Program Notes
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Guest speaker: Daniel Greig
Date this lecture was recorded: 2018
Daniel Greig studies cognitive science and philosophy. His lectures on psychedelics incorporate magic and mysticism. He uses the language of psychology and neuroscience. It makes for a fascinating mix.
In this episode we will be hearing about his unique views on how these drugs are illuminated by the mystical systems of the past.
Daniel Greig ‘The Psychedelic State’
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from Cyberdelic Space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in Psychedelic Salon
00:00:23 ►
2.0.
00:00:24 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in Psychedelic Salon 2.0.
00:00:30 ►
And I’m very pleased to begin today by thanking longtime supporter Dr. Dan Oh,
00:00:36 ►
who once again has made a direct donation to the salon to help with the expenses associated with these podcasts.
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And I also want to thank Paul D., whose Patreon pledge will also be used to support these podcasts.
00:00:45 ►
And I thank you both from the bottom of my heart.
00:00:51 ►
Now, you’ve probably noticed that today’s podcast is a bit late in being published,
00:00:57 ►
and the reason is twofold. The first reason is that, well, it’s been so hot here in our apartment that I simply haven’t had enough energy to even turn on my computer. But the other reason is that
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I’ve been spending time with some interesting visitors.
00:01:06 ►
Fellow salonner Charles Brownstein,
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who I got to know through my weekly Zoom conversations
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with my Patreon supporters,
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well, he was here for a visit.
00:01:15 ►
Charles is the director of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund,
00:01:19 ►
which is doing really valuable work
00:01:20 ►
in protecting our right to free speech.
00:01:23 ►
And Charles was able to get me into the
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recent Comic-Con event here in San Diego. Now, while I’ve been reading about this event for many
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years, it was my first time to actually attend it. And to say the least, I was overwhelmed.
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It was very much like a crowded version of Burning Man in a big box.
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And after the event ended on Sunday, Charles came out
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here and spent some time with my wife and I, and he got a ride to our home from Larry Martyr,
00:01:53 ►
whose name I’m sure many of our fellow salonners will recognize. Among other creations of Larry’s
00:01:58 ►
is the popular series Bean World, and the omnibus of which I’m looking forward to reading as soon
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as my granddaughters finish reading it themselves. Also, Charles gave me a graphic novel that I suspect,
00:02:11 ►
well, a large number of our fellow slaughters are going to eventually purchase.
00:02:16 ►
It’s titled Crawl Space and is by Jesse Jacobs. I’m not really sure how to describe this book
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without being a spoiler, but in my opinion, it is a perfect example of what Terence McKenna talks about
00:02:28 ►
when he encourages creative ways to teach non-psychonauts about psychedelics.
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First of all, it has some of the most beautiful artwork that I’ve seen
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when it comes to picturing a DMT experience.
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But here’s the kicker.
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Nowhere in the book does it even mention drugs of any kind.
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Basically, two kids get into a washing machine and dryer and somehow get propelled into an alternate universe.
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I’ll most likely be talking about this little book in future podcasts, but here, at least to me, is the most important feature of this book.
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most important feature of this book. You see, I often hear from parents whose children are beginning to ask very pointed questions about drugs, and psychedelic drugs in particular.
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Now, at long last, I have an answer to their questions about how to explain a psychedelic
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experience to their kids. Without ever mentioning DMT or drugs of any kind, this graphic novel,
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quite literally, through the excellent and
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profuse artwork, takes them on a trip. Plus, it goes on to discuss many of the aspects of psychedelics,
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including prohibition and drug law enforcement. I won’t go on any more about this important book
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right now, but even if you aren’t a parent, you’re going to want a copy of this book, I’m sure.
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I’ve read it once already, and tonight I’m going to read it again while I vape a little cannabis
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and, well, let it transport me back to some of my own DMT experiences.
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If you only get one book to help your children understand what psychedelic experiences can teach us,
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then this book is for you.
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And if you don’t have children yourself, I still believe that you’ll want a copy of this book for yourself
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it’s a, well, it’s a real gem
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and full disclosure here
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neither Charles nor I have even met the author slash artist
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and neither of us are getting paid to promote Jesse’s book
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although I do hope to have him as a guest here in the salon one day
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well, that’s enough of me for now so let let’s join Lex Pelger, who will introduce today’s
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program.
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I’m Lex Pelger, and this is the Psychedelic Salon 2.0.
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Daniel Gregg is a researcher of psychedelics in Canada.
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He’s also an engaging speaker that delivers lectures with titles like
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The Neurobiology of Prophetic Visions.
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He studies cognitive science and philosophy at the University of Toronto
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and works with the Canadian students for sensible drug policy.
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Today’s episode is a very intriguing conversation with him
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about several mystical systems, including Kabbalah, the mystical branch of Judaism.
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He shares about how these systems can be important
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for learning more about psychedelic states.
