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

1 hours 52 minutes 27 seconds

🇬🇧 English

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Speaker 1

00:00

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. Their links are in the description. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast, and here's my conversation with Brian Murescu.

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Speaker 2

00:33

Who or what do you think God is? How has our conception maybe put another way of God changed throughout history?

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Speaker 3

00:41

We're starting with an easy 1 Lex. Yep. So what is God?

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Speaker 3

00:47

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. So how do we talk about that? 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.

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Speaker 3

01:20

So we use poetic language. 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.

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Speaker 3

02:00

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

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Speaker 2

02:03

So there's some aspect in which God is a part of us. So 1, it's the thing we can't describe. It represents all of the mystery around us.

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Speaker 2

02:11

It's outside our ability to comprehend. And at the same time, it's somehow the thing that's inside of us also.

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Speaker 3

02:18

The ultimate paradox. 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.

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Speaker 3

02:46

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.

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Speaker 2

03:09

There's some sense in which our conception of God though is conjured up by our own mind. And so aren't we creating God? Like aren't we the gods that are creating the idea of God?

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Speaker 2

03:28

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 not the mystery. It's our struggle to comprehend the mystery.

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Speaker 2

04:06

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.

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Speaker 3

04:13

It makes no sense whatsoever. Great, this is wonderful. But this is the eternal mystery.

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Speaker 3

04:22

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.

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Speaker 3

04:47

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.

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Speaker 3

05:17

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.

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Speaker 3

05:45

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.

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Speaker 2

05:56

Can you expand on this? You mean a human being can embody God?

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Speaker 3

06:03

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.

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Speaker 3

06:35

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

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Speaker 2

06:42

The poetry here is incredible.

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Speaker 3

06:44

So, well, Listen to Rabbi Kushner. 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.

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Speaker 3

06:59

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.

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Speaker 3

07:26

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.

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Speaker 2

07:38

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.

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Speaker 2

08:18

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 doesn't actually know the full thing. He needs the human brains to figure out the puzzle. So that's in contrasting to the unlearning, to the getting out of the way that we've talked about.

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Speaker 2

08:42

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

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Speaker 3

08:46

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?

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Speaker 3

09:07

The whole, the God equation. 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.

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Speaker 3

09:26

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. Another mind-blowing concept. 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.

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Speaker 2

09:52

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. That's a lot of video games.

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Speaker 2

10:18

Yeah, but that's very sophisticated worlds being created, especially in the world of Warcraft. It's a massive online role-playing game. So you have these characters that are together, sort of creating a world, but they in themselves 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.

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Speaker 2

10:41

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.

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Speaker 2

11:29

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? Like, won't we become the gods? This conversation is not going how I expected.

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Speaker 2

11:56

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.

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Speaker 2

12:19

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. This is the kind of stuff I think about. But is that any at all useful to you to this thought experiment of a simulation?

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Speaker 2

12:41

Basically the fabric of our reality, how did it come to be? What is running this thing? Is that useful Or is it ultimately the project of understanding God, of understanding myth, is the project that centers on the human, on the human mind, for you?

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Speaker 3

13:00

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.

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Speaker 3

13:17

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.

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Speaker 3

13:59

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.

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Speaker 2

14:17

First, who are the archons? And second, what is this world where Terence McKenna meets Plato? Do you mean in the space of ideas?

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Speaker 2

14:24

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

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Speaker 3

14:28

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.

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Speaker 3

14:51

He visited Maria Sabina down in Mexico. 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.

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Speaker 3

15:15

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.

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Speaker 2

16:02

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. So he's talked about the, what is it?

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Speaker 2

16:14

Self-healing machine elves? Self-transforming. Self-transforming machine elves during his DMT travels. And I just talked to Rick Doblin, who also had different travels through this hyperspace.

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Speaker 2

16:30

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?

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Speaker 3

16:57

So the big question is, is it real? Is it really more real than real? The ancient philosophers were asking the same question, and their means of attempting to answer that was by dying.

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Speaker 3

17:07

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 how does Terence talk about this?

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Speaker 3

17:31

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.

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Speaker 3

18:02

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... I'm sorry.

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Speaker 2

18:19

You're dropping so many good lines, it's so good. Okay, I apologize. Somewhere between mythology and zoology.

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Speaker 3

18:26

This is all Terrence McKenna.

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Speaker 2

18:27

Okay, all right.

