The Psychology of Psychedelics | Roland Griffiths | EP 167

Hello! If you have found the ideas I discussed interesting and useful, perhaps you might consider purchasing my recently released book, "Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life," available from Penguin Random House in print or audio format. You could use the links we provide below, or buy through Amazon or at your local bookstore.

This new book, "Beyond Order," provides what I hope is a productive and interesting walk through ideas that are both philosophically and sometimes spiritually meaningful, as well as being immediately implementable and practical. "Beyond Order" can be read and understood on its own, but also builds on the concepts that I developed in my previous books, "12 Rules for Life" and, before that, "Maps of Meaning." Thanks for listening and enjoy the podcast.

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I'm very pleased today on this Good Friday, as it turns out, to welcome Dr. Roland Griffiths, PhD, professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Neurosciences and director of the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and author or co-author of more than 400 scientific research publications.

I should let those of you who aren't that familiar with scientific enterprise know that three publications is roughly equivalent to a PhD thesis, all things considered, in the biologically-oriented or psychologically-oriented research domain. So that means that Dr. Griffiths has been involved in something approximating 150 PhDs. If you just think about that for a minute, then you can understand what that means.

About 20 years ago, he initiated a research program at Johns Hopkins, which is one of the world's foremost universities, investigating, of all things, transformative psychedelic psychological experiences—the mystical type and insightful type experiences occasioned by the classic psychedelic psilocybin, the active component in what are popularly known as magic mushrooms. His research has indicated that the participants in his studies rate their experiences of psilocybin use as among the five most personally meaningful of their lives, and later attribute to them enduring positive changes in moods, attitudes, and behaviors months to years after the experience.

He's also conducting a series of intense related studies of brain imaging and drug interactions, examining the pharmacological and neural mechanisms of psychedelic action. He's conducted a series of extremely interesting and well-received therapeutic studies with psilocybin, including the treatment of psychological distress in cancer patients and, more specifically, fear of death, major depressive disorder, nicotine addiction—so smoking cessation, anorexia nervosa, and various other psychiatric disorders.

His research group has also conducted a series of survey studies characterizing both naturally occurring and psychedelic occasion transformative experiences, including mystical experience, entity and god encounter experiences, near-death experiences, and experiences that have been associated with those who have had them with a reduction in depression, anxiety, and proclivity for substance use.

He's also engaged in a series of ongoing studies in healthy volunteers, beginning in long-term meditators, and most interesting, as far as I'm concerned, in practicing religious leaders. Any one of those topics would do for two hours, but we're going to try to delve into as many as possible in this following conversation. Thank you so much for agreeing to talk to me; I'm extremely excited about this conversation and have been thinking about it for weeks.

Well, it's a great pleasure to join you, Jordan. You and I met some 15 or 16 years ago at a retreat in California, and frankly, as this work has unfolded, and as I've followed your fascinating course, "Maps of Meaning," and your other books, I really became intrigued by having a conversation with you about all this. I'm very grateful for this opportunity and also delighted that you and Tammy are now back in Atlanta.

Yeah, thank you. I was really taken with our first meeting. I remember that was just before you were about to publish the first of what are really a series of revolutionary papers, and I would say revolutionary not only for their findings but for the mere fact that they're being conducted at all. I mean, the psychedelics burst into Western consciousness in the late 1950s and caused so much trouble and distress that they were rapidly made illegal, and that was the end of research, really, for, what, 20 years? More than that?

Yeah, more than that. Yeah, I thought that was a complete catastrophe because, as a psychologist, my sense was that the most interesting possible domain of study for a truly curious psychologist was the mystical domain that appeared to be opened up by these psychedelic substances, which indicated something that we do not understand, in my opinion, at all.

Absolutely right. But by the time I got to graduate school, that was the University of Minnesota, in the area of psychopharmacology, which is a predecessor to neuroscience, the idea of studying psychedelics was entirely off the table. As a matter of fact, it was considered a third rail issue to even suggest interest in that. It was a career-destroying interest.

Yeah, it was, let alone a pursuit. Well, I was so interested in meeting you, and when we met in California, we went to this conference on awe, which actually turned out to be quite a good conference. It was a small conference; there were about 30 of us, if I remember correctly, for three days, for the full days, and there were really a series of extremely interesting experiences. We did laughing meditation at one point, which I found extremely interesting and quite easy, but I couldn't duplicate it myself at home.

I was really struck by you in particular because there was nothing about you that I would have associated with the probability of restarting the psychedelic investigation into psychedelics in the scientific community. And that's a compliment, that's the deepest compliment, because it seems to me that the reason you were able to pull this off is because you're surprisingly sensible and level-headed.

I'm very curious about why it was that you were able to get through all the regulatory hurdles—social career hurdles, psychological hurdles, ethical hurdles—and actually manage to establish this research program at such a prestigious university. Why do you think you were able to do that?

You know, part of it was the innocence with which I came into the area. So I came into the area having initiated a meditation practice, and I had been trained as a radical behaviorist in psychopharmacology, you know, which means that you don't pay any attention to motives or thoughts; those are irrelevant. You want to focus on observable behavior.

It's great scientific training to be trained as a rigorous behaviorist, though. But even in graduate school, I was curious about interiority and had tried to do some meditation, but like so many, when I tried, it became hopelessly difficult. Three minutes felt like three hours, and so I set that aside. I went about developing my career in psychopharmacology at Johns Hopkins, became internationally prominent in drug abuse pharmacology, and then 25 years ago started a meditation practice again.

This time there was something fundamentally different about it. I don't know why, but I engaged with it, and it became really intriguing to me. There were states of consciousness that emerged from that, getting me to ask questions about the nature of spiritual and transformative experience—what's going on with meditation? I didn't have a strong religious grounding or background; in fact, I had flunked out of confirmation school in the sixth grade.

But there was something really compelling, and it got me reading about different meditation traditions, different religious traditions. I was trying to understand this whole area of spirituality and then came to be reintroduced, incidentally, by Bob Jesse, who organized that conference we went to, and he's an engineer who founded a group called the Council on Spiritual Practices.

I got reintroduced to the idea that, well, you know, Roland, if you're interested in spiritual experience, if you want to investigate that, take another look at the psychedelics. I came into this just out of raw curiosity, and frankly, I would have to say that my intrigue with the nature of these experiences was so compelling that it made me question whether I should be allocating all my time to running around the world and giving conferences and giving papers and doing studies on the next abuse liability risk for a new compound.

That, in itself, seems quite remarkable. Okay, so let me summarize that to some degree. You had rigorous scientific training and, of the least mystical kind possible in some sense, because that's a good way of characterizing behaviorism. No concentration whatsoever on subjective experience and the reduction of everything to measure that which can be objectively measured.

I would say some of the most impressive work ever done in psychology was done by behaviorists—like Geoffrey Gray is a good example; he's an absolute genius, and all came out of that behavioral tradition. So you established and then you established your credibility methodologically but also as a communicator within that domain.

So what do you think you had for a publication record by the time you started the meditation practice and followed this other interest?

Well, I mean, at that point, I was a full professor. I had a long history of publication in drug abuse pharmacology, and in that sense, we did measure subjective effects and euphoria and things like that. But I was very well established in that field. I had done a whole parallel set of studies in animal behavior, pharmacology, and drug abuse looking at physical dependence and drug self-administration.

