[Music] welcome to jyn and tantra spirituality with a twist the podcast that takes tantrusim buddhism taoism sutheasm cabalism shamanism chinese medicineism 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 refreshing i want you to get together hey gnters we're back for our second episode on the question of psychedelics and spirituality we had ended at the point in the first one talking about the buddhist three-part division of good bad and neutral and we're kind of applying that to this question the good bad neutral thing is based on how anything affects a person psychologically or spiritually those things that kind of help people advance forward are good those things that maybe are negative for people are bad and they have a whole bunch of things that are kind of neutral that can go in either direction and i know that was kind of interesting thing for me daniel because i kind of ended at the point where i was like yeah this seems like a question of neutral to me things that can go into either direction and it it got me kind of an interesting point because what led into the discussion last time we were talking about the criticisms from american zen master uh brad warner he's an author and uh you know uh creates a lot of content around zen buddhism and he has a lot of criticisms and i was like okay i hear what he's saying i think everything he's saying has a certain validity to it so i can i can hear him he was talking about this doesn't take the place of meditation it's not the same thing there are questions of really having to have your mind in a clear state in order to be able to do things like zen and other buddhist practices and and he says you know for him his own experience are things that if you're using substances it can detract from that and like i don't have a problem with really with any of that when the dalai lama says it can create more delusions and illusions i get that point i also get kind of like lama yeshe's point too which was really interesting for lee phrased he said something like you know it's it's not a it's not a clear and perfect path or something but he did seem to be a little bit acknowledging and kind of a diplomatic answer that you know there's some value that can be found in this so i got really curious and i wrote to a i wrote to a friend of mine and i was just you know another spiritual person great lady and i was just asking her what's your experience with this and she said uh you know that she had these experiences that really kind of matched everything we've been talking about and i found that really interesting i answered the question just as a kind of an open question and she said basically you know it was there were positive experiences and what they really gave her was sort of an alternate uh vision of what reality could be especially a place where emotions like fear doubt are removed and positive heart emotions like loving connections are amplified i'm kind of reading verbatim here [Laughter] and she thinks that's a very powerful piece the realization that the reality uh one may feel stuck in has the ability to completely change and there's nothing maybe stronger in the world than that actual experience and there's a genuine value in it and i thought you know we kind of were talking last week and i kind of shared my own lsd experience i was like bang that seems like the exact same experience that i had on the other hand she said that she did know people who got carried away in things like uh mdma maybe ayahuasca is these things have become more mainstream where people aren't using them in the most skillful way and it's caused them problems and you know in the end she kind of said you know she's had some bad trips and i've had some bad experiences probably all of us have had things that were tougher rides and in the end she sort of felt like okay there's been a growth with this maybe in some ways i don't need him as much as she's moved to more meditative things i thought well that's that's pretty much on point with what my experience has been with this too so on the other hand though of course you know we want to talk in this episode especially about not just neutrality but like you know the real problem which is also that these things that can have a lot of value a lot of times are being vilified so there's kind of a particular american problem around substances and and sort of a lack of clear balance around them i guess would be the word and a lack of an understanding of the positives which i know you feel passionate about too yeah so um you know in sort of preparation for this i had done some research in about a term that i have read about in numerous different books and studies and it's referred to as the default mode network or the default network and and this has been a more sort of popular kind of idea over the last 10 or 12 years or so and it was found during a functional mri and what it showed what it the default mode network so give context what is it it's it's a company and it's a number of different things so first it's kind of like the grand central station it runs it's like in the middle of the brain and it connects all different parts of the brain and it's actually more active when we're not um particularly engaged in a task and so how these two things kind of coalesce is that it as it's this great kind of connector it connects all different sorts of things so first it'll connect like your more executive functions with things that are like older in terms of memory or emotions or something like that it also connects with physical movement to reason like all sorts of different aspects of the brain and i'm certainly not a neurologist or a neural psych person but this is roughly kind of what you could consider what it is and then other things that it does it it sort of helps to identify like who we are it helps with our own individual story right kind of a sense of self i guess right absolutely smaller cells yeah okay cool yeah yeah be on a larger sense of self because it is it did it does work with memory so it is kind of that reinforcing aspect so it's involved in the sense of self and also it's also involved in like what they call time travel meaning it it's in charge of helping to connect memories it's also helped to connect thoughts of moving towards in the future so possibilities it also does something really cool which is uh it helps to imagine states of mind so meaning that like you can imagine what it's like to be in someone else's state of mind right and and how this is useful is that it's helpful