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Speaker 3

18:27

I take no credit for this.

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Speaker 2

18:30

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. Anyway, go ahead.

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Speaker 3

18:39

Well, we're going into mixolydian right now. So, option number 2, and this is what Terrence calls sort of the mentalist reductionist approach. And this is pure McKenna poetry.

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Speaker 3

18:53

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

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Speaker 3

19:19

In other words, they actually exist in some kind of real place, in some kind of real space, and that we can have Congress with them. There is communication. He talks about 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.

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Speaker 3

20:12

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.

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Speaker 2

20:44

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.

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Speaker 2

21:25

It could be something coincidental like fire and learning how to cook meat and all those kinds of things. But it feels like there could be other things. And I think that's at the core of your work is exploring what those things could be. Is there, is it possible?

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Speaker 2

21:44

Talked about Joe Rogan off line. Is it, I mean, it's entirely possible. 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?

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Speaker 3

22:05

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

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Speaker 3

22:18

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.

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Speaker 3

23:05

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.

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Speaker 3

23:30

All of a sudden there's a phase shift. Did something like that happen millions of years ago? And I love the way Paul Stamets talks about this. It would be the ingestion of perhaps psilocybin containing fungi millions and millions of times over millions and millions of years.

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Speaker 3

23:47

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.

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Speaker 3

24:17

He's famous amongst other things for the discovery of previously undiscovered hominids like Homo naledi. And there's an interesting point. 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.

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Speaker 3

24:51

So there is a recognition of self-mortality and the practicing of rituals around death. We're talking about burials. And if you have burials, says Lee, in an archaic hominid 300,000 years ago, maybe you have language. And I 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.

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Speaker 3

25:23

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. English, by comparison, has about 45. So I don't know what to make of this, but what you find in that part of the world is very, very complex language.

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Speaker 3

25:49

Language that could be an inheritance. Language that could be incredibly archaic. Together with this recognition of self mortality. And when I talk to Lee Berger, we say, when you're looking at universals like that, language around all human populations, the recognition of self mortality, the contemplation of death, just maybe you have pharmacology.

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Speaker 3

26:10

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.

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Speaker 2

26:24

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.

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Speaker 3

26:34

That's what I asked Dr. Berger. So Lee has discovered in the dental calculus of archaic hominids.

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Speaker 2

26:44

Dental calculus, I like this.

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Speaker 3

26:47

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.

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Speaker 3

27:24

I'll fast forward to 50,000 years ago. There was another study out of El Cidron Cave in 2012 which found that Neanderthals, again preceding our species 50,000 years ago, were ingesting yarrow and chamomile, which had been identified as medicinal. So again, not psychedelic or psychoactive, but we kind of have the beginnings of the technology, and that was 9 years ago, to begin figuring out the ancestral diet of these hominids.

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Speaker 2

27:53

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.

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Speaker 2

28:12

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?

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Speaker 3

28:29

But it's not, it's not. 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.

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Speaker 3

28:52

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.

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Speaker 3

29:34

So we can say that there is initial archeochemical data for the consumption of psychedelics and cave art. And so where else might we find this?

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Speaker 2

29:44

Are there a lot of archeochemists in the world? Like, is this fascinating? 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.

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Speaker 2

30:05

Are we talking about dozens here? Like how hard is this problem relative to how many people are taking it on? Just as a side little tangent.

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Speaker 3

30:13

We're probably talking more dozens than hundreds. I spent many years trying to track down an archaeochemist who would talk to me. There were a couple, Pat McGovern at the University of Pennsylvania, and then my friend Andrew Koh at MIT, which you might know something about.

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Speaker 3

30:30

Andrew really, on his own time, on his own dime, has been gathering the data for this organic residue analysis. He has what's called the OpenArchem Project, which is this online open source repository for this data. But there's never been a center for this. No university has stood up a dedicated center, a team, really, which is what you need of archaeochemists looking at this stuff.

S3

Speaker 3

30:56

But I mean, even despite that, there have been some remarkable discoveries over the past 10, 20 years. It's still a discipline very much in its infancy. Maybe it's becoming a toddler, but as the technology gets better and cheaper, I hope you'll see more and more archeochemists joining the fight.

S2

Speaker 2

31:13

Yeah, Andrew's fascinating. His work is fascinating. But also, I just, because of your work, I came across and exchanged a few emails with Patrick McGovern, who's basically, what would you call him?

