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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
0:33 - Who or what is God?
16:02 - Terence McKenna's DMT Trips
20:44 - Psychedelics were the source of collective intelligence
31:16 - Psychedelics in ancient alcohol
34:17 - The Immortality Key
37:03 - Jesus and psychedelic wine
49:42 - Role of rituals in human society
53:24 - Human confrontation with death
56:01 - The future of the human experience
1:07:54 - The role of religion in society
1:13:41 - The future of psychedelics research
1:16:52 - Fasting and meditation as religious experiences
1:20:31 - Neuralink and BCIs
1:27:28 - Is LSD a crutch or an aid in creative work
1:30:08 - Nietzsche said God is dead
1:32:35 - Creatures people meet while on psychedelics
1:38:04 - Consciousness
1:44:27 - Books or movies that made an impact
1:48:26 - Meaning of life

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The following is a conversation with Brian Murevescu, author of The Immortality Key, The Secret History of the Religion with No Name, a book that reconstructs the forgotten history of psychedelics in the development of Western civilization.

To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors, Insight Tracker, GiveWell, NI, Indeed, and Masterclass.

This is the Lex Friedman Podcast, and here's my conversation with Brian Murescu.

How has our conception maybe put another way of God changed throughout history?

Well God is a thought, God is an idea, but its its reference is to that which is beyond thinking, beyond our ability to even conceive, beyond the categories of being and non-being.

To talk about it is almost to get it wrong, right?

So Joe Campbell famously said that, any God that is not transparent to transcendence is like an idolatry because it's just a mental construct and it can't possibly speak to the incomprehensible.

We say the being of beings, the infinite life energy of the universe, the mystery of transcendence, boundless life, unqualified isness, but it doesn't quite get to the point.

I think that if there's any great insight from mysticism, it's that you and I participate with God in a very real way, Lex Friedman, here in Austin, Texas.

That in the here and now, to touch that eternal principle, another way to refer to God, to touch that eternal principle within ourselves is to participate with divinity in some way.

So not an external force, but that divine sense within.

So there's some aspect in which God is a part of us.

It represents all of the mystery around us.

And at the same time, it's somehow the thing that's inside of us also.

Mekhtild of Magdeburg, 13th century German mystic, maybe the first German mystic, says that the day of her spiritual awakening was the day that she saw and knew that she saw God in all things, and all things in God.

And so we can say this, by the way, without apology or lightweight theology or vapid speculation or even heresy, you know, we can talk about this, including within the Abrahamic faiths.

The mystical core of these faiths all talk about the encounter of divinity within.

That's what I explore in the Immortality Key, this notion of techniques, archaic techniques in some cases, of ecstasy, that allow that experience of the eternal principle to actually rise up in our consciousness when we're still here as flesh and blood beings.

There's some sense in which our conception of God though is conjured up by our own mind.

Like aren't we the gods that are creating the idea of God?

Like if we are, like when we talk about God, aren't we playing with ideas that are created by our mind, and thereby we are the creator, not God?

This is a very kind of cyclical question, but in some sense I mean that if God is the thing that represents the mystery all around us, contrast that with our conception of God, the way we talk about him, is more a creation of our minds.

It's our struggle to comprehend the mystery.

And therefore we're creating the God in terms of the God that we're talking about in this conversation or in general, if that makes any sense.

This is why it's so difficult to talk about, and yet it could be the very center of our beings.

You know, the Upanishads speak about us as the creators, about us as gods.

It's a very different creation myth, but the god of the Upanishads in this great verse talks about pouring themselves into creation.

Indeed, I have become this creation, says God.

And there's a great line, verily he or she who knows this becomes in this creation a creator.

So yeah, I mean, just our ability to engage in mentation, our ability to think about this stuff is partly our divine nature.

This is what the humanists were talking about in the Renaissance, by the way.

And that it's not so much learning, putting dots together, having arguments with each other over learned books.

It's a process of unlearning, is what some of the mystical traditions talk about.

Unlearning all these thoughts, emotions, traumas, and experiences that have gone into the false construction of our false self.