Right. So there was no way, by that time, of casually dismissing any interest that you might manifest; you'd already established yourself as a highly credible researcher. So that was a precondition for the next move. Why do you think your interest in this alternative domain, let's say, became so intense that it was able to displace an already developed expertise and a fully functioning career in this other direction? What was going on?

Well, there's something very compelling about the nature of these transformative experiences, and that's what we can describe: the kinds of effects that emerge with the psychedelics. More than that, in meditation, in prayer practice, there really arises a sense of the ineffable, and there are a lot of things tied to that. But meaning is integrally involved in that, and that, frankly, just became so compelling to me.

As a matter of fact, it kind of dwarfed my interest in drug abuse pharmacology to the point that I actually considered at one point dropping out of the scientific academy and going off to India to an ashram to do much more intensive meditation practice. So were there existential reasons for that, or was it merely a matter of where your curiosity took you?

I mean, you had a fully functioning professional life at that point. But something gripped you, and were there personal reasons for that, or do you think it was more a manifestation of curiosity?

I think it was raw curiosity. But once one enters into that relationship of investigating this mystery of what it is that we're doing here, this is kind of the core existential mystery of being that I think comes up in this. This is my framing now. At the time, I didn't know how to even contextualize this. I knew it was something that emerged from meditation; I thought it had something to do with what religious teachings were about.

I had just no context for putting that together, but it was super compelling, and it seemed incredibly important. If anything, that interest and the importance in it hasn't faded one bit for me.

So why did you decide then, instead of abandoning what you'd already created and journeying, let's say, to India for the second half of your life? That's how the unions would think about it, I suppose, as the spiritual part of your life. Why did you decide to continue walking down the scientific pathway, and what do you think of that decision?

Well, I think it's one of the best decisions I could have possibly made. Let's see, it was what I knew. All the tools I had; I was in a unique position. I started reading the literature on psychedelics and going, huh, this is interesting, and I wonder if this is true. Frankly, I went into that first study and may have made me an acceptable person to take this on. I went into that first study with a deep sense of skepticism.

I was very happy with what I was learning about the nature of these experiences from meditation. I was kind of put off by what struck me as excessive enthusiasm among those people who have continued to be engaged in psychedelics. Well, enthusiasm means to be filled with God's spirit, so it's exactly the right word for people who've been by psilocybin, let's say, or hypothetically excessive enthusiasm.

And, of course, that is a danger. There's no shortage of religious manias; I mean, that can manifest itself as part of manic depressive disorder, and you see religious experience of a sort often in schizophrenic delusions as well, so it's not like there's no danger there; there's plenty of danger.

I agree, and there still is. The first study? The first study was looking at a high dose of psilocybin and comparing it to a fairly high dose of methylphenidate or Ritalin under very deeply blinded conditions.

So it's a good study because you used an active placebo, so to speak. Did you have a placebo in there as well, or was it methylphenidate versus psilocybin?

It was just straight up comparing methylphenidate to psilocybin, but under deeply blinded conditions where people knew that in the course of two or three sessions, they would have at least one session in which they would get a dose of psilocybin. They were also told that they could get, I think, it was 13 other psychoactive compounds. We recruited in only people who had zero prior experience with psychedelics, so because allegedly the profile of subjective effects are so unique that people could unblind themselves by taking in naive people.

We also eliminated a potential recruitment bias of people who had good experiences. So we could actually—how did you convince the ethics committees that it was acceptable to do this at all and also the administrators at your university? And second, that it was acceptable to use naive participants?

Yeah, why did they—why did they—do you think that in today's climate, do you think that study would now be possible if, well, let's say if you hadn't laid the groundwork for it?

I think partly it was good luck and partly it actually speaks very well of Johns Hopkins and their ethics review procedures. So when I assembled that protocol with some help from the Council on Spiritual Practices and counseling from Bob Jesse, when I assembled that protocol, I actually thought that there's probably less than a 50 percent chance it would even be approvable because of these ethical committees it has to go through—not only the Hopkins ethical committee but FDA, and FDA hadn't approved a study giving a high dose of a psychedelic to a psychedelic naïve individual for, I don't know, you know, 25 plus years—decades. And so it was by no means clear that it would even go.

But it was so interesting to me, and as I said, I was losing comparative interest in the other things that I was doing that I thought, well, you know, why not?

The ethical scrutiny that that got was unlike any previous protocol or even any protocol since. It went through many levels of scrutiny within my institution, Johns Hopkins, including being looked at by the dean and the managing attorney's office and whatever.

I have to say I'm very proud of Johns Hopkins as an institution. It's stunning that they did it; I can't believe that they did it. What arguments did you marshal to put up against—because I mean, it's so easy for a committee to say no if they see risk, just to say no, because no is simple. The problem goes away, and no one's accountable for it. Yes is complicated, and so like, how did you convince them this was a worthwhile endeavor, especially given your own skepticism at that point?

Well, it really came down to a science and risk-benefit ratio. I think the big risk that most institutions would have caved in on is a political risk, a reputational risk. You know, to be associated with psychedelics like that?

Yeah, look what Leary did for Harvard.

Yeah, exactly. But the committee at Hopkins that looked at this really put the politics to one side and weighed the risk-benefit ratio to the volunteers.

What did they see as the benefit?

Oh, yeah, in terms of just understanding the nature—let's see, we put it forward as a comparative pharmacology study, okay? We had done a lot of work on comparative pharmacology, and in fact, I had a grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to compare—one of my specialties at the time was sedative hypnotics. I had a grant that had proposed to compare ketamine, which is an NMDA dissociative anesthetic, with some other compounds.

So I modified it to say, well, we were going to look at ketamine, but I think we'll look at psilocybin. Instead of comparing it to a classic—okay, some mentalism there. Because ketamine is already like radically psychoactive, although perhaps not so much as a pure psychedelic, let's say.

So there was some incrementalism, and you'd already got support from granting agencies, and you had all your credibility behind you.

Yeah, and so what we could argue is we're looking at relative abuse potential here. Now, the study, as it's published, doesn't read out as that, but that was really how it was designed—as a classic comparative pharmacology study in which we could compare the effects of psilocybin to methylphenidate in healthy volunteers.

We could look at things—right, so that's like—I can see that you could make a pretty straightforward, valid scientific argument for that. You have methylphenidate, which is a standard psychomotor stimulant, basically dopaminergically mediated, something like cocaine, and then you have this strange psychedelic, and the reason they're addictive is not, or if they are, and of course there's tremendous discussion about that, but they don't fit neatly into the category of other abusable drugs.

It's very hard to get animals to voluntarily take psychedelics, at least regularly, whereas you can do it with cocaine with no problem. I can see that you can make a basic science argument right there, and you said also abuse potential.

Okay, okay, okay, I'm still stunned that they managed it, but it's so interesting to see how much work and preparation and care at all sorts of levels had to go into that before it was made possible. It's also even possible that maybe that caution was warranted because one of the things that really strikes me about your research program is that it hasn't got out of hand, right?

I mean, and that's what happened in Harvard in the early 60s when Leary started playing around, let's say, with LSD, which you don't play around with. You've been able to really keep this within a tightly bound scientific box, while still investigating and popularizing the reality of the mystical experience for the participants.

Okay, so you started the study; you had naïve people. What happened?

Well, what happened is the story that actually changed my career direction because the results; you know, I was interested in spiritual experience. I put in questionnaires into this study that had been used to measure naturally occurring mystical experiences, and Ralph Hood, who may have been a participant in the meeting that we went to, I think we met Ralph there.

