Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics | Lex Fridman Podcast #211

the following is a conversation with brian muirescu author of the immortality key the secret history of the religion with no name a book that reconstructs the forgotten history of psychedelics in the development of western civilization to support this podcast please check out our sponsors inside tracker give well ni indeed and masterclass their links are in the description this is the lex friedman podcast and here's my conversation with brian murescu who or what do you think god is how is our conception maybe put another way of god changed throughout history we're starting with an easy one lex yep [Laughter] so what is god well god is a thought god is an idea but it's its reference is to that which is beyond thinking beyond our ability to even conceive um beyond the categories of being and non-being so how do we talk about that to talk about it is almost to get it wrong right so uh joe campbell famously said that you know any god that is not transparent to transcendence is like an idolatry because it's just a mental construct and it can't possibly speak to the incomprehensible so we use poetic language we say the being of beings the um the infinite life energy of the universe the the mystery of transcendence boundless life unqualified is-ness but it doesn't quite get to the point i think that if there's any great insight from mysticism it's that you and i participate with god in a very real way lex friedman here in austin texas that in the here and now to touch that eternal principle another way to refer to god to touch that eternal principle within ourselves is to participate with with divinity in some way um so not an external force but that divine sense within so there's some aspect in which god is a part of us so one it's the thing we can't describe this represents all of the mystery around us it's outside our ability to comprehend and at the same time it's somehow the thing that's inside of us also the ultimate paradox mcfield of magdeburg 13th century german mystic maybe the first german mystic um says that the the day of her spiritual awakening was the day that she saw and knew that she saw god in all things and all things in god and so we can say this by the way without apology or lightweight theology or vapit speculation or even heresy you know we can we can talk about this including within the abrahamic faiths the mystical core of these faiths all talk about the encounter of divinity within that's what i explore in the immortality key that this notion of techniques archaic techniques in some cases of ecstasy that allow that experience of the eternal principle to actually rise up in our consciousness when we're still here as flesh and blood beings there's some sense in which our conception of god though is conjured up by our own mind and so aren't we creating god like aren't we the gods that are creating the idea of god like if if we are like when we talk about god aren't we playing with ideas that are created by our our mind and thereby we are the creator not god this is a very kind of cyclical question but in some sense i mean that uh if god is the thing that represents the mystery all around us contrast that with our conception of god the way we talk about him is more a creation of our minds it's not the mystery it's our uh struggle to comprehend the mystery and therefore we're creating the god in terms of the god that we we're talking about in this conversation or in general if that makes any sense it makes no sense whatsoever but this is this is uh this is the eternal mystery um this is why it's so difficult to talk about and yet it could be the very center of our beings you know the upanishads speak about us as the creators about us as gods it's a very different creation myth but the god of the upanishads in this great verse talks about pouring themselves pouring themselves into creation indeed i have become this creation says god and there's a great line verily he or she who knows this becomes in this creation a creator so yeah i mean just our ability to engage in mentation our ability to to think about this stuff is partly our divine nature this is what the humanists were talking about and in the renaissance by the way um and that it's not so much learning putting dots together having arguments with each other over learned books it's it's a process of unlearning is what some of the mystical traditions talk about unlearning all these thoughts emotions traumas and experiences that have gone into the false construction of our false self that behind all these layers like peeling back the onion is a part of us that once you can identify that um begins to look a little bit different in other words it's one thing to foster a relationship with god it's a very different thing to identify as god and and i mean that quite literally without being heretical you can you can find this in the mystery traditions can you expand on this you mean a human being can can embody god that is um textbook incarnational theology that you can find in any any christian mystic um but you can find it in the mystical tradition of islam and and judaism as well so rumi for example the great uh the great sufi mystic talks about um if you could get rid of yourself just get rid of yourself just once the secret of secrets would open to you that the face of the unknown would appear on the perception of your consciousness rabbi lawrence kushner a modern-day contemporary mystic talks about uh because this stuff does continue there's a continuity the poetry here is incredible so well listen listen to rabbi kushner he says that the emptying of selfhood allows the soul to attach to true reality and in kabulism the true reality is what's called the divine nothingness i yin and so i like the adage that um and mystics both essentially believe in nothing except that the mystics spell it with a capital n the divine nothing yeah and then i'll give you meister eckhart another medieval christian mystic he says that if you could not yourself right the same concept if you could not yourself for just an instant indeed i say less than an instant you would possess all so again you're seeing the same thing in sufism kabbalism christian mysticism the way to identify with the divine is to peel back these layers and attempt to discover pure awareness if we look at the universe from a physics perspective or you know i'm a computer science person so if the universe is a is a computer there's some sense that god the creator of the universe or just the computer itself doesn't know what the heck is going to happen it just kind of creates some basic rules and runs the thing so there is some element in which you can conceive of humans or conscious beings or intelligent beings as uh as a tool that the creator uses to understand itself himself do you uh do you think that's a perspective that uh we could or is useful to take on god that is basically the universe created humans to understand itself he doesn't actually know the full thing he needs the human brains to figure out the puzzle so that's in contrasting to the unlearning to getting out of the way that we've talked about it's more like no we need the humans to figure out this puzzle well we have no answers to this which is why philosophers still have jobs if they have jobs at all but i mean they're so the physicists take a look at this um have you seen the article that came out i think it was this month in the journal of cosmology and astroparticle physics um uh robert lanza the biocentrism theory the idea that the universe comes into being through our observation right the whole the god equation so not just in quantum mechanics but in general relativity the idea that that we make the universe moment by moment which is kind of mind-blowing gets into ideas of simulation okay so that's how the physicists at least some of them might look at it you could also look back to the medieval christian mystics meister eckhart once again says that the i with which i see god is the same eye that sees me right so one sight one knowledge one love um another mind-blowing concept but this is this is why the arts and poetry and music are so important because although i love astroparticle physics it's another to kind of hear this the same message um across time yeah the simulation thing i was actually looking this morning at video games just the statistics on video games and i saw that the two top video games in terms of hours played is fortnite and world of warcraft and i saw that it's 140 billion hours billion hours have been played at those games that's a lot of video games yeah but that that's very sophisticated worlds being created especially in the world of warcraft it's a massive online role-playing game so you have these characters that are together sort of creating a world but they in themselves they're also developing they have all these items and they're growing like they're little humans like there's complicated societies that are formed they have goals they're striving and so on and it's we're creating a universe within our universe and for now it's a kind of um it's a basic sort of constrained version of our more richer earth like civilization but it's conceivable that you know that we are this thing on earth is a kind of video game that somebody else is playing it's like you could see sort of video games upon video games being created that uh and this is something i think a lot about not from a philosophical perspective but practically how fun does this video game have to be for us to let go of the silly pursuits in this meet space that we live in and fully just stay in wow stay in world of warcraft stay in the video game for full time so i think about that from an engineering perspective like is there going to be a time when this video game is actual real life for us and then the creatures inside the video game they'll be just borrowing our consciousness for sort of to ground themselves will refer to us as the gods right like won't we become the gods this conversation is not going how i expected but i think about this a lot from you know because i love video games and i wonder more and more of us especially in covet times of living in the digital world you could think about twitter and all those kinds of things you could think about clubhouse people using just voices to communicate with little icons sort of in the digital space you can see more and more will be moving in the digital space and let go of this physical space and then the the remnants of the the ancients that created the video games that nobody centuries from now will even remember those will be the gods and then there'll be gods upon gods being created this is the kind of stuff i think about but is that any at all useful to you to this thought experiment of a simulation basically the fabric of our reality how did it come to be what is running this thing is that useful or is it ultimately the project of understanding god of understanding myth is the project that centers on the human on the human mind for you we seem to be at the center of this divine dance which which sounds awfully anthropocentric but the ancients thought about this too i mean the concept and sanskrit of lila that the point behind the existence is this play right it's ultimately playful this divine dance it gets awfully complicated in the gnostic and neoplatonic schools these chains of being from godhead down to us right some invisible right and we're going to get into terence mckenna territory later on but we can start now by talking about discarnate entities and archons and aliens and archetypes i mean there is a a world where terrence mckenna does meet plato and gnosticism um quite kindly and that that's in the um this invisible college right the um the invisible world uh with which we seem to have some kind of symbiosis um that has a higher intent maybe even a purpose or a plan in mind for us so i mean these ideas come across when you've had a heroic dose of mushrooms um they also pop up in the ancient philosophical literature this idea of archons who you know the puppet masters controlling us flesh and blood beings it's all uh it's all a cosmic dance