for empathy and understanding and communication with people but it doesn't sounds like it's tied into like these mirror neurons concept i guess we can get some people on the talk about that ultimately on the show that's one of the goals but it sounds like it's a little bit up to that too maybe okay cool yeah so it has it has a number of different functions to it but it's really most active when we are not focusing on something and so meditation is one of the things that directly kind of works on this thing in particular and because we are focused on something when you're in meditation right or a number of things or what i mean depending on the meditation so yeah it sort of tunes it down and so that what ends up happening is that we have new pathways then that are able to happen more naturally right and so we're able to kind of transcend some of these pathways that are are really habituated and so when people have these kind of like deep connections right um that feelings of like insight or that like you have this like new way of thinking about something or you're able to overcome some fear it's because that network is is dampened and that dampening can come from meditation it can also come from and here's the dinger psychedelics i could hear the drum roll coming in right here right that's what and that's the really one of the main points that they found in um numerous studies i mean and the book that talks about this a lot is michael pollan's book how to change your mind they do functional mris with people who they give uh lsd and they give psilocybin and they inject them with it they don't take it orally they inject them and they put them right in the mri machine and you know kudos to them for uh you know taking a psychedelic then going into a tube you know yeah yeah rip but that's what it that's one of the things that it showed and so when you have that you're able to really reconnect aspects of the mind right we're going to move beyond just brain talk we're talking about aspects of the mind that wouldn't normally connect so the ability to like hear color right and so people have these kind of like universal experiences of overcoming like habitual mind states and feeling a greater sense of connection ah and so if we're able to do that then we feel more more at peace more at one with other people around us with the environment god or you know whatever you want to call that kind of thing because our mind is melding together in new ways you know and so i think that like meditation and psychedelics are are linked together and you know really are you know for me they go from like neutral to good but i understand how they could be viewed as poor if someone is not like well developed in that sense and they don't use the the sort of momentum they get from using the psychedelic to continue their own path if they don't have a path in the first place it might be difficult you know to just start something out of nowhere well that's kind of the concept of i think you said set in setting that you were talking about last episode right that you need to have those things yeah yeah mindset and physical type setting i didn't bring this up last time but we both studied with the great tibetan teacher lama gaelic rinpoche and he has a funny anecdote he shares it multiple places i couldn't find the exact thing i know it's in some of the retreat manuals i was reading it's in other spots but i think when he was in india someone sort of slipped him some bong so he didn't even know he's going to be doing it and he kind of told it it's kind of an anecdotal story i don't think he was making an opinion one way or the other but he was just sharing it and i heard him talk about it in person and i read about it too because he was occasionally thrown out to people i think he was understanding his western students on this point you know and what he said was there was you know in in in tantric buddhism you have this notion of the vajra body that we'll talk about in more detail i guess at some point or another as we were all the wrong we've got so many things yeah maybe but it's kind of like yeah yeah a quick little it's kind of like it's not even like acupuncture channels my own sense of this is the acupuncture channels are a little bit more gross and connected you know to the physical body you know we're both acupuncturists we get a chance to think about this the the vajra body seems to be a more subtle phenomenon it's kind of how the tibetans talk about chakras too which i guess could this could sound like a hokey subject matter to some people the way it's sometimes talked about in uh in the states but it really it isn't you know and there's a way in which it kind of directs more with how the mind and the body interact well and so i think people talk about that like you know it's a it's an aspect of like what you can consider the nervous system right people don't i agree with that right you don't see you don't see like wires running around your body but we know that there are nerves there and if you touch one at some point you know with a needle or whatever it's uh you feel it you know yeah yeah and i kind of have the sense that you know the the meditations on the vajra body are kind of a software way of visualizing what's going on within the hardware too you know that you have this tool that you use as a visualization and it it just allows you to tap in the same way you know we can talk about this way as 21st century americans it kind of it's like your user app or something yes yes absolutely yeah yeah so uh yeah so it's it's a great thing it's a great part of tantric buddhism and you know we'll talk about it for sure but so he he would slip this bong i don't think he knew he was going to go on that right and all of a sudden he's on this ride and he said you know he had this experience of just seeing little aspects of the vajra body you know uh and he talked about the way you know the central channel of the vajra body looked to him when he was you know doing this bong journey and uh you know i don't think he was even saying it's good or bad but you know it that's why that's how he experienced it and then you know that's set and setting you know he was in a position where he could he could do something like that because he had built up the experiences that could tap into that thing for him right the other thing that massively strikes me about you know everything you were sharing is hmm okay first off it matches my experience too you know you do a psychedelic it kind of opens up this possibility