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Speaker 2

31:26

So he has a center, I guess, that does biomolecular archeology at UPenn. And he's the author of a bunch of books, 1 of which is Ancient Brews. So he's a scholar of beer and wine and like ancient alcohol, which is fascinating. The influence, even just alcohol, but he has like alcohol with hallucinogenic properties as well, But it's fascinating, as a Russian, it's fascinating to think about the influence of alcohol on the development of human civilization throughout its history.

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Speaker 2

32:01

Is there something you can comment on alcohol or in general Patrick's work that was informative to you, inspiring or kind of added to your conception of human history?

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Speaker 3

32:16

His work was some of the first hard scientific data that I saw for the ritual consumption of these intoxicants. I don't think he's ever found the hard and fast data for psychedelics, but what he turned me on to was this idea that alcohol, or beer and wine specifically, could have been used as vehicles for the administration of psychedelics. That's where it all started for me.

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Speaker 3

32:40

Just the notion that ancient beer and ancient wine is very, very different from what we drink today, that typically they were cocktails. They were often fortified and mixed with different fruits, berries, herbs, plants, maybe even fungi over time because this was all in the absence of distilled liquor, right? There is no hard alcohol, even in Russia, before maybe the 12th century it was in Europe, maybe a bit earlier, but the concept of distillation just didn't exist, and so to pack a punch, rather than just drink a kind of watered down Budweiser, these people were interested in fortifying these beverages with whatever they could find in nature. And Pat, to his credit, found some of the initial data for these, you could say, spiked wines and spiked beers, Not with anything overtly psychedelic, but just the fact that in the 16th century BC at Grave Circle A in Mycenae, there's this Minoan ritual cocktail of beer mixed with wine mixed with mead is very interesting.

S3

Speaker 3

33:45

It's even more interesting that you find that across the Aegean in Gordium at King Midas's tomb, right? The same kind of ritual cocktail, which Pat and Sam at the Dogfish Head Brewery resurrected as the Midas touch. So, I mean, the notion that we can go back, find this data, resurrect it, in some cases, 2,800 years later, I found pretty exciting 10 years ago.

S2

Speaker 2

34:08

Yeah, bring it back for research. But that's fascinating that people were playing with these ideas. And we'll return to, we'll return to ideas of psychedelic infused wine, which is pretty fascinating, but can we step back and just kind of look at your work with the book Immortality Key?

S2

Speaker 2

34:26

What is the story that you tell in this book?

S3

Speaker 3

34:29

I knew we'd get there eventually, Lex.

S2

Speaker 2

34:33

It's a nonlinear path. Somehow we were talking about simulation and the universe is a computer that's creating video games and wow and Fortnite, but we got there. And We'll return, always, to insane philosophical.

S2

Speaker 2

34:49

But your book, Immortality Q, what's the story that you tell in this book? Which part of human history are you studying?

S3

Speaker 3

34:56

Right, so that's the way to phrase it. So it's my 12-year search for the hard scientific data for the ritual use of psychedelics in classical antiquity. So we're talking about amongst the ancient Greeks and Romans and the paleo-Christians.

S3

Speaker 3

35:12

So the generations that would give birth to the largest religion the world's ever known. Christianity today was 2 and a half billion people. The big question for me is, you know, were psychedelics actually involved? There was a lot written about this in the 60s.

S3

Speaker 3

35:25

John Marco Allegro, the book that I follow, was published in 1978 before I was born. The Road to Eleusis by Gordon Wasson, who we talked about already, Albert Hoffman, who famously discovers LSD or synthesizes it from ergot, and Karl Ruck, who is still a professor of classics at Boston University, the only surviving member of that renegade trio, and now 85 years old. So this all predates us. But what was lacking in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, I think, was some of this technology and the hard scientific data.

S3

Speaker 3

36:01

Now, for years and years, I went out to the archeobotanists and the archeochemists around the world and I asked a very basic question. Is there any evidence for psychedelics in classical antiquity? And the answer would almost invariably come back no. I'm talking to, in addition to Pat, he put me in touch with Hans-Peter Stieke in Germany, Tania Valamotti in Greece, Assunta Florenzano in Italy.