That behind all these layers, like peeling back the onion, is a part of us that, once you can identify that, begins to look a little bit different.

In other words, it's 1 thing to foster a relationship with God.

It's a very different thing to identify as God.

And I mean that quite literally, without being heretical.

You can find this in the mystery traditions.

That is textbook incarnational theology that you can find in any Christian mystic.

But you can find it in the mystical tradition of Islam and Judaism as well.

So Rumi, for example, the great Sufi mystic, talks about if you could get rid of yourself, just get rid of yourself just once, the secret of secrets would open to you, that the face of the unknown would appear on the perception of your consciousness.

Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, a modern day contemporary mystic, talks about, because this stuff does continue, there's a continuity to it.

He says that the emptying of selfhood allows the soul to attach to true reality.

And in Kabbalism, the true reality is what's called the divine nothingness, ayin.

And so I like the adage that atheists and mystics both essentially believe in nothing, except that the mystics spell it with a capital N, the divine nothing.

And then I'll give you Meister Eckhart, another medieval Christian mystic.

He says that if you could not yourself, right?

The same concept, if you could not yourself for just an instant, indeed I say less than an instant, you would possess all.

So again, you're seeing the same thing in Sufism, Kabbalism, Christian mysticism.

The way to identify with the divine is to peel back these layers and attempt to discover pure awareness.

If we look at the universe from a physics perspective, or you know I'm a computer science person so if the universe is a computer there's some sense that God, the creator of the universe, or just the computer itself, doesn't know what the heck is gonna happen.

It just kind of creates some basic rules and runs the thing.

So there is some element in which you can conceive of humans or conscious beings or intelligent beings as a tool that the creator uses to understand itself, himself.

Do you think that's a perspective that we could, or is useful to take on God, that is basically the universe created humans to understand itself.

He needs the human brains to figure out the puzzle.

So that's in contrasting to the unlearning, to the getting out of the way that we've talked about.

It's more like, no, we need the humans to figure out this puzzle.

Well, we have no answers to this, which is why philosophers still have jobs, if they have jobs at all.

But I mean, so the physicists take a look at this.

Have you seen the article that came out, I think it was this month, in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle physics, Robert Lanza, the biocentrism theory, the idea that the universe comes into being through our observation, right?

So not just in quantum mechanics, but in general relativity, the idea that we make the universe moment by moment, which is kind of mind-blowing, gets into ideas of simulation.

Okay, so that's how the physicists, at least some of them might look at it.

You could also look back to the medieval Christian mystics.

Meister Eckhart once again says that, "'The eye with which I see God "'is the same eye that sees me.'" Right, So 1 sight, 1 knowledge, 1 love.

But this is why the arts and poetry and music are so important, because although I love astroparticle physics, it's another to kind of hear this, the same message across time.

Yeah, the simulation thing, I was actually looking this morning at video games, just the statistics on video games, And I saw that the 2 top video games in terms of hours played is Fortnite and World of Warcraft.

And I saw that it's 140 billion hours, billion hours have been played of those games.

Yeah, but that's very sophisticated worlds being created, especially in the world of Warcraft.

So you have these characters that are together, sort of creating a world, but they in themselves are also developing, they have all these items and they're like, they're little humans.

Like there's complicated societies that are formed, they have goals, they're striving and so on.

And it's, we're creating a universe within our universe.

And for now, it's a kind of, it's a basic sort of constraint version of our more richer earth like civilization, but it's conceivable that, you know, that we are this thing on earth is a kind of video game that somebody else is playing.

It's like, you could see sort of video games upon video games being created.

That, and this is something I think a lot about, not from philosophical perspective, but practically, how fun does this video game have to be for us to let go of the silly pursuits in this meat space that we live in and fully just stay in while, stay in World of Warcraft, stay in the video game for full time.

So I think about that from an engineering perspective, Like, is there going to be a time when this video game is actual real life for us?

And then the creatures inside the video game, they'll be just borrowing our consciousness sort of to ground themselves, will refer to us as the gods, right?

This conversation is not going how I expected.