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I had a great time learning from Daniel.
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I know a little bit about this stuff,
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and so it’s fascinating to hear from someone who knows a lot.
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I hope you find it illuminating as well.
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Hello, everybody. I’m very pleased to be here today with Daniel Gregg, who is a researcher
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and lecturer. And thank you so much for coming on the show today.
00:05:35 ►
Hey, thank you so much for having me, Lex.
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You’re a student of wisdom traditions and neurobiology and mystical experiences and
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psychedelics and Buddhism. It’s a lot of different things.
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And so I guess my first question is, when you were a little kid, what did you want to do when
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you grew up? Yeah, so I kind of came out of the womb being interested in a lot of stuff, I think.
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My dad was always very interested in like psychics and psychic phenomenon. So he was always trying to
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get me to think about that kind of stuff. And I went to a Catholic school, I was raised in a
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Catholic school, which by the time I got to high school, very quickly made me atheist,
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as I think is the experience for a lot of people. But when I was in like kindergarten, grade one,
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I was like, I didn’t really figure out what this was all about. And I started like reading the
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Bible and getting really interested in that. That turned out to be a little bit difficult.
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So my mom got me like a graphic novel version of the New Testament. So I’ve always been sort of really heavily immersed in these sorts of symbols and traditions and so on.
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I got very interested in Harry Potter, like by the time I hit like mid-elementary school.
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And then at some point I realized, oh, my God, like this is all just like based on like actual magic and alchemy.
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And so that was like a huge turning point because that sort of more magical aspect of the wisdom traditions are my primary
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interest point. The science thing was a bit of a later turn for me. I was actually very much
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interested in like the arts. And when I was in high school, I was like doing musicals and just
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taking arts classes and music classes all the time. And I sort of stopped doing like math and
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science and all that kind of thing. But after I went to Brock University for a year,
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I was there taking English, I was convinced that I was going to be a science fiction writer.
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Somewhere in that time, I had a succession of mystical experiences facilitated by psychedelic
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compounds, and then realized, once I found the cognitive science program at U of T, that I could
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like actually sort of do the science that I was trying to write the science fiction about. And
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that has ended me up here. And yeah, so I’m at Toronto
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at the University of Toronto right now.
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I’m doing a double major
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in cognitive science and philosophy.
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And that sort of lets me get away
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with a lot of strange things.
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I like to often joke that I’m sort of like
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literally studying magic.
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And there’s a few other people
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who have similar interests as well.
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There’s a good friend of mine
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who studies sort of like Eastern magic.
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And I’m more interested in sort of like Western esotericism and the occult traditions and so on. But, you know, from a very rational, analytical perspective, trying to see from the premise, we are capable of these experiences, you know, how do these sorts of transcendent visionary experiences work in the brain? And, you know, what are they possibly good for?
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working the brain and, you know, what are they possibly good for?
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Before you had the psychedelic experiences that helped you to glimpse this,
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had you had other things in your life that were kind of felt like they were sober versions of that,
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that were pointing you in this direction?
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Yeah, definitely.
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You know, I distinctly remember, like, a few times when I was younger,
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sort of trying to imagine something very vividly in my imagination and then having it like literally flash into being like a full
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like a veridical percept um and so that was very strange um and yeah i had had experiences where i
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thought you know i could like sort of see ghosts and that kind of thing when i was like really
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really young uh but it was those experiences of like sort of being able to spontaneously generate
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full visionary experiences with my imagination alone that kind of like flagged in my consciousness
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as something that is my kind of basis for a lot of the research that I’m doing now, I think.
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And those experiences were when I was like maybe like between like 10 and like 12 years old.
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So very young, definitely hadn’t been exposed to psychedelics.
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And, you know, there’s definitely those murmurs in my psyche of that kind of experience.
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It reminds me of a former guest we had, Dr. Bruce Dahmer,
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who talks about endotrips, where he uses his imagination
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to think about things of science and keep it all on his head
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and kind of run simulations in there.
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And that old idea of imagination being such a key part of both being a person
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and also changing the world through magic.
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Totally, yeah.
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The imagination is like a powerful, powerful faculty
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that the human mind has at its disposal.
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And it’s very much used in like magical traditions.
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You know, it’s basically all about manipulating the imagination
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to cause changes in both yourself and the world beyond yourself.
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So yeah, sounds like that would be an episode I’d be interested in hearing
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and a person I’d be interested in talking about.
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That’s exactly sort of the line of interest and research that I am doing.
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Yeah, yeah.
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He seems like a cat up your alley.
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Now, what did your first psychedelic trips go like for you?
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How did they loosen to this path?
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Yeah, so my first psychedelic trips, I was probably like 19
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by the time I started experimenting with psychedelics.
