:42 ►
one of the largest, if not the largest groups of professionals that are currently conducting research into psychedelic consciousness.
00:01:50 ►
And for our deep meditators here in the salon,
00:01:53 ►
I think that you’re going to be really interested in the research he talks about here in a bit
00:01:59 ►
that his team is conducting in regards to the intersection of meditation and psychedelics.
00:02:05 ►
So let’s travel back to last year’s Burning Man Festival and find a seat in the big Palenque
00:02:11 ►
Norte tent where Pez is about to introduce Dr. Roland Griffiths.
00:02:16 ►
So it’s my great pleasure to introduce Dr. Roland Griffiths.
00:02:21 ►
Dr. Roland Griffiths is a professor in the Department of Psychology and Neurosciences
00:02:26 ►
at the John Hopkins University School of Medicine.
00:02:29 ►
His principal research focus in both clinical and preclinical laboratories has been on the
00:02:34 ►
behavioral and subjective effects of mood-altering drugs.
00:02:37 ►
His research has been largely supported by grants from the National Institute on Health,
00:02:41 ►
and he is an author of over 300 journal articles and book chapters.
00:02:46 ►
He has been a consultant to the National Institute of Health
00:02:48 ►
and to numerous pharmaceutical companies in the development of new psychotropic drugs.
00:02:53 ►
He is also currently a member of the expert advisory panel on drug dependence
00:02:57 ►
for the World Health Organization.
00:02:59 ►
He has an interest in meditation
00:03:00 ►
and is the lead investigator of the Psilocybin Research Initiative at Johns Hopkins,
00:03:05 ►
which includes studies of psilocybin, occasioned mystical experience in healthy volunteers and cancer patients,
00:03:13 ►
and a pilot study of psilocybin-facilitated smoking cessation.
00:03:17 ►
So it’s my great pleasure to introduce Dr. Griffiths.
00:03:28 ►
Thank you very much.
00:03:37 ►
I’m just curious, how many of you were here for the researchers’ discussion earlier at 4?
00:03:39 ►
So, okay.
00:03:43 ►
So I apologize then if I cover some of the same material,
00:03:45 ►
but I think there are enough new people that I will.
00:03:50 ►
So it’s a great pleasure to be here.
00:03:57 ►
As I said earlier, this is my first visit to Burning Man. And as I was reflecting on the experience last night,
00:04:06 ►
the word that came up to me is ineffable,
00:04:10 ►
which is a word that we use to describe the primary mystical experience.
00:04:15 ►
That’s one of the qualities of that.
00:04:18 ►
And it kind of bemused me to think of all the reading I’d done,
00:04:23 ►
the survival guide, and looking at the videos and trying to imagine what it would be like to be on the playa at night
00:04:31 ►
or as the dust falls, you know.
00:04:34 ►
Well, it’s something you have to experience, right?
00:04:38 ►
So it’s pretty amazing, pretty special.
00:04:48 ►
pretty special and I’m really grateful for the blanket plenty nor Norte crew for putting together this opportunity to speak so I’m going to talk about the
00:04:55 ►
psilocybin research project at Johns Hopkins and I think what I’m going to do
00:05:01 ►
is is very briefly tell you some of the domains of what we’re doing right now,
00:05:09 ►
because we’re doing quite a few studies,
00:05:13 ►
and then try to feel into what it is we should spend time with in this 45 minutes or so that I have with you.
00:05:24 ►
So we initiated our work with,
00:05:26 ►
so I’m a psychopharmacologist,
00:05:29 ►
professor in psychiatry and neuroscience at Hopkins,
00:05:33 ►
and I’ve been doing psychopharmacology research
00:05:35 ►
for 40-plus years.
00:05:39 ►
And about 18 years ago,
00:05:42 ►
I took up a meditation practice
00:05:44 ►
that really transformed the way I looked at the world, some of the questions I was asking, raising all kinds of questions for me about the nature of spiritual unfoldment, spiritual experience.
00:06:05 ►
got me actually questioning what I was doing at Hopkins as a drug abuse pharmacologist,
00:06:11 ►
looking at yet another new molecular entity for its abuse potential.
00:06:19 ►
And until I became reacquainted with the older literature from the 60s that suggested that the classic seronegic hallucinogens could occasion remarkable experiences
00:06:26 ►
that look like primary mystical experiences.
00:06:31 ►
And that so spoke to me that we developed a protocol around assessing that
00:06:39 ►
as well as being able just to do some routine clinical pharmacology. The thought in undertaking that study was one of, for me, mostly intellectual, spiritual curiosity.
00:06:53 ►
I didn’t have an ax to grind, if you will.
00:06:59 ►
I wasn’t being led into the research through personal experience, or the personal experience that was organizational and meaningful to me
00:07:09 ►
was experience out of meditation.
00:07:12 ►
And so I felt like I was kind of a neutral party
00:07:16 ►
coming in and proposing a study with psilocybin.
00:07:22 ►
We actually initially didn’t know at all
00:07:29 ►
that we could get approval for the protocol.
00:07:31 ►
This was 1999.
00:07:34 ►
Studies of this sort hadn’t been approved,
00:07:37 ►
particularly in volunteers with no histories
00:07:41 ►
of prior exposure to classic hallucinogens.
00:07:45 ►
Those kinds of studies hadn’t been conducted for over three decades.
00:07:50 ►
And so we thought that there was a good chance that the regulatory hurdles,
00:07:56 ►
FDA and DEA and our IRB, would just be insurmountable.
00:07:59 ►
It turned out that they weren’t, and we got approved.
00:08:03 ►
It turned out that they weren’t, and we got approved.
00:08:08 ►
And we published our first study in 2006,
00:08:14 ►
and now have published a series of studies in healthy volunteers and some survey studies.
00:08:27 ►
And what was part of the topic of the researchers’ symposium is, you know, the landscape has changed remarkably for doing scientific research now with the classic hallucinogens. Our
00:08:31 ►
laboratory has generated quite a bit of safety
00:08:35 ►
data. We’ve treated in studies
00:08:39 ►
over 190 people. This is psilocybin
00:08:43 ►
over 460 sessions.