But I think about this a lot from, you know, cause I love video games And I wonder more and more of us, especially in COVID times are living in the digital world.

You could think about Twitter and all those kinds of things.

You could think about clubhouse people using just voices to communicate with little icons, sort of in a digital space.

You could see more and more will be moving in the digital space and let go of this physical space.

And then the remnants of the ancients that created the video games that nobody centuries from now will even remember, those will be the gods.

And then there'll be gods upon gods being created.

But is that any at all useful to you to this thought experiment of a simulation?

Basically the fabric of our reality, how did it come to be?

Is that useful Or is it ultimately the project of understanding God, of understanding myth, is the project that centers on the human, on the human mind, for you?

We seem to be at the center of this divine dance, which sounds awfully anthropocentric, but the ancients thought about this too.

I mean, the concept in Sanskrit of lila, that the point behind the existence is this play, right?

It's ultimately playful, this divine dance.

It gets awfully complicated in the Gnostic and Neoplatonic schools, these chains of being from Godhead down to us, some invisible.

And we're going to get into Terence McKenna territory later on, but we can start now by talking about discarded entities and archons and aliens and archetypes.

I mean, there is a world where Terence McKenna does meet Plato and Gnosticism quite kindly, and that's in this invisible college, right?

The invisible world with which we seem to have some kind of symbiosis that has a higher intent, maybe even a purpose or a plan in mind for us.

So, I mean, These ideas come across when you've had a heroic dose of mushrooms.

They also pop up in the ancient philosophical literature.

This idea of archons who, you know, the puppet masters controlling us flesh and blood beings.

It's all a cosmic dance, and there are no answers to this.

And second, what is this world where Terence McKenna meets Plato?

Or are we talking about some kind of world that connects all of consciousness to all of human history?

I think through different techniques, It is, you know, I think a lot about, I think Gordon Wasson is the meeting point of the 2.

So Gordon Wasson, who I do talk about in the book, was this JP Morgan banker turned ethnomycologist.

And he's largely credited with the rediscovery of psilocybin-containing mushrooms, which kind of gave rise to the pop psychedelic revolution of the 1960s.

In his wake went Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, The Stones, and everybody else.

And the way he describes his psilocybin experience is a bit strange, because he thinks of Plato, right?

And he says that whereas our ordinary reality is kind of this imperfect view of things, Gordon Wasson felt that on mushrooms he was spying the archetypes.

And he talks about Plato and he writes about the archetypes in this famous article that's released in 1957 in Life magazine.

And so a well-read individual from the mid-20th century has his premier psychedelic experience and out comes Plato because what he was witnessing was so sharp, so brilliant, so detailed, in some sense more real than real, this noetic sense that William James talks about, that when you confront something more real than real, these discarnate entities, these images, these visionary motifs, you're tempted to believe that you've tapped into the truest nature and the underlying structure of the cosmos, and that's difficult to escape from, whether you're Plato or Terence McKenna or Gordon Watson caught in between.

Can we talk about this, being in touch with something that is more real than real.

And let's just go straight there to McKenna before we return to the bigger picture.

Self-transforming machine elves during his DMT travels.

And I just talked to Rick Doblin, who also had different travels through this hyperspace.

But they all seem to be traveling on the same spaceship, just the different locations.

And there is a sense in which they seem to be traveling through whatever, I don't know if it's through space time or something else to meet something that is more real than real.

What can you say about this DMT experience about Terence McKenna, about the poetry he used, but maybe more specifically about this place that they seem to all travel to?

The ancient philosophers were asking the same question, and their means of attempting to answer that was by dying.

So if you ask Plato the definition of philosophy, he will say that to practice it in the right way is to practice dying and being dead.

And many people describe the psychedelic experience in sort of near-death experience terms.

And the encountering of all this visual imagery tends to be something that is often described as more real than real.

So I was just listening to the trilogues, which folks should look up.

Somewhere between 1989 and 1990, Terence sits down with his friends Ralph Abraham and Rupert Sheldrake at Esalen, and they're trying to figure out the meaning of these discardent entities and these non-human intelligences.

