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022 - Psycho-Tech with Dr. Roberts

Jul 31, 2017, 62 min read

Program Notes

Guest speaker: Dr. Thomas B. Roberts

http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/1594774595Date this lecture was recorded: 2017

Dr. Thomas Roberts is one of the most forward thinking people in the field of psychedelics. This interview covers his experiences leading up to the idea of psycho-technologies. His book, “The Psychedelic Future of the Mind: How Entheogens Are Enhancing Cognition, Boosting Intelligence, and Raising Values” is a valuable addition to any explorer’s bookshelf and his approach to psychedelic scholarship envisions the future of creative thinking fostered by these old tools.

Also see:
Home Page of Dr. Thomas B. Roberts

Multidisciplinary Approaches to Psychedelic Scholarship by Thomas B. Roberts, PhD

 

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545 - Current Research and Future Trends of Psychedelics, Stanford 2_3_91

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Transcript

00:00:00 ►

Greetings from cyberdelic space.

00:00:19 ►

This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in Psychedelic Salon 2.0.

00:00:24 ►

This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in Psychedelic Salon 2.0.

00:00:33 ►

And to begin with, let me answer those fellow salonners who have asked if there is going to be any more podcasts from this Psychedelic Salon 1.0.

00:00:38 ►

And I’m pleased to tell you that, yes, there is much more to come.

00:00:44 ►

But for the past three weeks, I’ve been, well, I’ve been on my somewhat regular summer goofing off period.

00:00:48 ►

However, thanks to Lex Pelger and the team at Symposia,

00:00:51 ►

I’ve been able to post several news podcasts in the interim.

00:00:57 ►

Unlike my silences in years past when this summer lethargy creeps up on me.

00:01:02 ►

You know, today it seems like a lot of people are so tightly wired to,

00:01:08 ►

well, to their phones and their work and to the pressure to be what their friends and family think they should be.

00:01:12 ►

Well, they don’t take enough time to just goof off once in a while.

00:01:24 ►

Now, in my case, of course, having grown up in the 1940s and 1950s, it was much easier to step out of the normal flow of daily routine because our technology was less intense. When a friend and

00:01:26 ►

I would play a board game like chess or checkers, it was, well, it was calm, slow, and a gentle time

00:01:33 ►

to relax. And as much as I would have wanted to have today’s technology available to me back then,

00:01:40 ►

well, I’m kind of glad that I didn’t have the stress of competing in violent video games

00:01:45 ►

and getting enough likes on my social media page.

00:01:49 ►

But, that said, I clearly remember many, many days when I’d tell my mother that I was bored.

00:01:56 ►

Her answer was always the same.

00:01:58 ►

Then go outside and play.

00:02:01 ►

So, which childhood experience is best?

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Who knows? I certainly don’t.

00:02:08 ►

And so, having left you with that imposing question,

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it’s time for me to move along and pass the microphone to Lex Pelger,

00:02:15 ►

who will introduce today’s interview with Dr. Thomas Roberts,

00:02:20 ►

author of The Psychedelic Future of the Mind,

00:02:23 ►

How Entheogens Are Enhancing Cognition, Boosting Intelligence, and Raising Values,

00:02:28 ►

which is something that you and I, quite obviously, find very interesting.

00:02:36 ►

Today’s show is made possible through your crowdfunded support on Patreon.

00:02:40 ►

Unlike other crowdfunding sites,

00:02:42 ►

Patreon lets you chip in a few bucks a month to help us keep the lights on

00:02:45 ►

find out more at patreon.com

00:02:47 ►

slash symposia

00:03:03 ►

I’m Lex Pelger

00:03:04 ►

and this is Symposia on the Psychedelic Salon 2.0.

00:03:12 ►

Dr. Thomas Roberts is surely one of those magical professors that you’d never forget.

00:03:17 ►

He’s got a white walrus mustache, likes to wear suspenders, and has a beautiful collection of drug books.

00:03:24 ►

likes to wear suspenders, and has a beautiful collection of drug books.

00:03:28 ►

He wrote the book, The Psychedelic Future of the Mind,

00:03:33 ►

how entheogens are enhancing cognition, boosting intelligence, and raising values.

00:03:37 ►

It’s some of the most forward-thinking work in the field today,

00:03:40 ►

and he’s an old soul who knows how to talk to millennials.

00:03:43 ►

If you enjoyed this interview with Dr. Tom Roberts, I recommend checking out any of his material on YouTube about psychotechnologies.

00:03:55 ►

I am very pleased to be sitting here with Dr. Thomas Roberts.

00:03:58 ►

Welcome to DeKalb.

00:04:00 ►

Thank you so much. It’s a great town.

00:04:02 ►

You’ve been teaching here a long time, correct?

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I started in 1970. Wow. And I thought I’d come for one year or possibly two.

00:04:09 ►

Here I am, retired now, but still here.

00:04:13 ►

What were some of the classes that you enjoyed teaching the most here?

00:04:16 ►

Well, basically, I was an educational psychologist,

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and I taught undergraduates who were going to become high school teachers.

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And then, as years went by, more and more graduates who were already teachers or principals

00:04:29 ►

were already active in schools.

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And then I started my psychedelics course in 1981.

00:04:36 ►

81 to start a psychedelics course, right when Reagan’s at his top.

00:04:40 ►

That’s right.

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Yes, when you look back at it, it’s sort of odd that I was able to do so, but it worked out all right.

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And I taught it, I think, probably through 2013 or 2014.

00:04:52 ►

That’s a long run.

00:04:54 ►

How did that course change over the time of doing it so long?

00:04:58 ►

When I started, there was almost no new research in the field.

00:05:02 ►

It was all looking backwards, although a couple books had come research in the field. It was all looking backwards.

00:05:08 ►

Although a couple books had come out in the 70s.

00:05:10 ►

I used Stan Grof’s Realms of the Human Unconscious.

00:05:14 ►

And Grinspoon and Bacalar had two books,

00:05:18 ►

Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered and Psychedelic Reflections.

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And those were basically the newest.

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And, of course, Doors of Perception. I always started with Doors.

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That’s a wonderful introduction.

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He talked on all the topics we covered in the course.

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And, of course, being a literary man, it was a literary book,

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and people could read it without a scientific background.

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That’s great.

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Have you found anything else that equals Huxley’s writing

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on what the new psychedelic paradigm might look like?

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No.

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I mean, everybody touches on it one way or another,

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but Huxley, basically, that’s really just one article.

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It’s the length of a long article in The New Yorker.

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I mean, the whole book is 70 pages.

00:05:56 ►

Well, everybody comes up with new…

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The stuff that’s going on at Johns Hopkins, for example,

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isn’t really new in its content,

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except it’s confirming a lot

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of what Huxley and other people talked about, basically the importance of mystical experiences.

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And then of course, I mean, there’s the discovery of Ibogaine and Ayahuasca that was basically

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unknown in the 1980s, I mean, in this culture, unknown. So, I mean, all that stuff is new.

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And then, well, DMT also was known at that time so and i mean of course if you count

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schulgen’s books they’re like a couple hundred chemicals waiting to be tried out

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yeah um how did you incorporate all of these new plant medicines and drugs coming into the

00:06:39 ►

consciousness as you were teaching this course um it really wasn’t hard at all. I didn’t take a very biological perspective

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because my students had no basic biological background. And we would talk about the

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implications, let’s say, of Stan Grof’s ideas for understanding one’s own mind and one’s own

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experiences. Particularly his perinatal stage was very helpful in people understanding how they

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reacted to their own psychedelic experiences,

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although actually very few students had psychedelic experiences.

00:07:11 ►

When my class was a seminar in the honors program,

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it was 15 or 20 students, and probably three had had psychedelic experiences.