Yep, yeah, had a nice questionnaire. You know, but I wasn't sure what to entirely expect and whether the effects would live up to what struck me as exaggerated claims by the psychedelic enthusiast populations. But indeed, what happened was, under these blinded conditions—and both the guides were blinded and the volunteers to what drugs were administered—what emerges, number one, immediately during these sessions that are done after careful preparation, so they're really curated experiences.

We meet with volunteers for eight preparation hours prior to the session, and then they come in; they take a capsule. We ask them to lay on a couch for the duration of the session, which can be up to eight hours, six to eight hours. We encourage them to use blindfolds so that their visual system is cut off. We have them use earphones through which they listen to a program of music, and so it's an introverted kind of—do they select the music, or do you select it?

We select it.

What were your guidelines for selecting the music?

Well, our main guide, who played a very important role in our initial study, was Bill Richards, and he had actually done psychedelic work at Maryland Research Center back in the 1970s. So he had a strong bias toward Western classical music, and so our initial playlist was very strongly influenced in that direction.

Since that time—any particular composers? Was it heavy on Bach, for example?

Well, not particularly heavy, but it covered a range of classical composers.

Actually, I'm focusing on that because, I mean, music and dancing are components of psychedelic experiences that stretch back tens of thousands of years. And so the fact that it's easy to skip over these details in some sense. You had people lay down, their eyes were closed, okay? So they're not, they're not having a sociological experience of psilocybin; they're having an interior experience, and then you use music.

God only knows what music does in the final analysis, but it's certainly the case that, you know, there isn't a tremendous amount of space between classical music and religious music.

So there's all sorts of things that you've done that are implicit in the experiment that are integral in some indeterminate sense to the outcome.

Now, these preparation sessions—eight hours? Okay, what are you doing with people during those eight hours, and why?

Let's see. The preparation is really developing rapport and trust with them. These experiences can be hugely disorienting, and fear and anxiety can arise in at very strong magnitudes; it's very important that people feel safe and cared for.

So I think of it that we're trying to create a container around these experiences. They have to trust their—we sometimes call them guides or sitters—they really have to implicitly trust these people to take care of them.

Okay, so how important do you think, you know, because you said they have to feel safe, but I would think that it's more that they have to be safe. And you know what I mean? That this is why psychological research in particular is so likely to go astray because its validity depends on integrity in ways that aren't obviously measurable or describable in a research paper.

So, you know, I would think—and please correct me if I'm wrong—that if you didn't have exactly the right sort of people qualified, intelligent, insightful, competent, caring, awake—all of that—and dedicated to actually taking care of the research subjects, like none of this can be a show for that to work right? Because this can go wrong very badly, and it didn't go wrong.

So to what degree—how did you select the people who were going to serve as the protector/cum guides, and what were you thinking about when you did that?

So in that initial study, Bill Richards, who I already mentioned, came in as someone who was already a strong believer in the power of these kinds of compounds. So we actually—he was a perfect person to bring into that role, and was he associated with the Council of Spiritual Practices? Was he a Bob Jesse contact?

He was, yeah. Actually, you drew from that domain of expertise already.

Yeah, yeah, and he's a psychologist in the Baltimore area. Now, you know, he may very well be among the absolutely most experienced psychedelic therapists in the world. So he already came in with substantial experience; he was our primary guide throughout that first study, and then he trained an assistant guide who's with us still, Mary Casamano. It was the pair of them that, in that very first study, provided that rapport, trust, and support before, during, and after.

The aftercare is also important, but that relationship is critical. And you're right, people, they have to feel safe, and they have to be safe.

That's the value of doing this within the institutional structure of something like Hopkins because people know that what we're doing is giving them a compound that we know to be psilocybin, in this case synthesized psilocybin in capsules. It's done with medical supervision, and if anything went amiss medically, we're capable of intervening.

Medical intervention is very rare. I mean, these things turned out to be remarkably safe, but these kinds of sessions certainly can go off the rails. So that's the nature of that preparation, and caring, and being with them in the session. We've probably been possibly more conservative than we need to. Our sessions even today involved two sitters or guides throughout the whole duration of the six or eight hours.

So people are tucked into their couch; they're asked to go inward. We're not guiding the session per se; we're asking them to pay attention to their own experience as it unfolds.

What about mindset? What do you tell the people about how to prepare psychologically for the experience? How are they informed? How do you want them to react?

Yeah, let's see. We want them to go in and be deeply curious about what they have to learn.

Okay, so you want them to be open and let it go and let it happen, and you say, "We'll take care of you, but you can let it happen."

Yeah, yeah, let it go, be open, trust. We prepare them to not necessarily expect, but not rule out the possibility that what may emerge during the session is something that they'll find absolutely terrifying or anxiety-producing.

Okay, so they know that? Oh, absolutely.

Okay, okay. And so, I don't know, how often do people encounter—so I mean, the experiences are exceptionally profound and range across the full range of emotional significance—in fact, past the normal ranges of emotional significance.

So how frequently in the experience is the negative end of the human experience magnified?

Actually, quite frequently. So in our first study, about 30 percent of volunteers would have said—actually rated—at the end of the study that sometime during the experience, they had an experience of fear or anxiety that they would rate at extreme.

Very often those are short-lived experiences, and to the extent that they drag out over long periods of the session, the outcomes are going to generally be less favorable.

But I think it's actually a very sobering statistic that in spite of all the selection we do—I mean, we've already screened out people for whom we don't think we can develop rapport and trust; we've screened out individuals with borderline personality disorder, for instance—so we've already selected a group of people who are open and curious.

We're giving them all this time and attention, yet about 30 percent will experience some significant anxiety during those sessions.

What's important is that it's very, very rare for anyone who has a session of under these kinds of conditions to report after the session that they feel as though their life satisfaction has been decreased. Most people, even if they have a difficult experience, will interpret that experience in a context of meaningfulness.

In some cases, it's actually through the doorway of the most difficult portions of the experience that the greatest learning comes up.

So let's dive into that a little bit. I mean, I know historically that it appears as though historically, when people were preparing for experiences of this sort, that they would often undergo a process of ritual purification.

I'm going to just abandon the ritual part of that and assume that what they were doing was attempting some moral purification; that they were settling their accounts, that they were trying to ensure that they didn't walk into the experience with excessive karmic baggage, that they were very careful to prepare themselves so that their consciences weren't weighing on them any more heavily than they needed to.

When people undergo these negative experiences but still emerge with, let's say, the judgment that that was worthwhile, what's the essential nature of the negative experience? I mean, it's not contentless terror; it's not that unformed; it's more personal.

Well, the interesting piece of it, Jordan, is it can take many, many different forms. So, you know, one example that we give is because psilocybin very often has a lot of visualizations attached to it, either imagery and sometimes realistic imagery or patterns or whatever.

So we'll say, well, for instance, if—and this can happen—if during the session a demonic figure comes up and starts to approach you, your job is to be interested and curious about it, to recognize that this is a display of consciousness. We will often say there's nothing in consciousness per se that can hurt you, and what we want you to do is be interested in this.

Instead of reifying an image in your mind—so take the demon; instead of reifying it, and if you do, you'll either choose to run from it, and then you'll spend the entire session running from this demon that’s going to annihilate you until you're exhausted and the psilocybin's gone.