And Terence develops a taxonomy for how to analyze this.

And he says that number 1, they're either semi-physical but kind of elusive.

So think of the Bigfoot or the Yeti or things like this.

Beings that exist somewhere between mythology and zoology, which isn't really appropriate here.

So option Number 2, he says, is the mental...

You're dropping so many good lines, it's so good.

But you're combining, you're like, Jimi Hendrix only used the blues scale, but he still created something new in the music he played.

Well, we're going into mixolydian right now.

So, option number 2, and this is what Terrence calls sort of the mentalist reductionist approach.

He says that these beings could be autonomous fragments of psychic energy that have temporarily escaped the controlling power of the ego.

So in Jungian senses, these would just be pure projections, the projections of schizophrenics in some cases.

And the third option, the most tantalizing, is that they're both non-physical but autonomous.

In other words, they actually exist in some kind of real place, in some kind of real space, and that we can have Congress with them.

He talks about the whisperings of the demon artificers, and that it's just possible that our meetings with these beings have coaxed the human species into self-expression in a very real way, that at different times in history, our relationships with these semi-autonomous beings may actually guide the species.

Now this is high speculation, and Terence and Ralph and Rupert wind up talking about the early modern period and the scientific enlightenment, and that even someone like Descartes reports a dream in which he came face to face with an angel who said that the conquest of nature is to be achieved through measure and number.

So even the hard-minded materialist like Descartes is confronting these discarnate entities.

John Dee in the 16th century, the high magician of the Elizabethan court, he reports decades worth of what we would say is extraterrestrial communication or interdimensional communication.

And you can find instances of this throughout history, including among the pre-Socratics.

And Peter Kingsley writes quite a bit about this, but I'll save that until your next question.

Well, first of all, we don't seem to understand from where intelligence came from.

We don't understand from where life came from on earth, but that we can kind of intuit because that's in the space of chemistry and biology, have good theories about the origins of life on earth, but the origins of intelligent life, that is a giant mystery.

And there's some sense in which, I mean, I don't know if you know the movie, 2001, Space Odyssey, but it does seem that there's like important throughout human history, throughout life on earth, there's important phase shifts of, it feels like something happened where there's big leaps.

It could be something coincidental like fire and learning how to cook meat and all those kinds of things.

But it feels like there could be other things.

And I think that's at the core of your work is exploring what those things could be.

Is it possible that psychedelics have in fact contributed of being an important source of those phase shift throughout human history, of the intellect, basically steering the intellectual development and growth of human civilization?

It's a hypothesis worth investigating, how about that?

And maybe not psychedelics in and of themselves, but I think our whole conversation is kind of wrapped up in these non-ordinary states of awareness.

We start by talking about God, which is something unordinary and expansive, and I think that as you trace the intervention of divinity, if that's the case, Throughout human history, you have to bump up against the irrational.

Mircea Eliade, the great scholar of religions and fellow Romanian, said that the history of religions essentially constitutes the point of intersection between metaphysics and biology, right?

So that we are biological beings who do interact with our planet, with the natural kingdom.

And you would think that as early archaic ecologists, we would have figured out what plants work, which fungi don't, and developed maybe language around that.

And so this is another 1 of McKenna's speculative, but very interesting hypotheses, the stoned ape theory.

Is it possible that psychedelics were involved in 1 of the several leaps forward, you mentioned the word leap.

Jared Diamond talks about the great leap forward 60,000 years ago.

The species had been around for a couple hundred thousand years, all of a sudden, the cave painting appears.

Did something like that happen millions of years ago?

And I love the way Paul Stamets talks about this.

It would be the ingestion of perhaps psilocybin containing fungi millions and millions of times over millions and millions of years.

So it's not just a one-time event that cascades, but it's the accumulation of psychedelic experience.

That it's really difficult to test that hypothesis, but I've been talking with a paleoanthropologist in South Africa, my friend Lee Berger, about ways that we might test for this.

And so Lee, amongst many things, is this National Geographic explorer.

He's the paleoanthropologist's paleoanthropologist at the University of Whitwater Shrint.

