[Music] welcome to jyn and tantra spirituality with a twist the podcast that takes tantrism buddhism taoism sutheasm cabalism shamanism chinese medicine and all of the other isms we've been influenced by and blends them into a tall crisp cool cocktail your spirit has been longing for you to get together now isn't that i refreshing you to get together hey g tears those of you who like a little tantra with your gin and a little gin with your tantra uh welcome aboard hard to say what uh older people may be listening to these daniel and i are in this constant midst of preparing this spiritual deluge for the show we have our two-person series talking about tantric and buddhist philosophy and practice we got our ginseng and tantra tcm episodes for people from the chinese medical community our sisters and brothers over there and we're talking about chinese medical issues especially things related to covet but other topics as well we are doing interviews with spiritually interesting folks uh we just finished up a series with the psychologist samit kumar author of grieving mindfully and the mindful path through worry so you can check out that series and we're also producing episodes like this one on quote unquote special topics of interest and today we're going to talk about um spirituality uh tantric buddhism and psychedelics so this should be a subject matter that yeah i think i think especially you have things that you want to say something about right daniel yeah absolutely okay so the episode is inspired by a little bit by brad warner who's the zen master of the soto school and he's an author author of a number of books uh popular books on buddhism and he has this pretty deep criticism of psychedelics so we thought we would look at his criticisms and have as much of a fair and balanced conversation as we can have about the subject and i know i just used the fox news slogan in this intro but we'll just we'll just try to ignore that let's just let that go okay i thought i'd throw out some of his critiques daniel if you have anything to say about them i got i got some feelings about this i'm sure we both have feelings about this so i'll throw out i'll throw a little bit what he thinks and you know when you want to pop in and kind of say what you think about what he thinks i think that would be good right i'll push the red button you know yeah yeah just come on in so uh okay so here's his thing you know he's done a number of like online videos about this and uh it was interesting for me to listen to him daniel because part of it i agreed with i mean i understood where he was coming from and part of it was like okay i'm not sure if i agree with this to the extent that he's he's saying it so okay here's some of his criticisms he's very adamant about the fact that it they're kind of like inconsistent and unpredictable as spiritual tools and so he says that that like really relates to a possibility of irresponsibility because some people have bad experiences and some people may ultimately develop serious problems around this or he's really concerned about people who would use you know the spiritual use of psychedelics as sort of an excuse to engage in you know drug problems they might already have what do you think about that kind of stuff i pushed the red button so apparently you saw that yeah yeah i could feel it from afar yeah yeah i mean i just honestly feel like that's a very ignorant way to look at it so you have some people who will use anything in just sort of a flippant way right and you just take a little bit of this or you do a little bit of that and then you might have an experience or you might not but if you use it in such a way that is ceremonial and you have an intention right you have a desire to have some sort of experience with this and learn whatever it is that you might learn because you're not in control and when you're really when you take enough you're not in control that that that unpredictability is the opening that's the whole point because if you could predict everything why would you bother taking it you know what i mean in order to transcend the limits of the mind why would i practice if i could just realize upon hearing some you know magic set of words then things would be a lot easier for my personal practice anyway so i feel like you know this idea of that people using um psychedelics or whatever in in you know some sort of reckless way yes then he is correct then it does become inconsistent and it can have a sense of irresponsibility to it but if it's done in a way that most traditional settings set it up to be used then it's actually the opposite of that and it promotes a very uh good relationship with that particular psychedelic that that person is using and can be infinitely life transforming so you know daniel i think just for the audience you have a you have a shaman's perspective on this i mean you have a shamanism as part of your experience so i mean maybe you should just like clue people in a little bit as to where you're coming from with that and sure yeah a little bit like what your experience is like yeah so i have been uh so we will have um you know one of my main teachers hopefully on here at some point on the podcast uh name is mary kay ryan and she was a a teacher at school where i went to also where i met you know my lovely co-host eric baker um but um so you know i learned various types of shamanism through her and then obviously in my own studying and i have been teaching shamanism now for probably the last i'll say seven or eight years um and really i think it's it's it's ceremony and even in most practices there's ceremony and i would say in all practices ceremony is absolutely part of everything that we do you know before you have for the most part before people have children there's some ceremonial courting right you go out on a date or you send them a tweet or i don't know how it works nowadays you know what i mean like yeah yeah but some amount of ritual involved you know um and so the ritualistic aspect is also in the zen and buddhist and catholic and muslim and every tradition tantra has tons of ritual elements to it it's like and i was raised catholic and the idea that you do a ritual it just knocks you into a certain place of mind yes it's attaching to uh tap into what's being asked of you but you start talking about like you're doing it with