and there are no answers to this first who are the archons the second what is this world where transformative means play-doh do you mean in the space of ideas or are we talking about some kind of world that connects all of consciousness throughout human history i think through different techniques it is you know i think a lot about i think gordon wassen is the meeting point of the two so so gordon watson who i do talk about in the book uh was this um jp morgan banker turned ethnomycologist and he's largely credited with the rediscovery of psilocybin containing mushrooms which kind of gave rise to the pop psychedelic revolution of the 1960s he visited maria sabina down in mexico in his wake when bob dylan led zeppelin the stones and everybody else and the way he describes his psilocybin experience is a bit strange because he thinks of plato right and he says that you know whereas our ordinary reality is kind of this imperfect view of things gordon watson felt that on mushrooms he was spying the archetypes and he talks about plato and he writes about the archetypes in this famous article that's released in 1957 in life magazine and so a well-read individual from the mid-20th century has his premier psychedelic experience and outcomes plato because what he was witnessing was so sharp so brilliant so detailed in some sense more real than real this noetic sense that william james talks about that when you confront something more real than real these discarnate entities these images this uh these visionary motifs you're tempted to believe that you've tapped into the truest nature and the underlying structure of the cosmos and that's difficult to escape from whether you're plato or terence mckenna or gordon watson caught in between so we talk about this being in touch with something that is more real than real and let's just go straight there to mckenna before we return to the bigger picture so he's talked about the uh what is it self-healing machina self self-transforming self-transforming machine i was during his uh dmt travels and uh i just talked to rick doblin who also had different travels through this hyperspace but they're all seem to be traveling on the same spaceships just to different locations and there is a sense in which they seem to be traveling through whatever i don't know if it's through space time or something else to meet something that is more real than real uh what can you say about this dmt experience about terence mckenna about the poetry he used but maybe more specifically about this place that they seem to all travel to so the big question is is it real is it really more real than real the ancient philosophers were asking the same question and their means of attempting to answer that was by dying so if you ask plato the definition of philosophy he will say that to practice it in the right way is to practice dying and being dead and many people describe the psychedelic experience in sort of near-death experience terms um and the encountering of all this visual imagery tends to be something that is often described as more real than real so how does terence talk about this so i was just listening to the trial logs which folks should look up um somewhere between 1989 and 1990 terence sits down with his friends ralph abraham and rupert sheldrake at esalen and they're they're trying to figure out the meaning of these discarnate entities and these non-human intelligences and terence develops a taxonomy for how to analyze this and he says that number one they're either um semi-physical but kind of elusive so think of the bigfoot or the yeti or things like this um beings that exist somewhere between mythology and zoology which is isn't really appropriate here so so uh option number two he says is the mental i'm sorry you're dropping so many good lines it's so good okay i apologize [Laughter] somewhere between nostalgia and zouave this is all terence mckenna okay all right i take no credit for this uh so but you're combining you're like uh jimi hendrix only used the blues scale but he's still uh he still created something new in the music you played anyway go ahead well we're going into mixolydian right now okay so um uh so uh option number two and this is this what this is what uh terence calls sort of the mentalist reductionist approach um and this is this is pure mechanical poetry he says that these beings could be autonomous fragments of psychic energy that have temporarily escaped the controlling power of the ego um so in jungian senses these would just be pure projections um the projections of schizophrenics in some cases so they're essentially unreal and the third option the most tantalizing is that they're both non-physical but autonomous in other words they actually exist in some kind of real place in some kind of real space and that we can have congress with them there is communication he talks about um the whisperings of the demon artificers and that it's just possible that our meetings with these beings have coaxed the human species into self-expression in a very real way that at different times in history our relationships with these semi-autonomous beings may actually guide the species now this is high speculation and uh terence and ralph and rupert wind up talking about the early modern period and the scientific enlightenment and that even someone like descartes reports a dream in which he came face to face with an angel who said that the conquest of nature is to be achieved uh through measure and number so so even the hard-minded materialist like like descartes is confronting these discarnate entities john d in the 16th century the high magician of the elizabethan court he reports decades worth of what we would say is extraterrestrial communication or interdimensional communication um and you can find instances of this throughout history including among the pre-socratics um and peter kingsley writes quite a bit about this but i'll save that until your next question well first of all we don't seem to understand from where intelligence came from we don't understand from where life came from on earth but that we can kind of into it because that's the space of chemistry and biology you have good theories about the origins of life on earth but the origins of intelligent life that is is a giant mystery and there's some sense in which i mean i don't know if you know the movie 2001 space odyssey but it does seem that there is like important throughout human history throughout life on earth there's important phase shifts of it feels like something happened where there's big leaps it could be something coincidental like fire and learning how to cook meat and all those kinds of things but it feels like there could be other things and i think that's at the core of your work is exploring what those things could be is there is it possible talked about joe rogan offline is it it's entirely possible is it possible that psychedelics have in fact contributed of being an important uh source of those phase shifts throughout human history of the intel basically steering the intellectual development and growth of human civilization it's a hypothesis worth investigating how about that beautiful and and maybe not psychedelics in and of themselves but i think our whole conversation is kind of wrapped up in these non-ordinary states of awareness we start by talking about god which is something unordinary and expansive and i think that as you as you trace the intervention of divinity if that's the case throughout human history you have to bump up against the irrational um mercedes the great scholar of religions and fellow romanian said that the history of religions essentially constitutes the point of intersection between metaphysics and biology right so that we are biological beings who do interact with our planet with the with the natural kingdom and you would think that as you know early archaic ecologists we would have figured out what plants work which fungi don't and developed maybe language around that and so this is this is another one of mckenna's speculative but very interesting hypotheses the stoned ape theory is it is it possible that psychedelics were involved in one of the several leaps forward you mentioned the word leap jared diamond talks about the great leap forward 60 000 years ago the species had been around for a couple hundred thousand years all of a sudden the cave painting appears all of a sudden there's a phase shift did something like that happen millions of years ago and i love the way paul stamets talks about this it would be the ingestion of perhaps psilocybin containing fungi millions and millions of times over millions and millions of years so it's not just a one-time event that cascades but it's this it's the accumulation of psychedelic experience that it's really difficult to test that hypothesis but i've been talking with a paleoanthropologist in south africa my friend lee berger about ways that we might test for this and so lee amongst many things is this national geographic explorer he's the paleoanthropologist paleoanthropologist at the university of waterstrength he's famous amongst other things for the discovery of previously undiscovered hominids like homo naledi and there's an interesting point um so naledi is this archaic hominid morphologically archaic but it dates to about 300 000 years ago which is very strange um what's even more strange about homo naledi at the rising star cave system there in south africa is that lee believes he's discovered the first bipedal ape deliberately disposing of its dead um so there is a recognition of self-mortality and the practicing of rituals around death we're talking about burials and if you have burials says lee in an archaic hominid 300 000 years ago maybe you have language and i mentioned that because terence mckenna was obsessed with language in the stone dape theory that the ingestion of psilocybin in addition to enhancing visual acuity perhaps facilitating sexual arousal leads to proto-language now isn't it interesting this could be entirely a coincidence that the largest sound inventory of any language is the koi-san of botswana and namibia they have something like 164 consonants and 44 vowels english by comparison has about 45. so i don't know what to make of this but what you find in that part of the world is very very complex language language that could be an inheritance language that could be incredibly archaic together with this recognition of self-mortality and when i talk to lee berger we say when you're looking at universals like that language around all human populations the recognition of self-mortality the contemplation of death just maybe you have pharmacology and so maybe we can go out and test for this using gas chromatography mass spectrometry proteomics technology that doesn't even exist but maybe we can actually test the stone tape theory to figure out once and for all if there's any merit there can you just linger a little bit on the pharmacology tools like how how would you how would it be possible to say something about what was being ingested so so so long ago that's what i asked dr berger so lee has discovered um in the dental calculus nice of archaic hominids dental calculus i like that evidence of their diet and you might not believe how old this was but in in sediba australopithecus sediba they found evidence of sadiba's diet going back 2 million years so through things like phytoliths which are essentially fossilized plant tissue they found evidence that sediba was eating bark and leaves and grasses and fruits and palm so no psychedelics to speak of but it just goes to show that through things like dental microwave analysis and other techniques that we're still developing we can actually figure out what the diet was at the time i'll fast forward to 50 000 years ago there was another study out of el cidron cave in 2012 which found that neanderthals again preceding our species 50 000 years ago were ingesting yarrow and chamomile which had been identified as medicinal so again not psychedelic or psychoactive but we kind of have the beginnings of the technology and this that was nine years ago to begin figuring out the ancestral diet of these hominids