S3

Speaker 3

36:23

I went all over the place asking 1 question and getting the same answer back time and again. And so the book is essentially my search for that data and the eventual uncovering of 2, what I think are key pieces of data. 1 data point shows the ritual use of a psychedelic beer in classical antiquity in Iberia, what today is Spain, and the other shows what looks like a kind of psychedelic wine just outside Pompeii from the first century AD, at the right place, at the right time, when the earliest Christians were showing up in Italy.

S2

Speaker 2

37:01

Again, these are early steps in the search for evidence in the space, but speaking of early Christians, what role do you think psychedelic infused wine could have played in the life of the, I won't be clever, in the life of Jesus Christ.

S3

Speaker 3

37:25

I've been saying recently that, and I hope this doesn't sound obscurantist, but I think it's impossible to understand Jesus and the birth of Christianity in the absence of ancient Greek. And I'll give you a very specific example of why I think that's the case. You can read the entire New Testament in ancient Greek and not once will you ever find a reference to alcohol because there was no word in ancient Greek for alcohol.

S3

Speaker 3

37:55

The way the word sounds, alkol, it's Semitic, it comes from the Arabic. Kahla means to enliven or refresh, probably comes from coal, K-O-H-L, sort of these powdered metallics that were used in alchemical experiments and cosmetics. So again, that's much later in time when we're using alchemy, distillation, et cetera. In the first century AD, the power of wine wasn't necessarily tied to alcohol, fermented grapes, the way we think about wine today.

S3

Speaker 3

38:24

So, Pat McGovern found some of that early organic data for wine being mixed with beer and with mead. But if you look at the literature from the first century AD, Dioscorides, for example, he writes this massive treatise at the exact same time the Gospels are being written. And Dioscorides, in just 1 of his books, talks about 56 detailed recipes for spiking wine, with all kinds of things like salvia and hellebore and frankincense and myrrh, these spiced perfumes, but also more dangerous things like henbane and mandrake, which he says in Greek can be fatal with just 1 cupful. And in book 474 of his Materia Medica, he talks about black nightshade producing fantasias ou aedes, not unpleasant visions.

S3

Speaker 3

39:15

What today we would say is psychedelic. So just looking at the literature and the kind of literature that even most classicists, I didn't really learn it in undergrad, I came across Dioscorides later, but just a basic look at the literature supports what McGovern has been testing, which is the fact that wine was routinely mixed with different compounds.

S2

Speaker 2

39:37

It's fascinating, by the way, that language affects our conception of the tools we use to understand the world. So like, you can see wine, you can see psychedelics, if they're not called drugs, you can maybe reframe how you see them in terms of their role in us thinking about the world, understanding the world. That's really interesting that language has that power.

S2

Speaker 2

40:04

But what language was used to understand wine at the time?

S3

Speaker 3

40:08

So we're talking about a Greek-speaking world, right? So Jesus is born and does his public ministry in the Holy Land, but think about the early Church. Think about where the Church takes root.

S3

Speaker 3

40:18

You know, Paul, the greatest evangelist of the time, writes basically half the New Testament. He's writing letters in Greek to Greek speakers in places like Corinth in Greece, or Philippi, a defunct city just north of the island of Thassos, or he's writing to folks in what today is Turkey, the Colossians, the Galatians, he writes letters to the Romans. These are Greek speakers in these pockets, these Hellenic pockets all around the ancient Mediterranean. And for them, again, ignore Dioscorides, ignore Pat McGovern's work.

S3

Speaker 3

40:51

To them, to think about wine was to think about a mixed potion. And so the word oinos in ancient Greek does show up in the New Testament, but there was another word to describe wine, and it exists for like a thousand years, before, during, and after the life of Jesus. The word used for wine is pharmakon, which obviously gives us the word pharmacy. It means drug.

S3

Speaker 3

41:14

So in Greek, a Greek speaker would actually use the word drug to refer to wine. Ruth Skodal, the classicist, talks about this as a ritualistic formula. They understood wine as this compound beverage, a drug against grief, a medicinal elixir that could either harm or heal, or just maybe a sacrament to put you in touch with wine gods old and new?

S2

Speaker 2

41:41

Clearly religion and myth, but religion very much so has sort of, much like dreams has like an imagery component. Like you're kind of going outside the visual constraints of physical space where you kind of have very specific conceptions of what things look like and you kind of use your imagination to stretch beyond the world as we know it. Things that are trying to get in touch with things that are more real than real.