00:08:47 ►
So we’ve developed quite a bit of experience with it
00:08:50 ►
in our controlled laboratory situations,
00:08:53 ►
and there are now a number of other academic institutions
00:08:56 ►
that have come online with approved protocols.
00:08:59 ►
So the train seems to be pulling out of the station.
00:09:04 ►
We’ve shown that we can do this research safely,
00:09:07 ►
and we’re interested in exploring any number of levels scientifically
00:09:14 ►
of unpacking the phenomenology, the behavioral attitudinal changes that occur,
00:09:21 ►
as well as looking for potential therapeutic applications.
00:09:27 ►
So we’ve completed two major studies in, well, three now, two major studies in healthy volunteers
00:09:35 ►
that were organized or the most interesting findings from those studies concerned this primary mystical experience, the transcendent experience.
00:09:48 ►
And I think I’m going to talk some about that.
00:09:51 ►
We’ve done a couple of survey studies, one on transcendent experiences, one on so-called bad trips, difficult or challenging experiences.
00:10:01 ►
We’re just finishing up a study in beginning meditators, and we have a study planned
00:10:09 ►
in long-term meditators, and we think that there’s an intersection between psilocybin and meditation,
00:10:17 ►
and I’ll discuss that a little bit, and it fits very well with George Greer’s last talk. He was
00:10:23 ►
speaking on being aware of awareness.
00:10:26 ►
And it’s one of those kind of self-reflective behaviors that get to the core, I think, of what the spiritual path is and what opens up under appropriate setting conditions
00:10:47 ►
with the serotonergic hallucinogens.
00:10:51 ►
But we’re also running some other kinds of studies.
00:10:56 ►
So we do have a study in distressed cancer patients,
00:11:01 ►
psychologically distressed cancer patients who are anxious or depressed, secondary to cancer diagnosis.
00:11:08 ►
Gabby from NYU made a presentation on that yesterday,
00:11:14 ►
and Alicia Danforth in the researcher seminar talked some about that.
00:11:21 ►
So I think I’m not going to go into detail about that work, although
00:11:25 ►
that’s ongoing. Maybe I’ll just put a plug in for recruitment into that study. We also
00:11:31 ►
have a really fascinating study ongoing. It’s a pilot study looking at psilocybin for treatment
00:11:40 ►
in the addictions. And in this case, the target that we’ve picked is cigarette smoking among people who are chronic smokers and who have failed multiple
00:11:50 ►
times to quit and we have very provocative and interesting data with
00:11:56 ►
that and that plays off of observations made in the 50s and 60s, particularly with LSD and alcoholism. But I think I’m not going to speak so much
00:12:09 ►
about that. So here’s my thought, time allowing. I’m going to start with the mystical experience
00:12:20 ►
and the nature of the transcendent experience. I’ll review some of our older data, tell you about some of our ongoing studies,
00:12:29 ►
and then talk a little bit about the meditation studies that we’re doing
00:12:34 ►
that I think fit very well with that.
00:12:39 ►
And then if time allows, I’d actually like to talk about the dark side of the serotonergic hallucinogens
00:12:50 ►
and talk to you about our challenging experience survey study because there are warnings within that.
00:12:59 ►
So we’ll see how this unfolds.
00:13:01 ►
And then I’m told they’ll let me know when we have about 10 minutes for
00:13:05 ►
Q&A at the end. So with respect to the mystical experience, of course, you’re familiar with this.
00:13:17 ►
Psilocybin is a naturally occurring tryptamine alkaloid. It’s the principal psychoactive component of the psilocybe genus of mushrooms.
00:13:26 ►
Mushrooms have been used in various cultures within structured manners,
00:13:33 ►
divinatory or healing manners, for thousands of years.
00:13:41 ►
So we have anthropological support for the use of psilocybin under these
00:13:47 ►
kinds of conditions. Our initial study
00:13:51 ►
was one in which we recruited in healthy volunteers
00:13:55 ►
with no prior history of
00:13:58 ►
serotonergic hallucinogen exposure and
00:14:03 ►
offered them setting conditions that we thought would
00:14:09 ►
maximize the possibility of a transformative kind of experience. And this is really based on
00:14:15 ►
the types of setting settings that had been explored and developed in the 1950s and 60s.
00:14:23 ►
So why did we pick hallucinogen-naive individuals?
00:14:27 ►
A couple reasons.
00:14:30 ►
One is that those individuals wouldn’t bring in the bias of their prior experience.
00:14:41 ►
We arguably could actually give a placebo
00:14:45 ►
or a positive control drug there
00:14:48 ►
and they may not know
00:14:50 ►
what’s psilocybin and what’s not
00:14:54 ►
and we thought
00:14:59 ►
also it was the right way to do this
00:15:02 ►
to find out what the base rate would be of adverse experience or transcendent experience.
00:15:09 ►
If you open this up to hallucinogen-experienced individuals, you’re going to have a big selection bias.
00:15:16 ►
You’re not going to find people who had one terrible experience and never took it again.
00:15:22 ►
So it seemed like a fair way to go about it.
00:15:25 ►
And our initial study in Healthy Volunteers, well, we ran a couple of studies.
00:15:34 ►
One was using methylphenidate or Ritalin as a positive control, a high dose of Ritalin. So it’s psychoactive, it’s stimulant,
00:15:50 ►
and that was the best we could actually do.
00:15:54 ►
We thought about all kinds of other controls. I’m not going to go into the blinding procedures,
00:15:58 ►
but we bent over backwards to blind people
00:16:01 ►
to what it is that they would experience on any given session.
00:16:05 ►
They knew that they would experience psilocybin.
00:16:08 ►
They thought they could receive, I think, 13 other compounds at various doses.
00:16:13 ►
So they didn’t quite know what was going to come at them from what direction.
00:16:20 ►
And that was important in terms of controlling expectancy,
00:16:24 ►
so that you don’t have everyone going in with strong preconceived notions of what the experience should be.
00:16:31 ►
And again, that was one of the reasons we took the hallucinogen-naive people.