presumably there could be a way to figure out it's not just diet but which are have psychoactive elements to them so whether you're chewing it whether you're smoking it whether i mean i don't know what licking it i don't know if there's any kind of ways through the dental calculus to figure out which exact substances were being consumed is it possible to figure out whether psychedelic substances are being consumed by looking at human behavior like you said organized burials or cave paintings no but so that's a little bit of a stretch to say like where did the sleep come from but it's not it's not so so so just last fall as a matter of fact so that that notion has been out there for a while the idea that hallucinogens and the ritual consumption of hallucinogens were somehow related to the great leap forward or somehow related to the initial cape pain and graham hancock wrote a beautiful book about this called supernatural which in many ways like sent me down this rabbit hole back in 2007. and so but even at the time when he was writing that in the year subsequent it was still kind of seen as a kooky idea last fall interestingly enough the first archaeochemical data for the ritual consumption of psychedelics associated with cave art was finally published it's it's not that ancient it's only about four or five hundred years ago but it came from the pinwheel cave a chumash site in in california and what they found were datura quids like these chewed up you mentioned how did they ingest it these chewed up quids like these these bunches of datura which contain these very powerful tropane alkaloids and what was believed to be some kind of chumash initiation site so we can say that there is initial you know archaeochemical data for the consumption of psychedelics and cave art and so where else might we find this are there a lot of archaeochemists in the world like because this is fascinating it's through chemistry through biology through physics whatever like all the disciplines we perhaps one day computer science we um apply those tools to study not the data of today but the data of the past are we talking about dozens here like how hard is this problem relative to how many people are taking it on just as a side a little tangent we're probably talking more dozens than hundreds um i spent many years trying to track down an archaeochemist who would talk to me there were a couple um pat mcgovern at the university of pennsylvania yeah and then my friend andrew ko at mit which you might know something about um andrew really you know on his own time on his own dime has been gathering the data for this organic residue analysis um he has what's called the open r chem project which is this online open source repository for this data but there's never been a center for this no university has stood up a dedicated center a team really which is what you need of archaeochemists looking at this stuff but i mean even despite that there have been some remarkable discoveries over the past 10 20 years it's still a discipline very much in its infancy maybe it's becoming a toddler but as the technology gets better and cheaper um i hope uh you'll see more and more archaeochemists joining the fight yeah and andrew is fascinating his work is fascinating but uh also i just because of because of your work i came across an exchange a few emails with patrick mcgovern who's basically what would you call him so he has a center i guess that's does biomolecular archaeology at upenn and he's the author of a bunch of books one of which is ancient bruise so he's a scholar of beer and wine and like ancient alcohol which is fascinating they influence even just alcohol but he has like alcohol with um hallucinogenic properties as well but it's fascinating the influ as a russian it's fascinating to uh to think about the influence of alcohol on the development of human civilization throughout its history is this is there something you can comment on alcohol or in general patrick's work that was informative to you inspiring or kind of added to your conception of of human history his work was some of the first hard scientific data that i saw for the ritual consumption of these intoxicants um i don't think he's ever found the hard and fast data for for psychedelics but what he turned me on to was this idea that alcohol or beer and wine specifically could have been used as vehicles for the administration of psychedelics that's where it all started for me um just just the notion that ancient beer and ancient wine is very very different from what we drink today that typically they were cocktails they were often fortified and mixed with different fruits berries herbs plants maybe even fungi over time because this was all in the absence of distilled liquor right there is no hard alcohol even in russia before maybe the 12th century it was in europe maybe a bit earlier but the the concept of distillation just didn't exist and so you know to pack a punch um you know rather than just drink a kind of watered-down budweiser these people were interested in fortifying these beverages with whatever they could find in nature and and pat to his credit found some of the initial data for these um you could say spiked wines and spiked beers not with anything overtly psychedelic but just the fact that in the 16th century bc at grave circle a in my senai there's this minoan ritual cocktail of beer mixed with wine mixed with mead is very interesting it's even more interesting that you find that across the aegean um in gordium at king midas tomb right the same kind of ritual cocktail which pat and sam at the dogfish head brewery uh resurrected as the midas touch so i mean the notion that we can go back find this data resurrect it in some cases 2 800 years later i found pretty exciting 10 years ago yeah bringing back for research but that's that's fascinating that people were playing with these ideas and we'll return to we'll return to ideas of psychedelic confused wine which is pretty fascinating but can we step back and just kind of look at your work with the the book immortality key what is the story that you tell in this book i knew we'd get there eventually lex it's a non-linear path somehow we were talking about simulation and the universe is a computer that's creating video games and wow and uh fortnite but we got there and we'll return always to insane philosophical but uh your book can mortality what what's the story that you tell in this book what do you which part of human history are you studying right so that's that's the way to phrase it so it's you know it's my 12-year search for the hard scientific data for the ritual use of psychedelics and classical antiquity so we're talking about amongst the ancient greeks and romans and the paleo christians so the generations that would give birth to the largest religion the world's ever known christianity today was two and a half billion people the big question for me is you know were psychedelics actually involved there was a lot written about this in the 60s john marco allegro the book that i follow was published in 1978 before i was born the road to ellucis by gordon watson who we talked about already albert hofmann who famously discovers lsd or synthesizes it from ergot and karl ruck who is still a professor of classics at boston university the only surviving member of that renegade trio and now 85 years old so this this all predates us um but what was lacking in the 60s 70s 80s 90s i think was some of this technology and and the hard scientific data now for years and years i went out to the archaeobotanists and the archaeochemists around the world and i asked a very basic question is there any evidence for psychedelics and classical antiquity and the answer would almost invariably come back no i'm talking to in addition to pat he put me in touch with hans peter stika in germany tania valamotti in greece florenzano in italy i went all over the place asking one question and getting the same answer back time and again and so the book is essentially my my search for that data and the eventual uncovering of two what i think are key pieces of data one data one data point shows the ritual use of a psychedelic beer in classical antiquity in iberia with today's spain and the other shows what looks like a kind of psychedelic wine just outside pompeii from the first century a.d at the right place at the right time when the earliest christians were showing up in italy again these are early steps in the search for evidence in the space but uh speaking of early christians what role do you think psychedelic infused wine could have played in the life of the i i won't be clever in the life of jesus christ i've been saying recently that and i hope this doesn't sound obscurantist but i think it's impossible to understand jesus and the birth of christianity in the absence of ancient greek and i'll give you a very specific example of why i think that's the case you can read the entire new testament in ancient greek and not once will you ever find a reference to alcohol because there was no word in ancient greek for alcohol the way the word sounds alcohol it comes it's semitic it comes from the arabic khala means to enliven a refresh it probably comes from coal kohl sort of these powdered metallics that were used in alchemical experiments and cosmetics so again that's much later in time when we're using alchemy distillation etc in the first century ad the power of wine wasn't necessarily tied to alcohol right fermented grapes the way we think about wine today so pat mcgovern found some of that early organic data for wine being mixed with uh with beer and with mead but if you look at the literature from the first century a.d diocerities for example he writes this this massive treatise at the exact same time the gospels are being written and diascorides in just one of his books talks about 56 detailed recipes for spiking wine with all kinds of things like salvia and hellebore and frankincense and myrrh these spiced perfumes but also more dangerous things like henbane and mandrake which he says in greek can be fatal with just one cupful and in book 474 of his materia medica he talks about black nightshade producing fantasias none not unpleasant visions what today we would say is psychedelic so just looking at the literature and the kind of literature that even most classicists i didn't really learn it in undergrad i came across diasporities later um just a basic look at the literature supports what mcgovern has been testing which is the fact that wine was routinely mixed with different compounds it's fascinating by the way that language affects our conception of the tools we use to understand the world so like like it you can see wine you can see psychedelics if they're not called drugs you can uh you can maybe reframe how you see them in terms of their role in on us thinking about the world understanding the world that's really interesting that language has that power but what language was used to understand wine at the time so we're talking about a greek speaking world right so you know jesus uh is born and does his public ministry in the holy land but think about the early church think about where the church takes root you know paul the greatest evangelist of the time writes basically half the new testament he's writing letters in greek to greek speakers in places like corinth in greece or philippi a defunct city just north of the island of thaus or he's writing to folks in what today is is turkey uh the colossians the galatians he writes letters to the romans um these are greek speakers in these pockets these hellenic pockets all around the ancient mediterranean and for them again ignore discordies ignore pat mcgovern's work to them to think about wine was to think about a mixed a mixed potion and so the word oinos in ancient greek does show up in the new testament but there was another word to describe wine and it exists for like a thousand years before during and after the life of jesus the word used for wine is farmacon which obviously gives us the word pharmacy it means drug so in greek a greek speaker would actually use the word drug to refer to wine uh ruth skodal the classicist talks about this as