00:07:19 ►

So once I taught it for the general students,

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and everybody thought it was going to be just sort of a drug Mickey Mouse course.

00:07:29 ►

And they didn’t like it because I had them write papers and give reports and do all the student kind of stuff.

00:07:35 ►

But the honors students liked it.

00:07:37 ►

Oh, that’s great.

00:07:38 ►

That’s fascinating.

00:07:39 ►

So it wasn’t a bunch of heads who were coming to you.

00:07:41 ►

It was serious students who were curious about these tools.

00:07:45 ►

Yeah. And my perspective basically is that these are tools that should be used in psychotherapy.

00:07:50 ►

And don’t drop them on your own on Saturday afternoon.

00:07:55 ►

And also then as Stan Grof’s book really talks about psychotherapy,

00:07:59 ►

and then when the research started to come on from NYU and Johns Hopkins and places like that, then there was like really good, you know, psychopharmacological writing, which one could read without being a psychopharmacologist.

00:08:14 ►

And basically, it’s a very open-minded group.

00:08:19 ►

An advantage of teaching my honor seminar, of course, there are honor students. So they were either very bright or very dedicated or both.

00:08:27 ►

So they would do their assignments, in other words.

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And they came from different majors because they were all juniors or seniors.

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So they could bring in whatever insights came from their field

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that they could talk about.

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I’ve been particularly surprised.

00:08:42 ►

They had a woman who was studying dietetics.

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I thought, well, good. I’m glad to have her in class.

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But we were talking about MAO inhibitors, and she looked through the dietetics research and discovered two foods that were MAO inhibitors.

00:08:56 ►

Turmeric, which is used in Italian cooking, and

00:09:00 ►

the outside of nutmeg, which is called mace, but it’s not the spray

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sort of thing.

00:09:05 ►

And so, you know, I pick up stuff for my students, too.

00:09:09 ►

The only ones that really were a problem were engineering students.

00:09:12 ►

Chemical engineering, of course, would fit in perfectly.

00:09:14 ►

But other engineering students, I mean, they were good students,

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but there was no applications that they could see.

00:09:20 ►

Yeah, that makes sense.

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They’re an odd bunch.

00:09:23 ►

That’s what I started off school in.

00:09:31 ►

Now, what about your story of coming to these drugs initially?

00:09:32 ►

What drew you in?

00:09:35 ►

Do you want the long version or the short version?

00:09:36 ►

I’d like the long version.

00:09:36 ►

Okay.

00:09:38 ►

I like your story.

00:09:39 ►

Okay. I was a graduate student in education at the University of Connecticut from 1965, 6, and 7. And this is when

00:09:47 ►

Larry was having trouble at Harvard. And it was, I didn’t have TV,

00:09:51 ►

but I had the radio and I picked it up here and there and I sent for a copy of, I think

00:09:55 ►

it was the Harvard Review that had an article in it or

00:09:59 ►

by him. And that’s the first I read about it. I wish I still had it.

00:10:04 ►

But I was not interested myself. And that’s the first I read about it. I wish I still had it. But I was not interested myself. And then

00:10:07 ►

I drove to Stanford in the summer of 67,

00:10:12 ►

which is the famous summer of 67.

00:10:17 ►

But I was going to get a doctorate in educational

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psychology and an MBA minor. So I wasn’t really

00:10:24 ►

going to the hippie events. But it was fun to drive to San Francisco.

00:10:28 ►

My car radio would play, you know, when you go to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers

00:10:32 ►

in your hair. So I had that sort of feeling. It wasn’t for me, but it was fun to be

00:10:36 ►

there. And then at Stanford,

00:10:40 ►

of course, there are a scattering of students doing psychedelics, but I didn’t

00:10:44 ►

really know any of them until I did my dissertation on Maslow’s needs hierarchy.

00:10:52 ►

And there was a professor, Bill Harmon, or Willis Harmon, in engineering economic systems who had been doing some research on Maslow.

00:11:00 ►

So I wanted to take a class with him.

00:11:03 ►

And he also was the person who got Jim Fadiman going.

00:11:07 ►

So that’s Jim and my sort of common professor. Wow. And he taught a course called the human

00:11:14 ►

potential. And it was so popular that you had to sign up two quarters in advance to get in.

00:11:20 ►

So finally, I got in. I was interested in Maslow, and it was graduate students from

00:11:26 ►

Stanford from all kinds of different majors.

00:11:29 ►

And he would look at things like parapsychology and meditation, biofeedback, Eastern religions,

00:11:34 ►

things that were sort of really fringe at the time.

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You wouldn’t want to say you were interested in those.

00:11:40 ►

But one day, a married student couple came into the class and started describing their

00:11:47 ►

psychedelic experience the previous weekend.

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Now my idea of psychedelics, picture the DEA picture of a drug addict, right?

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Terrible long hair and long fingernails and looked real scraggy.

00:11:59 ►

And these were graduate students in Stanford who didn’t look like that at all and talked

00:12:03 ►

very coherently.

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So this didn’t fit in with what I thought I knew.

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And what really surprised me is of about probably 30 people in the class,

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a good 20 of them nodded their heads and participated in the discussion

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and knew what they were talking about from their own experiences.

00:12:21 ►

Now, these are graduate students at Stanford.

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This is not what I’d expected.

00:12:25 ►

So I thought, well, okay, you know, there’s something else going on here. And then Esalen

00:12:32 ►

Institute had a program called Esalen at Stanford. And because Stanford students couldn’t go

00:12:37 ►

down to Esalen, they’d come up and they offered courses on weekends and speakers and so forth.

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And so I signed up for that. I went to a couple, no, I didn’t sign up first.

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A friend of mine who was a newspaper reporter in that class,

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he was from St. Paul or Minneapolis,

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had bought tickets to a speaker coming to campus who I’d never heard of.

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And he couldn’t go, so he gave me the ticket.

00:12:59 ►

So I went to hear this guy who I knew nothing about, and it was Alan Watts.

00:13:03 ►

Whoa.

00:13:04 ►

And this is a very erud about, and it was Alan Watts. Whoa!

00:13:09 ►

And this is a very erudite, scholarly British clergyman philosopher talking about how Eastern and Western philosophies were alike

00:13:12 ►

and the effect of psychedelics.

00:13:15 ►

I thought, wow.

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I mean, I was really impressed with that.

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Although I didn’t really go, you know, at that point sort of,

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it was an interest, but I didn’t read in the field,

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and I was working on my dissertation, so I didn’t have a lot of time.

00:13:28 ►

But I was doing it on Maslow’s needs hierarchy, and Maslow had moved next door to Menlo Park.

00:13:34 ►

Okay, so I called him and went over to see him.

00:13:38 ►

Wow.

00:13:38 ►

And he started telling me about this new area that went beyond self-actualization called self-transcendence.

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And you can see the pieces are starting to fit together at this point.

00:13:49 ►

And he wrote a couple of articles for the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology.

00:13:53 ►

So I became a member of the society and subscribed to the journals.

00:13:56 ►

And he talked about the difference between self-actualizers and self-transcenders.

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What he did is divide self-actualizers into ordinary self-actualizers

00:14:06 ►

and transcenders. So this got

00:14:08 ►

me, I recognized that

00:14:10 ►

well, here was this intellectual hero

00:14:12 ►

by Maslow talking about self-transcendence

00:14:14 ►

so it wasn’t so nutty.

00:14:17 ►

And then

00:14:18 ►

in the

00:14:20 ►

January 1970

00:14:21 ►

through

00:14:24 ►

a couple friends,

00:14:26 ►

I had my first psychedelic trip up at Lake Tahoe.

00:14:29 ►

Beautiful wintery day in Lake Tahoe.

00:14:33 ►

And a lot of people sort of get into the perceptual aspect of it.