Alternatively, you may choose to fight it, but by fighting it, you've also reified it. What we really want you to do is be really interested in it and be curious about it, and it's terrifying.

It's a construct created by you, for you, probably to terrify you. Be interested in it and curious about it, and it's through that recognition that, although the hair on the back of your head may be standing on end, we would much rather have you approach it and, in effect, ask it what it's doing there, what am I to learn from this.

The guarantee is that whatever the nature of that is—and it can take any number of forms and it's not necessarily a monster or just visual—but whatever it is is not going to be static. I mean, unless you reify it, unless you make it static, if you actually investigate it, it's going to start changing.

Initially, it actually might become more terrifying, but it can't and won't continue to do that. It’s going to dissolve, and it may dissolve into something disgusting or beautiful or transcendent or silly, but it's going to change. Your job is just to stay with the experience and recognize that you're empowered in a way to approach whatever it is that emerges in consciousness.

My own sense—I’d be very curious about how you interpret this from a clinical psychological point of view—but my sense of that is that’s a hugely empowering experience for people to have, that they have literally faced the dragon. They have faced the greatest terror, whatever form it's taken, and they've come out recognizing that they're safe, they're empowered, and that that can be a life-changing experience in and of itself.

Because after you really have been there with the demon, the worst demon of your dreams, and faced it down, and looked it in its eyes and realized it's actually nothing other than an object of consciousness, nothing other than yourself, then what is it in life that can put up an obstacle with that much fear for you?

It's very much like a classic initiation ceremony; I mean, that’s—that's the—that's the basic story. The truth is, one thing that clinicians have agreed upon, regardless of their school of thought, let's say, is that voluntary exposure to obstacles in your path that are threatening or disgusting is almost inevitably curative.

It seems that the rule is that that which you approach voluntarily shrinks as you approach it, and you grow. If you run, the reverse happens, and you can play that out very straightforwardly if you're a behaviorist because if someone's afraid of an elevator, then you have them stand ten feet from the elevator, then nine feet, and then eight feet.

Not only do they learn that, what they learn is that they can withstand the fear. That's what generalizes. You don't get symptom substitution the way the psychoanalysts thought because you're probably not counter-conditioning the fear. What you're doing is showing the person that there's more to them than they thought.

And there isn't anything more salutary than that, and that is precisely why you're encouraged, let's say, in mythological stories to confront the dragon and get the gold. That’s the basic story, and it’s very interesting how that becomes portrayed in a psychedelic experience.

I mean, what do you make—okay, there are two directions there I'd like to continue the discussion of the study. Okay, so what happened to you as a consequence of running this study, and how did that influence what you did, and then what happened culturally as a consequence of reporting this study?

So I think the most interesting and unexpected finding for me was I was deeply interested in the nature of that initial experience, but the most interesting thing to me occurred when people returned two months later.

So this first study, we were giving sessions at two-month intervals, so people would come in; they would have their session with the guides; they would meet with them intermittently beforehand, and then they would come back for the second session. They'd sit down in my office, and this is just a vivid memory; it was one of the very first volunteers.

I asked him, "So, what do you think of the first session? I'm just curious as to what you're thinking." The person said, “You know, I think about that every day. That's among the most important experiences of my whole life.”

[Laughter]

And I thought, what? I mean, now at this point in my career, I've given dozens and dozens of different psychoactive drugs to people, both healthy volunteers and drug abusers, yet at high doses.

Oh, how high was the dose? In like, typically among street users, two grams is a moderate dose for psilocybin of the actual mushroom.

Four grams, I think five grams is what Terence McKenna called the heroic dose, isn't it?

What kind of dose were you giving?

This is equivalent to five-gram dosage. So this was not a trivial pharmacological experience, like over-the-top.

Well, that's in the description. It's not a beginner's experience, in some sense; it's the full-fledged thing.

Yeah, okay. How did you settle on the dose?

Well, we wanted to provide a strong test of what it was that psilocybin could do. That is the same dose, although we did it on a weight basis, but it's the same dose that Walter Pankey gave in the famous Good Friday experiment. Given that this is Good Friday, we can reference that: that was the study done at Harvard back in the very early 60s.

But there were some limitations to that study, but in effect, many of the things that we showed were consistent with what they ended up reporting. But we knew from the literature that psilocybin at that dose had been given safely in various studies.

So we thought that there wasn't any great value in studying a range of doses, nor could we afford to do so because this study was supported partly through a pre-existing grant but also through significantly philanthropic support.

So, people came back two months later and they said this, and you listened, which is also extremely interesting because it did violate some of your presuppositions, even though you were curious about this.

So it just was hugely unprecedented in my experiences. Someone would say, "That experience I had two months ago, I think about it every day, and it's among the most important experiences of my life."

My first thought was, "What kind of life experiences do these people have?" This seems absurd to me. When you quiz them about it, they would say, "Well, you know, when my first child was born, my whole life changed. I’ll never forget that."

When my father died, that's, you know, a huge life changer. This is, it's kind of like that. So they're describing it in a metric across their life experience that actually makes a whole lot of intuitive sense of major existential episodes.

But it's so different than any other psychoactive drug I had ever looked at. I was accustomed to measuring acute effects and describing those acute effects. If you give cocaine or an opiate or a dissociative anesthetic and asked someone a week later, or much less than a couple of months later, they’d tell you, but they're drawing on memory.

Oh, yeah. You know, we got drunk and we had a good time, and we laughed a lot. But if you said, "Well, is that important to you?" You know, it wouldn’t be unless they learned not to drink that much.

Right, right, right, right. But this has embedded existential personal meaning of the deepest order. And so, after those interviews, we put together another set of questionnaires that we have used since then.

That's actually rating these experiences with respect to your entire life experiences. Just replicated across now a variety of studies, we can show that usually 80 to 90 percent of people rate these experiences in the top five of their life.

In that first study, I think 30 percent rated it as the single most spiritually significant experience of their entire life. So it's of that order of magnitude, right?

So now you went in there with this skepticism, but you'd also be gripped already at that point by some intuition that there was something in that domain of experience that was crucially important. So now people came back and said, "Well, look, I've experienced that, and you know, it had a huge impact on me."

So what happens next in your research? Where do you take that? You develop this new questionnaire; what's the next study and why?

Yes, so it interfaced with my own experience because, you know, I'd been involved with meditation. I appreciated aspects of the primary mystical experience, and we can talk about that—those are the qualities of the acute experience that seem to predict these longer-term attributions of meaning and spiritual significance, right?

So you—okay, so were there people who took the psilocybin that didn't have the mystical experience and that didn't report the long-term effects, or was it—was everyone who was affected—was everyone affected by this psilocybin, regardless of that?

No, there's some variation, and some people will not have classic mystical experiences. Some people won't have classic mystical experiences yet will describe them as meaningful. But overall, those people who have these experiences that we describe as classic mystical experiences are the ones that will report enduring positive changes.

Are they reporting—sorry, I also interrupted one of your points there.

Yeah, let's see. So they're reporting, you know, in the most general terms positive changes in attitudes about themselves, about life, their emotions, behavioral changes, spirituality are all changed in ways that are felt to be deeply meaningful and significant.

Right. So things are bad—so they report that their lives are better, but it's not hedonic better, like cocaine better; it's not a psychomotor stimulant better. It's philosophical better, and I mean that's why I think your findings on this increase in trait openness are so absolutely—well, they're unbelievable, first of all. They're so powerful.