a as a ritualistic formula um they understood wine as this compound beverage a drug against grief um a medicinal elixir that could either harm or heal or just maybe a sacrament to put you in touch with wine gods old and new clearly religion and myth but religion very much so has sort of uh much like dreams has like an imagery component like you're kind of going outside the visual constraints of physical space where you kind of have very specific conceptions of what things look like and you kind of use your imagination to stretch beyond the world as we know it things that are try to get in touch with things that are more real than real what role do these tools do these uh farmicons have in trying to stimulate the imagery of religion like do you have a sense that they have a critical role here or is this just a bunch of different factors that are utilized a bunch of different tools that are utilized to construct this imagery or is this not even or is imagery the wrong terminology is it more like space of ideas that's core to to religion no i think the wine is absolutely essential and so if it's impossible to understand paleo christianity in the absence of ancient greek i think it's equally difficult in the absence of the sacred pharmacopoeia or wine itself right just think about wine at the time um i i think that the ancient greek audience would have heard that in a very different way um from us and so they're referring to it maybe as a pharmacon but the followers of dionysus which precedes jesus and in some cases the story of jesus is kind of a recapitulation of the mysteries of dionysus but when you think about dionysus maybe from your high school mythology you think about him as the god of theater or the god of wine which is typically what it is or the god of ecstasy you know again dionysus is not the god of alcohol there's no there's no concept of of fermented grapes the power of dionysus and the ability to commune with dionysus through his blood and before christianity the blood of dionysus is equated to his wine the sacramental drinking of the wine was interpreted and classicist write about this including walter berkert it was interpreted as consuming the god himself in order to become one with the god this is where we get the idea of enthusiasm because the language matters enthusiasm to be filled with the spirit of the god so that you became identified with dionysus and acquired his divine powers now how does that happen again he's not the god of alcohol he is the god of wine but he's really the god of madness and delirium and frenzy and his principal followers are women they're called the mine ads and the way they get in touch with him is through the consumption of the sacramental wine even at the theater of dionysus separate from his outdoor churches there was a wine served there called drima and this is the wine that gives birth to hollywood i mean the ancient hollywood was there at the theater of dionysus this is where comedy and tragedy and poetry and music come from but rather than a hot dog and a beer what they drink at the theater of dionysus was this wine called trima which means pounded or rubbed and professor ruck talks about maybe it was the drugs that were rubbed into this theatrical beverage to help uh the play come alive so madness is seen as a positive thing is it like a creative journey it's not it's not uh it's it's the what is it the unlearning getting out of the way kind of thing is is that how it seen or is it more like um entertaining escape from life that is suffering okay i gotta i gotta inject a little modern dostoevsky into the old despair um maybe it's maybe it's a bit of that we we can't say that there wasn't recreational drinking happening um the greeks also have the symposium right um and they also were just getting hammered in some cases yeah but when it comes to the rights of dionysus yeah what you see there is um the creation of these states of awareness in which again you identify with the god to become the god there's there's theophagy there's the consumption of divinity in order to become divinity right back to how we started the conversation right so if we stop conceiving of god as something exterior to us but that the mystery of being itself is the mystery of your being and the mystery of my being that the way to encounter that is through the sacramental theology that you drink the actual blood of this greek god to become that god and there was a place for this in ancient greek society so drinking the wine and drinking the blood of dionysus do you think jesus is an actual physical person that existed in history or is he an idea that came to to life through the consumption of wine and those kinds of rituals so this is where i faced my ex communication depending how i answer this [Laughter] i mean you're you're playing with fire and wine [Laughter] that's a good combination by the way yeah uh so i i shy away from that controversy in the book i'm perfectly willing to accept jesus as a historical personage um you know we have the multiplicity of sources although it's a generation after his death um but we have the eucharist being described in the four gospels we have it being described by paul in first corinthians but when you read john it does read a bit differently than the other gospels and in my book i rely a lot on the scholarship of dennis mcdonald who writes a fabulous book called the dionysian gospel and this is again why the greek matters because once you start to analyze the greek of john's gospel it seems to be a presentation of jesus very much in the guise of dionysus the most obvious example is the wedding at cana right that only occurs in john's gospel the famous transformation of water into wine now again to any greek speaker of the first century they would have known about the greek district of ellis on the peloponnese and in ellis around the epiphany every january the priests of dionysus would deposit these water basins empty basins in the temple of dionysus they'd return the next morning and find them magically filled with wine now on the island of andros it's even more interesting around the same epiphany date the gods gift day dies theodosia the wine would emanate from the temple and run like a river for a week and you can google the baccanal of the andreans a wonderful painting by titian which hangs in the prado and you'll see a river of wine behind these people having a great time this exists for centuries and centuries before the wedding at cana and before jesus begins his public ministry with what these scholars call the signature miracle of dionysus it would not have been lost on the greek audience that that something very specific is being communicated here what's being communicated that you just might find in early christianity what you hold strong to in these mysteries of dionysus that you may have inherited from your parents your grandparents your great grandparents for centuries there was a perfectly good religion there were perfectly good mystery cults in the ancient greek and roman worlds and here comes this new untested illegal cult illegal of a dozen or so illiterate day laborers that go on to convert the empire in a few hundred years the answer to that extraordinary growth is not psychedelics but i do think it's visionary experiences and i do think it's this continuity from the pagan world into early christianity so what part you mentioned this idea that's really interesting though i i think you said paul stamets of i guess millions of people over millions of years kind of uh consuming really practicing a ritual or a habit of some sort this idea of rituals is kind of interesting again you mentioned cult what's the role of ritual consumption of some of these substances or just ritual practice of anything in um the intellectual growth of particular groups of people or societies so again i would say it is the the centerpiece of ancient life not just the mysteries of dionysus uh which we've only talked a bit about but the mysteries of ellucis were probably the most famous and longest lasting of these greek mystery rites and i mean just to put it in simple terms the best definition for a mystery religion um as the name implies is something secret all right muo from the greek means to shut the eyes or or to shut the mouth up to keep quiet about this stuff um you know we're always teasing details from the archaeological and the literary record and we're kind of just grabbing at these at these secrets but ellucis which survives for like 2000 years into the christian period from about 1500 bc to the 4th century a.d it's kind of this this centerpiece of greek life cicero the great roman statesman calls what was happening at a lucius the most exceptional and divine thing that athens ever produced so not democracy the arts and sciences or philosophy but the vision that was encountered atalusis perhaps through the ritual consumption of a potent psychedelic over hundreds and hundreds of years thousands and thousands if not millions of initiates pilgrims who would walk from athens to ellucis to encounter this vision it seems to have been not just an important part of greek life but the thing that made life livable such that as these mysteries are about to be exterminated by the newly christianized roman empire there's this passage in the ancient literature that talks about these you know in the absence of these mysteries life becomes unlivable abigail is there ways you can i mean you write about the mysteries of ulysses and is there ways you can convert that into words why those are so important to them more important than any other invention to them why is it such a source of meaning to life so from what we can reconstruct they would make that pilgrimage 13 miles northwest of athens to confront their mortality remember we were talking about homo naledi and in south africa this recognition of self-mortality the deliberate disposal of the dead um plato talks about the the real practice of philosophy being the the death and dying process so in in some senses you went to elusive to die and to experience a a death before your death we talked about this with with terence mckenna as well and this the how the psychedelic state seems to share something in common with the near-death or out-of-body experiences or these ecstatic experiences whether through wine or beer or otherwise you went to ellucis to die um and it was said that only those who had witnessed this vision whatever vision was to be witnessed and endemic or sanctuary it essentially vouch safe to uh the afterlife that only those who went there became immortal um and cicero says that um you know at that point you essentially live with more joy and die with a better hope can i ask you a question about this uh human contention with death this uh confrontation of death that seems to be at the core of things i i don't know how deep to the core but um it seems to be a central element of the human condition what do you think about ernest becker and those guys that put put death at the what is it the warm at the core which uh as the main thing the the main create like this confrontation of our own mortality first of all being understand that we're mortal and then confronting the terror of it the the fear of it as the creator like trying to escape the fear of death as the creative force of human society it's like the reason we do anything is because we're just running away from our death scared uh do you find some of that to be true first of all as a somebody who looks in the mirror looks at yourself and your own as a human being two just looking at society today and three at this whole big s spread of human history and all the cool stuff we've created including the mysteries of elusive i wonder what life would look like in the absence of the fear of our mortality i wonder how we'd interact with one another if there was relatively little or no fear of death i really do when it comes to becker's work and others um if the ancients were known for anything it was running to death it was the opposite in fact dying before dying which is the immortality key by the way it's not psychedelic's point when i when i refer to this key i'm referring to this notion that's preserved