00:14:37 ►

It was fun watching the clouds rolling overhead

00:14:40 ►

and I was sitting at the edge of the lake.

00:14:42 ►

But what I realized, there’s something really interesting here.

00:14:47 ►

This is not just about perception.

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I’m interested in psychology, so I think, what does this say about the human mind? And I was an educational psychologist, so that sort of

00:14:56 ►

got me going. So that fall, that’s when I came to Northern

00:14:59 ►

and started to teach. And I didn’t

00:15:02 ►

include trans personals.

00:15:05 ►

Well, I was editing a book called

00:15:08 ►

Four Psychologies Applied to Education,

00:15:10 ►

and the fourth was trans personals.

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But then, through a very fortunate sort of situation,

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I ran into a woman who invited me to a conference in Iceland in 1971.

00:15:28 ►

And it was held there because it was halfway between the United States and Europe,

00:15:32 ►

and the organizer lived there.

00:15:34 ►

And it was called Transpersonal Psychology and Psychobiology.

00:15:39 ►

But the speakers were Stan Grof, Joseph Campbell, Houston Smith,

00:15:43 ►

Walter Houston Clark, right?

00:15:47 ►

Bill Richards was there with his wife, young wife at that time.

00:15:51 ►

So suddenly I realized that this is not just an area I could get into

00:15:55 ►

in my own sort of curiosity recreational way,

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but I heard these really scholarly people talking about it.

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And that’s when I realized, oh, okay. This is a direction my scholarship can go.

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And so I came back that summer and started teaching an expanded section on transpersonal

00:16:13 ►

psychology.

00:16:14 ►

And then finally, in 1981, I got that course going.

00:16:18 ►

So it’s all these sort of lucky circumstances that I just sort of bump into.

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There’s no real, you know, organization to it.

00:16:26 ►

It’s just good luck.

00:16:27 ►

That’s great.

00:16:28 ►

And so your first psychedelic came just as you moved here to northern Illinois to start teaching.

00:16:34 ►

Yeah, my first experience was February, and I moved here in June or August.

00:16:41 ►

Okay.

00:16:42 ►

Wow.

00:16:43 ►

And so how did that realization of the scholarship here move into

00:16:46 ►

your first work? What did you start working on initially? Oh, well, I was editing that book

00:16:53 ►

called Four Psychologies Applied to Education. And also I came here without finishing my degree.

00:16:58 ►

So I finished my degree two years later. Okay. So I came here in 70 and got my degree in 72. So that kept me busy. And

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then I was, you know, as you start a career teaching, it takes a lot of time to organize

00:17:10 ►

your material and change it and edit it. So basically a lot of my time was spent teaching.

00:17:18 ►

And then when I started teaching the graduate educational psychology course, I had a section on transpersonal.

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And I wanted to teach on psychedelics,

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but there wasn’t really anything that came out.

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And then Stan Grof’s book, Realms of the Human Unconscious,

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came out in 1975.

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And I started to use that as the transpersonal aspect of my course. And by good luck, I had gone to a conference

00:17:49 ►

that the Menninger Foundation had every year called the Council Grove Conference. And it

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was held at the little church conference ground out in the prairie in Kansas with nothing

00:18:00 ►

else around. And it was an experimental place in the sense that

00:18:07 ►

people, professors, researchers could present ideas that they

00:18:12 ►

weren’t polished enough to present at professional conferences but wanted to try it out.

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So there were no procedures, no report on it. There were a couple

00:18:20 ►

brief articles in the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology but never about

00:18:24 ►

the content of the conference.

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And Stan Groff was one of the regulars there, as were some other people who had done psychedelic

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research.

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But topics like meditation, biofeedback, all the stuff that was like new and groundbreaking

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at the time, those were like the roadshow tried out.

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And people would say, well, you ought to say this, or have you thought about this, or here’s

00:18:42 ►

some research.

00:18:43 ►

So it was a cooperative group of around probably 45 people or so.

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So where I’m going with this is that one day we were having lunch,

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and we started talking about lucky numbers,

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and seven is most people’s lucky number.

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And one of the people at lunch said,

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well, the seven chakras are representative of that.

00:19:03 ►

And somebody else said, Disney, Snow White, and the seven dwarves are supposed to represent the chakras are representative of that. And somebody else said, Disney, Snow White, and the Seven Dwarfs

00:19:06 ►

are supposed to represent the chakras.

00:19:09 ►

So I thought, well, that’s kind of interesting.

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And I came home,

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and we were using Stan Groff’s Realms book

00:19:14 ►

in my class that night.

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And what should we be showing down

00:19:16 ►

at the local DeShel Theater

00:19:18 ►

but Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs?

00:19:20 ►

Okay, so this graduate class went down there.

00:19:24 ►

The manager was there, you know, selling an occasional ticket.

00:19:27 ►

All of a sudden, a whole bunch of adults show up, buy tickets,

00:19:30 ►

sit together in the theater and sort of look at each other and nod.

00:19:33 ►

We talk about, you know, we’ll see this perinatal experience

00:19:36 ►

and that perinatal experience.

00:19:37 ►

So that got me writing my original Snow White article.

00:19:42 ►

So that was sort of the first really, like,

00:19:44 ►

applied transpersonal ideas that I did. That’s great. my original Snow White article. So that was sort of the first really like applied

00:19:45 ►

transpersonal ideas that I did.

00:19:48 ►

That’s great.

00:19:49 ►

So what’s the basics of your Snow White article?

00:19:54 ►

I use Stan Grof’s Four Levels of View of the Mind

00:19:57 ►

as an overall structure of the movie,

00:19:59 ►

but particularly pay attention to the third level,

00:20:02 ►

the perinatal level.

00:20:04 ►

And the perinatal level represents four stages of birth.

00:20:08 ►

And we see those, particularly in Snow White, when the huntsman takes her into the woods,

00:20:12 ►

and then she has the experience of fear running through the woods, struggling, apparently dying.

00:20:19 ►

She falls over a log and thinks she’s going to die.

00:20:21 ►

But she wakes up in the sort of birth sequence the next morning,

00:20:26 ►

a beautiful spring day

00:20:28 ►

with birds and little

00:20:29 ►

bunnies and stuff.

00:20:31 ►

And they then take her

00:20:33 ►

over a stream to

00:20:35 ►

the dwarves’ house.

00:20:37 ►

And that’s basically the

00:20:39 ►

transversal level. And then here

00:20:41 ►

she meets later on the four chakras.

00:20:43 ►

I mean, the seven chakras. And throughout the movie,

00:20:48 ►

particularly in the latter part of the movie, mushrooms keep appearing.

00:20:52 ►

And people who are not into mushrooms don’t notice them much. But people who

00:20:56 ►

are interested in mushrooms see them a lot. And those start to appear there.

00:20:59 ►

So Stan Groff’s view of our minds

00:21:03 ►

as a structure for the movie,

00:21:07 ►

and then I give that lecture to my class

00:21:09 ►

and then have them interpret something.

00:21:12 ►

And by going through that psycho-critical interpretation,

00:21:15 ►

they learn the structure, Stan’s structure of the mind.

00:21:18 ►

And some of them will use it on movies and TV shows,

00:21:21 ►

but I’ve had people, one that surprised me, a woman did it on buying a new pair of shoes for a dance

00:21:28 ►

and taking that through the series, and it worked.

00:21:30 ►

And what I want them to do is to be able to recognize their own stresses

00:21:38 ►

and understand their own minds and sort of recognize

00:21:40 ►

that when they get stuck into a cluster, a coax cluster, it’s when simple

00:21:48 ►

or similar emotions sort of clump together.

00:21:51 ►

Like if they get angry, suddenly they remember other times it made them angry.

00:21:55 ►

And sort of this is part of Stan’s structure of the mind.

00:21:58 ►

And they can then understand their own reaction to things.