psychedelics so there's a ritual around it which sort of primes the mind to get people in the space to be able to use that that's basically what you're talking about right absolutely absolutely and so from that perspective then it all comes down to how it gets used you know so if let's say they're you know i'll give an example uh there's haitian shamans who use rum as their means to for a trance state okay and so they drink you know and they're pretty heavily intoxicated but they're performing rituals and and spiritual acts you know in order with their tradition to do whatever it is that they're trying to do but i know that they use rum in particular well that's certainly different than the uh vacationer from long island who is down in the caribbean you know having uh you know a coconut rum drink you know on the beach with his wife and a couple kids you know and he's getting lit you know what i mean like they're not the same thing even though the substance is the same so am i gonna say that well for him he's contributing to and now i've made this person from long island now an alcoholic i'm sorry from whoever that is you know but now he's contributing to a habit that's a problem whereas the the shamans that are using it to uh elicit a trance state this is their medium to get to that trans state is it wrong no it's a neutral substance just used differently it kind of goes back to what like timothy leary said back in the day even about lsd which a lot of it has to do with setting and you're talking about intent and those kinds of questions right yes this is called set and setting mindset and physical setting so what do you think about so a part of his concern and i get it and you know i don't you kind of can respect the guy from voicing it do you think there's really a thing where people who have substance abuse problems are trying to justify it by like couching it under spiritual reality i think my gut level reaction would be something like i hear what you're saying i think it would be irresponsible to i don't know to try to like um you know lure people back into something that could be negative in terms of them developing habit problems but i think people who have habits with substances are going to happen with substances it's hard to say whether they need the excuse of a ritual setting to do it they want to do it anyway so is there any conversation about you know being on the lookout for people who might have tendencies to have substance abuse problems when you're looking at that from a shamanistic perspective or does it just not come up because people are going to drugs they can do drugs for their own recreation and they don't need to couch it an excuse so it's both if you want to do it you're going to do it you don't need an excuse however if you're going to use it for a purpose i know numerous people who have used you know particularly ayahuasca to help break drug addictions oh yeah yeah we're going to talk about the research around that too because there's lots of research so we're going to do a little bit on that later in the episode too or we can do it now whenever you want to do it but yeah yeah so there there's that component to it but i think more than just a substance abuse it's a mind state so whether you want to you know label it one thing or another the the mentality of addiction is the larger part that we're talking about here you know and people who have addictive type personalities that's a larger problem you know in terms of use of anything right because it's a drive that and once you have positive feedback from something so you get high or you feel whatever it is that you feel from something that wants you to do it more and more and then that repetitive behavior damages your life that's the problem with addiction outside of all all the physical you know ailments that go along with being addicted to an external substance like that um so that's a question that i'm always asking anybody who is interested in doing something is do they have a family history of addiction do they have a family history of psychotic break do they have a history of anxiety depression or something like that that they might be pushed over the edge if they're not prepared properly and that really goes back to our previous discussion of set and setting mindset and setting why are you doing this you know just like if someone comes to a church or a temple or whatever you know they come to practice they come to learn but it's like why are you doing this and if they say oh well because i want to learn how to control a partner who is not listening to me well that's not the intention for their desire to learn is not pure you know that has to be worked out so i i think just labeling something as one thing or another is is very short-sighted and actually the opposite of what it is that we're trying to do and weave everything together and try and and find the gems you know within the the piles of trash essentially i kind of like an interesting personal reaction to it too because on the one hand i come from a family where there's definitely like alcoholism as a problem you know um but i don't really have any of those kinds of things i just don't you know have that i'm doing the air the air quotes i don't have that kind of karma i can like interact with the substance and put it uh take it up or put it down i don't really have any issues with that but obviously i have people in my family who do have issues with that so i i kind of understand that but i've never had the personal thing like that but as i was thinking about what he was saying for just using him as a jumping off point for the conversation i was like well if i'm honest though we could talk about our own experiences as we go through but like not a lot of experience with this but the experiences i had were pretty much positive you know so you're going to have this massive kind of individual difference thing but i could certainly see maybe other people in my family who would have serious problems potentially right so there's a kind of a i you know my personal reaction was kind of like interesting you know yeah okay so the next thing he brings up is that this is not a part of a a real buddhist tradition like zen and i think that that's a fair thing to say you know i don't know if you're gonna because i think part of his objection was there's people who are going well