in greek if you die before you die you won't die when you die for some reason the ancients prized that experience and we talked about the mystics of of sufism and kabbalism and christian mysticism where you have this the same self nodding this death before death the divine nothingness right for some reason the mystic saints visionaries and ancient philosophers they ran to death and the one message i wanted to try and communicate with this book is how they viewed life that it can only be fully experienced fully embodied in the wake of a really intense perhaps terrifying but utterly transformational encounter with death so running to death not running away from death you talk about aldous huxley and mind changers so if we look at the history where the ancients were running to death and maybe using some uh uh performance enhancing permacons [Laughter] to run more effectively towards death and now we're using like um tools of modern society whether they're psychological sociological or pharmaceutical to run away from this conception so where uh what do you see as a hopeful future for human civilization like which um if all of these kinds of uh societies or ice cream flavors how do you create the perfect ice cream flavor like what is the future of religious experience of psychedelic experience of intellectual journeys of uh facing death running away from death what do you hope uh that looks like and what kind of ideas should we look to my next book will be entitled performance enhancing pharmaka you get yeah yeah i like it so uh so but that's that's a historical view i mean what's what in that book would you suggest in one of the last chapters about the the future of this um of this process well hux huxley has to stop you in he stopped me in my tracks aldous huxley so in in 1958 he he pens this this op-ed of sorts um and it's just it reads incredibly prescient um because i really do think in many ways as the fog of the war drug is ending and finally lifting that we we've kind of come full circle back to the late 1950s which might sound strange um it'll make more sense when you hear what huxley said about psychedelics and so he was looking forward to a revival of religion which is why i subtitled the book the religion with no name and and to him to huxley this this this revival wouldn't come about through televangelistic mass meetings or photogenic clergymen as he says but he points to the biochemical discoveries such as we have today that would allow for large numbers of men and women to achieve a radical self-transcendence and a deeper understanding of the nature of things in other words that this revival religion he says would be a revolution and alan watts comes along and says that there's there's nothing more um dangerous to authority than a popular outbreak of mysticism but i think this is what huxley was pointing to and he talks about religion in these terms about being less about symbols and returning to a sense of experience and intuition and huxley says that he envisions a religion which gives rise to everyday mysticism and he talks about something that would undergird everyday rationality everyday tasks and duties and everyday human relationships in other words religion has to mean something and these these altered states of awareness that we seem to be able to produce quite easily inside the lab at hopkins nyu and elsewhere with psilocybin i i think this is kind of part of huxley's prediction about a time when we would have legal access safe access efficacious access to this material that would allow for insight in an afternoon and what do you do when millions of people can become mystics in an afternoon so um psychedelics psilocybin might be so the the practical way of having these kinds of maybe could be termed religious experiences and then many people partaking in those experiences and then like evolving this collective intelligence thing we got going on that's the that's sort of the practice of religion that we should be looking striving for as opposed to kind of um operating in the space of ideas actually practicing it um you you mentioned and that's the religion with no name the use of these tools is there a simple way to summarize religion for our previous discussion about god basically discovering the god inside what if i give you a very complicated definition of religion and then we talk about a more simplified let's do it so the the most complicated we can get on this is is the anthropologist clifford geertz but i think it's worth defining our terms um when we're talking about god and religion so religion religio from the latin means to bind back so to bind us back to some meaningful tradition to bind us back to the source here's a mouthful from clifford geertz you know religion he defines as a set of symbols which acts to establish powerful pervasive and long-lasting moods and motivations by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing those conceptions in such an aura of factuality that those moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic which is complex what does that mean that religion has to make you feel something these moods and motivations but it can't just do that in the way that sex does that for us or or sports or ultimate fighting or the world cup or going to a concert so we get all that emotion in these experiences like that but that emotion has to be concomitant to a deep existential insight that answers this question for you in the morning i know why i'm here i know why humans are here i think i know what the meaning of life is that's what religion is and if you find that meaning in science then that's your religion and that's fine but we need to be more honest about that if if you're epistemological model is weighing facts and figures and you think that's why you're here on this planet and you find deep meaning that's okay religion is the thing that makes you feel right it has the aura of factuality it just makes you feel like you know the point behind existence in other words i think it comes down to experience like joe campbell was talking about like alice huxley mentions about experience and intuition i think this is how we connect to god make you feel like you understand the world i mean so that's that's kind of bigger than science that includes science but it's bigger do you think what is real like uh do you think there's an absolute reality that we're kind of striving towards understanding or is it all just conjured up in our minds and that's the whole kind of point we together create these realities and play with them and dance uh to to somehow derive meaning from those realities and it's ultimately not like very deeply integrated into what's like um into atoms of space time another easy question lex well i mean you have to kind of when you're thinking about emotion and making it concrete into something that feels real you have to start asking like what is real it's uh it's something that you know ben shapiro has the saying of facts don't care about your feelings i was always uncomfortable with this with us i mean he's just being spiffy whatever but uh i was always uncomfortable with somehow first that the hubris of thinking that humans can have like arrive at uh absolute truth what he means which is what i assume he means by facts like things that are uncontrovertible and then somehow deriding feelings like feelings are not important to me like the whole thing is reality the facts don't even like facts is reality feelings are reality like the entirety of human experience is reality all these consciousnesses somehow interacting together make up making up random crap and together agreeing they're all going to wear the same colors rooting for one football team or the other football team or countries all those things that's re that's real because we've agreed that it's real in the same way and gives us meaning in that same way religion is a set of ideas that gives us meaning but you know real it it's really a difficult for uh for me as a scientist that finds comfort in the physical understanding of the universe of physics you know i love physics i love computer science it makes me feel like everything is perfectly understandable and then i look at humans they're totally not understandable it's like a giant mess but that's part of the beauty like what is love like what the hell is love it's certainly not a like a weird uh hack to convince me to procreate because it feels something bigger than that so like taking a purely evolutionary biologist's perspective is missing the uh it's not missing it's only capturing a part of the picture and so it just keeps making me ask like what is real because i as a human it's very human-centric it does certainly feel like uh a part a big part of what is real is all the fake stuff my mind makes up [Laughter] i mean okay i guess is there something you could say from our discussions about the tools of psychedelics about our discussion about religion of what is real of what is reality these are largely unanswerable questions but we should nevertheless strive to answer them that's the whole point of the human experience and i think science is one way and religion is another and i think there's actually a sphere where they intersect you know there's a way for religion to be observable testable repeatable falsifiable when i look at the ancient mysteries that that's what i find i think i find people exploring alternate states of consciousness and arriving at conclusions based on that exploration and deriving deep meaning from that which yes are feelings and emotions and very hard to quantify but nonetheless these are the things that govern our lives i mean i don't know a parent who isn't motivated by their by the love of their children um everything i do at 40 years old now is pretty much inspired by my love for my two daughters and i can't prove to you that i love them i can say it i can show you behavior but it's very hard for me to weigh and measure that so not everything um is so reducible to this quantifiable reality and yet i also love science and and i love the historical process of weighing this data i love the chemistry i love the biology um and and for me um i think this was the message of the ancient greeks and i think this is the world in which paleochristianity was born i think there is this this meeting ground between science and religion um uh which allow for the if not the discovery then at least the the near identification of the ultimate reality which is another way to describe god right this being a being is the transcendent mystery so speaking of god you mentioned to me offline you're wearing uh the most sophisticated clothing choice um of the elite intellectuals uh like you mentioned sam harris was wearing a hoodie this is the sam harris hoodie he's starting a trend he's starting a trend um this is a new religion you could even say it's a ritual it's a ritual practice of uh intellectuals of searching for meaning uh so there's there's a quite a fascinating debate so he was for a time still um known as one of the sort of new age atheists so he was kind of trying to explore the role of religion society and the role of science and on the other side another kind of powerhouse intellectual is jordan peterson who in um sometimes for my taste a bit too poetic of ways is exploring ideas of religion and they had these interesting debates that i think will continue about the role of religion and society for uh uh for jordan there's all these flaws with religion but there is a lot of value to be discovered amidst the the rituals the traditions the practice the way we conceive of each other because of the ideas that religion propagates and then for sam it says that everything about religion is uh basically gets in the way of us fully realizing our human potential which is deeply scientific and rational and um sort of like we're surrounded by mystery calling that mystery god is getting in the way of us understanding that mystery what do you think about this debate about the role of religion and society we should continue having this debate i talked to jordan a couple weeks ago as a matter of fact excellent and and his podcast is public excellent it'll be out soon and so you