00:22:00 ►

So it’s a sort of very mild self-realization of how one’s own

00:22:06 ►

emotions work or don’t work and so forth.

00:22:08 ►

So I think that helps them.

00:22:10 ►

And I know it helps those

00:22:12 ►

who’ve had psychedelic experiences

00:22:13 ►

because they can start to see, oh,

00:22:16 ►

this is what was happening to me then, or that’s

00:22:18 ►

why I felt that way and so forth.

00:22:19 ►

So that got me

00:22:22 ►

going, and then since then

00:22:24 ►

I’ve been going one way or another with psychedelics.

00:22:27 ►

Snow white as a mirror.

00:22:29 ►

Yes.

00:22:30 ►

That’s a good phrase.

00:22:31 ►

Yeah.

00:22:32 ►

I should use that next time.

00:22:33 ►

Thank you.

00:22:34 ►

You’re welcome to.

00:22:35 ►

That’s just a psychological mirror.

00:22:37 ►

It’s a psychodrama.

00:22:38 ►

Yeah.

00:22:39 ►

Oh, then I did one on that one with Bill Hurt about the isolation booths.

00:22:47 ►

Altered States of Consciousness,

00:22:48 ►

was that the name of the movie?

00:22:49 ►

Something like that.

00:22:50 ►

Altered States?

00:22:51 ►

Altered States, yeah, yeah.

00:22:53 ►

So, and I have several years

00:22:58 ►

wondering why I want to paint Floyd the Wall.

00:23:00 ►

It fits in just beautifully.

00:23:04 ►

It’s not so much,

00:23:05 ►

during psychedelic experiences,

00:23:08 ►

the experiences don’t happen in order.

00:23:09 ►

You sort of bounce around one thing to another.

00:23:12 ►

And Pink, the musician

00:23:14 ►

in there, bounces around.

00:23:15 ►

Sometimes he’s in a hotel room. Sometimes

00:23:17 ►

he flashes back to childhood experiences.

00:23:20 ►

Sometimes he’s in a very symbolic

00:23:21 ►

stage.

00:23:24 ►

We’re all bricks in the wall.

00:23:25 ►

You know that scene where the kids move along,

00:23:27 ►

that sort of very perinatal stage.

00:23:30 ►

And the ending, the animation of cartooning,

00:23:33 ►

is very powerful, perinatal and transpersonal.

00:23:38 ►

And then he finally breaks through the wall,

00:23:41 ►

and there’s a little bit at the very end of,

00:23:44 ►

instead of the sort of

00:23:45 ►

hard driving aggressive music of very calm serene music where apparently you know it’s worked like

00:23:53 ►

a psychotherapeutic experience and we see kids kind of cleaning up cleaning up after world war

00:23:57 ►

two but but that’s it that’s a very powerful movie wow out of curiosity do you get lost a lot

00:24:04 ►

watching pop television and children’s books and stuff,

00:24:07 ►

just starting to break them down to their archetypes and their pieces?

00:24:11 ►

I don’t know.

00:24:11 ►

In fact, I bought a copy.

00:24:15 ►

Stan Groff, by the way, illustrated a child’s book.

00:24:18 ►

Yeah.

00:24:18 ►

And I bought a copy to take with me to California, to Oakland, but it didn’t arrive in time.

00:24:24 ►

So I’ve got it up actually

00:24:25 ►

i’ve got it up in my room now um but yes we do or my wife and i will be sitting there sometimes

00:24:30 ►

we look at each other and say oh bpm2 bpm3 yeah right um that’s great you know aldous huxley has

00:24:38 ►

a really great children’s book as well the crows of pear blossom it’s very close of pear i believe

00:24:44 ►

that’s a name i found two

00:24:45 ►

copies so far in my life thanks yeah they’re dark but that’s because he had honest eyes for the

00:24:51 ►

world i believe oh thanks good yeah they’re they’re really cool um yeah because i’ve i’ve

00:24:56 ►

really loved your snow white idea since i heard about it i mean these mirrors seem to be everywhere

00:25:00 ►

you just have to choose which one you want to once you start thinking that way you sort of

00:25:04 ►

notice this stuff and you can appreciate other people in your life.

00:25:07 ►

That this person is just having a BPM2 experience.

00:25:09 ►

So, you know, feel sorry for them,

00:25:11 ►

but it doesn’t mean something really terrible.

00:25:15 ►

And just a side note then,

00:25:17 ►

have you delved into tarot much?

00:25:19 ►

Has that been of much interest to you?

00:25:22 ►

You mean Walden Thoreau?

00:25:23 ►

No, the tarot.

00:25:24 ►

Oh, the tarot. Oh, the tarot.

00:25:25 ►

No, I haven’t.

00:25:26 ►

I had a friend who used to do a lot of tarot reading.

00:25:28 ►

In fact, we invented a reading called the Stanislav Grof reading,

00:25:32 ►

where you lay out the cards according to his view of the mind.

00:25:35 ►

It didn’t go anywhere, but she and I did it together.

00:25:37 ►

And it works out as well as regular Thoreau.

00:25:41 ►

Yeah.

00:25:41 ►

Aha, that’s interesting.

00:25:43 ►

And I wanted to ask about some of your other work

00:25:45 ►

because i think the book you pulled together spiritual growth with entheogens uh psychoactive

00:25:50 ►

sacramentals i think it is such a well put together essay collection of essays on this stuff it’s just

00:25:57 ►

i find very personally challenging and insightful in all these different directions good a lot of

00:26:02 ►

the credit goes to bob jesse because you know, the Council on Spiritual Practices originally did this.

00:26:07 ►

This came out of the conference we had in 1995,

00:26:10 ►

and it was called Psychoactive Sacramentals,

00:26:14 ►

and that current title is the new title for it.

00:26:17 ►

It’s the same materials,

00:26:19 ►

slightly changed in the way it’s presented in the book,

00:26:24 ►

but it’s all the same material.

00:26:26 ►

And that came out of that conference.

00:26:29 ►

We held a conference in Valambrosa Conference Center

00:26:35 ►

in Menlo Park.

00:26:38 ►

And that’s what really got me going on

00:26:40 ►

the entheogenic use of psychedelics.

00:26:43 ►

By the way, I reserved the word entheogen

00:26:45 ►

for the spiritual religious use, not as a synonym for psychedelic. So I talk about the

00:26:51 ►

therapeutic use of psychedelics, the entheogenic use of psychedelics, and now the ideogenic

00:26:56 ►

use of psychedelics. Bob wants to, or at least I think he still wants to, use entheogen as

00:27:04 ►

a synonym for psychedelic.

00:27:06 ►

That includes MDMA as well?

00:27:08 ►

Yes, but it includes different types of experiences.

00:27:12 ►

Like the ordinary perceptual stuff is not entheogenic in the spiritual sense,

00:27:17 ►

but it is psychedelic.

00:27:19 ►

Or experiencing one’s unconscious is not necessarily entheogenic,

00:27:24 ►

that is not spiritual entheogenic,

00:27:28 ►

that is not spiritual or religious, unless you get into that part of the unconscious.

00:27:34 ►

So I would save entheogenic for getting into the religious, spiritual part of the unconscious.

00:27:41 ►

That makes sense, especially because your background in education and psychology in the mind,

00:27:45 ►

it’s really awesome to see how much you, as a college professor,

00:27:50 ►

you’ve spread that out to something much more spiritual and probably a little bit edgy for any university to say, oh, no, these aren’t just good therapy tools for PTSD. These are also old

00:27:56 ►

ways to get in contact with the one, whatever. Yeah. Well, I’m in a men’s group at church,

00:28:02 ►

and they’re actually quite interested in this.

00:28:09 ►

I think they think I’m a little off, but it’s a very liberal, open-minded group of people.