let's bring our psychedelics into buddhism and call it buddhism and i think there's part of him that's saying well then you're just doing something else he doesn't like it and i get you know you get the feeling like okay he must have seen people who've suffered with this you know so he seems to be talking he's not saying that he is but you get the vibe he's talking from a personal place which i can respect um and there's obviously a problem with substance abuse within the within the culture all kinds of substances though obviously beyond psychedelics right we have a whole opioid epidemic going on there's nothing to do with this so but i also get like he's saying like well if you're gonna say it's buddhist you know you should probably like give a shout out to tradition and just kind of acknowledge that the tradition isn't necessarily majorly like that though it's kind of like a complicated question and so he had like yeah go ahead you got something you wanna say about that too yeah i mean you know if we're gonna talk about you know this kind of idea it's not part of tradition yes perhaps that's that's true um but like in in the yoga tradition which you know is absolutely inherently related i mean they're all from the same kind of area um you know one of the eight limbs one of the eight paths to realization is substance they don't say which substance yeah it is substance so and because it's not elicited as to what it is that they generally tell people to steer away from it because they don't really you know it's like well i don't know what to tell you but it's not but the the texts do say that it it exists or at least it did at one point so to you know to to pretend as if like this doesn't have its place is just you know sort of being disingenuous you know what i mean like maybe from the the you know from the buddhist tradition or from the zen tradition that's the case and i can certainly respect that as their own tradition uh but to say that it's not traditional is not true so he's really okay so we're gonna have a conversation about the mysterious soma at some point before we're done with this whole thing and you know what that might be but it's interesting because even if you don't know exactly what that is it doesn't mean that you might not have other substances like an ayahuasca or whatever it is that's or psilocybin that's producing analogous experiences so we we deal with that issue a lot in asian cultural things you know we're doing chinese medicine we don't know exactly what some chinese medical doctor was doing 2000 years ago but we can extrapolate it out we can learn from it and we can also kind of look at our experiences now and make substitutions and do other things around that so even if we can't crack the code of what the mysterious soma was it's not like we're completely paralyzed by that to my mind i think you can make other you can kind of make other conclusions by what's available now and still make potentially a useful thing for people if it's done in a way that's you know obviously respectful and uh careful and caring right yeah so okay so this whole issue like is this in the buddhist tradition and this comes down to the question of the precepts so you know they have the um the buddhist precepts and the fifth one really talks about intoxicants and it seems like they specifically mentioned alcohol and i think the warning is that they can lead to kind of like like i think they use the phrase sometimes in translation heedless behavior behavior that ends up being potentially not so well thought out you know not so well handled because of the intoxicants which again i think in the ritual setting that you're talking about when you're being directed by another person that isn't as much of an issue but they are they are they're they are mentioning that right and um then it raises a really interesting question about precepts that seems like it was worthwhile talking about because in some of the like the buddhist traditions and we're referencing a lot to buddhist tantra so that's the reason we're making the connection here so in some of the buddhist traditions that are more i guess you'd say conservative uh the precepts are taking kind of like verbatim things like the way a person might think about like the ten commandments or something like that but um in other parts of tradition they're not taken quite as literally and there are you know there's just a different way of interacting with those things so i was doing a little research on this little part of the conversation people talking about psychedelics and buddhism and there's there was a zen master or zen teacher i wasn't really familiar with it's kokyo henkel and he is apparently someone who is associated with tasahara zen mountain center which is a pretty famous place in northern california and he also at the time the video was made that i was just doing a little curiosity searching around this he was at santa cruz zen center if he's still there not or not i don't know but he was only giving him his shout out because he was just talking about this and he gave the example of like one of the precept against lying you know you could take that as a literal thing or you can take that as an interpretable thing and he gives the kind of classic example if you were hiding someone in your basement who was wanted by the secret police would you lie to protect them and of course you would right so you're going to interpret what those are which raises the interesting question even in the buddhist precepts do you interpret what people are talking about when you're talking about using even something like something that's going to be something a consciousness altering substance you know if you're a mahayana or you're a tantrica you know then your attitude might be a little bit different about that than it would be if you were following the precepts in a strict strict strict way and i was raised catholic so i have some feelings of what it's like to have like strict precepts versus precepts that you have to interpret right so yeah so in some of the tantric rituals you know they'd use wine or they use sexuality and if you're following this precept super strictly you wouldn't necessarily think about that so there might be some some ways when you get to certain kinds of ways of practicing buddhism where you know you're not going to be maybe as literal you