It's just—and I have no idea in the final analysis what to make of them, but it is really something. Stop me if I'm wrong, but it's like a philosophical deepening, and it is better conceptualized as an expansion of the experience of significant meaning rather than on a generalized rise in positive emotion.

Like you didn't get an increase in extroversion, which is the positive emotion dimension; you got an experience in openness, which is the creativity dimension. It's also associated with revelatory thought, right?

Because openness looks like the trait that we would identify as creativity. Creative people are generative in their ideas, right? They're intuitive; they have these inside experiences that you were all also interested in. They're able to make associations between distant thoughts and observe patterns.

And if you're high in openness, you're also interested in ideas; you tend to be philosophical in your outlook, you have a strong affinity for fiction and narrative— all of that clumps together. And your research, maybe we can go there next, is you showed that after a single dose mystical experience on psilocybin, people moved the equivalent of from the 50th percentile to the 85th percentile in trait openness—one standard deviation.

And so that’s—and that was permanent. Okay, so talk about that, and what the hell happened, and what do you think's happening neurologically?

Yeah, well, let me back up to the acute experience and describe components of that because that explains, then, I think how people are looking back at these experiences. So the key features of this so-called primary mystical experience—and we now have developed a very good questionnaire that’s psychometrically solid and can measure this—the key features of this are this sense of unity, this sense of the interconnectedness of all people and all things, and that can be experienced both introvertedly—that is, that everything is within—or it can be experienced extrovertedly.

In the whole literature on mystical experiences outside of drugs, it was laid out in the set forth this kind of template. So there's a sense of the interconnectedness of all people and all things, the unity—

Yeah, the meaningful interconnectedness, right? That somehow that's all connected—not just connected but also that the entire pattern of connection has some transcendent or ultimate significance that's hidden from us.

Let me go into the other quality. So it's that unity that's accompanied by a sense of sacredness or reverence. So there's something about this experience that's felt to be deeply precious; if you don't want to use a word that's tinged with spiritual implications, but there's something deeply precious about it.

And then, there's the noetic sense—not only is it precious; it's absolutely true. For most people, they will endorse it's more real than everyday waking consciousness. It's more real than real, and then there are sub-factors to the mystical experience: positive mood, transcendence of time and space, and ineffability.

One of the first things that people say in coming out of these experiences, when I walk into the session room and ask them, "Well, you know, tell me about your experience?" They'll kind of look down and maybe smile or look baffled and they say, "You know, I can't even put this into words."

I'm thinking, okay, well, that's one of the six criteria here. So what I think is that this sense of unity, the fact that there's some sense that we're all in this together, this is all interconnected—there's a wholeness there that's precious and it's absolutely true.

With that, it may be that noetic quality—that it's absolutely true—might account for why these experiences then are sustained. They have enduring because people believe that there's some fundamental truth value in what they have learned; it's not like getting drunk and saying, "Yeah, I had a great time," but you don't learn anything important about how to conduct your life going forward, other than maybe not drink so much.

But this is something at a very personal level, and I think that accounts for these enduring changes and the fact that people then become behaviorally much more flexible, because if that narrative structure is changed, then the analogy I think of is you're rewriting the underlying operating system.

And with that, everything can change. People can change their life courses in ways that were unimaginable.

Okay, so let me make a couple of comments about that, and you tell me what you think about this. Okay, so when I've looked at—I think of the operating system as it has a narrative structure fundamentally, and the reason for that is that we have to know how to behave and narratives are about behavior.

And so narratives address the question of how we should behave. There's a perceptual element too because you have to perceive in order to act, and so your perceptions are very tightly linked to your behavioral aims, and that's quite clear from the hardcore psychological literature.

Okay, so my sense of the deep narrative—because I think that the world is best construed—and I do mean best construed—as a place of order and chaos, and that can be technically described, the distinction between those two, and that there's a battle between good and evil going on against that background.

Now I want to talk about the good and evil background a bit because it pertains to this rewriting of the narrative. So I look at stories like the story of Cain and Abel, which is a very ancient story, and it's clearly a story of good against evil.

It's a foundational story because it's really in the Western culture, in the narrative tradition, it's the story of the first two genuine human beings because Adam and Eve are made by God, but Cain and Abel are born—they're the first actual people, and one of them is a murderous genocidal psychopath, and the other is a hero.

And so you see that dichotomy there instantly, and so Cain is the adversary, the dark narrative, the dark force, let's say. And why? Well, what happens to Cain is that he struggles and sacrifices like we all do; we make our sacrifices in the present and we assume that by doing so, the benevolence of the world will manifest itself to us.

That's why we're willing to forego gratification and to work; that's all sacrifice. So Cain sacrifices, but God rejects his sacrifice.

And the story is brilliantly ambivalent about why, and the reason that's a brilliant ambivalence is because you can work diligently and make the proper sacrifices, as far as you're concerned, and yet fail, which means that all that work, all that foregone gratification, that pact with God, that—what is it that God has with the Israelites? There's a name for that—the implicit covenant.

The covenant has been broken, and Cain responds to that with tremendous anger, right? He raises his fist against the sky and shakes it and says, "Ah, this should not be," and then he takes revenge. He says, "I will destroy what is most valuable to you," and so he goes after Abel, who is an ideal person whose sacrifices are welcomed by God, and he kills him.

All hell breaks loose in the aftermath of that. In Cain's relatives, and like the more I just delved into that story, the more it shocked me. I couldn't believe that much information could be packed into what's essentially 12 lines.

Okay, so now imagine that in each of our souls, we have this competing tendency. You know, we see the suffering and the horror of our lives—the vulnerability and the mortality of everything that we love and cherish—and our failure, and that turns us against being.

And then there's the other part of us that maintains faith and that strives forward, but each of us is an intermingling of those. And so the rewrite seems to me to be something like the revelation that the positive end of that prop set of propositions is actually true—that things are interconnected, that things are fundamentally good, that love and truth can actually prevail.

And that gives some experiential weight that can be used as a counter-position against that destructive cynicism.

And the psychedelic, the mystical experience seems to allow for that transformation. That does seem—what do you think of that?

Yeah, that sounds right. I mean, there's something hugely curious about the nature of these experiences because they appear to be strongly biased toward this benevolent sense of wonder.

Yeah, and that's associated with that certainty of truth, which is not what you'd expect, right? Because it's not that easy to make a powerful, credible case for benevolence and truth. We're not even wired that way, because we overestimate the magnitude of negative experiences.

We're more sensitive to them. So it's surprising that that would emerge; it's unlikely.

But isn't it interesting? I mean, you know, the fact is, you know, that these experiences that occur with the psychedelics are very much part of naturally occurring experiences of this type. So, you know, there can be conversion experiences or religious experiences that come out in, you know, under various conditions, either spontaneously or in prayer practice.

To me, you know, I conclude that we're wired to have these kinds of experiences.

What? Yeah, so that in itself is an absolute radical claim, you know. I mean, I've gone after some of the Darwinians that I've— the atheistic Darwinians that I've talked to for failing to take into account what I regard as the preponderance of scientific evidence indicating that the religious instinct is real and that it's biologically grounded.

It's like, okay, it's real, it's biologically grounded. What do you have to say about that from an evolutionary perspective then? Is that a spandrel? It's like, no, because it looks like it's central to the development of human culture itself—not some peripheral element but a central element.

What are we supposed to conclude? If we conclude that the religious instinct has actually evolved, it's deeply biological, and it speaks of like a benevolent and truth-oriented teleological reality that is not the way our culture is constructed.