00:16:36 ►
So we had, and then we also subsequently ran a dose-effect study.
00:16:41 ►
So after we did a methylphenidate comparison with a high dose of
00:16:46 ►
psilocybin, I should mention that. So our high dose of psilocybin is 30 milligrams per 70 kilograms.
00:16:55 ►
And so that’s equivalent to five grams of dried mushrooms, of normal dried mushrooms. Mushrooms can vary a lot in potency, but that’s normative.
00:17:08 ►
So we’re giving a really high dose.
00:17:11 ►
People are thoroughly prepared before these sessions.
00:17:14 ►
They have eight hours of preparation time with the monitors or guides
00:17:21 ►
who are going to be with them throughout the session.
00:17:24 ►
the monitors or guides who are going to be with them throughout the session.
00:17:29 ►
And during that time, we’re reviewing life history,
00:17:40 ►
trying to understand life struggles and other aspects that could come up during a psilocybin session.
00:17:46 ►
And ideally, those are the conditions under which a volunteer could be maximally supportive.
00:17:47 ►
We have two guides or monitors present throughout the session.
00:17:55 ►
The term guide is a little bit misleading because this is not a guided experience. We have people lay prone on a couch.
00:18:07 ►
They have eye shades and headphones
00:18:10 ►
through which they’re listening to a program
00:18:12 ►
of largely classical music.
00:18:16 ►
We’re asking them to turn their attention inward
00:18:19 ►
on their inner experience.
00:18:21 ►
So this is an inward-bound experience.
00:18:24 ►
experience. So this is an inward bound experience.
00:18:25 ►
And the bottom line from this, of course, we got
00:18:32 ►
the expected psilocybin effects. The second study was
00:18:36 ►
a dose effect study where we looked at a series of graded doses
00:18:40 ►
of psilocybin and placebo. And we
00:18:43 ►
manipulated order of dosing to get some information about whether
00:18:48 ►
there’s some special risk to exposing people to a high dose for the first session.
00:18:56 ►
And, you know, we got the expected effects of serotonergic hallucinogens.
00:19:00 ►
So there were perceptual changes, auditory changes, visual changes, emotional reactivity, some thinking changes. in terms of the implications of where this research could go, is that the majority of these volunteers
00:19:27 ►
had what we would classify as a full-blown primary mystical experience.
00:19:34 ►
Now, what’s that?
00:19:37 ►
It sounds unlikely that we could measure that, doesn’t it?
00:19:41 ►
But it turns out that the folks in the psychology of religion
00:19:46 ►
have been working on this problem for decades. And William James, back just around 1900,
00:19:56 ►
in Varieties of Religious Experience, actually started to describe the elements of the primary
00:20:02 ►
mystical experience. And then these have been developed,
00:20:07 ►
and there have been psychometric measures that have been developed
00:20:10 ►
over the years to assess these kinds of effects.
00:20:16 ►
And so we were able to use some validated psychometric instruments,
00:20:21 ►
as well as a couple of instruments that Walter Pankey had used for the Good Friday
00:20:26 ►
experiment back in the early 60s in which
00:20:29 ►
he gave psilocybin to seminary students.
00:20:33 ►
And the
00:20:34 ►
interesting piece of this was that
00:20:38 ►
the majority of these hallucinogen
00:20:41 ►
naive volunteers had full-blown
00:20:44 ►
mystical experiences
00:20:46 ►
as rated by questionnaires immediately after the experience.
00:20:53 ►
So that was interesting.
00:20:55 ►
But even more interesting than that is that on follow-up,
00:21:00 ►
these experiences continue to be rated as extraordinarily salient, personally meaningful, and spiritually significant.
00:21:10 ►
And so when we initiated these studies, it wouldn’t have occurred to me to develop a scale
00:21:20 ►
that would rate the meaningfulness of this experience in terms of some of the most meaningful of your life.
00:21:28 ►
But in fact, those are the reports that we started getting back from people.
00:21:32 ►
I’d talk to people after sessions and at follow-up.
00:21:36 ►
They’d say, wow, that was really amazing.
00:21:40 ►
That was one of the most meaningful experiences of my life.
00:21:43 ►
And I’d say, well well so what does that mean
00:21:46 ►
thinking maybe they haven’t had very many
00:21:48 ►
interesting life experiences
00:21:50 ►
but yeah they’d say no
00:21:54 ►
this is like the birth of my first born child
00:21:58 ►
or the death of my father
00:22:01 ►
who just recently passed away
00:22:02 ►
it’s a very seminal experience
00:22:06 ►
that I will never forget.
00:22:10 ►
So that was
00:22:14 ►
really exciting.
00:22:19 ►
That kind of effect can occur
00:22:22 ►
reliably, replicably in a dose-dependent fashion,
00:22:30 ►
in people with no history of hallucinogen exposure.
00:22:32 ►
And many of our initial volunteers really hadn’t even read very much of the literature on psilocybin,
00:22:41 ►
so they wouldn’t have even thought to know very deeply about these experiences,
00:22:47 ►
and yet they were ticking off all the qualities of the primary mystical experience.
00:22:53 ►
So what are those?
00:22:56 ►
So the primary mystical experience is defined by endorsement of six factors. So one is unity.
00:23:07 ►
It’s a core feature,
00:23:08 ►
and it’s the interconnectedness of all people,
00:23:12 ►
of all things,
00:23:13 ►
sometimes experienced as pure consciousness
00:23:17 ►
or pure awareness.
00:23:19 ►
It can be either extrovertive or introvertive,
00:23:22 ►
but there’s a sense of the connectedness of everything.
00:23:25 ►
We’re all in this together, right? There’s a sense of sacredness or reverence that
00:23:32 ►
accompanies that experience. So this is a deeply moving experience that even people who don’t have a religious or strongly spiritual orientation
00:23:47 ►
will use the word spiritual or sacred or an experience deserving reverence.
00:23:57 ►
There’s a noetic quality to the experience,
00:24:00 ►
and that is the experience is said to be more real and felt to be more real and more true than everyday waking consciousness.