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like, yeah, I think I was like 19 by the time I started experimenting with psychedelics. And it was actually the 2C series was available widely when I was at that age. There was someone in town
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that was just making a whole bunch of it. And so my first mystical experiences happened with like
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2CC. And let’s see, they were more, I think, of the sort of unitive variety, sort of intellectual apprehensions into like the unity of all things,
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which was very good for me to experience because I also had like, you know, severe depression and like especially just years of constant depersonalization
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where I felt like there was very much a barrier between me and the world and like I wasn’t really sort of in the world.
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I was kind of locked within a glass box and just observing it from a
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distance and sort of unable to fundamentally come into contact with the world. And so these
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experiences allowed me to see that there was sort of like an interconnection between all things and
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that there was a meaningful mutual momentum between all aspects of the universe. And then,
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you know, from that is the inference that I too am one of these aspects of the universe that is
00:11:04 ►
contributing to the momentum of all things across time.
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So that was one of the first real significant insights that I had was just looking up at the sky and then perceiving everything sort of twisting into itself and seeing that that is what it is for there to be a higher power.
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That’s what it is for there to be something more than us.
00:11:22 ►
At that point, had you heard of Walter Pankey’s Scale of Mystical Experiences, or did that come later?
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No, yeah, definitely that came very later.
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I hadn’t really heard of any of that stuff.
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I was mostly interested in science fiction novels
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like Dune and Dallas, a lot of Philip K. Dick’s work,
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and there’s often very heavy substance use,
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especially psychedelic substance use, in those novels.
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And so I was trying to just explore
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not only the external domain,
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but the internal by use of these compounds. That was my motivation. And I sort of just
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accidentally stumbled on these mystical experiences. How did they incorporate into
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your life? And did it lead to a thirst of finding these things without actually finding these states
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without actually using the psychoactives? Yeah, definitely. I have that motivation.
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without actually using the psychoactives.
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Yeah, definitely I have that motivation.
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At that time, I had started getting also into meditation and yoga,
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different phenomena like that,
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very much trying to not only enhance the experiences that I was having with psychedelics,
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but having those sorts of experiences in general as well.
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I had a strong intuition that there was a deep power
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that comes with these sorts of things, but of, a power that you have to be careful with. It’s very easy
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to sort of get derailed and become detached from reality if you sort of immerse yourself in that
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too much. But yeah, definitely fostered a deep, deep interest in just looking into like spirituality
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and mysticism and the traditions of the world that make that available. And so I bring a lot of that into the work that I’m doing to this day.
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And your first step was getting to find this psychedelic academic program.
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You could really start diving in to all these different directions.
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Yeah, yeah.
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I think I had an experience that many people have where you have this massive insight,
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this huge sense of significance that you get from a psychedelic experience.
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You know, like I’m going to be like the urban shaman who transforms the universe. So I definitely had sort
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of that as like a mindset going into things. And I came across the program at U of T, the
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cognitive science program, and it seemed like a perfect, perfect place for me to sort of poise
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myself in the midst of psychedelic research. And let’s see. Yeah, I think the time that I was
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having these experiences was just when the psychedelic research was starting to pick up.
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So it was around like 2012, which is when you get like the first publication of Robin Carhart-Harris’
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paper, the neurobiology of the psilocybin experience with fMRI imaging. So I think I
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came into this at a very good point. And the environment at U of T is like
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very good for this. And cognitive science, it mixes a whole bunch of strange things together,
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like linguistics, philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence, and sort of that
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interrelationship between all of those things, this interdisciplinary nature of it makes it
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really good for looking at the psychedelic experience. That sounds like a great program.
00:14:04 ►
What did you first work on when you got there?
00:14:06 ►
So some of the first classes I took, there was like an intro to CogSci class, and it
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basically was just like a history and overview of the field of cognitive science. I wrote
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some papers on like the phenomena of insight, which is the moment where you go, aha, and
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there’s like a particular felt sense that is unique to that aha experience.
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It’s associated with positive mood and a bit of an increase in affect and motivation
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and a felt sense of significance and all of that.
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So I wrote about that aha experience, and I later did some writing in some classes
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about how the mystical experience kind of just is that giant aha experience,
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basically, or at least for the unitive kind of experience.
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It’s just a magnified version of the tiny insights that we have every day.
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So I sort of started looking at, like, insight and flow states, that kind of thing,
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and I’m still kind of elaborating different models for understanding that.
00:15:04 ►
Oh, I like that.
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So a trip is like a long eureka moment for somebody.
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Oh, yeah, yeah.
00:15:10 ►
And it’s literally got the same neural stuff going on, right?
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So like both the aha experience and the mystical experience of the unitive variety are related
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to a burst of activity in like the right temporal lobe and sort of a passive activity
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in the right medial prefrontal cortex,
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a boost in neural entropy and disorders. So like both when you’re having, you know,
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the psychedelic state we all know is one of like a very high disordered state of your neural
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networks sort of randomly reconnecting. But even in just the insight experience of the
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everyday insights that we have, there’s also an elevation, a temporary elevation in neural entropy.