know he and i how did that go by the way um it was it was incredible uh carl rock the professor joined us as a matter of fact for one of his rare public appearances so beautiful we went we went deep um and jordan is very well read obviously on the psychedelic literature he had just had um roland griffiths from hopkins on the podcast and it's one of roland's figures that jordan and i again just like the the language of aldous huxley it's hard to move past the following statistic over the past 20 years of the modern study of psilocybin roland will tell you that about three and four of their volunteers walk away from their single dose of psilocybin high dose saying it was among the most meaningful experiences of their entire lives if not the most meaningful and jordan says like how do you what do you do with that um uh how do we i mean how do we synthesize that um you know here we are quantifying the the qualifiable the unqualifiable and and yet these these compounds have dramatic effects on people's lives and they walk away feeling like they're more loving more compassionate um the science of all talks about um the the welling up of cooperation and resource sharing and kindness and all these strange things from this single chemical intervention which seems to reduce us to automata as if enlightenment can be flipped on uh like a switch and yet there it is there's the data and i don't see how you walk away from that i mean i i completely understand sam's position but i think there's there's a reading of religion particularly the mystical core of of the big faiths and especially these ancient mystery cults which do speak again to those moods and motivations um creating this aura of factuality that these volunteers never walk away from permanently transformed just like the ancient mysteries and part of that is perhaps language that we need to continue to evolve language in in how we conceive of these processes maybe religion has a bunch of baggage associated with it that uh is good to let go of or perhaps not i don't know it did this connected to our previous part of our conversation is the importance of language in this whole thing well that's how i start my book with one of these volunteers from the nyu psilocybin experiments this this woman at dinah bazer who's an atheist and she still describes herself as an atheist and yet as one of these three and four people who walked away from this experiment transformed she says that her experience of psilocybin was like being bathed in god's love from an atheist yes and i asked her why she uses the word god why not the love of the cosmos or the universe or mother nature and she says well frankly you know we don't know about any of this stuff and that god makes sense to me um she's still an atheist um but it's the way she describes that as kind of like the way your mother's love must have felt when you were a baby yeah there's a there's a kind of i like the way einstein uses god god doesn't play dice there's a poetry there's a humility that you don't know what the hell is going on there's a humor to it i'm a huge fan especially like more and more of just kind of having a big old laugh at the absurdity of this world and this life as uh represented nicely by memes on twitter kind of thing i mean there's a there's a sense in which we want to be playing with these words and not take them so seriously and being a little bit light-hearted and explore uh let me ask you about because you mentioned and nyu um what i find fascinating is how much amazing researchers speaking of science right uh studying the effects of psilocybin studying the effects of various psychedelics mdma on the human mind right now for helping people but i'm i'm hoping there'll be studies uh soon at hopkins and elsewhere that allow people that are kind of more quote-unquote creatives or regular people that don't have a particular demon they're trying to work through the a problem they're trying to work through but more like to see what can i find if i utilize psychedelics to explore is there something you could say that is exciting to you it's promising about the future what currently is going on but also the future of psychedelics research yeah hopkins and elsewhere the healthy normals the healthy norms i was looking for the right words because normal doesn't feel healthy doesn't feel like a good term and normal doesn't feel like a good term because we're all pretty messed up and we're all weird so well those with ontological angst in that case great maybe that'll be a future dsm qualification yeah um there's no doubt that that things like psilocybe and mdma are are useful for things like anxiety depression end-of-life distress ptsd alcoholism you name it um and it's largely because of the clinical research that mdma and psilocybin will probably be legal in some fda regulated way in the next five years um but i mean again i start the first page of my book with this question why why do psychedelics work across all these different conditions and uh the best that i could find is is the meaning right um tony bossus at nyu talks about psilocybin for example as meaning making medicine which is interesting because it puts it somewhere between a therapeutic and again this this ontological instigator what is it about psychedelics that creates these mystical experiences or mystical like experiences you can call them emotional breakthroughs you can call them moments of all i do think we get locked up in the language and we're somewhere between science and religion here um including legally so the fda is one route to this what excites me about psychedelics is the first amendment what is this going to mean for religion the freedom of religion being the first thing that's mentioned in the first amendment before freedom of speech freedom of assembly oh interesting yeah if america is known for anything it's it's a refuge for uh religious pioneers and so we already have the native american church brazilian spawn churches that are using psychedelics but what would happen if judaism or christianity or islam were to begin incorporating the very ritual very sacred and discreet use of psychedelics as part of their liturgy so not replacing the sunday eucharist in the case of christianity but um part of the extra uh extra credit dimension of the faith and then we can through practice figure out how essential it is it could be a minor thing it could be a major thing that's another thing i wanted to kind of ask you is um i recently despite the fact that i'm eating a huge amount of meat i'm getting fat i'm loving it i'm you know this is actually uh as of two days ago i started this long road to training for david goggins to training back to uh to getting back to competing in jiu jitsu so the fun is over but i also partake in fasting and there was a very strong there's an almost like a hallucinogenic aspect of fasting because it was especially because it was a 72 hour fast versus a more common fast that i do which is 24 hours you know and a bunch of people talk about throughout history about the value of fasting in having these kind of visual these kind of intellectual experiences also there's meditation sam harris with the hoodie uh do do you have a sense that um those other rituals of fasting of meditation and maybe other things could uh could be as essential or more essential to the religious experience as psychedelics yes if not and this is going to sound weird but maybe not if more so um i look at psychedelics as a catalyst for spiritual investigation not as the superficial means to an end um i i think their their value is in kind of um serving as a google maps for the kingdom of heaven um all right i like this well so rom das teacher said that when when he was was offered psychedelics that um it'll it'll get you in the room with jesus but it won't keep you there okay yeah and i think that's all well and good but what if you don't know where the house is in the first place what if you've never had a mystical experience what if what if religion is anathema to you what if you hate god what if all these words mean nothing to you and they probably do for many many people and it's perfectly understandable i think that we've we've lost the coordinates to these irrational states again that were prized throughout antiquity and that continued to be prized by the mystical communities even in big organized religion it just doesn't filter out that much and so psychedelics in my mind help orient our minds bodies and souls towards the irrational right we talked about mckenna's invisible world that seems to have this symbiosis with our own and perhaps has this higher intent for us um you could very well just you know take catalog of your dreams right and that would do it too but psychedelics seem to be particularly fast acting um particularly potent and very reliable especially in the clinical studies and so i looked at them as as biochemical discoveries like like huxley did maybe it's once in your life or infrequently right but maybe that's the beginning of a genuine introspection and a life well examined as the ancients always instructed us yeah it does seem like in the research that's the effect of psychedelics always comes with the integration where you use it just like you said as a catalyst for thinking through stuff it's not it's not going to be i don't even know if google maps oh maybe maybe google maps is the right analogy but it doesn't do the driving for you you still have to do the driving uh it just kind of gives you the directions uh so after you come come down from the trip or whatever you still have to drive there's other tools that are kind of interesting we've been talking about this um at the psychological level but there's also a neuroscience perspective if we kind of like go past the skull into the brain with the neurons firing there's ideas of brain computer interfaces first of all there's a whole field of neuroscience that's kind of zooming in and studying the firing of the brain the firing of the neurons in the brain of how from those neurons emerges all the things that we think that make us human that's a fascinating exploration in the human mind that that's of course where the psychedelics have the chemical the biochemical effects on on those neurons there's ideas of brain computer interfaces which you know if you look at especially what neural link is doing with this long-term vision with elon musk and your link they uh they hope to expand well he calls it a wizard hat [Laughter] this is back to the humor on the internet thing uh the the the wizard hat that expands the capabilities the capacity of the human mind do you think there's something there or is is the human mind so infinitely complex that we're quite a long way away from expanding the capabilities of the human mind uh through technology versus something like psychedelics i wonder how terence mckenna would answer that question um no he looked to shamans as kind of the the scientists um the high magicians of the high archaic past and the far-flung future i'm not going to discount you know more about ai than i do so i'm not going to discount it but i do think that ai paired with um the sacred recovery right um the archaeology of consciousness um and these and these states these archaic techniques of ecstasy that were practiced across time i think that's a winning combination um you know part of what i do in the book is just i try and lay out the sentence setting that's often talked about with psychedelics i mean so maybe psychedelics in the right ai environment is going to work i think it'd probably work a lot better with that myth and ritual incorporated so the reason ellucis worked for 2 000 years and let's assume the psychedelic hypothesis has some merit to it but i think the reason it worked is because you were born into a mythology you were born into a story about demeter and persephone and you waited your entire life to meet them in the flesh so you weren't just preparing for a few months it was a lifetime of expectation anticipation ritual preparation in fact some of the early church fathers made fun of the greeks for essentially just peaking people's curiosity and revving up the anticipation which has something