know so so i think that's kind of an interesting kind of point with just from a i know a zen and buddhist perspective you might get different attitudes how you would think about that kind of stuff but it does come down to the fifth precept so for people who are coming at this podcast from sort of a zander buddhist point of view that's where the discussion comes from so okay his other big criticism then is that he sees that it opens the door to sort of absurdities which i kind of get like he kind of gives this example like you wouldn't say that someone would just do a substance and learn how to do heart surgery or do a substance and learn how to like like uh you know fix a car you know so why would you take a drug and all of a sudden learn how to meditate and i guess i get part of what he's saying there because he's basically saying meditation is a skill that you develop it's its own unique thing and i guess there can be a temptation for people to say well i don't have to like do the work of the meditating i'll just go through and like work around that by doing some substance induced thing which might be kind of an american thing to do you got a feeling about that daniel um yeah i mean it just to be honest it sounds like this person has never done it before oh no he definitely has he definitely has yeah he definitely has and he kind of it's funny he has like an old album he recorded he was like a punk rock bassist back in the day and he did his own kind of solo albums and there's he has actual recordings of himself and a friend who are tripping on asset at the time and he has their voices recorded on the backing track or something so he makes the argument like i think people throw that throw that out to him he's like no it's not like i've never done it i feel like you know everyone's path is their own you know and maybe for him the the the lure of re rep repeated use repetitive use was um greater than the you know the benefits or the detriment to his life was greater than the benefits that he was maybe he was in the music scene he saw a bunch of people fall prey to drug culture right sure yeah but i mean you know i think then to have a position of authority to be sort of an influencer if we'll use a modern term you know um to just lambast anything in particular that has potential for good it's not like we're talking about some sort of you know exclusive ideology right that we're saying all these people are bad based on their beliefs or whatever we're talking about like something that has uh that that has been around that it just really transcended millennia generational you know like cultures all across the world from time beginning you know from man really the beginning of man uh to say that they're bad or whatever is is just sort of short-sighted and i understand that people can only speak from their experience and that's where they generally teach from but i think you have to be very careful because what was not good for you maybe might be okay for somebody else and you know he had experience with them which is great but he's able to come to these realizations because he had the experience with them you know what i mean so it's hard to say that like you can't remove this from your experience now and say that they're all bad because you did a bunch of them you know so you know it's like it's like someone say trust me this works believe me yeah there's someone who says believe me a lot and i don't believe a word he says well it's kind of funny because he brings up that it's kind of a remnant of like 60s boomer culture you know like the hippie culture from the 60s and he feels like he was around in the 70s and he just saw a lot of those people being kind of like wasted out but um and it's always like there's a funny cultural thing around that because it's a lot of those people from the 60s who did all this wild [...] and then they tried to tell everybody not to do it and you're like dude you did it yeah so okay whoever you are now is like was influenced by who you were then so i don't know what to tell you right and when someone tells me not to do something you know i'm definitely don't do it bro it's too much fun okay all right music sounds amazing and like your life is going to change forget it don't do it i'm like all right well where is it i don't want to try it right now yeah yeah it's kind of like yeah it gets it gets to that kind of funny space you know and so when i was listening to him talk and this is you know i wanted to have you talk about shamanism too but it was like at least the starting point for the episode connected back to the buddhist stuff we've been doing but i was like you know it's interesting like it's not like i don't hear what he's saying you know i give him his props there's there's the fifth precept and there is a kind of a thing where i don't you can't say that like learning how to meditate is the same as just you know doing some psychedelic that's not the same thing and the goal of meditation isn't you know but they're not they're not they're not exclusive mutually exclusive things i suppose and they're also it's going to be a truth in our culture that a lot of people who end up getting into buddhist things zen or tantric buddhism or whatever it is uh tantra or daoism we're gonna just because of the culture have experience of doing these psychedelics and having whatever experiences we had on them it's gonna be part of our background right so that's just natural and you don't i don't think you can pretend that that's not true right so it's interesting no that's i mean that's part of the audience i think most people who are in a lot of these centers and are have an open mind open their mind at some point you know what i mean that's why they're here so you know to say you the way that you got here for some anyways it's not good so don't do that ever again it's like well that's why i'm here now it's yeah i was look at the one guy and i can't remember his name now but he was basically saying he was doing like informal research he's a researcher on the medical usages of psychedelics and i came up with the dude's name but he basically was saying that um as many as maybe 90 of the people who end up in spiritual centers in the states have some experience with psychedelics before coming in you know yeah so and if they're saying that you know it's an interesting situation you