00:28:14 ►

In fact, I’m getting ready to give my Snow White talk there in another two or three weeks. But we watched the videotape of Roland Griffith’s TED Talk, and that impressed them.

00:28:21 ►

And I talked a little bit about my idea of mind apps.

00:28:27 ►

And they understand it.

00:28:30 ►

So I’m lucky to be in a very liberal church group.

00:28:35 ►

What denomination?

00:28:37 ►

Congregational.

00:28:37 ►

Okay.

00:28:38 ►

That’s great.

00:28:40 ►

Wow.

00:28:40 ►

Getting to speak at your church, that’s kind of like hitting the big leagues, isn’t it?

00:28:44 ►

Well, it’s just a little men’s group.

00:28:45 ►

It’s not a big lecture.

00:28:46 ►

Yeah, but that’s exactly how to – the coming out of the closet that seems to make the difference.

00:28:53 ►

And what was that like for you, being someone on a university, eventually coming out of the psychedelic closet?

00:28:58 ►

Well, I was worried before it happened.

00:29:01 ►

I bet.

00:29:01 ►

And when it happened, I was disappointed.

00:29:00 ►

before it happened.

00:29:01 ►

I bet.

00:29:02 ►

And when it happened,

00:29:03 ►

I was disappointed.

00:29:07 ►

Well, Grinspoon and Bacalar have a book called

00:29:09 ►

Psychedelic Reflections.

00:29:11 ►

It came out in 1982.

00:29:13 ►

And they asked me

00:29:13 ►

to write a chapter for it.

00:29:16 ►

And so, you know,

00:29:17 ►

I thought, well, okay.

00:29:18 ►

I wrote about my experiences

00:29:20 ►

and what I thought

00:29:20 ►

psychedelics would be useful for.

00:29:22 ►

It’s almost the last chapter

00:29:24 ►

in the book. It’s called the last chapter in the book.

00:29:25 ►

It’s called New Learning.

00:29:27 ►

And I was worried, you know, before the book came out,

00:29:31 ►

you know, what will my colleagues think and so forth.

00:29:35 ►

And the book came out, no response at all.

00:29:38 ►

Now, they probably didn’t read it because of the title,

00:29:41 ►

and they probably thought we knew it all the time anyway.

00:29:44 ►

So, I mean, that was a relief in its own way but you know so I had a little bit of

00:29:52 ►

flack across campus when I first offered my course okay the course was one of those one-shot

00:29:59 ►

directed readings in special topics and you know all those each department has its own name and so

00:30:05 ►

mine I was that time was called psychedelic mind view or second no psychedelic research

00:30:10 ►

I found later that the word research was scaring away people who were afraid of math

00:30:15 ►

so I so I changed the name to um psychedelic mind view and then it became foundations of

00:30:21 ►

psychedelic studies but anyway um to recruit people for these sort of one-shot courses,

00:30:26 ►

you had to put up posters around the campus.

00:30:29 ►

So I walked around all these university buildings

00:30:31 ►

and put them up all over the place.

00:30:33 ►

And two days later, my assistant department chair

00:30:35 ►

got a call from the assistant provost

00:30:38 ►

asking whether this was an appropriate course

00:30:40 ►

for a university to be teaching.

00:30:44 ►

And my department chair asked me, and I got on my self-righteous high horse course for a university to be teaching.

00:30:48 ►

And my department chair asked me, and I got on my self-righteous high horse, which I’ve tried to explain to people

00:30:51 ►

that that’s not a good position to get on to. And I, rather than

00:30:56 ►

backing down, I wrote a letter to the assistant provost and told him,

00:31:00 ►

you know, well, the paperback edition of

00:31:03 ►

Psychedelics Drugs Reconsidered came out,

00:31:06 ►

and it has a 40-page annotated bibliography.

00:31:10 ►

And I know what an annotated bibliography is.

00:31:12 ►

It takes an enormous amount of work.

00:31:14 ►

It is really good.

00:31:15 ►

And basically, when I want to look something up, I always go there.

00:31:20 ►

It’s my, and they, anyway, so I photocopied this

00:31:25 ►

and I may have sent some other stuff

00:31:28 ►

to him

00:31:29 ►

my high horse letter was

00:31:32 ►

it was my

00:31:34 ►

understanding that the decisions

00:31:36 ►

on what should be in the department’s course

00:31:38 ►

is to each department

00:31:40 ►

and it is the standard university

00:31:42 ►

procedure

00:31:43 ►

if he wants to talk about this,

00:31:46 ►

I’d be glad to talk about him at an open meeting of the university council, which is representative

00:31:51 ►

from every department. Well, every department is going to defend their department’s right to decide

00:31:55 ►

what to teach, right? So, I mean, he would just get smashed, and he knew it, right? So two days later,

00:32:01 ►

my department chair got a call. He said, I heard from the distant provost, and somebody just wondered.

00:32:07 ►

That’s what I was asking.

00:32:08 ►

Then he left, the distant provost, and he came back a couple years later as our president.

00:32:15 ►

And Tom Riedlinger, the Wasson scholar, said, they know they’ve got a bulldog over there.

00:32:21 ►

And I think my colleague sort of agreed to let me teach it. I mean, he’s not

00:32:27 ►

hurting anyone, kind of, you know. And it would bring in some students. And I

00:32:31 ►

brought a couple graduate students who became doctoral students.

00:32:36 ►

But basically, I mean, they sort of let me go my way.

00:32:39 ►

And college campuses are quite

00:32:43 ►

open to new ideas.

00:32:46 ►

And surprising to most people, education is one of the departments that’s most open.

00:32:50 ►

Because you don’t have to believe, you don’t have to be a Weberian if you’re in sociology.

00:32:54 ►

You don’t have to be a Jungian or whatever if you’re in psychology.

00:32:56 ►

As long as it works, it’s okay.

00:32:58 ►

And people don’t care where it comes from because it’s a practice-oriented group.

00:33:03 ►

So if some good ideas come out of psychedelics,

00:33:06 ►

they don’t care if it works.

00:33:08 ►

And I just basically had a lot of talk on it.

00:33:11 ►

And I didn’t propose the course until I had tenure,

00:33:16 ►

and I don’t know if I would have had the guts

00:33:17 ►

to do it before tenure.

00:33:19 ►

So that’s an unanswered question.

00:33:22 ►

Anyway, that’s how that got going.

00:33:24 ►

And then it moved little by little.

00:33:27 ►

I would start teaching it in the honors society or honors program and then it became only an

00:33:32 ►

honors course after I retired. And the honors program by the way is just you know up in the

00:33:41 ►

next corner and I lived about half a block up. So I can walk. And in any university, not being able to look for a parking place is a real privilege.

00:33:49 ►

So I could teach the course without looking for a parking place

00:33:51 ►

and just walk down there and then walk home and have lunch.

00:33:54 ►

So it was really handy.

00:33:56 ►

And as I said, a good bunch of bright students.

00:33:59 ►

For a lot of years, too.

00:34:01 ►

You got to see the best of the best interested in this.

00:34:03 ►

Yeah, that was fun.

00:34:05 ►

That must have been really helpful for sharpening your own ways of communicating this to not only students but to your peers.

00:34:12 ►

Yes, yes.

00:34:13 ►

It’s very handy because I’m talking to people who are intelligent but don’t know the information.

00:34:17 ►

Yeah.

00:34:18 ►

Okay.

00:34:18 ►

And they’re willing to ask good questions.

00:34:22 ►

And then, you know, that’s always nice.

00:34:21 ►

And they’re willing to ask good questions.

00:34:24 ►

And then, you know, that’s always nice.

00:34:31 ►

And, well, Stephen’s book on psychedelics, what’s the name, Storming Heaven?

00:34:32 ►

Came out.

00:34:32 ►

Jay Stephens, yes. Yeah, right.