00:24:11 ►
So there’s an authority that comes through this experience that says this is important.
00:24:19 ►
And I’m going to remember this and I’m going to remember this, and I’m going to remember this going forward. And I think it’s that quality, perhaps, that’s so important to the longevity of this experience.
00:24:30 ►
I mean, we’ve gone out past a year in terms of follow-up,
00:24:35 ►
and the recall and the attributions in terms of positive changes in mood and behavior and attitudes is absolutely stable.
00:24:49 ►
Deeply felt positive mood accompanies this experience,
00:24:54 ►
very often experienced as a heart opening, love, could be gentleness, gratitude.
00:25:02 ►
Transcendence of time and space.
00:25:04 ►
So time collapses into the present moment. gratitude, transcendence of time and space.
00:25:09 ►
So time collapses into the present moment.
00:25:13 ►
The past and the future are irrelevant.
00:25:15 ►
It’s all about what’s happening right now.
00:25:20 ►
And space becomes unbelievably vast, endless.
00:25:28 ►
And then finally there’s this paradoxicality and inaffability this sense so so at this point i’ve gone into the session room uh hundreds and hundreds of times to sit down
00:25:35 ►
with people after a session and so the one of the probe questions that i’ll always ask, you know, as, you know, well, so how was it? And it’s not infrequent
00:25:47 ►
that people will just shake their head and they say, you know, I can’t possibly even tell you.
00:25:55 ►
It’s indescribable. And I’m thinking to myself, okay, that’s check mark one,
00:25:59 ►
in affability. Let’s see where it goes from there.
00:26:03 ►
in affability. Let’s see where it goes from there.
00:26:15 ►
So, as I said, the remarkable features are in these studies, about 70% of people were saying that these experiences are among the most personally meaningful and spiritually significant
00:26:20 ►
of their lives. We had recruited in our initial cohort people who had interest
00:26:27 ►
in spirituality and even among that cohort that was prime for spirituality, 30% said
00:26:34 ►
it was the single most spiritually significant experience of their life. Volunteers are making
00:26:42 ►
all kinds of attributions about changes in attitudes, moods, and behavior.
00:26:47 ►
Now I’m going way past the session.
00:26:50 ►
I’m going to two months or to 14-month follow-up.
00:26:55 ►
And people are endorsing, like, attitudinal changes, like having more personal integration.
00:27:01 ►
There’s more meaning, enthusiasm, patience, optimism, authenticity,
00:27:05 ►
self-confidence, mood changes, increased love, open-heartedness, joy, inner peace,
00:27:12 ►
social effects, more sensitive or perceptive, compassionate, tolerant,
00:27:17 ►
increased positive relationship, increased need for service to others.
00:27:23 ►
increased need for service to others.
00:27:28 ►
So these are powerful effects.
00:27:30 ►
They occur dose-dependently.
00:27:34 ►
They occur under conditions where people are as deeply blinded to drug condition as we can do.
00:27:37 ►
So I’m, as a psychopharmacologist,
00:27:40 ►
absolutely convinced about their reliability,
00:27:43 ►
and that’s what we have.
00:27:45 ►
We know we can occasion these kinds of experiences.
00:27:52 ►
In their own words, so we had them…
00:27:56 ►
Oh, the nature of these experiences have to do…
00:28:01 ►
Let’s see.
00:28:02 ►
The meaningfulness and spiritual significance
00:28:05 ►
attributed to the experience at over a year later
00:28:10 ►
correlated really highly with the mystical experience score
00:28:16 ►
immediately after the session.
00:28:19 ►
So the scale that these people in religious,
00:28:24 ►
in psychology of religion developed,
00:28:27 ►
and that scale incidentally had never been given to people after a classic hallucinogen,
00:28:34 ►
but that scale is picking up something that predicts what happens 14 months later.
00:28:40 ►
But it’s that score on that scale that predicts how spiritually significant they’ll say it was at 14 months.
00:28:49 ►
It’s not the magnitude of effect.
00:28:51 ►
So independently of the magnitude of psilocybin effect, the intensity of effect, that’s not it.
00:28:58 ►
There’s almost a zero correlation.
00:29:00 ►
So it’s this constellation of these factors that define the mystical experience.
00:29:09 ►
We also interviewed families, friends, coworkers, and did telephone interviews with them,
00:29:20 ►
probing many of these same dimensions that people were claiming to have made changes on.
00:29:25 ►
And that essentially validated the volunteers’ kinds of claims.
00:29:32 ►
So the family member, friends, coworkers were also saying that they were making changes along the lines that they said they were.
00:29:40 ►
They’re more open, relaxed, sensitive, less depressed.
00:29:46 ►
I’m just going to read just a couple of quotes. This is just out of the 14-month follow-up they’re asked.
00:29:53 ►
So what was meaningful about this experience? So here’s one volunteer who says, the part that
00:30:00 ►
continues to stick out for me was the knowing, seeing, and experience
00:30:05 ►
with every sense and fiber of my being
00:30:08 ►
that all things are connected.
00:30:11 ►
Here’s another one.
00:30:13 ►
The sense that all is one.
00:30:14 ►
I experience the essence of the universe,
00:30:17 ►
the knowing that God asks nothing of us
00:30:19 ►
except to receive love.
00:30:24 ►
And some of these descriptions
00:30:27 ►
were theistic.
00:30:29 ►
Some people would put their experience
00:30:32 ►
in terms of encountering God
00:30:36 ►
or God of their understanding.
00:30:38 ►
Other descriptions are totally non-theistic.
00:30:42 ►
And there are some people
00:30:43 ►
who will not endorse the word spiritual in any sense to
00:30:53 ►
describe the experience, but they’ll yet say it’s among the most meaningful experiences of their
00:30:58 ►
lives. I think this is partly semantics, and it really deserves unpacking.
00:31:09 ►
So one of the things that we did after
00:31:11 ►
running the first two studies
00:31:15 ►
is we did
00:31:18 ►
an analysis of
00:31:20 ►
personality.
00:31:24 ►
We had done some pre-post personality inventories,
00:31:29 ►
and the question was,
00:31:31 ►
does psilocybin change personality?