know so i hear what i hear what brad weren't saying and i i do get what you're saying i don't think meditation is the same i don't think that the experiences are you know are substitutable but you know just have too many people who have already done it and have gotten some value out of it so it's an interesting situation sure well i mean even even let's take one one more layer off okay what what is well a lot of there's many answers for this but what is one of the main points of meditation why do people practice and i'm asking you why do people practice meditation well i think when you start bringing up the psychedelic part there's some kind of idea of whether or not you're trying to have experiences that are transcendent of your normal consciousness and i can say and we'll go we'll go the deeper dive down our own experiences and i'll share my little bit of acid experience which actually was really positive you know i didn't do a lot so but it was positive where you i did have the experience of like oh this is helping me transcend some limitations within my own experience of my own mind like i did have that experience i can't lie and say that i didn't right yeah so i mean but so the but the to the ant to the answer the quest i mean that's people meditate in order to help themselves transcend the limits of their own mind is that one one one reason that's certainly a reason to do it right there's other reasons too you know but you know part of the thing can you get the mind into a state where it sort of transcends itself right its own limitations what would you say or another couple reasons why people would meditate well you do it to develop concentration you use it to develop virtues like love and compassion you use it to develop moments of insight that are maybe not exactly just transcendent experiences but moments of like aha psychological or philosophical insight i mean there's lots of things you're doing that's one of the beauties of the meditative thing you know there's so many things potentially happening within that i mean it's almost another episode but you know there probably are lots of misunderstandings of people what meditation is right so you know we probably have to save that for the episode on meditation but uh yeah no i hear why you're going there but yeah that then we'll never get back to this this one here we're talking about that it's true there's so much going on there yeah but yeah part of it is the transcendent experience so you can see that there's more to your mind than what you think yeah i will say that you know from personal experience that i've had and then being in these settings numerous times that i've seen people experience all of those things you know not at the same not the same person in one sitting but various people have experienced all of those things in their own uh in their own setting while we're while they're working with the medicine so to say that this is you know something to be discarded is just not the case i mean you know the way that i the way that i look at is that if someone takes you know significant time out of their life to do something with intention with focus with dedication you know and to really do it properly and not treat it flippantly but you know really treat it with respect and that doesn't mean you can't have fun um but then those those things are possible to have and if that can help them along their path and in their meditative state that they might not be able to achieve normally or at least not in enough time that keeps them motivated well then by all means why wouldn't we not any tool necessary i mean if the goal if the end goal is to become enlightened for the benefit of all other beings who is to say what tool is or is not appropriate to be used yeah so it's kind of an interesting question of like individual difference there we also use the word fun and i think that's one of the goals of the podcast which is kind of point out to people like you know this stuff can be fun i have lots of conversations with people saying you know meditation can be fun you can have some really good cool experiences meditating or you can have some really cool cool good experiences through some other shamanistic ritual ayahuasca thing some of it will be rough right and some of it will be you know fun and some of it will be lessons that are toughly learned but are valuable to you i mean all that stuff can happen through all these different things are you so from what you're saying i was again i was going through this and there's the great lama yeshe right who wrote introduction to tantra and so i thought well does he have anything about this and he says something kind of interesting about this he says someone asks him you know and this would be back like probably in the 70s or something they're asking him like well what do you think about this use of psychedelics and he says an interesting thing that kind of goes back to what you were talking about too danielle he said well he says he thinks it can help some people in a certain way who think that body and and mind or spirits are one then they can kind of have this insight to get past that limited point of view so it's interesting to watch like someone asked him the question he thinks about it for a while you can kind of like see the inner gears going and that eventually comes with this answer and he's trying to be honest and he says you know it looks like from what he's saying it can have to give people that initial insight but then he says the other side of it which i guess i agree with too which it's not a perfect he uses the word perfect and maybe natural way to realize higher consciousness so he kind of gives this dual answer it can give an insight then probably that insight has to be cultivated on uh further and he uses the word perfect and perfect is kind of an interesting use of a word there because he means like it has value but it may not be a complete or something like that so that's an interesting way to handle that problem too and i think he gives a real real honest answer from sort of a you know tibetan tantric buddhist point of view yeah yeah the dalai lama goes more like a different way he says like well the danger is increasing illusions which is not uh is not a uh unreasonable thing to say for some people so that's sort of like at least some of the tibetan tantric people i've heard talk