to do with the outcome by the way but in other words i think we need to create a new mythology around this i don't think you you pop into a laboratory i don't think you pop into a retreat center um from one day to the next i think that in my own case i feel like i've been preparing 12 years for psychedelics and i'm still preparing including in today's conversation i'm learning new things and uh i'm willing to explore it you know together with the computer interface but i i but i do think ritual is a is a gigantic part of this and even mckenna would say that um i'll paraphrase him by saying that if if you'd met someone who didn't know where they were between the years 1995 and 2005 you would describe them as a fairly damaged person and yet who among us knows what was happening in western civilization between 900 and 1300 let alone 2500 years ago so this is in many ways the prophet of the psychedelic renaissance saying that history has lessons and i don't think they're superficial lessons i think it cuts to the very core of how and why western civilization came to be born yeah but that history can be loaded into ai systems and i do love the idea of whether it's to bring computer interfaces or without intrusive sort of without direct reading of the neurons and more sort of interactive experience of the robot that you can have an ai system that steers your psychedelic experience that helps you sort of when you take a heroic dose of psilocybin for example help steer you steer your mind say just the right things i mean you could say that kind of thing with uh it's a totally open um problem i would say you talk about set and setting this the interesting thing about johns hopkins is you know you create a comfortable environment a safe environment for allowing then if you take a heroic like a large dose of psilocybin that you could trust that everything would be safe and you can really allow the exploration in your mind but then you don't know from a psychotherapy perspective of like during that trip what a human should say to steer that trip like that's a totally open set of problems and in some sense probably throughout history those rituals you figured out what are the right things to say to each other exactly how to collaborate and maybe if you can turn that into an optimization problem ai could figure that out much much quicker i'm with you so ellucis was known for three things the legomena the dromina the numena the things said the things done the things shown if you can pack that all into your ai interface i'm in lex friedman i'm going to write a proposal and and then try to get it through the irb at mit i mean there there's a certain sense in which i definitely wanted to to explore uh psychedelics i mean in my personal life but also more rigorously as a scientist and uh to to push that forward and especially in the ai space and it is um difficult kind of how to do that dance when there's uh gray areas of legality and all those kinds of things and we're dancing around them and some of that is language and some of that is uh what we socially uh conceive of as as drugs or not and you're right that perhaps we can reframe it as religious experiences all those kinds of things i mean it's fascinating because it feels like there's a bunch of tools before us that were used by the ancients that we're not utilizing for exploring the human mind that we very well could be in a rigorous scientific way in a safe way and that's fascinating there's this interesting period of uh in the 20th century of lsd use that uh many of the people doing research on psychedelics now kind of have their roots in that history i mentioned that dr mcdovin he is one of those people uh and there's this interesting story of a bunch of creatives that used lsd or other drugs to help them what do you make of the idea of somebody like ken kizi who wrote one flew over the cuckoo's nest in part under the influence of lsd like what do you make of the use of psychedelics to uh maximize the creative potential of the human mind is this um is this a as a crutch or is this actually um an effective tool that we should explore one person's crutch might be another's bungee cord um you know it depends on that mind yeah uh think about paul mccartney i mean we might not have some of the better beatles music in the absence of lsd and what did sir paul say in 1967 when he was asked about his use of lsd he said that he recognized the dangers inherent in it but that he did it with a very specific very deliberate purpose in mind um he wanted to find the answer to what life is all about and i'm not sure what sir paul is doing this week but he's probably not doing lsd speaking back to my theory about these these substances being catalyzers of spiritual introspection um you know it came along at a time in their life when i think they were right for it especially george harrison um i highly recommend the martin scorsese documentary about uh about george harrison um you know for for them i think it was exactly the way we ought to investigate it which is uh well mind expanders this is what psychedelics do right that which makes manifest the contents of the mind um in the absence of an experience like that and it can be in a three-day fast it can be laying down in a cave it can be in ritual chanting it can be in a sundance but in the absence of that kind of experience at the right time in your life it may otherwise be very difficult to find entrance to that kingdom of heaven which i do think is here and now getting right back to the very beginning if we are actually to participate in that eternal principle how and when what do you think nietzsche meant when he said that god is dead so there's a sense that religion is fading from society and uh there's a cranky german that kind of wrote about it what do you think he meant he was a cranky german who knew a lot about dionysus by the way which is why i like him uh so certainly there's some truth to the mortality of god um i think gallup put out a study only a couple months ago where church membership is now officially in the minority in the united states at 47 according to the most recent poll that number was closer to 70 percent only 20 years ago wow so we're living through something and we're living through the unchurching of america and it's the rise of the spiritual but not religious um you know the uh the inheritor of all traditions but the slave to none there's a rise in the unaffiliated the nuns i think it was like one-third of millennials it's probably much higher now that don't affiliate with any religion so in that sense god is absolutely dead um but maybe not the god that we were trying to define at the very beginning you know so nietzsche also looked forward to the ubermensch which would be a fully realized human being that despite the death of god um did not fall into nihilism and amorality existential despair all that great german stuff and there are some commentators who talk about this eternal recurrence that just maybe by incorporating some of these techniques not necessarily doctrine and dogma but i would say the techniques of antiquity and again nietzsche writes a lot about the rationality of dionysus having its place in society if if anything these biochemical discoveries i think point us back they point us back to dionysus and their responsible incorporation of the irrational into our otherwise society of of rational um people and our kazoo history i i have a sense that there will be kind of just kind of as you've implied that there will be um maybe the god of old is dying and there'll be a rebirth of different kind of god and it'll just keep happening throughout history i i do think there will be a time where ai will be the gods we look to uh the the other the the super-intelligent those kinds of things there's a little bit of an inkling of um religious longing for meaning in the way people conceive of aliens currently i it i mean i talked to a bunch of people about ufos eops and aliens and so to me it's very interesting for perhaps different reasons because i'm just i look up to the stars and it's incredibly uh humbling to me to think that there's trillions of intelligent alien civilizations out there which to me seems likely or not perhaps not intelligent perhaps just alien life and actually also that we don't even understand what it means to be intelligent or do we understand what it means to be alive the time scale the spatial skill which patterns of atoms can form in a way that uh you can call life it's just could be way weirder uh than we can imagine that's and certainly way different than human life anyway that to me is humbling and so i it's almost like with the simulation uh conceding in the world of simulation thinking of aliens to me is a useful thought experiment of like what would aliens look like if they visited how would we know how would we communicate with them how do we send signals to them uh if they're already here and we don't see them how's that possible that seems to me actually likely it would just be too self-centered and too dumb to see them if they're already here anyway uh but so that's kind of the almost the the the pragmatic the engineering the the physics sense of aliens but there's also kind of a longing to connect with other intelligent beings out there both the fear and the excitement of that that has kind of a religious aspect to it sure that i find fascinating and in the right context when you remove the skepticism of government from that it's actually a hopeful longing uh do you have a do you see this kind of interesting aliens as it all connected to your study of religion so you're the first person to ask me about aliens in eight months so it looks like i'm going on the record let's go so um i'll drop some j allen heineck on you um so heinek um involved in project blue book famously says in 1966 when the long-awaited solution to the ufo problem comes and we're assuming that ufos have something to do with aliens but um when the long-awaited solution comes i i believe it will prove to be not merely the next small step in the march of science but a mighty and unexpected quantum leap in other words i do not think that we're dealing with flesh and blood beings in nuts and bolts crafts i think it's way way more complicated than that and if anything it takes me back to the ancient world it takes me back to this invisible college of beings of apparent higher intent it takes me to the geniuses and the muses so the first document in western civilization homer's homer's epics they begin by invoking an alien they invoke a muse andra moya nepe musa polutre von jos malabola tell me o muse about the man so homer isn't inventing poetry he's channeling poetry epic poetry from an alien intelligence maybe that intelligence has felt a little unrecognized in recent years trying to show up in human recognizable forms the muse is trying to give a little hint of of its existence yeah i mean i i have a i've been saying i honestly sort of i don't believe this but i think about this whether alien like muse is a great example whether aliens could be thoughts ideas we have are the aliens or consciousness itself is the methods by which aliens communicate with us like i find this very kind of liberating to expand our conception of what intelligent beings are you would like julian janes julian janes writes a great book um the origins of consciousness and the breakdown of the bicameral mind it's this this theory that the ancient greek mind was very different from ours and that when they heard the muses they heard or the gods and goddesses for that matter they would hear them as voices in the head and hear it as an internal god figure offering commands which they couldn't ignore so were they walking schizophrenics it might be one way to talk about it before the breakdown of the bicameral mind but it's it's a provocative theory largely untestable but when you're reading ancient greek and latin for that matter you can't read it very long without bumping up against these discarnate entities they're everywhere um and they they survived they they persist across time which is even stranger not just in the form of all the things my daughters like like fairies and gnomes