00:31:35 ►
Now, this is an interesting question
00:31:38 ►
for a personality psychologist,
00:31:40 ►
because personality is really thought to be
00:31:43 ►
a very stable characteristic of individuals.
00:31:47 ►
And by the time you reach early 20s, personality doesn’t change.
00:31:53 ►
There are goal standards for assessment of personality.
00:31:58 ►
They’re measured in five different factors, neuroticism, extroversion, agreeableness, openness, and conscientiousness.
00:32:07 ►
Everyone has their own profile, and the thought is that profile is pretty stable across the lifetime.
00:32:14 ►
So what does psilocybin do to personality? Well, the interesting thing is it does something,
00:32:20 ►
and it’s in those individuals who had a full mystical experience.
00:32:26 ►
And what we’re seeing there is an increase in the personality domain of openness.
00:32:32 ►
So that’s robust.
00:32:35 ►
And it’s unexpected insofar as I don’t know of any single manipulation that’s been done in the area of personality, particularly something that occurs over a six-hour period
00:32:47 ►
that changes personality later.
00:32:52 ►
And openness is interesting because it encompasses
00:32:56 ►
aesthetic appreciation and sensitivity, imagination, and fantasy,
00:33:01 ►
as well as a broad-minded tolerance of other viewpoints and values.
00:33:06 ►
Kind of sounds like Burning Man, doesn’t it?
00:33:11 ►
Openness is fundamental to creativity,
00:33:15 ►
and it predicts creativity in a wide range of domains,
00:33:18 ►
in the arts, in the sciences, as well as the humanities.
00:33:22 ►
the sciences as well as the humanities.
00:33:38 ►
So we went on and did a survey study asking people to complete a very detailed survey about the most meaningful experience that they ever had on psilocybin.
00:33:43 ►
And we, I think in this first study, we had about 1,600 people.
00:33:49 ►
And that study essentially validated or confirmed the kinds of observations we were seeing in
00:33:59 ►
the laboratory, that these experiences, and remember, we’re selecting this.
00:34:04 ►
We’re asking people to complete the questionnaire
00:34:06 ►
and the set of questions on the basis of a deeply meaningful experience
00:34:11 ►
after taking psilocybin.
00:34:14 ►
But about 50% of the people reported that it was in the top five
00:34:19 ►
or single most spiritually significant experience of their life.
00:34:23 ►
single most spiritually significant experience of their life.
00:34:32 ►
So that compares, it’s just slightly lower than what we get in the laboratory.
00:34:36 ►
In the laboratory, we get 60% to 70% saying that.
00:34:44 ►
But remember, these people are selecting the single most spiritually significant,
00:34:46 ►
or the single most meaningful experience.
00:34:54 ►
Top 60% said it was in the top five most spiritually significant experiences.
00:35:04 ►
I’m getting a timing flash going off in the back here, so I’m going to collapse some of these comments.
00:35:08 ►
One of the things that we did with the survey data that’s really useful, and it’s the way science proceeds, is when you have 1,600 people,
00:35:13 ►
then you can do some psychometric studies.
00:35:17 ►
And so we did a factor analysis of the mystical experience
00:35:23 ►
and have found that the mystical experience,
00:35:27 ►
at least after psilocybin,
00:35:29 ►
falls into four main factors.
00:35:32 ►
But there’s the main factor of unity,
00:35:35 ►
no added quality, sacredness,
00:35:37 ►
and then there’s a positive mood factor,
00:35:40 ►
transcendence of time and space factor,
00:35:42 ►
and an ineffability factor.
00:35:42 ►
transcendence of time and space factor and an ineffability factor.
00:35:46 ►
So I want to talk a little bit
00:35:49 ►
about the meditation studies.
00:35:53 ►
They’re near and dear to my heart
00:35:55 ►
because that’s the path
00:35:56 ►
into which I got involved in this research.
00:36:00 ►
So we have just recently completed
00:36:04 ►
one study in 75 people who initiated a meditation practice.
00:36:10 ►
They had opportunity for one or two psilocybin experiences,
00:36:16 ►
and we’re looking at that intersection between psilocybin and meditation. So why is it that we’re interested in this intersection?
00:36:33 ►
So there are a couple of observations from the literature that are provocative.
00:36:43 ►
Both a study with psilocybin and a study of meditation
00:36:47 ►
show that both of those manipulations
00:36:50 ►
decrease something called activity in the default mode network
00:36:55 ►
and these are brain areas
00:36:58 ►
that are responsible for self-referential processing
00:37:03 ►
it’s kind of self-reflective processing.
00:37:07 ►
And so meditation can shut that down.
00:37:11 ►
Psilocybin apparently can shut that down.
00:37:13 ►
And that’s what George Greer, who was talking immediately before me,
00:37:17 ►
was emphasizing.
00:37:19 ►
This is all about be here now.
00:37:21 ►
And so they seem to be convergent in that effect.
00:37:27 ►
We think of psilocybin and meditation as actually being complementary processes. So if you think
00:37:34 ►
about it, psilocybin is a pharmacological tool that helps people recognize how it feels to embody the present moment.
00:37:47 ►
And that’s exactly the same of meditation.
00:37:50 ►
It’s about bringing yourself into the present moment.
00:37:55 ►
Psilocybin allows people to dispassionately observe and let go of pain, fear, and discomfort
00:38:02 ►
if given under supportive setting conditions.
00:38:07 ►
That’s exactly what meditation is about.
00:38:09 ►
If you’ve ever done a meditation retreat,
00:38:13 ►
you run into plenty of fear, pain, and discomfort.
00:38:20 ►
Psilocybin transforms a conventional sense of self,
00:38:24 ►
that is, the ego.
00:38:27 ►
A strong message that comes out of a psilocybin experience
00:38:31 ►
is that you are not your mind.
00:38:34 ►
And that’s exactly what happens with meditation.
00:38:37 ►
All the Buddhist meditations are aimed at deconstructing self.
00:38:43 ►
are aimed at deconstructing self.