about that specifically yeah and i would say that you know one of the my sort of tantric teacher will say that they can provide uh states of you know mind states that are beyond where someone is prepared to be at therefore it's it's it can be great but because you're not prepared for those states it's relatively unstable and so from a you know you know sort of logical process it's it's past where you're ready to be at you know and so then that can create attachments for you trying to make your way back there or wherever you know wherever quote unquote there is so it has it has detriments but his point is that it's not that it it should be avoided at all costs it's just if you're not ready for it and you may receive it that's something to be cautious of yeah i get a couple of interesting things what you're saying there one is you do hear people talk that way they have some experience they just want to like get back to that thing that was that transitory experience and that's probably not going to work one way or the other whether that's a meditative thing or a substance induced thing like to sit there and try to work your way back to some you know particular transient experience but that just doesn't really happen you know you have to learn how to deal that whether you're a meditator or whether you're doing whatever you're doing you know the idea you can get back to some exact state you know from some particular experience that you had you know you might get experiences that are like that again but you know to go striving after that one thing again probably isn't it gonna happen and you're also making it like the big point which i think you're saying the whole way through but i'll just like i'll just emphasize it too you're really talking about the difference of whether you're doing this in a guided spiritual setting with spiritual intent which is so much different than doing it with a bunch of your friends you know like in a party setting it's not the same thing right well so you have the guidance of someone yeah and there's preparation you know what i mean if you're gonna go let's say on retreat you're probably not gonna you know go into the retreat you know working you know 50 hours the last you know four days drinking a bunch of you know booze and coffee and sugar and stuff like that you're rich your first you know depending on how long you're going to retreat for but you know your first couple days is going to be really difficult because your body is going to be kind of deep unprocessing what it is that you've been doing to yourself so when people use these things in a ritual type setting they're usually dieting you know or you know really working on their diet in a very specific way that we can talk about at a later time in order to help themselves a process what it is that they're going to be taking whatever that you know psychedelic is but then b also have space for the material that they're going to be processing as well so processing used in an ambiguous term but consciously right so i think that it goes much like anything if you prepare yourself do it properly with proper guidance then the end results are really personal and can be transformative but the same could be said for a meditation retreat you know or a camping weekend with you and a friend out in the middle of the you know colorado woods like who knows what you're gonna see when you stare at at a flowing river what you know insight might come to you if you're if done you know with intention we talked about skillful means you know uh with our podcast with samit and you know mentioning that doing it skillfully um i think oftentimes gets looked at because people treat you know psychedelics as as drugs as some sort of party thing or flip it thing that some people are just using to get away from society well i can certainly say the same for meditation right we're trying to pause the world in a sense you know so you know i mean because same can be said for netflix can be said for work can be said for sports you know what i'm saying so i think for me and i think probably for a lot of people this is just a a subject within the the lexicon of life and the overarching um negativity the stereotypical negativity against it is odd i will say well i was trying to be honest about it so from a i'll just go from a very personal place so i had um i was already like uh seeing my psych mentor i was already getting my head shrunk you know i kind of a rough upbringing and i was going through that process and it was it was difficult and helpful in the way that that kind of a thing is right so he was leading me through this process of sort of psychologically understanding myself and i had things to understand for sure my uh my little acid experience was just sort of a fluky thing but it was i was already like in my own inner world like dealing with my own mind you know so this is back in my 20s and it was just sort of a fluky thing and i i did control dosing pretty well i didn't do a huge dose but i did enough to go on a ride for sure it was one of those interesting experiences too we've all been there the first time you've done something like that where you kind of do it you're like is this really going to do anything and then all of a sudden you know it's like you're on the roller coaster and it's like going up and you're like okay is something going to happen and then zoom you go through and i was like whoa and um and again just sharing my own experience with it i had i had a great time and a great experience you know but i was in the kind of a funny place in my life where i was prepped and i went out and i was at some party and there was i played guitar so there was like an old school dan electro guitar which is a really freaky guitar it's not a common thing and there was one sitting at the party where i was at and i was like damn look at it it's a dan electro so i kind of like goes in the funny space i took the dan electro i kind of went off into the kitchen so i could get a little privacy with myself i was playing some of the songs i would have played as a teenager on this old guitar and then some dude came in that i didn't know that well i couldn't even come up with his name now but he kind of looked at me and he said are you wigging and i said oh yeah i'm wigging out my mind right now and then he went he was more experienced than me and so with