of seeing the world in a new way and that's what i was kind of getting from the other person i was sharing her experience too so that seems genuinely subjectively real so that's cool right and the other part is the more tantric cynical uh potentially more darker part which is that there you know there's so much vilification of this in the united states and one begins to wonder hmm are there factors uh aspects of the united states of the u.s culture that doesn't want you to have this experience because there's definitely kind of a hostility towards altered states of consciousness that it's kind of hard to totally get right certain kinds of ultra states of consciousness are definitely like for boat and a cynical person would say why are these so forbidden right and and it is certain states right they allow particular states so caffeine which is absolutely a neurotoxin and is a is a mild psychedelic in it in its own right is totally allowed and and even like part of the culture people talk about it right don't talk to me i can't have my coffee so let's say more specifically you're not the same person without that substance that's what you mean by that okay cool that's fine right that's an interesting way of framing that too you know that whole thing that like don't talk to me till i have my morning coffee because i'm not in the space where i can even and that means it's doing something too right right and then the same thing can be said right they allow alcohol and you know caricatured and absolutely accepted as part of the culture right there's so many different hell the name of the show is gin and tantra right i mean so alcohol is a huge part of of the of the culture nicotine right tobacco totally part of the culture not a problem at all we just we take it and it is what it is people get stressed they go outside they smoke or whatever you know whatever it is becomes a habit they become addicted to it no one ever talks about i mean it gets talked about but it's not really frowned upon from a social perspective it's frowned upon because it's a health perspective right and there's you know there's other things sugar you know sugar has effects on the brain and on the mind absolutely um you know there's so there's just a number of different things and then of course i'm not even going into the pharmacy well you could go you could go into the the the food industry and how sugar is something that they researched the [...] out of to try to figure out how you induce these states right which are themselves addictive right if you're i know i was i was talking with somebody who's you know the scientists i know who came from outside the states so a guy from europe and when he first saw these food journals he was like what in the hell is this you know as a scientist he's like this is science we're just trying to figure out how to addict rats to different combinations of like dosages of sugar and then how that translates into humans that's insane yeah so those are accepted ways of altering concepts absolutely and then the other one that that's probably the you know elephant in the room is pharmaceuticals yeah i mean that's clear it's clear i mean i'm not even gonna talk about methadone you know because that's a different kind of you know it's a heroin it's an opioid-based thing but you know you have there's there's pain pills and their i mean there's all sorts of stuff psych meds and things like that and and they have a half-life to them so they're controllable right so they're acceptable because they're going to run out at some point and i i have personally never heard of somebody taking uh an ambien right and having an amazing dream that changes their life you know what i mean i know yeah yeah you know people who've taken an envy and jumped off a building and died right but ambien is still prescribed regularly you know so a couple of people who have a bad trip on acid in the 50s and all of a sudden now it's a schedule one right but that's part of the whole interesting thing because there's a you know one of the things we want to talk about here too well let's double all this around we did we did the gin and tantra name because we're trying to get to the idea of spirituality with a twist right the idea that we're going to talk about things not just in the most i don't know new agey repetitive ways you know those things are being done by other people so you know um so it wasn't even you know you and i are drinkers and we said that multiple times on the podcast at the goal if you're thinking you're gonna hear some dudes like getting drunk and talking whatever that's not what the [...] we're getting drunk on life bro yeah we're getting drunk on the tantric vibes of the universe yeah um yeah and then you know again the pharmaceutical thing is kind of fascinating if you're not hooked up into gen z like i am because i have a 17 year old daughter there's this phrase called being off bars which basically you're just going to dose yourself wigged out on xanax and what's that going to do yet you know so it's sort of these questions of you know in our own clinical lives we can see people who've been negatively affected by these things you know i've seen people who have to get on off with anti-anxiety meds and it's not easy you know and a lot of these things of course are are problems of abuse right yeah but they're you know otherwise culturally accepted drugs and there are drugs that are not culturally accepted and you know again the the tantric cynical point of vimico the ones that could alter consciousness in a way that challenge that network that you were talking about to make people more questioning those are the ones that are going to be more problematic where caffeine and you know when you're talking about we'll probably do you know we have the ginseng and tantra one too where we talk about issues in chinese medicine and i think doing one on the negative effects of coffee is a great one to do so let's put that in the docket of things to do you know as far as that list of things that we need to kind of keep uh keep going forward but you know the whole thing of like you know again the drugs like uh you know there's a whole war against them and it's weird as a cultural thing because there's definitely an argument that this goes like way way back so yeah for this episode we're going to do a little history dive and you know there's a there's a deep kind of conservative almost catholic christian aversion to psychedelics yeah that's the word i was searching for that's right puritanical thing