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And then it sort of like reorganizes into a new framework from that point of entropy.
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So there’s like lots of similarities between them.
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So I think that they fundamentally are relying on the same neural circuitry.
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How is it that you sort of take that back in history to the neurobiology of prophetic experiences?
00:16:05 ►
Right. Yeah. So that is definitely like my number one interest. sort of take that back in history to the newer biology of prophetic experiences.
00:16:11 ►
Right. Yeah. So that is definitely like my number one interest. I think that there’s been a lot of focus in the research on psychedelics, on the unitive variety of mystical experiences, but not
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so much in the visionary. And one thing that I’ve noticed from my own experiences and from other
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people’s experiences is that it seems as though the visionary kind of experience which is described
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by, say, the tradition of biblical prophecy is kind of a little bit more common to what people
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are actually experiencing when they’re undergoing entheogenic or psychedelic experiences. So, you
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know, I was having some intuitions about that, and around that time I came across a book by Rick
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Strassman called DMT and the Soul’s Prophecy.
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And so he was basically articulating the idea that biblical prophecy is a more accurate model for framing psychedelic mystical experiences, as opposed to those unitive nothingness,
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oneness experiences that get attributed to, say, certain elements of Christian mysticism or
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Zen. Buddhism is very often applied as a model to understanding psychedelic experiences and psychedelic states. But yeah, so I really
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took a lot of those ideas that he was working with, and I really deeply dug into them. So
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I got a book called The Guide for the Perplexed by Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides, and he
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sort of outlines a hierarchy of prophetic experiences,
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the most basic one being just very strange dreams that happen to give you true intuitions about the world,
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ranging up to, you know, visions of angels speaking to you.
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And then there’s Moses, who is of the highest level of prophecy, where your intellect is so highly developed
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that God basically just inserts rational truth into your brain without the need to be mediated by imagination.
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But the function of the imagination in these experiences is to translate higher-order concepts that are too difficult for you to apprehend with linguistic rational functioning into a sort of visual metaphor to allow you to more easily access ideas and to facilitate insights.
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is and to facilitate insights.
00:18:06 ►
So one of the key things that I think is important about studying visionary experiences, especially in the model of prophecy, is that the unit of experience is likely very often preceded
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by visionary content and that how you get to the unit of experience is by going through
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a succession of meaningful mental images that appear to you in a visionary quality.
00:18:23 ►
So is that kind of the old idea of Jacob’s Ladder, going up and down between the different
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levels of thought?
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Yeah, that’s definitely very related.
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And I think that metaphor also gets at something important in that you need some sort of structure
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to be able to ascend up there and also to come back down, right?
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You can’t really comment about nothingness very much.
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There’s really not a lot of valuable content you can get from nothing.
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So you need to have some sort of like framework, some sort of set of images or symbols that you can use to translate these truths, these ideas to other people.
00:18:57 ►
So it reminds me of Georgia O’Keeffe’s quote where she said, I paint things that I cannot say.
00:19:02 ►
That, I think, is very apt, yes.
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said, I paint things that I cannot say.
00:19:04 ►
That, I think, is very apt, yes.
00:19:09 ►
Of these old prophets, what are some of the most stories that are most related to the things we’re talking about?
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One of the classic models is Ezekiel’s vision of God on a throne with four cherubs carrying
00:19:18 ►
that.
00:19:20 ►
And that model has been used in the tradition of Kabbalah, which I’m particularly interested
00:19:24 ►
in, because Kabbalah is all about sort of developing the rational and imaginative faculties such that you can produce experiences that are very much like prophecy.
00:19:45 ►
is more useful as sort of a model for analyzing certain similarities.
00:19:49 ►
But in everyone’s psyche, these sorts of content that they get is going to be unique to them, right?
00:19:51 ►
Because it has to translate in a way that is understandable
00:19:54 ►
to that individual specifically what that content actually means.
00:20:01 ►
That’s sort of like one of the difficult things, I think,
00:20:02 ►
about looking at visionary experience is that it’s very difficult
00:20:04 ►
to get things that cross over between people’s experiences.
00:20:08 ►
Because the way that your imagination is going to render one idea to you is going to be very different from the way that it renders it to me.
00:20:14 ►
Our angels all wear different clothing, but they’re still coming from the same source.
00:20:17 ►
Exactly, exactly.
00:20:18 ►
And there’s an author, his name is Gershom Scholem, and he’s a great author who kind of founded the academic study of Kabbalah.
00:20:26 ►
And the way that he refers to it precisely is that the images that come to you in prophecy are like garments upon the face of God.
00:20:33 ►
So can you talk a little bit more just about what Kabbalah is and why it would be a subject of interest to people who are interested in these psychoactive mystical states?