00:38:48 ►
Psilocybin helps people recognize that mind is capable of revealing knowledge
00:38:52 ►
not readily accessible in everyday waking consciousness.
00:38:55 ►
There’s a lot more going on here
00:38:58 ►
than normal waking consciousness gives us a clue of. And that’s identically true of meditation.
00:39:13 ►
And finally, psilocybin can give you this authoritative sense
00:39:17 ►
of the interconnectedness of all people and all things.
00:39:20 ►
And again, that’s what comes out of deep meditation experiences.
00:39:28 ►
We’re following this up, the novice meditation study, with a study in long-term meditators.
00:39:36 ►
And I think this is particularly interesting.
00:39:40 ►
What our goal is to recruit people with decades of experience of intense meditation practice,
00:39:49 ►
ideally daily meditation experience, lots of retreat experience, deep contemplative insights and practice.
00:40:13 ►
And then the question for us and for them, actually, is when we drop psilocybin into their worldview, how do they interpret this?
00:40:26 ►
What all the language and the contemplation that they’ve developed over decades and decades of practice, you know, can that give us unique insights into the nature of mind?
00:40:30 ►
And so it’s a really interesting, exciting study.
00:40:33 ►
We’re combining it with brain imaging.
00:40:45 ►
So we’re going to be doing pre-post brain imaging to see if we can, one, document the continuance of some of these kind of experiences,
00:40:49 ►
what brain networks are altered.
00:40:56 ►
And then two, we’re going to give a lower dose of psilocybin to people in the scanner, and that will be interesting.
00:41:01 ►
But these are long-term meditators,
00:41:04 ►
and have them then
00:41:07 ►
do a series of meditations
00:41:09 ►
and right now we’re thinking about Buddhist meditators
00:41:13 ►
who are very familiar with breath meditation
00:41:16 ►
with loving kindness and with an open awareness
00:41:19 ►
meditation and so the question there
00:41:22 ►
is so what the heck happens when you drop to the brain
00:41:26 ►
when you drop psilocybin in to people
00:41:29 ►
with those kinds of histories
00:41:31 ►
let’s see
00:41:35 ►
so I got the five minute flash
00:41:37 ►
about five minutes ago
00:41:39 ►
so what that means is I won’t proceed to tell you
00:41:44 ►
about the bad trip survey,
00:41:47 ►
other than I guess I want to just give the bottom line.
00:41:52 ►
You know, these compounds deserve a lot of respect,
00:41:57 ►
and we screen participants very tightly.
00:42:02 ►
We’re in a major medical institution.
00:42:04 ►
It’s going to be risk-averse,
00:42:05 ►
and if this research is going to go forward, you know, we’ve really got to minimize the
00:42:11 ►
opportunity for difficult experiences. And we’ve done that, and we’ve done that successfully.
00:42:18 ►
But the adverse or the bad trip survey, if you’ll allow me to, I’ll call it the challenging experience
00:42:27 ►
survey, did reveal that there, you know, two to three percent of people have experiences that are
00:42:37 ►
persisting years later that they’ve sought out psychiatric support for and that they attribute the adverse changes in mental state
00:42:52 ►
to a single psilocybin experience.
00:42:56 ►
So, you know, we’re just beginning to understand
00:42:59 ►
the nature of how psilocybin affects consciousness. Consciousness is such a mystery, certainly to neuroscience.
00:43:13 ►
And we just have a kindergarten level of understanding about really what’s going on there.
00:43:23 ►
So it’s with a lot of humility
00:43:25 ►
that we need to undertake these studies.
00:43:28 ►
But for me, the most moving piece of it
00:43:33 ►
is this awakening,
00:43:37 ►
sometimes called the mystical experience,
00:43:40 ►
but it’s the self-awareness
00:43:42 ►
and the sense that we’re all in this together.
00:43:46 ►
We’re connected in a matrix.
00:43:48 ►
However you want to language that or experience that religiously or materially
00:43:56 ►
or from an environmental standpoint, but we are in this together,
00:44:01 ►
and there’s something deeply precious about that recognition
00:44:05 ►
and it’s going to be very important
00:44:09 ►
to the survival of humankind
00:44:11 ►
that we get that message
00:44:14 ►
and then move forward
00:44:19 ►
with the implications wisely
00:44:21 ►
so thank you.
00:44:41 ►
We have a few minutes for questions here.
00:44:45 ►
Hello, in the laboratory setting, did you find any adverse effects?
00:44:47 ►
Say it again. In the laboratory
00:44:49 ►
setting, did you find any adverse effects?
00:44:51 ►
Thank you for asking that.
00:44:54 ►
So, yes, we did.
00:44:56 ►
And that’s important and
00:44:57 ►
instructive. So in spite of the fact that
00:44:59 ►
we screen people
00:45:01 ►
very, very carefully
00:45:03 ►
and we have all this preparation,
00:45:08 ►
kind of optimizing,
00:45:09 ►
or we think we’re optimizing set and setting.
00:45:12 ►
33% of our volunteers reported
00:45:16 ►
that at least some portion of the experience
00:45:20 ►
was one of extreme fear or anxiety.
00:45:24 ►
So all this preparation doesn’t negate that as a possibility.
00:45:29 ►
Now what I can also say about the laboratory studies
00:45:31 ►
is that we have never had someone within the healthy volunteer population
00:45:38 ►
who has reported that they have been adversely affected by the psilocybin session.
00:45:44 ►
There are some people who say it was horrific.
00:45:47 ►
They wouldn’t want to do it again.
00:45:49 ►
But most of them value the experience.
00:45:52 ►
Not all of them.
00:45:53 ►
Some say, not for me, thanks.
00:45:57 ►
But no one is saying that they’re harmed.
00:45:59 ►
And I think that’s key and that’s important so we can do this.
00:46:03 ►
But even all the set and setting conditions that we can bring to bear,
00:46:08 ►
a good 30% will have difficult
00:46:12 ►
experiences. Some of those are really short-lived.
00:46:16 ►
It could be 30 seconds of panic.