you know so if you look at something like a psilocybin the flesh of the gods that was really i mean that's but apparently you know that in the in the in the native terminology right that's what it means and so you know that's the thing that's in the consciously expanding drug and and you know that was come down like really hard on right yeah or uh the muscaria the mushrooms you know that were kind of part of i'm if i understand the history correctly and i'm just sharing you can everyone could look for themselves but the whole idea of you know them being part of the witch hunts and people were like we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna crack down especially on uh you know female shamans and practitioners in europe who are using these psychedelics you know we're going to close the door on those things and we're just not going to let those things be and for for people who don't know what those those those amanita muscaria mushrooms are those are the mushrooms that look like the ones from mario they're red capped with white dots on them and they are pictured all over in all cultures in in pictures everywhere you know what i mean they're oftentimes in people's yards they're in in old school imagery they're you know they're just kind of everywhere these these red capped mushrooms with the white stem and white dots all over them they're they're definitely in the lore yeah i was looking a little bit of research on it because i have you know less familiarity with that one but i wanted to talk about a little bit because it's another one where i know that was cracked down on historically and there's a couple of weird twists to it one is that administration had to be through the mucosa so it wasn't something you'd do orally as i understand it you know and if you get to the tantra of it in a weird way which connects back to almost like wish hunty things one of the ways that people would do it is you would kind of put it into things where you'd have to like have it be soaked up into the vaginal mucosa and so there was sort of like a broom thing and i've heard people talk about like that's the association of witches and brooms because there was this way of administering the psychedelic for consciousness expanding purposes you know and all those imagery got tossed together and again when there was this kind of young negative backlash against these parts of shamanic culture in europe those things got kind of shot down in these major ways but it's part of the reason why the brooms and the witches are kind of tied together and i was like that's eye opening i never heard that little bit of uh yeah factoid before another another kind of interesting sort of thing is that the way in which they say you know mushrooms work is that like they work so the herbs work in the body as they do with nature generally this generally that's how they work right that like the mushroom because it it sort of comes from the ground that it works in your body in the same way it sort of starts in the digestive tract starts in the base of the body and then works its way up and then once it gets up to the brain once it works its way right past the blood brain barrier that like that's when it opens up you know and that's when the visuals start happening and all those other types of things so it does what it does in your body which is why you know likely why it was probably tried in the first place but you know that's bro science not necessarily uh thoroughly not thoroughly researched you know uh yeah it sounds yeah whatever we're going with it yeah yeah we're going with it a little imagery in there anyways right these things are image requested right sure yeah i've heard also the idea of like what was the soma and that's one of the things that maybe people talk about soma so i thought we'd throw that out there too but there's speculation and that was funny because i was looking into it and they were talking about maybe it's uh muscaria maybe it's psilocybin maybe it's even ephedra which i never heard before but you know our our tcm listers would be like hmm you know and it does say that that's a culture that conscious altering thing too so then um that's uh that's all kind of interesting right um i don't have a deep thought and maybe you have an opinion maybe you don't do you have a deep sounding difference between like a psilocybin and an amino acid yes in terms of like what that does to people honestly is is it is far more potent far more potent uh you need you need much less and it it can be lethal actually whereas psilocybin i don't know anybody who's died from psilocybin and i know people who've taken very large amounts um whereas people who i know amanita folks the the dosage is much smaller and they are far more careful than they normally would be do you have a feeling for the difference between that and like an ayahuasca experience are those similar kinds of spiritual things or is that hard to talk about no no i could talk about i mean i've i've worked with both of them uh in various settings and and i could say that like you know depending on it's dose dependent right and it's setting dependent but let's assume that you know the the setting is a relatively safe place and the dose is tolerable for the person right so enough to kind of get their default mode network to kind of calm down and and to allow for new connectivities within the brain and the mind and to have these sort of you know transcendent experiences um they can be similar in that both of them can bring up you know they call it like the dark side of the medicine uh and it's how they refer to it when you're using it in that way it's a medicine because it's really helping you in a sense um so you can have it where you experience you know sort of more difficult mental states right you see things that are hard to handle aspects of your personality of your psyche that you know you often avoid or try not to put much light on because it's it's hard to deal with it comes up you know and that can do it that's that's that's true in meditation too though if you do longer meditation retreats i know like day two or three of any retreat i'm gonna do i'm gonna have like a little dark night of the soul where all whatever the freaky [...] that's going on in my mind at that time will come like pouring out you know it took a little experience to even know like ah day two or three this is gonna happen you know and then it starts to smooth yeah i'm not making like a total analogy but there's definitely a meditation oh yeah no without a doubt