Well, this was the question I was kind of posed to you: what's going on here?

Well, that's exactly what we're trying to figure out, isn't it? Just what the hell is going on here?

What the hell is going on? And just to reflect it back on—is it a good decision to follow this? I mean, what's more important than this, Jordan? What's more important than finding out what's going on here?

No, I can't believe—like, I actually can't believe how important this is. You know, I mean, I've been studying the psychedelic literature for 20 years, and in as deep a manner as I can possibly manage, and every time I think I have some grasp on how important it is, I learn something else and I think, "Oh, it's way more important than I thought it was." It's of crucial significance.

It's of central—it's literally of central significance. And so now it needs to—it, you know, partly why I was so interested in talking to you is I'm trying to figure out, it's like, okay, well, what happens if we take this seriously? Like, if we start to actually take this seriously with dead seriousness.

What’s the consequence of that, you know? And so, all right, so let's look at the fear of death. That's the place I want to go next. And there's a couple of things I'm interested in about that.

The first is that there—you have this study showing that cancer sufferers take psilocybin, and they show a marked reduction in the fear of death. And that gets stranger the more deeply you investigate it.

And then there are these ancient Eleusinian mysteries that seem to be associated with something like the experience of a voyage to the land of the dead, an encounter with ancestral spirits, a religious transformation and then—and then the eradication or at least the diminution of the fear of death.

But all of that mythological baggage, so to speak, went along with the experience. So there's a journey of some sort to a place of some sort that seems to have commonality across different individuals, strangely enough, that results in this pronounced transformation of the existential consideration of mortality itself.

So it's again of sufficient significance that there's no end to how deeply you can investigate it. So tell me about that experiment, what you saw happening, and what you've made of it.

So these were cancer patients who met diagnostic criteria for significant anxiety or depression secondary to their cancer diagnosis. As you well know and can appreciate, when someone's facing a life-threatening illness, that can be hugely disruptive to them.

So the study was a simple study. It was blinded and done very rigorously, but people ended up getting a high dose of psilocybin at some point. And after doing so, their depression and anxiety drops just precipitously.

It remains completely low out to the six-month point, and another group that ran a parallel kind of study did a follow-up five years, and they're still reporting those kinds of effects.

So these are the kinds of enduring changes. So, you know, what's going on there? Well, it's a mixture. Part of it is a different attitude about death and dying, and we're actually analyzing data from a huge survey right now on changed attitudes about death and dying, secondary to psychedelic exposure and comparing that to the kinds of changes that people have that occur naturalistically, such as near-death experiences where you get that same kind of shift.

So that's certainly an element, but there's also, related to that, this sense of benevolent unity—that there's something about this mystery that we find ourselves in.

Like something cropped up. Let me tell you about it. I've—when I've—so our life is dependent on death, because our cells are constantly dying. And if death isn't regulated properly within us, we get cancer, for example.

So the fact of our healthy existence is actually paradoxically dependent on death itself—the proper amount of death keeps us healthy. And you know, it's so interesting because that's also true psychologically, is that you have to let old concepts die.

And they don't like to die; it's a painful experience to have the old you die in the light of new experience. It's painful enough so that people will resist it. But there's this benevolent death that's a reparative mechanism.

And when I've allowed my intuitions to extend themselves as far as possible, I think, well, that's true of being itself—that in the manner that we can't comprehend, death plays a restorative role.

It's something like the precursor to resurrection, and God only knows where that idea goes, but—and I believe that these mystical experiences provide a window into that—that there's this mechanism of death at work, but it's a reparative and creative mechanism.

All things considered, it's building towards something that we have an intuition of and want to participate in and are tortured by our conscience for not participating in.

And a glimpse of that at least shows you that there's more going on than you think, that there's more going on than you want. So much of hopelessness is a consequence of prematurely—if premature closure, I am certain this is hopeless and pointless.

Well, that mystical experience can dispense with that certainty. I'm not so sure that I know what's going on; I'm not so inclined to be what—to be—not have doubt about my own skepticism.

So, all right, so back to the study. Let me just pick up on that, because one of the questions that I found myself asking people as they enrolled in the study is, you know, so, you know, what do you think happens when you die?

It's a very interesting question to ask people, and you know, there are those who say it's lights out; it's unplugged, that, you know, and that's it. After these kinds of experiences, there's a crack in that doorway.

There's less certainty about that, and that is part of these kinds of changes that come about with these experiences. A shift in worldview—a shift in the sense of the nature of consciousness, maybe having an eternal quality to it—and that can be tinged with spirituality if someone interprets it within a religious framework.

There's something enduring about that, and so the certainty that everything ends at the moment of death comes into more significant question very often with these kinds of experiences.

But I don't think it accounts for everything, and there are people who come out of these experiences still saying, "Well, yeah, I don't believe in any kind of afterlife or anything existing," you know, but there is a sense that they may have of the elegance and the beauty and the benevolence of the entire process that just makes them feel filled with gratitude for the opportunity to be a sentient being and have this experience.

There's something celebratory about gratitude. Why that emotion in particular did you focus on?

I think that's actually—I think that's the core of what very often—well, at least what I believe comes out of these experiences. There's a sense of wonder that comes out of the mystery of what it is that we don't know.

I mean, you know, there is this hard problem of consciousness, but most people don't contemplate it very seriously. With a psychedelic, it's almost impossible not to be astonished by how much—and humbled by how much you don't understand about the nature of your own mind and the nature of reality.

And so we're confronted with this mystery of what is this about? How is it, you know, that we're these highly evolved beings, you know, who have developed the capacity to sense things, to walk, to talk, we've developed societies, we’ve developed science as a methodology, we can communicate, and on top of all that, the astonishing fact is that we're aware that we're aware?

That wouldn't have to be the case, and that's the hard problem of consciousness. And well, I think there's even a harder problem which—the which the mystical experiences seem to shed some light on—which is, to what degree is being itself dependent on consciousness?

Because there is the problem of consciousness, but there's the problem of being. What does it mean that things are? Well, it seems to mean, or at least you can make the case that, well, things aren't unless they're experienced, because what sort of being is there in the absence of any experience whatsoever?

All you can do is construct the hypothetical picture of what being would be like in the absence of consciousness as a conscious creature would formulate that.

That's the best you can do, but that's still dependent on consciousness. And so there's a real mystery there, which is what, you know, I don't think it's a mystery that's properly addressed by—I mean, I'm an evolutionary biologist for all intents and purposes in my orientation—but reductive materialism doesn't address that problem.

And there's many other problems it doesn't address as well, and it doesn't address them if you take them seriously. It's like there is some relationship between consciousness and being, and I don’t see how that can—it's—that’s not easily explained by making consciousness an epiphenomenon of matter.

That just makes matter more mysterious as far as I'm concerned; it doesn't get rid of the problem. But therein comes the gratitude, right? The very—the very fact that we are gifted with this experience of experience.

Well, I ended my last book with a chapter, "Be Grateful in Spite of Your Suffering," and that was the end of a two-book cycle of thinking, and I put it at the end as the culmination—like, what's a final moral rule? Well, that's it because that's the antidote to Cain, you know?

And I take Cain's argument seriously. It's a serious argument. Are things so terrible that they shouldn't exist at all? Well, you know, you can accrue a fair bit of evidence in favor of that hypothesis. It doesn't lead to the right place; it makes everything worse, as far as I can tell, and I haven't encountered a situation, personally, where gratitude wasn't better than its alternative.