this thing so he went you know what i love about that process of that experience and i said what and he said well you know when you're in that state it's like your mind is a goldfish bowl and i said yeah and then he said and there's two fish in the bowl and i went dude that's so dead and uh because it was something i was going through the psych stuff and it gave me this weird i mean this is you know part of we're talking about they gave this weird little moment of me going you know my mind is different when i than what i think it is and i had a probably because i came to a household there was a lot of like physical and verbal abuse and um it some little crack happened that i realized i wrote stuff down in that weird days that you write stuff down in but some of it was like even semi-coherent when i went back at it later and it was very clear to me that like something opened and there was this realizing that there was some part of my mind that had been very influenced by those experiences and was maybe internally highly critical or like hostile you know because i internalized in all of those voices from my from my youth and my mind went and it popped and i realized no you know there's another problem my mind has nothing to do with that and actually this is a conditioned thing and therefore changeable but as far as preparation goes i was in the state where i was kind of prepared you know and so the experience was kind of euphoric i had like an into i guess i would say the nature of myself but also sort of the nature of the mind or you could say the spirit or the shen if you want to talk in chinese medical terms that there's something that made me realize no this is a conditionable thing and therefore a changeable thing and then you're getting really close to some pretty buddhist philosophical ideas maybe it doesn't have a solid fixed state that it's in it's like it's changeable and adaptable and more malleable than what we normally think it is you know so it was it was a good experience i was actually i sort of had my first love at the time and we were a little bit broken up uh you know but i found that we had to use like an actual like uh there were no cell phones i actually had to use like what do you mean hold on there was a time where there were no cell phones are you kidding me that's mind blowing so i couldn't just pull out my cell phone and just text her like i'm wigging out of my mind and i had to like actually find a phone and call and i was you know you're kind of like on those things so when you do acid you're speeding right so i was speeding a little bit so i was like speeding and i was talking with her and she was cool about it and i know it's one of those i could still i'm talking now like you know because i can still remember the images like really clear of those moments yeah and they were it was good so i was listening to brad warner talking i was like well okay i do hear what you're saying everything you're saying is legit you know to a point it's all legit to a point but i was like if i'm honest about it you know if someone were to ask me is this one of the more important experiences of the early part of my life you know in the life that's had a lot of really i think good psychospiritual experiences to be honest but it's one of the early ones that was really good i can't lie about it yeah so so i mean i did like kind of a i had that personal reaction to it yeah yeah so i'd say okay so the other part of this conversation you know and how far we'll get down the well of this maybe we'll continue this in the next episode i guess we'll decide when we do it but yeah there's kind of like in buddhism they talk about three kinds of phenomena and uh they talk about good bad and neutral phenomenon so this is sort of the the buddhist little part of this podcast for sure you know a little buddhist technique here and so there are phenomena that are good which are the ones that are going to lead to growth and development and insights and all those positive things right they're phenomenon that are bad and when you say something is bad it's because it's holding you back from those right it's keeping you back from insight and growth and development and you know uh all those good qualities and then there are things that are neutral and the things that are neutral that can it can go in all kinds of different directions and so when i was thinking about the brand warner thing he was kind of going a little bit more towards the side that the drugs are bad right you could go from the point of view to the drugs are good but i guess i would have to say honest from a sort of a bigger picture of buddhist point of view i'd have to say probably you know psychedelics and different drugs are probably neutral they can go the different ways for different people depending on what you're talking about setting and intention right do you setting and set are those the words that you use set and setting is saying oh mindset and setting got it yeah yeah and i guess in a weird way i don't know what you think about this daniel but it taps into sort of a problem around this whole set questions in american culture overall because there's definitely an idea that drugs are bad in the culture and there's a whole history of drugs being labeled bad and i almost felt like yeah there's a little bit you know of that problem coming through this discussion in spirituality because there's so much of lingering feeling you know of war on drugs mentality and drugs being this like intrinsically destructive thing yeah i i think that i think that's probably uh a good a good place to you know a good place to pick up our our next podcast actually um but what i what i do but you know before we before we sign off and sort of pick that up because i think it's a i think it's a good naturally cutting that natural cutting point you know yeah but but what i will say is that because that is the case that and there are there is ideology behind it which we'll get into you know more deeper and more deep next time um that there is that you feel a stigma around much like but like you don't when you let's say drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes or do some of these other things that are quote unquote accepted you know that are legal um and i think what people forget is that like things that are legal change right so for one point alcohol