yeah i agree from personal experience i could say that that's definitely the case so that this is there but then after you know you sort of wake your mate through so ayahuasca is definitely going to cause you to purge more than than uh psilocybin will um and that could be from any orifices or um or it could be crying it could be laughter and i've seen you know people who use suicide but it's generally crying or laughter or you know temperature fluctuations usually as that form of purgation um they both have visuals you know for sure but the lessons so you're talking civil aside but in ayahuasca not right you're not talking about that yeah so the lessons are they can be quite similar but that because they're different herbs they have different personalities that's the best way that i could really explain it so it would be like it would be like getting a life lesson from your stern loving grandmother versus getting a life lesson from your very wise uncle you know gotcha it's kind of somewhere along those lines you're going to get you might get similar messages depending on your intention right and why it is that you're using it but the way in which is going to come is likely going to vary and how it's feeling to you is going to vary so um yeah i suggest you know so the ayahuasca though because it's a much more like it's much more of an attacking experience right there's a little bit more of a confront part of it and you're going to have more physical sensations that are going to be more dramatic that's much more like a vision question kind of a thing you know they both cannot they both can function that way but to be fair to say when you do ayahuasca you're going on the vision quest right well when you're doing mushrooms you are as well you know i guess that's true yeah i think people get people take mushrooms in like a party or something like that but if you really the thing is when people take ayahuasca they're for the most part they're preparing and if they're working with the good shaman and for anybody who's listening to this if you are looking for tips on how to prepare you know you could certainly reach out and send me an email i'll be glad to kind of give you some pointers um but you're preparing to do that it's like if you're going on a meditation retreat you know you're probably going to start preparing a few days or a week beforehand hopefully you have the time to do that in your life you know you might change your diet a little bit or you know stop doing this something or start because you're getting yourself ready to do that and i think most people take mushrooms or you know psilocybin or as you know most people call it shrooms or boomers it's like some of the you know kind of some of the the kid names of things right um yeah you sort of take it kind of willy-nilly oh we're going out to a party oh we're gonna go hang out in a park or we're going with our friends you know but like there's not really that idea that like this is a very sort of special thing uh whereas like you're like if you go to peru or you go sit with the shaman somewhere in a state that's legal that has a church you know maybe in florida or wherever arizona something like that you're going to work with this medic quote-unquote medicine right and so your mindset is completely different and i don't believe that like you can just simply remove that mindset from the application of the medicine you know either one so what i hear you saying about the psilocybin thing would be that you really can use that in more of a spiritual journey kind of way you know and it just takes the the set and setting to kind of bring up the quality of that experience when you're on when you're taking and for the most part when you're using ayahuasca and there's different traditions you know so the santo daime church uh they they take uh they have the light they keep the lights on and they dance and they play music and they try to make you know about the uplifting kind of thing but most traditions you generally do it in the dark and there's people playing music and singing you know that's generally how it's done because uh you are to sit with your stuff so that's the ritual setting you were talking about last year so yeah for sure and usually with psilocybin and you know you're it's more of an active kind of a thing you're doing something with your friends or you're going for a walk but if you just kind of hang out in a in a smaller area and you force yourself not to be distracted by whatever it is that you are going to be distracted by right if you're watching a movie or something like that it's pulling your attention outside you know and taking your attention away from really what the medicine is trying to work in within you and help you see but if you're not looking at it then it's not going to have those kinds of effects so if you're just going to go hang out at a house party and you take a you know a handful of of mushrooms it's going to be certainly different than if you're sitting with a couple close friends in a cabin you know in northern michigan you know when you know on a beautiful day and you're taking a handful of mushrooms and you're gonna sit there and really talk to each other and have great connection and see what comes up that's a very different setting that sounds like an autobiographical tale it might be yeah so i know just to kind of pull this stuff all this part all together did you have a feeling about how the muscaria fit into that sort of trio of things from from what i have been told uh is on the same par but it's it's more potent you know so everything is amplified yeah yeah are there like major shamanistic groups in the states who kind of use that one is that yeah i don't know i don't know i don't know i have to top my head i'm not that well versed in in every tradition and what they use i know some traditions use ayahuasca some traditions use peyote some traditions use psilocybin some traditions use uh san pedro so you know there's all and that's it within the states somewhere you know legal legally of course i would never say anything and it's illegal these are legal uh religious uh practitioners that have license from the federal and state governments to do this they have churches uh so it's part of their religious practice well that's basically the point that you're making the whole way through you're talking about this as a spiritual path instead of experiences right not just something you're just doing on the weekend correct you know not to vilify that or anything but that's