00:20:42 ►
Yeah, for sure.
00:20:43 ►
So Kabbalah is a tradition of Jewish mysticism,
00:20:46 ►
and it actually grounds the majority of occult practice and esoteric practice in the West. It’s
00:20:54 ►
a really powerful and profound system. It’s very heavily oriented towards the letters of the Hebrew
00:21:00 ►
alphabet. Each one of them is sort of like a meditative object that has a particular kind of meaning. The whole universe, according to the system, is constructed out of the Hebrew letters,
00:21:12 ►
and God sort of makes creation continue by speaking order into these letters of the Hebrew
00:21:20 ►
alphabet. And an interesting consequence about that is that Kabbalah is very intrinsically magical.
00:21:24 ►
Hebrew alphabet. And an interesting consequence about that is that Kabbalah is very intrinsically magical. It sort of gets at this idea of being able to transform reality. And part of that is
00:21:30 ►
by sort of like learning the Hebrew language and being able to speak it correctly such that
00:21:34 ►
you can connect your mind to this causal force emanating from God and contribute to the
00:21:40 ►
structuring of reality itself. And the way that you do that is with their core symbol. It’s called
00:21:45 ►
the Tree of Life. So it’s a pretty common symbol. And it’s got 10 different spheres of light.
00:21:51 ►
They’re called the Sephiroth. And this structure of 10 spheres describes the process of
00:21:58 ►
determinant reality emanating out from the absolute uncertainty that exists at the beginning of the cosmos and
00:22:06 ►
also within every center of measurement. So one of the ideas is that there’s like
00:22:12 ►
a little bit of nothingness from the initial phase of creation left over within every point in space.
00:22:18 ►
And from that nothingness, change is allowed to flow in through the universe. And change follows
00:22:23 ►
the structure of emanation from the first Sephiroth, called the crown, all the way down to the last Sephiroth,
00:22:30 ►
which in Hebrew is called Malkuth. And so what the system does is it gives you sort of a readily
00:22:36 ►
available relational system that you can interface with your mind to extrapolate insights from it.
00:22:46 ►
With all traditions of mysticism,
00:22:50 ►
all of the symbols that they use sort of have these implicit ideas embedded into them. So whether you’re using like the Tree of Life of Kabbalah, or if you’re meditating on Buddhist deities,
00:22:55 ►
what you’re doing in that process is you’re sort of allowing your cognition to focus on the elements
00:23:00 ►
of the symbols. And as you learn more about the philosophy in which those symbols are embedded,
00:23:04 ►
it allows you to sort of like have insights about the relationships of each of the symbols and as you learn more about the philosophy in which the symbols are embedded it allows you to sort of like have insights about the
00:23:08 ►
relationships of each of the elements within the symbol that you’re looking at
00:23:11 ►
so Kabbalah is very useful it’s at least been very useful for me in sort of
00:23:15 ►
gaining insight about the relationship between mind wisdom and reality and also
00:23:21 ►
understanding because it posits understanding and wisdom as sort of creative
00:23:26 ►
aspects of the cosmos itself, as well as sort of the microcosmic version of those phenomena as they
00:23:33 ►
manifest in the individual. So it’s a profound system for being able to sort of drive insight
00:23:38 ►
out of your own cognition. And there’s a whole bunch of practices that you can use within the
00:23:43 ►
context of psychedelic experiences and even to prepare for psychedelic experiences that I think make these the most interesting when pairing them with the psychedelic state or even with just spiritual development.
00:24:04 ►
in general, there’s a whole bunch of meditative traditions that come with these. They’re not very well known anymore. But one of the things that is emphasized is increasing the clarity of your
00:24:10 ►
mental imagery. So for example, one simple thing that you can do is you just imagine very clearly
00:24:16 ►
the letter A in your mind’s eye, and you just contemplate the letter A for 15-20 minutes every
00:24:21 ►
morning. And then so what this is supposed to do is it’s supposed to increase the clarity of your mental imagery
00:24:26 ►
such that when visions do come to you, they’re more clear and you can see them more clearly
00:24:30 ►
and thereby you can more readily interact with them.
00:24:33 ►
And so that’s something that I really want to study in relation to psychedelics.
00:24:35 ►
If we do these sorts of practices where we’re increasing the quality of people’s mental imagery,
00:24:40 ►
does that actually allow people to more readily interact with and gain insights from their mental imagery?
00:24:46 ►
So I think that that would be the case.
00:24:49 ►
And it seems like it’s especially important today because as AI comes on, it seems like
00:24:55 ►
one of the things that humans will have left is the power of imagination.
00:24:59 ►
And with systems like the Kabbalah or the I Ching. They’re just such rich symbolic systems
00:25:05 ►
that it helps people to build up their own maps
00:25:08 ►
and legends of the world
00:25:10 ►
that are more textured than they would have had.