was illegal yeah yeah uh and in some states marijuana is totally legal like just recreationally no problem and marijuana has absolutely uh psychedelic components to it depending on you know the kind of stuff that you use the amount that you use that you could certainly have realization to it so i i think you know things have to be kept in flux and and to your point about neutrality with with drugs in general with you know with however you want to call them entheogens or you know whatever it is neutral and it just depends on how you use it you know and so like one of the the statements that i've said numerous times i forgot if it was you who said it or somebody else who i said it but you know tantric master was like it's not about what you do but how you do it and that absolutely fits with our conversation today it is not what you do but how you do it so some people who have an addictive personality you know or who have genetic predisposition for addiction chemical changes you know that are that are oftentimes outside of their ability to control should not use them period just should not use them because you know i have friends who have been and are you know recovering heroin addicts would i recommend them using another no never never even if i believe on some level that they're ready for it and they've been clean for 10 years and whatever no because that there are some changes that occurred to them that probably or that might not be able to be re readdressed in this lifetime in that way you know there's other ways healthy lifestyle you know things like that that's a great change but going back down the road of letting go of that sense of control and going down the road of mystery might just be too closely related to their addiction you know so it really is how you do it and i feel like that the the route that you know our society is on at least a big portion of it it's very clearly you know good or bad and that's it there's not like a gray area in between and like the only gray area is where you caught you know what i mean that's the gray area and then the drug thing if you're caught that could be a real serious problem yeah okay like the way the culture has come down yeah it's a really good point it's a good place probably to break it right because i think part of the goal of our whole conversation with a lot of these things the whole jin and tantra spirituality with the twist thing is to be realistic about what people's lifestyles are now right and then how those things actually can be used for spiritual import and a lot of that stuff will be things that could go in either direction you know sexuality can go in either direction it could be one of the most rewarding things for you spiritually it could be something that causes you a lot of problems and the same is also true with you know uh substance things and the same is the truth with a lot of parts of life right so you're dealing in our lives we're gonna deal with things that are neutral and part of the deal can be will be can we turn those into things that are going to be positive for ourselves right correct correct all right that seems like a good spot right yeah perfect man well well you know really this is a this is a good conversation there's all of them are but you know i think we're we're both have uh we're pretty lively and feel pretty good about this and you before we go you know just if people hear this you know the seven people who are who will hear this in the next year and a half oh we have to go we have to go more optimistic than that yeah okay at least that are here this and if they don't hear the follow-up episode you know i'm saying to use things recklessly right and this goes for pain medications like this doesn't necessarily just stop with marijuana right this goes for pain meds this goes for you know anti or depression medications sleep medications vitamins you know everything with the with the a question of desire and why it is that you're using it should always be in place you know and this way your your decisions can be made from a a place of empowerment you know as opposed to a place of chasing and you know when it comes to hallucinogenics the same thing goes just like you treated like alcohol just like you treat anything else if you have an addictive personality or you have predispositions for addiction in the family then you got to be really careful uh but if you're okay relatively you know air quotes okay then i don't i wouldn't be afraid of it you know i wouldn't necessarily be afraid i'm not telling anybody what they should or shouldn't do that never would do that but i'm also saying like it's not the boogie man you know you're also talking about like things where you can have guidance with this so if you're really interested you can find people who will help you on this is like to to learn how to use this in a responsible way and that's obviously part of the conversation too you know not a willy-nilly thing but a place where you know there are people who can help you with this right yeah yeah lives can you can definitely have a huge impact on your life with anything but with this in particular because it is so potent and it is so personal the lessons that often come up are extremely personal because it's just you you know it's you in whatever plant or whatever you know hallucinogenic you're using so and that could also be addictive too you know so we just have to be careful i mean ultimately we're trying to help people um question things and become more conscious and this is just one of the things that ends up in our lifetime that we should you know deal with all right so i think this was a very i'm gonna go there again fair fair and balance conversation oh man oh i went there we're gonna steal that saying back from them we're gonna feel that back from those mf so uh yeah so i think what next time we'll continue on and we'll talk about some of the you know we'll go deeper down the well of the the good the bad and the neutral of it right and we'll just explore some of the research and we'll talk a little bit more some personal experiences and we'll continue that sounds great daniel awesome well for eric this is daniel thank you very much for tuning in we uh do appreciate all the support all the ears and everything else uh we look forward to uh hooking up with you guys next time thanks i want you to get together you