not that's not the point right right yeah yeah so i guess that gets to the deep part you know of okay why why such such hostility then is an interesting tantric question you know is there sort of a way of wanting to shut down access to alter states of consciousness that might push people in other directions and that that's that's one of the questions so as i was looking at the criminalization of this it is pretty interesting you know again you know it's one of these things i back in the nixon administration there was you know one of the people within that administration erlichman so you have this incredibly reactionary part of the american government tradition right and there was sort of this idea that well let's villa let's vilify and criminalize the things in the groups of people that are causing us problems right so if we're having trouble with the african-american community the black community well let's let's criminalize heroin and that's your effect right at the time and apparently these were like open discussions you know like just you could hear them on the tapes i suppose you know if that part you could access and then i think the other part was let's let's make sure that we deal with our hippie adversaries by criminalizing the things that they're into so there definitely is a there's a darker undercurrent to that you know in the initial start of the whole idea of an american war on drugs as i understand the history you know but was was kind of amazing to me is even if you go as you go forward like anything that was too conscious consciousness altering had the tendency of getting kind of slapped down and again i'm not pretending to be historian of this but i just you know got curious right for the episode so so there even with yeah there's a really great ted talk that was banned and therefore made it even more popular uh by an author uh from the name graham hancock and the ted talk is called oh yeah he's a big shooter in this whole area right like yeah he's a big voice a war on consciousness and it's a 20-minute talk just about this question right here why why are these things banned um and so some of it went into what i mentioned earlier about these sort of like um problem-solving states even on nicotine or caffeine or still in your relatively normal state you're not that far outside of your personality that's like kind of clinically shown with that too that's interesting okay so with the network that you're talking about that doesn't alternate that doesn't alter that too much no that's fast that that makes the inquiring mind go and they've shown recent studies in the last like three years have shown that increased um activity in the default mode network are directly linked to increased feelings of anxiety and depression wouldn't that pass me one more time yeah so people who are people who exhibit symptoms of anxiety and depression also have increased levels of activity in their default mode in their default network oh that's interesting too that opens up a whole nother way that meditation actually deals with that question of like subjective unhappiness yeah and if that's okay so i'm going down this well because this is the township part of me that is tapped by this but like again the suspicious person would say probably that default mode is very highly conditionable by a particular social and cultural setting yeah so it knocks people into this cultural state right that isn't affected by the drugs of the culture and also potentially associated with a bunch of like negative emotional states that's that's pretty fascinating actually yeah there's an article i read and i don't i don't i can't remember if it was i read a few articles one was by sam harris and one might have been by somebody else but they said the the default mode network and how meditation is the antidote for it you know and then yeah yeah at this point it's like when people are in meditative states because they are focused the default network the activity of the default mode network decreases and thereby increasing other areas of the brain that are normally not connected they are allowed to connect in different ways and i think that strikes me at you know someone who's been doing meditation for you know decades now that strikes me as subjectively very true and the other part where it gets you questioning the standard thoughts you know of the society that you happen to be in that's a true thing too it gives more doubt you know so those things that deserve to be questioned you start questioning them in a different way right yeah and that would be part of the reason why you wouldn't want people doing this stuff if one wanted to go down the darker well so the the mdma thing also came up as a thing and if you have a deep feeling about this but i found the back story kind of interesting so apparently and i didn't know this even you know again i have like a little psych background hovering in my background but it was apparently used clinically a lot is what they were calling like an m pathogen so there were clinical psychologists that were interested in using it in sort of couples therapy to get people to sort of have some of the hostility it might have got built up between them kind of relax a little bit and it was being used for individual treatment of things like anxiety and depression and um again this is back in the day you know we're talking probably back in the 80s there was a you know uh when there were when it was being used recreationally in ways that potentially could have been dangerous so there's your other side you know there was sort of a dea thing to um criminalize it right and make it a schedule three and and there were psychologists who went back and tried to challenge this ruling and i think there were lower courts that basically said yeah this is probably not a dangerous substance in the way that the d.a is talking about and it's interesting story because and again a little bit more research i would love to do it you know we did what we could for this but yeah the dea apparently just stepped in and overruled the courts and still made it schedule three so apparently there are psychologists who are still trying to get that back as a medicinal substance right to be used in therapy well there's a movie you know there's ketamine clinics all over this country now you know and psilocybin is coming to be used in a clinical setting so it wouldn't surprise me and there's actually uh there's a school offering a master's program out in california on the use of psilocybin and ketamine as like