00:25:11 ►
Because I remember I read,
00:25:13 ►
I saw one big fat book of magic
00:25:15 ►
and I didn’t get to read the whole thing,
00:25:16 ►
but I did go to the last page
00:25:18 ►
and the last page was
00:25:19 ►
the key is to be creating your own archetypes,
00:25:22 ►
to take these maps and enrich them
00:25:24 ►
even to your own level and it will help you understand your own archetypes, to take these maps and enrich them even to your own level,
00:25:26 ►
and it will help you understand your own microcosm of yourself,
00:25:29 ►
which will help you understand that the universe is pretty darn similar to what’s actually happening inside you.
00:25:35 ►
Yeah, totally. I think all of those ideas are very much on point.
00:25:38 ►
And what happens as you engage with these systems of images is they increase the coherency of your own mind, right?
00:25:45 ►
Sort of like instantiating a symbol system into your cognition.
00:25:49 ►
And as that symbol system becomes ingrained in your memory, it can be redeployed at future
00:25:54 ►
times in your dreams, in your visions, when you’re not really knowing it, in order to
00:25:59 ►
like facilitate insights that you couldn’t have really had without the structure giving
00:26:03 ►
form to your mind.
00:26:04 ►
This plays into some of the work of Giordano Bruno, who I saw from your talk that you’re a fan of.
00:26:09 ►
And he talks a lot about memory and building these memory palaces in your mind filled with statues,
00:26:15 ►
and each statue being a symbol that you just make covered in imageries and symbols.
00:26:21 ►
So it really becomes something very rich that you can draw on.
00:26:24 ►
Yeah, yeah. Bruno is great. And his mnemonic system is basically trying to refine the cognition
00:26:33 ►
through the practical use of symbols, such that you can just have insights into truth about the
00:26:39 ►
world, which is like notoriously difficult to do, right? You know, we’re all sort of
00:26:42 ►
succumbing to the veil of illusion, the veil of Maya to some degree.
00:26:46 ►
It’s very difficult to get out of our own patterns of sense-making that falsely render certain things in the world
00:26:52 ►
and that thereby causes our suffering. But if you do use imagistic symbols like this,
00:26:58 ►
the claim generally is that you can avoid that necessary process of illusory false generalization that happens just because your cognitive system is kind of sampling data from the world and trying to make predictions as best it can.
00:27:14 ►
So you’re kind of optimizing the process of your mind to be able to make predictions about the world.
00:27:20 ►
Yes, I’ve got this great quote from Frances Yates’ book, Art of Memory.
00:27:24 ►
She has a whole bunch of sections in there about Bruno.
00:27:26 ►
But so like here’s some things like sort of get at the project that he was trying to get at.
00:27:31 ►
So in your primordial nature, the archetypal images exist in a confused chaos.
00:27:36 ►
The magic memory draws them out of chaos and restores their order and gives back man his divine powers.
00:27:43 ►
So those divine powers are like intuition, knowledge, the capacity for
00:27:46 ►
creation, you know, and that’s kind of what it means for man to be made in the image of God,
00:27:50 ►
which founds a lot of thinking in Western systems, is we have this power of being able to actively
00:27:57 ►
create reality, but it’s something that you have to earn. And so for Bruno, he’s got the system of
00:28:01 ►
like 150 different images arrayed in concentric circles. And you internalize the system.
00:28:07 ►
They’re all based on sort of the Zodiac and the deacons of the Zodiac.
00:28:10 ►
And you just sort of permute the system in your mind and allow you to just think more aptly about natural phenomena and about social phenomena,
00:28:19 ►
such that you can sort of infer truth through the structure of the system.
00:28:23 ►
And it takes your mind out of its primordial state
00:28:25 ►
of chaos and like being disformed and provides a divine structure that allows you to sort of
00:28:33 ►
earn your powers of creation that come as a result of being made in the image of God.
00:28:37 ►
It’s beautiful. It reminds me of it sounds something like, you know, Buddhist practices
00:28:42 ►
being coming so widespread now because meditation is a type of brain training.
00:28:47 ►
It sounds like what you’re talking about is another type of brain training more in the creative imaginative sphere.
00:28:53 ►
Yes, definitely.
00:28:54 ►
And so there’s an interesting historical element in Western culture, right?
00:28:57 ►
Because within the context of the Protestant Reformation, there was also a whole bunch of educational reform that was happening at the time. And so the Protestants saw the use of images as mnemonics as being the worshipping
00:29:12 ►
of internal idols, basically. And so as they were smashing idols in the churches, they were also
00:29:16 ►
trying to smash the idols of the imagination. And as a result, we had a transition in the Renaissance from people learning the arts of memory that were largely image-based and coming to only learn things in list and rote.