and elves but and mckenna loves this the sylphs and the boulder grinders and the sprites and the gins and elementals every society has them it seems to be fairly universal and they largely exist in in folklore mythology this is what jacques vallee writes about so wonderfully we've kind of been uh sneaking around it but let me ask you from yours from everything we've been talking about how do you think about consciousness is it uh is it a fun little trick that the human mind does or is it somehow fundamental to this whole thing so uh this three pound lump of jelly inside our craniums that can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space it can contemplate the meaning of infinity and it can contemplate itself contemplating on the meaning of infinity that peculiar self-recursive quality that we call self-awareness so this is the hard problem right this is this is uh the unknowable the unknown at least yeah um i don't know i have no good answer for that aside from do you think it's somehow deeply fundamental to the human experience or is it just a trick so you have like i mean samurais has really been making me uh think about this so you know calling free will and illusion the interesting thing about sam is it's not just a philosophical little chat with him about free will he really says he experiences the lack of free will like he's able to you know large parts of the day to feel like he has no free will in that same way now he thinks that consciousness is um not an illusion it is you know it's a real thing but at the same i'm more almost like i'm almost more of like consciousness seems to be a little bit of an illusion in the sense that like it feels like maybe this is a robotics ai perspective but it feels like in that same way that sam steps outside of feeling like he has an agency feeling like he has a free will i feel like we should be able to step outside of having a consciousness so that that from my perspective maybe that's a hopeful perspective for trying to engineer consciousness but do you think consciousness is like at the core of this or is it just uh just like language or almost like a thing we build on top of uh much deeper human the things that makes us human i don't know i am attracted to lanza's notion of biocentrism i mean it's difficult to walk away from the double slit experiment not wondering why we seem capable of collapsing that quantum wave function it's very very weird um giving rise to even weirder ideas about superposition and spooky action at a distance and things that mit guys know a lot better than me but um it seems to me fundamental maybe consciousness is is the fundamental thing um i mean weirdly some of these ancient incubatory practices i talked about peter kingsley before so he's not a proponent of ancient psychedelic use but is a proponent of these ancient rites of incubation that were practiced by pythagoras parmenides and pedicles other pre-socratics and so what were they doing they were trying to get in touch with consciousness they were entering into suspended states of animation um in these cave-like settings pythagoras had built one in his basement and would lie down motionless apparently for long periods of time and what i think they were trying to do was tap into and trying to answer this question in their own you could call it a scientific way actually less religion than science and what they would discover or try to discover was a state of awareness that is somehow beyond life and death beyond waking and dreaming where you can be aware of the senses but also in touch with another reality at the exact same time what kingsley calls sensation that i think is definitely worth exploring well and the way i hope to explore is by trying to build it but everybody uses the tools they have well no i do also hope psychedelics can help so how do you build that i'm curious that's a whole other discussion this is uh there's a lot of things i can say here but let me put simply is i believe that you can go a long way building towards building consciousness by trying to fake consciousness so fake it till you make it as an engineering approach i think will work for consciousness [Laughter] you seem satisfied with that i i'm satisfied with that because i know how deeply unsatisfied others are but just wait so i mean i don't know what to so most most the the the topic of consciousness is mostly handled by philosophers currently and that's great uh and their philosophers are wonderful and good at what they do i'm not a philosopher i'm an engineer and i think the approach there is quite different i think in love is different than trying to have a podcast conversation about what is love uh you know i i think the engineering effort is just fundamentally different than the philosophical effort and i have a sense that consciousness can be engineered even before it is understood by the philosophers so i think there's a bunch of things like that in this world that could be engineered before they're understood i think the intelligence is one such thing i think we'll be we'll we'll be able to engineer super intelligent beings before we're able to understand the human mind that's um yeah i mean there's less there's a lot of intuition to unpack there of why that is but um as it stands that's perhaps my engineering um optimism and engineering ethic under which i operate consciousness is easy to build hard to understand okay [Laughter] are there books or movies in your life long ago or recently that had a big impact on you you've you've uh immortality key is exceptionally well researched the amount of books you read is uh i cannot even imagine so is there something in those in that in those in your travels through the land of language that stuck with you that was especially impactful i mentioned a couple of them but so i i knew nothing about psychedelics before 2007. and it was in in hearing about some of the first psilocybin experiments at hopkins and then shortly thereafter i went down this rabbit hole and so the first set of recommendations all kind of fit in that time period in my life 2007 2008 it started with jeremy narby the cosmic serpent dna in the origins of knowledge it was a total impulse buy at the barnes noble on 6th avenue in new york and wound up introducing me to supernatural by graham hancock um that that convinced me that there was a long story to psychedelics that um he tried to prove in that book and that we're still trying to prove i mentioned the connection between ritual psychedelics and cave art this is the the neuropsychological model that was first proposed by david lewis williams at the university of waterstream the the same university where lee berger is by the way in south africa so these ideas are old um but what graham did in that book is just um it's it's well worth your time it's well worth a few reads actually because it was after that that i discovered breaking open the head by daniel pinchback um and and a lot a lot of other books that just um kind of blew my mind what is uh breaking open the head about so it's it's it's daniel's romp through contemporary shamanism and it's his uh very well told experiences with everything from psilocybin to iboga being initiated by the buitis and it was the the first time i'd read uh any first-hand accounts aside from jeremy narby any first-hand accounts but by a new yorker by the way um about the potential for these these compounds that i'd been ignoring for far too long obviously um and so that's when i started revisiting the road to ellucis and looking through the anthropological literature reading everything gordon watson had ever written that carl ruck had written and it sent me down a pretty weird rabbit hole until i found peter kingsley which is my second recommendation so so peter again he's not a fan of the psychedelic hypothesis but what he does is i think expose the value of the irrational to the ancient greeks especially the pre-socratics here we are talking about a.i and god and these you know entangled philosophical questions um the best i can read kingsley is that western civilization is a product of a gift from the goddess persephone and this is not a hippie this is this is a a pretty gold standard classicist who went on to write a couple of books uh one is in the dark places of wisdom and the other is reality what better way to title your book where he talks about these ancient techniques for exploring the irrational the same thing carl rock was talking about after compiling all this data in the road to ellucis ruck says that the biggest challenge is trying to convince his colleagues in the late 1970s that the ancient greeks and indeed some of the most famous and intelligent among them could enter you know so fully into irrationality same thing nietzsche's talking about in his exploration of dionysus and so i think kingsley just stands apart as um you know one of those books reality that my life was never quite the same after reading that we talked about three-pound uh jelly that uh is able to conceive of the entirety of um the fabric of reality in the universe and everything and uh oh also of its own mortality what do you think is the meaning of it all what's the meaning of life is a three-pound jelly able to answer that one no but i can plagiarize joseph campbell which is uh which is good enough um joe joe campbell says that you know i don't think what we're looking for is a meaning of life i think what we're looking for is an experience of being alive so that the experiences we have on the purely physical plane will have resonances within that are those of our innermost being and reality you talked about the true reality absolute truth um these are all constructs and i think they're they're constructs that that are made day by day and acquire this aura of factuality remembering clifford geertz's definition of religion we're all just faking it until we make it and i think a lot of that has to do with moods and motivations and feelings and emotions which is not to discredit facts and figures but i think that meaning meaning making is a very subjective process that is not only difficult to talk about but difficult to quantify an experience is a primary in that versus so like the actual subjective experience is primary to the meaning making process versus like some kind of rigorous analysis of like uh having an algorithm that runs and computes and and then finally spits out 42. well this this is how families are created um tell me more about my wife and i fell in love and made babies we didn't we didn't type up an excel sheet and figure out the best way to go about this that's what i've been doing all these years that's why i'm single [Laughter] too many excel sheets uh what we say falling in love right we say fall in love what does that mean to fall in love you are surrendering to an intelligence um that that that is beyond us um you could say a god-like intelligence richard rohr the franciscan friar i mentioned in the universal christ he writes a lot about how the divine for you is is often encountered in in the other in fact how could it be otherwise this is this is bedrock sacramental theology that you find the god in the things in your life as well you should that that's the proving ground for identifying as god rather than creating a relationship with god and so i think that these irrational states play a big role in that ratio well i don't think there's a better way to end it than on the topic of love brian thank you so much for a brilliant exposition of history and the poetry i really appreciate you uh talking with me today i love you alex i love you too bro thanks for listening to this conversation with brian miura rescue and thank you to inside tracker givewell and i indeed and master class check them out in the description to support this podcast and now let me leave you some words from terence mckenna about psychedelics part of what psychedelics do is they decondition you from cultural values this is what makes it such a political hot potato since all culture is a kind of con game the most dangerous candy you can hand out is one which causes people to start questioning the rules of the game thank you for listening and hope to see you next time