a guide you know for people now that's that's interesting kind of practical information for you who might this might really be speaking to them right yeah yeah the psilocybin thing is really interesting and i again wasn't familiar with this either but you know there's a whole there's a whole kind of like cachet of research that really demonstrates how you know positive those experiences can be right you know which is what you're talking about earlier in the ritual setting but even in the clinical setting right it creates these changes in the personality it makes people more uh opens up creative uh open aspects of the person and you know the vast majority statistically that people talk about as a positive experience and maybe even one of their most positive experiences yeah and then the addiction therapy part like treating nicotine addiction they kind of got interested so you know you have studies that can show up to 80 effective rates and we treat nic we treat naked addiction via acupuncture too and probably hit a similar kind of a number you know in my experience with it but you know that's of course fantastic and the most striking one and this actually reminded me a little bit of our interview with sumeet as well you know our friend of the show that we did the interview with um because he was talking about working with patients who are you know dealing with life-threatening diseases and there's kind of an amazing little branch of research i think it's associated with a psychologist named steven ross where people seem to overcome fear of death in an amazing way through the psilocybin experience which again i think goes into the meditative experience too you know it's one of those things that meditation is trying to help you deal with so yeah pretty amazing yeah no doubt i mean the the if done you know with with the right not to i can't say right because i'm not trying to tell people what their intentions are if done in a way that is conducive for somebody to have these kinds of experiences that make it that you know these are life-altering kind of experiences you know things that definitely transcend rational thinking and things like that that really leave a huge imprint and there's so many different studies and uh like i mentioned that book earlier by michael pollan how to change your mind he's got tons and tons of anecdotal stories from his research that he used with psilocybin and lsd in the writing of his book and then obviously other research that that has been published that he included in the book that all that talk about all sorts of you know anecdotal experiences from different people that he has met and encountered that are just you know really sort of mind-blowing and one of the things that they've shown is that i think it's about 70 of people who they do the studies with have changed past six months you know yeah i saw that too it sticks it's not just a transient experience yeah it doesn't just come it's not like a crazy night and then you go back to like living your life the next day like it never happened it leaves an imprint you know they uh ascent if you will yeah like yeah that's i was really struck by that and i think again you know coming from the psych background the psychologist that i kind of just looked at talking about this we're kind of astonished you know if you had something that you know low impact not ongoing dosage not the necessity of that that could make impacts that could last six months or longer why wouldn't you do that right yeah look before we like check it out you know we're getting a little bit to our episode cut off i thought i would throw it out to you just to talk a little bit about more like the micro dosing thing sure because that's the other part you hear talked about and as i was looking at you you get a lot of people who give credit to you know those experiences either with you know full-on psychedelic or you know uh more of the micro dosing thing i guess steve jobs is a famous person for this but i didn't realize this but francis crick who was the person mostly responsible for kind of doing the double helix work credits a lot of his work to his sort of psychedelic experiences as well yeah and some of this would be more in a micro dose setting so i thought maybe you talked about that a little bit just to give some feedback and and some thoughts on what that is yeah so francis crick story is interesting right because they were trying to to get the model for the dna and i don't know if he microdosed i think he macro dosed you know i wasn't i wasn't sure about that yeah yeah that's what i mean but you know everyone's going to tell the story they're going to try to make it you know oh he had this crazy trip but i mean whether he micro dose or he macrodosed if it wasn't for lsd he would not have come up with that model right and it was during the during one of the experiences he was having when he saw it and he asked to be taken down to that level so he could see it and he according to the story that's how he figured it out you know no that's interesting yeah so that's super interesting yeah so so i find um micro dosing to be really really interesting and and so let's set this the definition for people who don't know micro dosing is taking a subclinical amount and when i say clinical i mean the amount that is going to cause you to have an experience okay and that's that's going to differ for everybody but generally it's a really really small amount and it and it depends on the the particular medium we're talking about so whether it's lsd or psilocybin or whatever mdma whatever you're using it's a small amount again not enough to really create a change however when used regularly it does help with a number of different things so one of which is we keep talking about this but it it helps to quiet the default mode network and how you can think about this working is that you can akin it to uh homeopathy right the idea that you use a small amount of something to create a gradual kind of change in the body and tons and tons of people in silicon valley microdose now right right now and have been for years because they're on a very you know sort of interesting schedule that they are always in a sort of creative state that this is a way for them to kind of maintain the the ability to think in on different levels at once uh and it's accredited to tons of different programmings and softwares and things like that that people have um given credit for really they've said it's because of microdosing um and so it's it's going to be used