00:29:32 ►
And so the fact that we still do that today, that when we’re in school and being educated to memorize things in lists all the time, that’s not because it’s the best necessarily, and it’s not because it’s the only way to really do that.
00:29:44 ►
the best necessarily, and it’s not because it’s the only way to really do that. It has this grounding within the Protestant educational reform, which sort of saw a turn away from
00:29:51 ►
the imagination as a useful faculty of the psyche. But for example, people are turning back to that
00:29:57 ►
now, and you can actually create memory therapeutics. So there’s a few researchers,
00:30:02 ►
I can’t remember their names right now, but they’re using the method of loci as a treatment for depression. So the method of loci involves
00:30:10 ►
using a location that you construct in your imagination. If you’ve seen Sherlock Holmes,
00:30:15 ►
you’ve known this through the memory palace that Sherlock Holmes explores to store his information.
00:30:20 ►
In the Renaissance, they would use the local church and they would store different information at each of the pews or at meaningful statues that were arrayed throughout the church.
00:30:31 ►
But you can really use any sort of location.
00:30:33 ►
And the scientific research into this has shown that if it’s a real location or if it’s one constructed by your imagination completely, that doesn’t change the benefits of the method of loci.
00:30:42 ►
So there’s this one study where they had the people who have depression memorize a bunch of self-affirming memories.
00:30:49 ►
And they had one group using the method of loci to store these self-affirming memories in a meaningful place.
00:30:54 ►
And they had the other group just memorize them by list.
00:30:57 ►
And when they tested them a few months later, only the people who were in the method of loci condition were able to recall these self-affirming memories.
00:31:06 ►
The people who had depression in the condition with list memorization just forgot them all.
00:31:10 ►
And a part of the reason for that is that with depression comes a constriction of your memory,
00:31:16 ►
a constriction of your capacity to think. It’s really sort of a narrowing down. It kind of puts
00:31:20 ►
the blinders on your imagination and on your thought. And it really narrows you down into
00:31:24 ►
being able to think and reason
00:31:26 ►
in ways that accord with the depressed state itself.
00:31:29 ►
And there’s also a phenomenon in memory called encoding specificity,
00:31:33 ►
which is where you encode information along with the specifics
00:31:37 ►
of the entire experience that you’re having in the encoding of that memory.
00:31:42 ►
So if you’re depressed, it’s more likely that you’ll recall memories
00:31:46 ►
that have sort of a depressed character.
00:31:48 ►
If you’re really happy, you’re more likely to recall memories
00:31:51 ►
that coincide with the mood state of being happy.
00:31:54 ►
And this is also the case for if you’re in different rooms, right?
00:31:57 ►
If you’re in one country and you memorize a whole bunch of stuff,
00:32:00 ►
when you go back there, you might have that location
00:32:04 ►
stimulate the
00:32:05 ►
response of recalling that memory because the actual physical location
00:32:09 ►
itself acts as a context cue that your memory can scaffold or like use to
00:32:13 ►
scaffold into recreating those pathways that had been created in the initial
00:32:19 ►
encoding phase of whatever information you were learning so with this method of
00:32:24 ►
loci you can basically
00:32:25 ►
create a resiliency against the mood effects that are detrimental to memory in depression by
00:32:31 ►
using imagination to create the simulation of a physical environment and then pulling information
00:32:37 ►
out of that structure, which isn’t only based on those sort of natural, unscaffolded qualities of memory access.
00:32:49 ►
So yeah, you can kind of like use that to intervene in oncoming mood states. And what
00:32:52 ►
these researchers have done is they will get people, when they notice a negative mood state
00:32:57 ►
oncoming, recall this memory palace that they’ve constructed and recall these self-affirming
00:33:02 ►
memories to intervene in the cyclical process,
00:33:06 ►
which will use a bunch of different cognitive biases and memory recall dispositions to, in normal conditions,
00:33:16 ►
result in a depressed state.
00:33:18 ►
You can intervene in that when that’s happening by using this system to recall memories
00:33:23 ►
that sort of work against the emotional quality of the depressed state as it’s coming on.
00:33:29 ►
I really like the practicality of that.
00:33:32 ►
And actually it leads me to some of the questions I wanted to end with about the practicality of all of these mystical things you’re talking about. might be listening who’s intrigued by these methods, what would you recommend for practices
00:33:45 ►
that they might use before, during, or after their psychedelic or sober mystical experiences,
00:33:51 ►
and maybe some favorite books as well? Yeah, so active imagination, I would say,
00:33:56 ►
is number one, because within the psychedelic experience, it’s basically just
00:33:59 ►
doing active imagination to you. So that is a practice that was developed by Carl Jung.
00:34:06 ►
And there is a really good book called Gnosis, an Esoteric Tradition of Mystical Visions and Unions.
00:34:11 ►
And that’s by a researcher named Dan Merker. He’s a psychotherapist and also a religion studies
00:34:18 ►
professor who unfortunately recently passed away, but he used to teach at the University of Toronto.