00:34:33 ►

So we used that when that came out.

00:34:35 ►

Wow.

00:34:35 ►

And that was a wonderful sort of history, social background.

00:34:39 ►

And so that covered the kind of sociology, historical background stuff that was going on.

00:34:44 ►

So, yeah, that was a very good book

00:34:46 ►

and

00:34:47 ►

let’s see well I one year

00:34:50 ►

I used after my book came out

00:34:52 ►

psychedelic future of the mind

00:34:53 ►

and

00:34:55 ►

I don’t know I would sort of work books in and try

00:34:58 ►

them out and work them out over the year

00:34:59 ►

of course never

00:35:02 ►

stand still there’s always something new and of

00:35:04 ►

course the psychedelics with this new research coming out.

00:35:06 ►

And then with this stuff online.

00:35:08 ►

Because when I taught it, only people had computers were the army and big corporations.

00:35:14 ►

And now my syllabus includes every week one online thing to view.

00:35:21 ►

And one recommended online.

00:35:23 ►

And so there’s just unlimited stuff that’s great is any

00:35:27 ►

part of your course available online now the syllabus or some of the lectures oh yeah i have

00:35:31 ►

my last two years syllabus are available at my website on my website um is an academic one it’s

00:35:37 ►

www.niu for northern illinois university academia.edu slash Thomas Roberts.

00:35:48 ►

And I have about 100 little articles or long articles on there too.

00:35:52 ►

And my slides.

00:35:53 ►

But not the Snow White slides, but all the other slides.

00:35:56 ►

Yeah, it’s a great resource for anyone.

00:35:58 ►

I was poking through it the last couple of days and ready for this.

00:36:01 ►

There’s articles in all kinds of directions.

00:36:03 ►

Because Dr. Roberts is

00:36:05 ►

working, his new stuff is very exciting. The Psychedelic Future of the Mind book and then

00:36:10 ►

the Mind Apps lectures about all these different tools that psychedelics represent and then all

00:36:17 ►

the other tools that we might combine with psychedelics. Yes, that’s an idea I’m trying

00:36:21 ►

to get across to psychedelic people is that our interest is one of a whole group of what I call,

00:36:28 ►

I call it the word mind app.

00:36:30 ►

And a mind app basically says that you can invent,

00:36:35 ►

just as you can write apps to go into digital devices,

00:36:39 ►

we are inventing apps to go into our minds.

00:36:42 ►

And just as you can do more things with your device when you install them,

00:36:46 ►

you can do more things with the human mind when you install mind apps.

00:36:49 ►

So psychedelics is a family of mind apps.

00:36:53 ►

And then there’s hypnosis and dreams and meditation and the martial arts,

00:36:56 ►

biofeedback, neurofeedback, vision quest, all that stuff.

00:37:00 ►

And I want psychedelics to see themselves as part of this larger whole.

00:37:05 ►

And so it’s basically a view of the human mind in all mind-body states

00:37:09 ►

and all ways of reaching them.

00:37:12 ►

And, of course, we’re inventing new ones all the time, and we’re importing them.

00:37:15 ►

So this is a huge, huge possibility.

00:37:18 ►

And the intriguing thing I find is that almost in every case,

00:37:22 ►

when somebody’s using a mind app, they use just one mind app.

00:37:26 ►

But what happens when you write recipes of them

00:37:28 ►

and put them together in ways they’ve never been put together before?

00:37:32 ►

In other words, you would invite mind-body states

00:37:34 ►

that have never been invented before.

00:37:37 ►

And most of them probably won’t be worth much,

00:37:39 ►

but some of them may be worth an enormous amount.

00:37:41 ►

So just like we’ve had synthetic elements in physics and

00:37:45 ►

synthetic chemistry and synthetic biology, now we have synthetic psychology.

00:37:49 ►

Okay, and invent new mind by. And that’s the idea I want to get across because

00:37:54 ►

almost all the people we know in psychedelics focus just on

00:37:59 ►

psychotherapy, which is definitely something to focus on. There’s no doubt

00:38:02 ►

about it. That’s the good beginning, but it’s only a beginning.

00:38:05 ►

And it goes from there into religion and the humanities

00:38:08 ►

and then into mind design.

00:38:10 ►

And we’re beginning the process of designing the human mind,

00:38:13 ►

just like we design apps for digital devices.

00:38:18 ►

That’s fascinating.

00:38:20 ►

What combinations have been most intriguing

00:38:22 ►

to the people you’ve worked with and taught about this to?

00:38:26 ►

None.

00:38:28 ►

No?

00:38:29 ►

I know there are.

00:38:30 ►

Well, the meditation people have gotten into psychedelics.

00:38:33 ►

Okay.

00:38:33 ►

The psychedelics people have gotten into meditation.

00:38:35 ►

Yeah.

00:38:36 ►

So that’s probably the one.

00:38:38 ►

But basically it’s, well, there definitely are people who combine them.

00:38:43 ►

well there definitely are people who combine them but usually it’s

00:38:45 ►

do psychedelics

00:38:46 ►

and then later do meditation

00:38:49 ►

and then do psychedelics

00:38:50 ►

so you go back and forth

00:38:51 ►

but it’s the combination that I find

00:38:53 ►

and I think of this as ingredients

00:38:55 ►

and when you say ingredient

00:38:58 ►

immediately people say

00:38:59 ►

what are the various possible recipes

00:39:01 ►

and there’s an infinite number of recipes

00:39:04 ►

so yeah what are the various possible recipes? And there’s an infinite number of recipes.

00:39:13 ►

So, yeah, this is why I call it the largest intellectual project.

00:39:17 ►

It’s not just using the mind in different ways, but inventing the mind.

00:39:20 ►

Yeah, because there are so many possibilities. The one that sprang to mind was holotropic breathwork and psychedelics.

00:39:24 ►

Sure, yeah.

00:39:24 ►

Just a low dose of mushrooms as deep as holotropic can take you.

00:39:28 ►

So if anybody out there has any great mind app combinations they found, write in and tell us.

00:39:33 ►

We would love to hear what worked for you because it is so many possibilities.

00:39:38 ►

All the different types of classes of drugs.

00:39:40 ►

Yes.

00:39:41 ►

Then all the other types of experiences.

00:39:44 ►

Well, there’s transcranial magnetic stimulation now. Okay. drugs than all the other types of experiences.

00:39:49 ►

Well, there’s transcranial magnetic stimulation now, okay?

00:39:55 ►

And what would that do combined with psychedelics and, let’s say, relaxation training or visual training and so forth?

00:39:56 ►

So, I mean, you see, as an educational psychologist, the big question is, what’s the greatest development

00:40:04 ►

of the human mind and how do we do it?

00:40:06 ►

But it’s in mind, not just in the cognitive sense, but in all these other senses.

00:40:11 ►

So this is an educational psychology question.

00:40:13 ►

What is our mind capable of, and how do we manage to become capable?

00:40:19 ►

See, that’s where that education…

00:40:20 ►

This is an educational psychologist’s perspective on psychedelic research and on neuroscience research.

00:40:27 ►

For instance, every week, at least every week, there’s some good, strong discovery made about the brain or the neurosciences.

00:40:36 ►

And, of course, they’re interested to say, will this help LAS or Parkinson’s or fears and that sort of thing, which is the right question to ask. But then there’s the question,

00:40:46 ►

when we can control that aspect of our brain, mind, or nervous system,

00:40:50 ►

what can we learn to do?

00:40:52 ►

Not just solve problems and cure people.

00:40:55 ►

So all those things that are discovered

00:40:58 ►

aren’t just treatments and possible treatments and future treatments,

00:41:02 ►

but they’re future ways of learning.

00:41:04 ►

And that’s what I find a real hidden treasure in psychedelic research

00:41:10 ►

is people aren’t recognizing that.