He's famous amongst other things for the discovery of previously undiscovered hominids like Homo naledi.

So naledi is this archaic hominid, morphologically archaic, but it dates to about 300,000 years ago, which is very strange.

What's even more strange about Homo naledi at the Rising Star Cave system there in South Africa is that Lee believes he's discovered the first bipedal ape deliberately disposing of its dead.

So there is a recognition of self-mortality and the practicing of rituals around death.

And if you have burials, says Lee, in an archaic hominid 300,000 years ago, maybe you have language.

And I mention that because Terence McKenna was obsessed with language in the stoned ape theory, that the ingestion of psilocybin in addition to enhancing visual acuity, perhaps facilitating sexual arousal, leads to proto-language.

Now, isn't it interesting, this could be entirely a coincidence, that the largest sound inventory of any language is the Khoisan of Botswana and Namibia.

They have something like 164 consonants and 44 vowels.

So I don't know what to make of this, but what you find in that part of the world is very, very complex language.

Language that could be incredibly archaic.

Together with this recognition of self mortality.

And when I talk to Lee Berger, we say, when you're looking at universals like that, language around all human populations, the recognition of self mortality, the contemplation of death, just maybe you have pharmacology.

And so maybe we can go out and test for this using gas chromatography, mass spectrometry, proteomics, technology that doesn't even exist, but maybe we can actually test the stoned ape theory to figure out once and for all if there's any merit there.

Can you just linger a little bit on the pharmacology tools?

Like how would it be possible to say something about what was being ingested so, so, so long ago.

So Lee has discovered in the dental calculus of archaic hominids.

Evidence of their diet, and you might not believe how old this was, but in Sedeba, Australopithecus Sedeba, they found evidence of Sedeba's diet going back 2000000 years.

So through things like phytolyths, which are essentially fossilized plant tissue, they found evidence that Sadiba was eating bark and leaves and grasses and fruits and palm.

So no psychedelics to speak of, but it just goes to show that through things like dental microware analysis and other techniques that we're still developing, we can actually figure out what the diet was at the time.

There was another study out of El Cidron Cave in 2012 which found that Neanderthals, again preceding our species 50,000 years ago, were ingesting yarrow and chamomile, which had been identified as medicinal.

So again, not psychedelic or psychoactive, but we kind of have the beginnings of the technology, and that was 9 years ago, to begin figuring out the ancestral diet of these hominids.

Presumably there could be a way to figure out, it's not just diet, but which have psychoactive elements to them.

So whether you're chewing it, whether you're smoking it, whether, I mean, I don't know what, licking it.

I don't know if there's any kind of ways through the dental calculus to figure out what exact substances were being consumed.

Is it possible to figure out whether psychedelic substances are being consumed by looking at human behavior, like you said, organized burials or cave paintings.

No, but so that's a little bit of a stretch to say like where did this leap come from?

So just last fall, as a matter of fact, so that notion has been out there for a while, the idea that hallucinogens and the ritual consumption of hallucinogens were somehow related to the great leap forward, were somehow related to the initial cape in.

And Graham Hancock wrote a beautiful book about this called Supernatural, which in many ways sent me down this rabbit hole back in 2007.

But even at the time when he was writing that and the year subsequent, it was still kind of seen as a kooky idea.

Last fall, Interestingly enough, the first archaeochemical data for the ritual consumption of psychedelics associated with cave art was finally published.

It's not that ancient, it's only about 400 or 500 years ago, but it came from the Pinwheel Cave, a Chumash site in California.

And what they found were datura quids, like these chewed up, you mentioned how they ingested, these chewed up quids, like these bunches of datura, which contain these very powerful tropane alkaloids, and what was believed to be some kind of Chumash initiation site.

So we can say that there is initial archeochemical data for the consumption of psychedelics and cave art.

Are there a lot of archeochemists in the world?

Is through chemistry, through biology, through physics, whatever, like all the disciplines we, perhaps in 1 day computer science, we apply those tools to study not the data of today, but the data of the past.

Like how hard is this problem relative to how many people are taking it on?

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