00:34:23 ►
He’s even got a few books on psychedelics. And so in the book Gnosis, he describes how Carl Jung’s rediscovery
00:34:30 ►
of active imagination is kind of, it coincides with his interest in Gnosticism. And it’s very
00:34:35 ►
similar to what the Gnostics, which are, you know, an early Christian group, a very diverse
00:34:41 ►
bunch of Christians from, say, the first century to the second century CE,
00:34:45 ►
when Christianity was initially forming. But it seems that they were engaging in the production
00:34:50 ►
of visionary experiences, which are effectively the transcendent function unifying conscious and
00:34:55 ►
unconscious material through meaningful visions. And it’s something like active imagination by
00:35:01 ►
which that is occurring. So I would recommend that book and that practice.
00:35:06 ►
I think just for my own personal interest, I find Gnosticism very fascinating.
00:35:10 ►
So if you can ever get your hand on a copy of Vinayak Hammadi’s scriptures, that would definitely go high on my list of things to look at.
00:35:20 ►
There’s also a book by Gene Knox.
00:35:22 ►
It’s called Memories, Fantasies, Reflections, I think. And it’s like a very rational cognitive science approach to Carl Jung’s psychology. And it’s a really good way of understanding how your cognition is sort of being revealed to you in the context of a psychedelic experience, what you’re kind of doing is integrating a bunch of your implicit memory, your unconscious complexes, which are, you know,
00:35:49 ►
not able to be conscious because they’re fundamentally implicit, meaning they can’t
00:35:52 ►
be conscious. So you’re basically synthesizing that information through an imaginative representation.
00:36:00 ►
So Gene Knox’s book is really good for kind of laying the groundwork for that.
00:36:04 ►
DMT and the Soul of Prophecy is really good.
00:36:06 ►
I definitely recommend looking into Kabbalah.
00:36:09 ►
Well, there’s a good book I just came across called Guide to Dakini Land,
00:36:12 ►
which is a book about the highest yoga tantra practice of Buddha Vajrayogini.
00:36:18 ►
And that’s like a meditational practice on one of the wisdom deities.
00:36:22 ►
And so it gives you a whole bunch of different things to interface with your imagination
00:36:26 ►
relating to sort of gaining realization from the qualities of that deity of wisdom.
00:36:33 ►
See, I think that’s a bunch of good stuff that I have on hand right now, and a lot of
00:36:36 ►
that interplays really well with sort of understanding and framing how to approach the psychedelic
00:36:40 ►
experience.
00:36:42 ►
And can you tell me about the projects you’re working on now that are exciting you?
00:36:45 ►
Yeah, definitely.
00:36:47 ►
So I’m currently, I’ve been starting to work on a series of papers with a professor of
00:36:51 ►
mine.
00:36:52 ►
His name is John Brevakey, and his research is really interesting as well.
00:36:55 ►
He’s got a bunch of talks on YouTube that are really accessible.
00:36:58 ►
He’s done a few on psychedelics recently.
00:37:01 ►
And so we’re working on developing a taxonomy of psychotechnologies.
00:37:06 ►
And so, you know, psychotechnologies are these different ways of kind of operating your mind
00:37:10 ►
so that you can appropriate its operation to scaffold the development of your cognition,
00:37:15 ►
hopefully towards the ideal of wisdom. So we’re working on one right now about how literacy
00:37:20 ►
affects cognition. And then we’re going to follow that up with some stuff about like imagination and mnemonic systems.
00:37:27 ►
And yeah, I’m going to speak
00:37:29 ►
at the Beyond Psychedelics conference
00:37:30 ►
in a few weeks,
00:37:32 ►
which I’m very excited about.
00:37:33 ►
So I’m going to be presenting
00:37:34 ►
about visionary experiences there
00:37:36 ►
and how they’re useful
00:37:37 ►
and how we should be sort of looking at them
00:37:39 ►
to optimize our engagement
00:37:42 ►
with psychedelic compounds
00:37:43 ►
and research settings.
00:37:44 ►
Oh, congratulations. That’s a great place to be able to present.
00:37:47 ►
Thanks. Yeah, I was very surprised when I got that. I just like, you know, I was like,
00:37:51 ►
I may as well just apply for this because why not? And then a few months later, I actually forgot
00:37:55 ►
that I had submitted my abstract and they’re like, yeah, would you like to come speak? And I was
00:37:58 ►
like, absolutely. All right. Well, I want to say thank you so much for taking the time to talk to
00:38:03 ►
us today. And I look forward to talking in the future and getting an update to hear more about your work.
00:38:06 ►
Yeah. And thank you so much for reaching out.
00:38:08 ►
I appreciate the opportunity to be able to talk to you.
00:38:10 ►
And I had a great time.