And the alternative seems unbelievably destructive. Resentment, I think, is the opposite of gratitude, and resentment can be a salutary emotion in that if you notice its emergence in your life, it signifies something that you should pay attention to, but I have seen nothing about it that's positive as something to be cultivated.

You certainly don't teach your children to be resentful; everybody agrees that that's toxic beyond tolerability. And so we know there's something wrong with it, and it is extraordinarily—well, I think it's extraordinarily interesting that you focus on that particular experience, and I think—and I think and feel, and that’s humbling as well—that gratitude, oh, it's hugely humbling.

I mean, the thing—I mean, the first experience you're looking into the existential mystery, right, and it's a mind-boggling proposition that initially is unfathomable.

From that arises this gratitude for that opportunity. And if we want to circle back to the cancer patients, it's that gratitude, you know, for the opportunity to live. Whether or not they believe that something occurs after death, there's a celebration of life and very often a joy. It's really quite remarkable to see how people who have been so transformed, how they interact with family members.

It turns out at that point to be more distraught than they are very often.

So how do—what sort of transformations do you see in their actions with their family members?

Oh, they're reassuring. I mean, they'll say, you know, "There's a realism to the seriousness of their condition." So, you know, they'll say, "This is this is very sad. I'm dying. I'm going to leave, but it's okay. It's okay; everything is all right."

So the transformation is so radical that not only do they suffer less with regards to their own mortality, but they're transformed sufficiently so that they can now attend to others, despite the fact that they are the people that have the fatal illness.

Yeah, that they become the caretakers in the family unit. And it also has the potential for totally shifting end-of-life care because if you're not, you're no longer grasping to every shred of every minute of life. You know, there's a deep interest in connecting and staying connected, and so you're much less likely to elect to go in the hospital under incredibly brutal conditions—to achieve those last days or weeks.

So it—the potential actually in terms of large cultural change to change death and dying and how we handle that as a culture is very significant.

Why psilocybin? Why did you pick psilocybin?

Well, a couple of reasons. One, its duration of action is clinically manageable. So it's not too short; if you did intravenous DMT, that's a matter of 15 or 20 minutes, and this gives you a longer period of time to have an experience and then to reintegrate that experience—but it's not nearly as long as something like LSD, which is like a 12-hour time course, which is just taxing for everybody and pretty clinically unmanageable.

There's a sense—but I don't think we have good data on this—that psilocybin can be gentler than LSD psychologically, and I'm not positive about that, but the most important piece of it is that most people can't spell psilocybin, and it simply didn't have the cultural baggage that LSD did.

And I think it turns out to be a really good pick for a model system, but there are literally thousands of other compounds that could be synthesized that are going to have a different influence on the nature of consciousness that should be—and will be explored over time.

I've been reading this book recently, "The Immortality Key," by Brian Muraresku, and he's making a case that has been made by other people, although he makes it in a very interesting way—in a very original way.

It's reminiscent to me of John Allegro's work from the late 60s, which sort of got pilloried at the time because, well, that was just when LSD and all the psychedelics were being made illegal, and Allegro was sort of lumped in with the hippie types and ignored.

I read "The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross" years ago, and I thought, he's a linguist and he claims to have gathered an immense amount of linguistic data suggesting that early Christianity was a mushroom cult.

I couldn't assess his claims because I'm not a linguist, but it certainly looked to me at the time like it was an extraordinarily serious book. I read it and I thought, I have no idea what to do with this information. I can't tell if it's credible or not, and if it is credible, well, then what?

Like, what in the world are we supposed to do with this? And then Murarescu, he's making a strong case that the Eleusinian mysteries were—which upon—which the Greek society that gave rise to the West, let's say, was embedded, was deeply embedded within a psychedelic religious tradition that was actually an integral part of the culture—not some peripheral element, but a central element—that that was also the case with the cult of Dionysius, the god of wine.

And that Christianity took many of the mysteries, including the sacrament, from the Dionysian cult. And so I think—and I certainly think that the Book of Revelation bears all the hallmarks of a classic psychedelic experience.

So then I'm thinking, well, what are you supposed to think about that, exactly? I mean, I take the fact that our society is Judeo-Christian and its underlying narrative structure extremely seriously. I think that's true as a fact; whether it's the right way for things to be is a different question but—oh, and also an important question—but I have no idea how to conceptualize our relationship with psychedelics.

Let me tell you my most paranoid thought about this. You tell me what you think about this.

Yeah, yeah.

So on the one hand, you have this—the most extreme idea on the one hand is that psychedelic experience is a gateway to something that's actually divine, and God only knows what the significance of that is.

But here's another thought: you know that parasites can hijack nervous systems. So there's this one example of a—I may not get this story exactly right—but there’s this parasite that hijacks ants' nervous systems and the insects, it makes them climb up a stalk and they pincer themselves to a leaf, and then their body fills up with the parasite spores, and they explode and the parasites go everywhere.

So the parasite has evolved to hijack the ant's nervous system, and there's plenty of examples of parasites doing that sort of complex thing over time. There’s a cat parasite that lives in cats that makes rats more fearful, and they're more likely to be caught by cats, which is quite interesting.

And so then I'm thinking about psilocybin, and it’s this mushroom, and it produces this chemical, and nobody really knows what good the chemical is to the mushroom, and it has this immense effect on us.

Have we been using psilocybin for 500,000 years? Have we been distributing its spores everywhere? Is it a parasite that's hijacked our nervous system?

And the way it's done that is by producing this religious experience that we value. I mean, that's the most devastating materialistic critique of this psychedelic idea that I've been able to formulate, and I mean, one piece of counter-evidence to that, I think, is the fact that I think the evidence seems to suggest that the psychedelic experience is salutary from the perspective of mental and physical health rather than destructive.

But it looks like we've been using mushrooms for God only knows how long—I mean, it's certainly tens of thousands of years; it's certainly at least as far back as the last ice age—and God only knows how far back it is before that.

As what? As a biological thinker, say, what are your thoughts about that? [Laughter]

Yeah, I don't know if I can take that on; I don't understand. I mean, it's a huge mystery, and—yeah, what role do these experiences play in the evolution of culture?

I mean, you can start with that one.

Well, and so, yeah, what roles do religions play in the evolution of culture? An important and central role, right?

Yeah, well, that central role looks to me like integrated cultures—there's no distinction between their ritual and their dance and their music and their stories and their religion; that's all one thing. And it's the central source of meaning that enables them to live as individuals and unites them as a people, so that seems clear.

So you can't just push the religious idea off to the side; that’s a mistake, and I think the data for that are in.

And so it’s central. Well, now it seems shaped by these psychedelic experiences, so what the hell are we supposed to make of that?

I don't even know how to—what to make of that, either epistemologically, you know, as a theory of knowledge, or ontologically. I don't know what that says about the structure of reality itself. [Laughter]

Well, let's see. It provides an evolutionary explanation for why that might have been conserved, right, that there's something super adaptive about the religious experience in terms of evolution of culture and the organization of culture.

Well, I think, look, when I've tried to reduce this, I mean, that experience of awe—so we went to a whole conference on that—so if you see someone that you really admire, that shades into awe. And you can see that in the effect that celebrities have on the public.

It can be paralyzing, so the admiration—there's a continuum between admiration and awe, and then you can easily make the case, I think, that admiration is the felt sense of the instinct to imitate.