00:41:12 ►

Because that’s not their job.

00:41:13 ►

They’re psychotherapists.

00:41:16 ►

What areas do you think are most ripe for improvement

00:41:20 ►

using a combination of these tools outside the psychotherapy?

00:41:24 ►

Well, it seems to be meditation and psychedelics. I mean, this is where some work has been done. using a combination of these tools outside the psychotherapy?

00:41:26 ►

Well, it seems to be meditation psychedelics.

00:41:29 ►

I mean, this is where some work has been done.

00:41:33 ►

Stolarov had an interesting idea.

00:41:36 ►

He thought in preparing people for psychedelic sessions,

00:41:39 ►

a good move would see if they like MDMA.

00:41:41 ►

And if they’re comfortable with MDMA,

00:41:45 ►

then they can probably go on to psychedelic sessions. But if they don’t like MDMA, then they can probably go on to psychedelic sessions.

00:41:46 ►

But if they don’t like MDMA,

00:41:49 ►

then that’s not the direction to go.

00:41:51 ►

It’s clear that psychedelics are not for everyone.

00:41:56 ►

And deciding who they’re for and who they’re not for is an enormous problem.

00:41:59 ►

Think of it in terms of freedom of religion.

00:42:01 ►

If people want to use psychedelics entheogenically,

00:42:04 ►

who has the right to determine that?

00:42:07 ►

There’s all the church-state stuff that comes in at that point.

00:42:11 ►

Psychedelics have to do with law, biology,

00:42:15 ►

social policy, the neurosciences,

00:42:19 ►

religion, and other fields. And they all have

00:42:23 ►

the legitimate claims to the field.

00:42:28 ►

Hal Evans and I edited a book called The Psychedelic Policy Quagmire.

00:42:34 ►

It came out a couple years ago.

00:42:35 ►

And we try to point out the vastness of these problems.

00:42:39 ►

And we don’t come up with a solution.

00:42:41 ►

We just want people to address the problem.

00:42:43 ►

And it’s an ethical issue because people tend to become more, now if they have mystical experiences, they tend to become

00:42:49 ►

more altruistic and more loving toward other people. Now, is it fair to want people to do that

00:42:58 ►

chemically? We like to convince people, you know, you should be a good person and help other people.

00:43:05 ►

But is it fair if people use chemicals to become more altruistic?

00:43:11 ►

If they know they’re doing it, that’s one thing.

00:43:14 ►

So, yeah, the vastness of these problems.

00:43:16 ►

And then there are all these intellectual areas.

00:43:18 ►

There’s hardly an academic department that can’t be touched by psychedelics.

00:43:23 ►

Two ways.

00:43:24 ►

One, I think, to study.

00:43:26 ►

But what I find most intriguing is as a way of inventing paradigms.

00:43:31 ►

Because Benny Shalom, who’s a cognitive psychologist at Hebrew University,

00:43:36 ►

took a trip to Brazil, and you can see where we’re going with Brazil.

00:43:38 ►

He got interested in ayahuasca, and he’s a cognitive psychologist.

00:43:41 ►

So he said, hey, what’s going on here?

00:43:43 ►

So he did a lot of studying of ayahuasca from a cognitive psychological perspective

00:43:48 ►

and basically pointed out a lot of paradigmatic assumptions

00:43:53 ►

that cognitive psychologists make that don’t hold in other mind-body states.

00:43:58 ►

So suppose people in other departments try psychedelics and see what happens.

00:44:03 ►

Of course, psychology would be one one but what about the social sciences

00:44:06 ►

or the arts because as Huxley says

00:44:10 ►

indoors his appreciation for the art became richer and deeper

00:44:14 ►

than it had been before so is this a method of teaching art appreciation

00:44:18 ►

now I don’t see art appreciation 101 students having lab experiences

00:44:23 ►

yet and I don’t expect to live that long, but the possibility is there.

00:44:28 ►

That’s great.

00:44:29 ►

And I’m so glad that you waded into that hard question of the policy of who actually gets to administer stuff,

00:44:34 ►

who gets to take it, who gets their license to fly taken away.

00:44:38 ►

If you were in charge of a university, how would you like to see –

00:44:44 ►

what do you think would be a reasonable approach

00:44:46 ►

for a university to take around psychedelics?

00:44:49 ►

Ah, Professor’s Fantasy.

00:44:50 ►

We probably all have those.

00:44:52 ►

Well, I think the way to go would be at a major university, one that has a lot of resources,

00:45:00 ►

start a psychedelic center, which would have faculty from various departments

00:45:07 ►

asking the question,

00:45:09 ►

how can psychedelics affect my department?

00:45:12 ►

And then teaching in this sort of center.

00:45:16 ►

And I think that you’d have to draw people from

00:45:18 ►

basically almost all the fields,

00:45:21 ►

particularly if you’re going to use psychedelics

00:45:22 ►

as the sort of problem-solving, micro-dosing approach.

00:45:27 ►

Because any professors might use that that way.

00:45:31 ►

And one of my favorite fantasies is to imagine a very

00:45:35 ►

rich, powerful, well, very well-funded

00:45:39 ►

foundation that will fund psychedelic classes and research

00:45:43 ►

in universities,

00:45:50 ►

including psychotherapy and medicine, but also in all these other fields.

00:45:52 ►

Now anthropology, of course, is just wide open to this.

00:45:57 ►

I mean, that’s one of the richest fields in terms of psychedelics and psychoactive chemicals and all that stuff.

00:46:00 ►

So they’re definitely there.

00:46:02 ►

But I would like to see sort of maybe probably like a three-rung process

00:46:08 ►

of giving awards to professors to develop psychedelic classes.

00:46:12 ►

First have them just sort of write a letter of interest

00:46:14 ►

and talk about their background.

00:46:16 ►

And then select from those the best ones and have a foundation.

00:46:22 ►

Then ask them to submit a more detailed course syllabus,

00:46:28 ►

and it would have to include a letter from the department chair or dean saying

00:46:31 ►

they would be willing to have this course taught,

00:46:33 ►

so that academic problem would be taken care of,

00:46:36 ►

and then to fund both the professor and the department.

00:46:41 ►

Okay, say like $10,000 for the department to take care of

00:46:45 ►

administrative things

00:46:47 ►

and part of the professor’s salary

00:46:48 ►

and then $30,000

00:46:50 ►

towards the professor to teach the course

00:46:52 ►

and then develop psychedelic courses

00:46:55 ►

in universities

00:46:56 ►

so my course was a general interdisciplinary

00:46:59 ►

course but each course

00:47:01 ►

would have its own particular areas

00:47:03 ►

Nessie Davino at Pacific Tacoma

00:47:08 ►

is sort of working along the lines in English.

00:47:12 ►

And that’s an example of what can be done.

00:47:14 ►

And of course, I would definitely want to include

00:47:19 ►

divinity schools, theological seminaries,

00:47:22 ►

and of course law schools, medical schools,

00:47:24 ►

and the professional groups ought to get into this.

00:47:27 ►

So there could be hundreds, even thousands of different courses.

00:47:32 ►

And then what happens with professors, when you have people working in the field,

00:47:36 ►

they need a publication and they need a professional organization.

00:47:40 ►

So you’d be like the English professors, psychedelic professors,

00:47:43 ►

and the anthropology psychedelic professors,

00:47:46 ►

and they each have their journal, probably online open journals,

00:47:49 ►

considering the way things are going now.

00:47:51 ►

Wow.

00:47:52 ►

Architects for ACID.

00:47:54 ►

Well, yeah, there have been a couple of architectural studies on ACID, yeah.

00:47:59 ►

They came out a long time ago.

00:48:03 ►

That’s right.

00:48:04 ►

Wow. That would right. Wow.