00:46:20 ►
The ones, of course, that are most difficult are the
00:46:28 ►
adverse experiences that stretch over hours.
00:46:35 ►
And that’s actually one of the things that this adverse experience or the challenging experience survey showed. It’s the long, challenging experiences that are least likely to be associated with meaning and persisting spiritual significance.
00:46:48 ►
In some occasions, people will have experiences of deep fear, short though,
00:46:56 ►
and that actually plays into the value of the experience.
00:47:00 ►
So that’s the objection to using the term bad trip because some of the
00:47:05 ►
bad trips turn out to be the most interesting portals to transcendence or to recognizing
00:47:12 ►
how the ego can clamp down and control the experience and it’s about letting go
00:47:19 ►
um my question is this how did you arrive at that dose level,
00:47:27 ►
and do you believe if the dose level was smaller
00:47:30 ►
that you wouldn’t have the 2% to 3% of the bad trips?
00:47:36 ►
And how did you determine that level,
00:47:38 ►
and have you ever done studies with more higher dose or lower dose?
00:47:43 ►
So we’ve done a dose effect study. We’ve given
00:47:46 ►
5, 10, 20, and 30 milligrams per 70
00:47:51 ►
kilogram. And we get nice graded dose effects.
00:47:55 ►
It turns out that the 20 milligram dose
00:47:58 ►
is substantially less likely to be associated with
00:48:04 ►
challenging experiences.
00:48:07 ►
And so there’s a steep increase of the slope, the dose-effect curve.
00:48:14 ►
This is across volunteers from, like, 20 to 30 milligrams.
00:48:22 ►
20 to 30 milligrams.
00:48:30 ►
The way we picked that dose, maybe principally,
00:48:35 ►
on the basis that that’s the dose that was given in the Good Friday experiment.
00:48:37 ►
They gave a flat 30 milligrams.
00:48:41 ►
We were giving 30 milligrams per 70 kilograms,
00:48:45 ►
which 70 kilograms is about 154 pounds.
00:48:54 ►
So a 200-pound person is going to get considerably higher absolute dose of psilocybin.
00:49:01 ►
There’s a lot of individual variability in terms of sensitivity to psilocybin.
00:49:05 ►
And so we need to figure that out and whether their genetic determinants of that is going to be important and interesting. And it’s going to be important
00:49:10 ►
to working out, uh, clinical studies and, and figuring out optimal dosing. So there are,
00:49:17 ►
for some people, 30 milligrams is, you know, it’s a, it’s definitely a big experience, but it’s not, you know, it’s not an on-your-floor experience.
00:49:28 ►
And for some people, 20 milligrams is plenty high.
00:49:35 ►
So we think the sweet spot in terms of the clinical trials is someplace between 20 and 30 milligrams.
00:49:43 ►
is someplace between 20 and 30 milligrams.
00:49:50 ►
There’s some preliminary data that Michael Bogenschutz has talked about or has developed in alcoholics that suggest that there may be subgroups
00:49:57 ►
that are significantly less sensitive to psilocybin,
00:50:01 ►
and so there may be some value in going up higher, say to 40 milligrams
00:50:08 ►
per 70 kilogram. But this, you know, we’re just beginning this, and there’s so much to be worked
00:50:12 ►
out. So sort of a twofold question. First of all, how did you verify that those people were
00:50:20 ►
hallucinogenically inexperienced? Like, are there tests for all the major hallucinogens?
00:50:22 ►
were hallucinogenically inexperienced?
00:50:24 ►
Like, are there tests for all the major hallucinogens?
00:50:29 ►
And second of all, do you think there was a selection bias in the people that only a certain type of person will be willing to come in and say,
00:50:32 ►
hey, I’m going to take like 30 milligrams of, I’m sorry,
00:50:36 ►
I think it’s milligrams of psilocybin.
00:50:38 ►
Like, probably that person is going to expect to have a good time from it.
00:50:43 ►
Let’s see.
00:50:44 ►
So there’s no biochemical test.
00:50:46 ►
We do extensive interviews and clinical observations with them
00:50:52 ►
and get to know these people really well.
00:50:55 ►
I’m confident that the majority of our people were hallucinogen-naive.
00:51:00 ►
There may have been one or two that had some experience
00:51:04 ►
that didn’t come out and interview.
00:51:07 ►
But clinically, it’s pretty persuasive.
00:51:09 ►
But all we can do is ask them.
00:51:14 ►
Your second question was?
00:51:15 ►
Like, do you think that there was some selection bias?
00:51:18 ►
Selection bias, right.
00:51:19 ►
Of course.
00:51:20 ►
I mean, you know, someone has to be interested and willing to undertake the extensive preparation
00:51:29 ►
and make the large commitment of time.
00:51:35 ►
We didn’t pay volunteers to do this.
00:51:38 ►
So in some sense, we were already picking people who were really open.
00:51:43 ►
As a matter of fact, that makes the openness personality domain even more interesting
00:51:48 ►
because these people tended to be high on openness.
00:51:52 ►
In our study in cigarette smokers and in our cancer study,
00:51:57 ►
we’re not picking people with those kinds of biases.
00:52:01 ►
They still have to be open to having a psilocybin session, but
00:52:05 ►
we’re not, we’re not, we’re finding a much broader range of demographics for that.
00:52:13 ►
You know, before the next question, it just occurred to me, and I’m embarrassed that I
00:52:17 ►
really didn’t make the comment that I’m just a figurehead for an incredibly talented research team at Hopkins.
00:52:27 ►
And we have, so, you know, on that team, we have Matt Johnson, Bill Richards.
00:52:38 ►
Bill did research with these drugs back in the 1960s.
00:52:43 ►
research with these drugs back in the 1960s.
00:52:48 ►
Catherine McLean, Mary Casamano, Brian Richards,
00:52:52 ►
Albert Garcia-Romeo, Maggie Kleindienst,
00:52:55 ►
Bob Jesse, Fred Barrett,
00:53:00 ►
and a whole bunch of people who are providing auxiliary support. But these
00:53:03 ►
are professional-level people
00:53:05 ►
who are making really important contributions,
00:53:09 ►
and it’s definitely a team effort,
00:53:12 ►
and I just want to make sure that is said clearly.