i believe more and more for people with uh depression and anxiety because it can it can help to sort of stabilize some of these you know mood swings or whatever because if it's building up in the body right and the way that it makes subtle changes and because every time you take something there's a little bit of that voice that's part of that medicine right and these things are used as medicine and cultures all around the world from for time forever really you know as long as humans have been eating foods and eating plants we've been eating herbs and medicine simultaneously and so you have this kind of like voice echoing in your in yourself on a regular basis and there's there's tons and tons of anecdotal studies that are out there and actually like there's even applications you could download on your phone i know paul stamets has one and he's collecting um research on people who are micro dosing psilocybin and he wants to make it a more professional study and so i forgot the name of the app but i'm sure if you looked it up on google you know look up google like psilocybin um case study app and pop up so hey daniel just like so i can get it yeah um so when you're talking about the voice are you talking about the voice of the default mode no network are you talking about the voice of the actual substance itself that's stepping in to challenge that default network yes yes okay so you're able then and then so that helps with neuroplasticity right which is one of the big things that like the functional mris have shown with people who are uh getting checked when they're using uh when they're micro dosing right is that the brain is able to create new pathways on a more regular basis now how does it work exactly you know like i i don't know it's not enough to do very much you know you're not you're not like tripping you're not sitting here taking a little you know uh a quarter grand not enough that's a lot uh a tenth of a gram of psilocybin or and eating it before you go to work or something like that but you do it on whatever schedule you do it on and it does have an it has a cumulative effect and if you combine it with some other things and it can really help with you know neurogenesis is the one they're talking about and and if you're able to create new pathways in the brain that literally is changing the way that you can think right changes your capacity to think and then now you have a little bit more control or more ability to have control over whatever it is that might be ailing you it's not a cure-all but it's shown it hasn't shown any negative side effects yet well i'm really fascinated you know as we're getting towards the end of the episode but i have to say i'm really fascinated by this whole concept of network so i'm really it's cool that you brought that into this whole conversation and you know when you look at it as a we're clinicians as well as doing this and you know looking at the stats as if if i understand it right there's like 25 to 30 percent of the american female population is on antidepressants 10 is on anti-anxiety meds you know just as a the beginning of a set of numbers right and you know we see that in our patients we see that in you know people that we know and i think the way that connects back to this concept of this default mode network and how that is potentially being medicalized maybe in a pharmaceutical way as opposed to other ways i might challenge that in different ways i mean that's pretty fascinating actually and it certainly does seem like on a subjective level if i think back at it what did my little lsd experience do well it just made me see that the way that my mind traditionally uh habitually operated wasn't the only way i could operate you know that's a default network thing so i think that's really fascinating right yeah yeah and if you have things that can challenge that in a more in a more subtle way over time in a way that's safe that's an interesting idea yeah it's it's definitely a thing you know i i don't know it's like people study for you know years and years uh things to make them more feel more connected to their environment to people around them and it's literally within us to do that you know like we have the capability but we just have to transcend our own particular limitations and some of them are literally physical right so you can tell yourself positive things all the time but until you create new pathways to help you see things in a different way those affirmations aren't going to stick or until maybe you have the initial breakthrough moment where you can see wait a minute my mind doesn't always have to be this way and that that is that is again from my own little bit of experience but that's a very strong meditative experience that is one of the meditative experiences for sure i mean there's other things meditation is doing but one of the things it's doing for sure is like that as well my mind doesn't have to be this way you know of course there's tons of meditation techniques to induce that experience but that's certainly part of yeah well i mean it's awesome yeah that's good we can talk about it for a long time but i think we did a good job with it right uh and yeah again i i think it's really that whole idea is you know a dmn a default mode network that's a that's something that we'll bring up probably in future episodes i would think because that's a useful concept for you yeah yeah i'd like to really kind of get into it and from from a meditative perspective so i think that's worth worth doing some research on you know and we do have plans to have on people who are some neuropsych people too yeah so that that's that's a standing plan yeah and the only hope for that is that they don't completely poke holes in all of my arguments just my ego couldn't take it my eagle couldn't take it well you know what's funny about that whole thing is um i like to be intellectually honest but i also can realize that like there's going to be a diversity of scientific opinions and you know i'm willing to gravitate towards the ones that's right yeah i feel better now that vibe with my [...] that's right that's leave me in my echo chamber all right okay i'll let you i guess i'll let you do the odds yeah thanks for sharing your thoughts and and uh absolutely yeah well uh thank you everybody for listening uh this was a fun conversation as all of them are so uh we do appreciate everybody tuning in and for eric this is daniel uh just wanted to say thank you and we'll see you again in the next episode of jin and tantra peace