00:48:05 ►

That would be a beautiful system to get more players in this game thinking about these things.

00:48:11 ►

Yeah.

00:48:11 ►

The idea is to use those different mind-body states in all these different disciplines.

00:48:16 ►

And, of course, we’re just talking about psychedelics.

00:48:18 ►

There could be centers for meditation studies and breathing studies and transcranial brain stimulation studies

00:48:25 ►

and all these sort of working together to develop the human mind fully.

00:48:29 ►

Because that’s what universities are supposed to do,

00:48:31 ►

is develop the human mind.

00:48:33 ►

And when you expand the design of the human mind

00:48:36 ►

to include all these different mind-body states,

00:48:39 ►

then universities have to start developing and exploring

00:48:42 ►

and teaching those states and how to use them.

00:48:46 ►

Basically, our educational system at all levels

00:48:49 ►

is what I call our default awake state.

00:48:53 ►

Someone is intelligent if they use our default awake state well.

00:48:58 ►

Good vocabulary, they can compute things.

00:49:02 ►

But our definition of intelligence has to expand

00:49:05 ►

to include using all mind-body states well.

00:49:08 ►

And I call the ability to select the right mind-body state

00:49:11 ►

meta-intelligence.

00:49:13 ►

So if you’re going to do a piece of creative work,

00:49:17 ►

maybe you want to microdose.

00:49:20 ►

And so the question then becomes for…

00:49:23 ►

Well, coaches do this when they get their teams up.

00:49:27 ►

They get them all excited and they get the adrenaline going.

00:49:29 ►

And a good coach really is producing a different mind-body state in his or her athletes.

00:49:38 ►

And so this is just done through good rhetoric, basically.

00:49:41 ►

But the same can be done in any field using any of these mind-body apps.

00:49:48 ►

So the question for every field is,

00:49:51 ►

what mind-body apps would be helpful in my field,

00:49:54 ►

and how do I go about using them,

00:49:55 ►

and do I have a special methods course for graduate students,

00:50:00 ►

methods in psychedelic mathematics.

00:50:04 ►

It seems to be math with multidimensional stuff, right?

00:50:09 ►

Yeah.

00:50:10 ►

And, of course, one of the things that typically comes out of psychedelics

00:50:16 ►

is the ability to visualize.

00:50:18 ►

Like Terry Mullis developing that PCR technique, it was a visual ability.

00:50:24 ►

And what I find intriguing about that is

00:50:26 ►

he had psychedelic experience,

00:50:28 ►

developed the ability to visualize,

00:50:30 ►

and then transferred that skill back to his ordinary state.

00:50:33 ►

He did not have his insight while doing psychedelics.

00:50:37 ►

Now, there’s all this question of transferring abilities

00:50:40 ►

from one state to another.

00:50:41 ►

And there’s an evidence that that can happen.

00:50:45 ►

And we all have this happen, like when we wake up in the morning

00:50:47 ►

and we know we’ve dreamt and can’t remember the dream

00:50:49 ►

and then suddenly in the middle of the

00:50:52 ►

morning the whole thing will download and we remember it.

00:50:54 ►

For me it’s around 10.30.

00:50:55 ►

So there’s transferring information

00:50:58 ►

from

00:50:58 ►

well, not known in an

00:51:01 ►

unconscious state to known.

00:51:03 ►

And I think one of the ways to get into this is,

00:51:07 ►

I think the way to characterize a state will be the default mode network.

00:51:13 ►

And once we sort of concentrate on that,

00:51:15 ►

this will be sort of the basic feeling.

00:51:18 ►

We’ll put the default mode network.

00:51:21 ►

I explained it’s like being in a car and the engine’s running, but it’s in neutral.

00:51:27 ►

So we’re in our mind, but it’s not thinking about it.

00:51:29 ►

It’s in neutral, just sort of floating around.

00:51:32 ►

That’s the default mode network.

00:51:34 ►

And I suspect this will be characteristic,

00:51:37 ►

the way of characterizing different mind-body states.

00:51:40 ►

We’ll start with the default mode network and work, if you can, work out from that.

00:51:44 ►

That’s great. Actually, that leads into the last question I really wanted to ask. We’ll start with the default mode network and work, if you can, work out from that.

00:51:45 ►

That’s great.

00:51:49 ►

Actually, that leads into the last question I really wanted to ask.

00:51:58 ►

What would your advice be to anyone out there listening who wanted to start exploring these mind states using these different mind apps and psychedelics?

00:52:06 ►

Let me start by saying that one of the articles in my website is psychedelics looking for graduate programs.

00:52:12 ►

Because I get people emailing me saying, you know, can I go here?

00:52:12 ►

Can I go to work?

00:52:13 ►

Can I study this?

00:52:14 ►

And so forth. So it’s basically how to find programs that are receptive to you in psychedelics.

00:52:19 ►

Oh, you were going to ask?

00:52:21 ►

Oh, you were going to ask?

00:52:26 ►

What your advice would be to maybe a young person who came in or a person hearing about this for the first time

00:52:27 ►

on using these mind state apps, including psychedelics.

00:52:31 ►

Okay.

00:52:32 ►

Whenever people write to me, the first thing I will say is stay legal.

00:52:35 ►

Okay.

00:52:36 ►

And because you will end up in jail,

00:52:39 ►

but the rest of us will miss your entire life work

00:52:42 ►

and the field will be less because of that.

00:52:46 ►

You know, you’ll be sitting in jail instead of doing research or whatever it is you’re supposed to be doing.

00:52:51 ►

So stay legal.

00:52:53 ►

And then I think the thing to do is to, you know, ask yourself,

00:52:56 ►

what about psychedelics or meditation or whatever it is that interests me most?

00:53:01 ►

And follow that.

00:53:03 ►

And because when you’re following your natural interests,

00:53:07 ►

your unconscious is on your side.

00:53:09 ►

Because it will notice.

00:53:10 ►

You know, when you’re interested in something,

00:53:12 ►

you notice it here and there,

00:53:13 ►

or somebody will say a word and it’ll pop out of a conversation,

00:53:16 ►

or you happen to hit a bit of news items

00:53:19 ►

and it’ll have to do with it.

00:53:20 ►

So follow your natural interests, whatever it is.

00:53:24 ►

Now, mostly the people who are into psychedelics

00:53:28 ►

now are in the psychotherapeutic aspect, which makes

00:53:32 ►

sense. That’s where the progress is being made. But whether it’s anything else, it just

00:53:36 ►

find out what your interests are and

00:53:39 ►

as you burrow into it, look for links

00:53:43 ►

to other interests.

00:53:50 ►

And the funny thing about specializing is when you really dig into specialization,

00:53:54 ►

you suddenly find that your specialization is linked to all kinds of other stuff.

00:53:58 ►

So be aware of those links and tell yourself,

00:54:03 ►

I’m going to follow this link or I wish I had time to follow this link, but I just don’t.

00:54:05 ►

And you have to be realistic about that. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us

00:54:07 ►

and for all your work

00:54:08 ►

we’ll link to all the books

00:54:10 ►

and your stuff in the program notes

00:54:13 ►

and it was such a pleasure to talk to you Dr. Roberts

00:54:14 ►

well thanks for coming by

00:54:15 ►

thanks again for listening to Symposia

00:54:21 ►

on the Psychedelic Salon 2.0

00:54:23 ►

do us a favor.

00:54:25 ►

Go to iTunes or Stitcher and leave a rating or review.

00:54:28 ►

Tell your friends.

00:54:29 ►

That’s how you can really help us out.

00:54:33 ►

Thanks to Matt Payne, who engineered the sound,

00:54:35 ►

Joey Witt for the intro music,

00:54:37 ►

California Smile for the outro music,

00:54:39 ►

and Brian Norman, who produced the show.

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