00:53:18 ►
Good question.
00:53:19 ►
So in our studies, we exclude people
00:53:24 ►
with either immediate family history or first-degree relative of psychotic disorder
00:53:36 ►
because we’re going to be risk-averse, but we’re concerned about precipitating and enduring psychiatric or psychotic process.
00:53:47 ►
You know, the literature on that is just simply not clear.
00:53:51 ►
You know, back in the 1960s, there are lots of case reports of kids,
00:53:57 ►
usually, you know, teenagers, early 20s, taking LSD
00:54:02 ►
and subsequently being diagnosed with schizophrenia.
00:54:06 ►
That’s the age range under which schizophrenia is going to emerge.
00:54:15 ►
And so whether or not the LSD precipitated that illness,
00:54:20 ►
whether they had preexistingexisting conditions we don’t know
00:54:25 ►
but that would be something that you wouldn’t want to wish on anyone
00:54:29 ►
because schizophrenia
00:54:31 ►
lifetime psychotic illness is terrible
00:54:35 ►
just terrible
00:54:36 ►
I don’t know
00:54:39 ►
what I’d say is if they were coming into our study
00:54:43 ►
we would exclude them is if they were coming into our study, we would exclude them.
00:54:46 ►
And if they were 60 years old, they’re going to be beyond the likelihood of any risk
00:54:59 ►
because schizophrenia would have shown up.
00:55:01 ►
And there the risk would be very small
00:55:05 ►
and here will be our last question one more oh so one last question I guess so
00:55:18 ►
my question is you spoke about preparing the participants eight hours.
00:55:28 ►
What was the range of the time length of the experience itself?
00:55:35 ►
And was there any typical pattern to actual the content of the experience that they went through?
00:55:54 ►
Was there a pattern that with this large number of participants you could predict what people would be experiencing. Yes, so the onset on average is, when you do curves across people, looks relatively smooth.
00:56:10 ►
We’re seeing onset at about 30 minutes, peak effects at 2 to 3 hours, tapering off over four to five hours. Most people at six to eight hours are back to pretty well normative levels.
00:56:15 ►
But there’s a lot of individual differences there.
00:56:21 ►
So peak effects for some people are maximal before an hour.
00:56:27 ►
Other people have seen peak effects as late as five hours.
00:56:37 ►
And we don’t understand that. We control as best we can for having them have an empty stomach.
00:56:44 ►
We’re giving pharmaceutical grade psilocybin. They’re drinking a set amount of water. They’re coming in semi-fasted.
00:56:46 ►
So there are individual differences there that we don’t understand.
00:56:50 ►
With respect to the phenomenology,
00:56:53 ►
no, there’s no characteristic pattern of that phenomenology.
00:57:00 ►
I think one of the most interesting things to me
00:57:02 ►
was looking at these fear responses,
00:57:06 ►
so experiences of extreme fear emerging in the session.
00:57:10 ►
And that, for some people, can be at 30 minutes.
00:57:16 ►
They have an extreme experience of fear, and it’s back down, and they won’t have fear again.
00:57:22 ►
Other people can end up having
00:57:25 ►
transcendent experiences for the first couple of hours and then all of a sudden
00:57:29 ►
move into a deeply fearful and collapsed state and some people can spike multiple
00:57:36 ►
times. So it really is important that the sitters and guides are alert and present and attentive throughout the session.
00:57:47 ►
Thank you so much, Roland.
00:57:51 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one
00:57:56 ►
thought at a time.
00:57:59 ►
I really wish that Myron Stolaroff was still alive so that I could talk with him about the research
00:58:05 ►
Dr. Griffiths just spoke about in regards to the intersection of deep meditation and
00:58:11 ►
a state of psychedelic consciousness.
00:58:13 ►
You see, Myron was very dedicated to daily meditation and would even attend multi-week
00:58:19 ►
meditation retreats.
00:58:21 ►
And as you know, Myron was also one of the first and primary psychedelic researchers in
00:58:26 ►
the U.S. During some of my conversations with Myron, we would talk about the possibility of
00:58:33 ►
achieving a deep psychedelic state on the natch, without a chemical boost that is, and doing so
00:58:40 ►
primarily through meditation. In fact, that was actually a goal of Myron’s.
00:58:45 ►
However, he also told me that while there were a few instances
00:58:49 ►
when he thought that he was getting close,
00:58:52 ►
the fact is that he never actually made it over the psychedelic threshold on the natch.
00:58:57 ►
So it’ll be interesting to see what the Johns Hopkins research will tell us,
00:59:02 ►
particularly since they’re including brain imaging in the protocol.
00:59:06 ►
That’s really fascinating.
00:59:08 ►
Also, one of the studies that Roland just mentioned
00:59:12 ►
was the so-called bad trip survey.
00:59:15 ►
If you’ve been with us here in the salon for a while,
00:59:17 ►
you’ll remember me talking about that survey
00:59:20 ►
and encouraging any salonner who had information to add to take the survey.
00:59:25 ►
In fact, I did so myself, and maybe you did so too.
00:59:28 ►
If so, thank you very much.
00:59:31 ►
Also, I think that it’s important to think about what Dr. Griffiths said about
00:59:35 ►
perhaps instead of calling them bad trips, we should be calling them challenging or difficult trips.
00:59:42 ►
I know from personal experience, both of my own and of
00:59:46 ►
some friends of mine, that whenever these really difficult experiences do occur,
00:59:51 ►
particularly in an ayahuasca circle, well, ultimately, these experiences end up becoming
00:59:58 ►
among the most valuable in the lessons and insights that they provide. Go figure, huh?
01:00:04 ►
Well, I’ve got a couple of other announcements about podcasts that I’ve been interviewed on recently,
01:00:10 ►
along with a couple of interesting little news items,
01:00:13 ►
but the simple fact of the matter is that I’m just kind of worn out today,
01:00:17 ►
so I’ll save those until next time.
01:00:21 ►
So for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:00:26 ►
Be well well my friends