So you see children, maybe they'll hear or worship someone, and then they'll imitate them, they'll copy them. They find someone who's in that zone of proximal development, and they start to copy them or they'll take on the identity of a hero or heroine in a movie.

My little granddaughter, who's three—for a year now, literally a year—she has two names: Scarlett and Ellie Elizabeth. We kind of call her one or the other, and if you ask her, is she Scarlett? She'll say yes. Is she Ellie? Yes. Is she Pocahontas? Yes.

Is she Scarlett, Ellie, or Pocahontas? Pocahontas—one year now. She watched that Disney movie over and over, and she has a Pocahontas doll. But—and she's picked that figure, that quasi-mythological figure, obviously not a historical figure.

She's picked that as her identity, and I see that as—we can imitate people; we talked about—and hyper-reality before. Well, you can find someone you admire, and they're real, or you can find someone who's a mythological figure, and they're hyper-real, and the hyper-reality is so adaptive that imitating the hyper-real is more adaptive than imitating the real.

And that, to me, is the essence of the religious instinct. It's to derive the hyper-real and then to imitate that.

And I think that's what worship means, essentially— all with everything stripped away, and so that's a profound instinct because human beings are unbelievable mimics.

I mean, that's a very underappreciated element of our cognitive architecture—a fundamental element. And that instinct to admire and experience awe facilitates that mimicry and that increases the probability of the manifestation of complex adaptive behavior.

Okay, so—and then what does that make of the religious domain? Something real, as far as I'm concerned, even real from the biological sense.

But that deepens the mystery of the involvement of the psychedelics in that. Are they parasitizing that? Are they, like cocaine, hyper-stimulating the psychomotor stimulant system?

Well, does psychedelics hyper-stimulate the imitation-awe system? And is that an illusion, or is it in fact a revelation of something deeper yet?

Yeah, just circle back to the ontological question. So just recently, I listened to a lecture that Francis Collins gave. Now, so Francis Collins, you may recognize, is director of the National Institutes on Health, and he was also the director of the Human Genome Project.

So he's as strongly credentialed a scientist as one can have, and yet he's an absolutely confirmed Christian. He was giving a lecture on the reconciliation of— I think he called it harmonization of a scientific and religious worldview, but he was laying out his arguments for the existence of God.

And one of them is what would be his claim—and it's an interesting claim, and you could argue it—but the existence of moral law—that there is an absolute moral law.

Look, you know, I looked at Jack Panksepp's work, you know, and he shows that you see complex morality emerging in rats in play—iterated play, which is a crucial issue, right?

What pattern of behavior is sustainably optimal across repeated social interactions? Well, you know, you hear all these postmodern critiques say of hierarchies because of its predication on power. I think, no, no, corrupt hierarchies are predicated on power. Functional hierarchies are predicated on reciprocal productivity.

You know, I was talking to this joker, Willink, who was the commander of Fallujah in, in—in the 20 years ago, and he's a real warrior type, you know, like a real intimidating person physically and mentally, for that matter.

He talked about his Navy SEAL training, and you know, he said, "Well, we were taught, it was pounded into us to have the back of the guy next to us." It wasn't like every powerful clamoring ape for himself—not at all—in these intensely competitive hierarchies, which would be, you'd think, as pure a manifestation of the power motive as would be possible.

Power is not the guiding ethos, and he made also a very sophisticated case for the development of verbal intelligence and the ability to communicate in strategizing and also in taking care of your team.

So I don't believe that—so what am I getting at in relationship to your last point? This religious—this emergent ethic, this natural law. Okay, so imagine now hierarchies are organized around an ethical principle.

If they're to be stable and productive across long spans of time, that pattern emerges across cultures. It's reciprocal productivity; it's something like that. It's more—there's more to it than that.

Now you're selected for your success in those hierarchies based on your ability to manifest that pattern because that'll push you up the hierarchy; that increases, as far as I can tell, that increases your attractiveness as a potential mate substantially.

And so I think you can make a very deep biological case for even for the emergent evolution of an ethical sense. And I think that does speak to people in the voice of their conscience, and that that is part of—but then you think, well, if that's part of existence, how deep a part is it? How built in is it?

You know, and I don't—I think that, I suppose, depends to some degree on how crucial consciousness is to being.

Okay, so back to the gentleman that you were discussing—he was talking about a natural ethic?

Well, I think as a pointer to God, something absolute about the nature of what moral law is. And from that standpoint, if you're willing to go that route, then maybe these experiences are actually pointing to something that is absolute and true and informative.

Do you think that's true?

I'm a scientist. It's fine to be investigating it. You know what?

Yeah, no, I'm going to pin you down. No, let's see. You know, I'm trained as a scientist; my default is to be deeply curious and to be deeply skeptical, right?

Which is the right attitude towards—yeah.

And so my response always is that I believe in the data.

And so that remains an open question, but it's certainly fun to toy with as an alternative framing of what's going on.

We're in the middle of this huge, huge mystery, so historical significance. What do you think of the theories associating early Christianity and the sacrament with the ingestion of psychedelic substances?

I don't—I don't know; certainly, it's quite plausible. I mean, if you really look at the accounts of the Eleusinian mysteries and the kinds of experiences people had, it sure sounds like a psychedelic experience at least some of those accounts.

But we also know that those kinds of experiences can be engendered—naturally as well, and so I—I don't want to discount that, you know, that is a possibility.

There’s actually some—the psychedelic proponents, the enthusiasts, you know, think that what we're laying down is the—you know, the future; this is the most valuable tool there is, you know, to open up to these kind of experiences.

And I see it actually quite differently, is, you know, we're learning about the capacity of the human species, of the organism, to have these experiences, and what I would suspect is that in, you know, 10, 20, 50 years, psychedelics are going to be considered very crude tools to engender these things.

We're going to have, you know, much better ways and more precise ways to intervene in this process to occasion experiences of this sort. But to go back to your question, so what, yeah, is this plausible that it has played a role?

It's certainly plausible. It seems quite unlikely that it accounts for you the entirety of these kinds of transformations. It still leaves all sorts of things unsolved, like I mean, why did the worship of Dionysius transform into the worship of Christ, for example?

I mean, we even if there's psychedelic continuity there—that's a question that we can hardly pose, let alone answer. And it also I'm also extremely curious. I mean, this place—do you think it's reasonable to conceptualize the destination place of a trip as a place?

I mean, that's what myth—that's what Greek mythology appears to be doing. That's what the mythology of the underworld appears to be about, as far as I can tell.

What do you think about—we've talked about how psychedelics shed a different light on the structure of reality as we perceive it, but people also report going places that aren't here, exactly.

And there's the entity problem as well, especially with DMT. I know Rick Strassman, who studied DMT so intently, and I have never met Rick, but my impression from reading him is that he was a pretty buttoned-down sort of guy when he got into the psychedelic field.

He wasn't driven in there from the hippie end of things; it was more from the, you know—skeptical intellect type or direction. But he appears to have been so shocked by what the DMT experience produced in terms of reports from people that, you know, it was shocking to him to say the least.

And no wonder, because it seems that everyone who takes DMT reports going somewhere very fast and encountering all sorts of alien entities, but they also describe that as hyper-real.

If you object that those are figures of the imagination or even Jungian archetypes among those who would know of that sort of thing, that's not an acceptable explanation, apparently. So what do you make of