S2

Speaker 2

42:17

What role do these tools, do these pharmacons have in trying to stimulate the imagery of religion? Do you have a sense that they have a critical role here or is this just a bunch of different factors that are utilized, a bunch of different tools that are utilized to construct this imagery? Or is this not even, or is imagery the wrong terminology? Is it more like space of ideas that's core to religion?

S3

Speaker 3

42:44

No, I think the wine is absolutely essential. And so if it's impossible to understand paleo-Christianity in the absence of ancient Greek, I think it's equally difficult in the absence of the sacred pharmacopoeia or wine itself, right? Just think about wine at the time.

S3

Speaker 3

43:02

I think that the ancient Greek audience would have heard that in a very different way from us. And so, they're referring to it maybe as a pharmakon, but the followers of Dionysus, which precedes Jesus. And in some cases, the story of Jesus is kind of a recapitulation of the mysteries of Dionysus. But when you think about Dionysus, maybe from your high school mythology, you think about him as the god of theater or the god of wine, which is typically what it is, or the god of ecstasy.

S3

Speaker 3

43:31

You know, again, Dionysus is not the god of alcohol. There's no concept of fermented grapes. The power of Dionysus and the ability to commune with Dionysus through his blood. And before Christianity, the blood of Dionysus is equated to his wine.

S3

Speaker 3

43:48

The sacramental drinking of the wine was interpreted, and classicists write about this, including Walter Burkert, it was interpreted as consuming the God himself in order to become 1 with the God. This is where we get the idea of enthusiasm, because the language matters. Enthusiasm to be filled with the spirit of the God, so that you became identified with Dionysus and acquired his divine powers. Now, how does that happen?

S3

Speaker 3

44:13

Again, he's not the god of alcohol. He is the god of wine, but he's really the god of madness and delirium and frenzy. And his principal followers are women. They're called the minads.

S3

Speaker 3

44:24

And the way they get in touch with him is through the consumption of this sacramental wine. Even at the theater of Dionysus, separate from his outdoor churches, there was a wine served there called drima. And this is the wine that gives birth to Hollywood. I mean, the ancient Hollywood was there at the theater of Dionysus.

S3

Speaker 3

44:43

This is where comedy and tragedy and poetry and music come from. But rather than a hot dog and a beer, what they drink at the theater of Dionysus was this wine called Trima, which means pounded or rubbed. And Professor Ruck talks about maybe it was the drugs that were rubbed into this theatrical beverage to help the play come alive.

S2

Speaker 2

45:04

So madness is seen as a positive thing. Is it like a creative journey? It's not, it's not, it's, it's the, what is it?

S2

Speaker 2

45:13

The unlearning, getting out of the way kind of thing. Is that how it's seen or is it more like entertaining escape from life that is suffering? I gotta inject a little modern Dostoevsky into the old.

S3

Speaker 3

45:31

Existential despair. Maybe it's a bit of that. We can't say that there wasn't recreational drinking happening.

S3

Speaker 3

45:41

The Greeks also had the symposium, right? And they also were just getting hammered in some cases. But when it comes to the rites of Dionysus, what you see there is the creation of these states of awareness in which, again, you identify with the God to become the God. There's theophagy, there's the consumption of divinity in order to become divinity.

S3

Speaker 3

46:06

Right back to how we started the conversation, right? So if we stop conceiving of God as something exterior to us, but that the mystery of being itself is the mystery of your being and the mystery of my being, that the way to encounter that is through the sacramental theology, that you drink the actual blood of this Greek God to become that God. And there was a place for this in ancient Greek society.

S2

Speaker 2

46:32

So drinking the wine is drinking the blood of Dionysus. Do you think Jesus is an actual physical person that existed in history? Or is he an idea that came to life through the consumption of wine and those kinds of rituals.

S3

Speaker 3

46:53

So this is where I face my excommunication, depending how I answer this. You've...

S2

Speaker 2

47:00

I mean, you're playing with fire and wine. A good combination, by the way.

S3

Speaker 3

47:08

So I shy away from that controversy in the book. I'm perfectly willing to accept Jesus as a historical personage. We have the multiplicity of sources, although it's a generation after his death, but we have the Eucharist being described in the 4 Gospels, we have it being described by Paul in 1 Corinthians, But when you read John, it does read a bit differently than the other Gospels.

S3

Speaker 3

47:33

And in my book, I rely a lot on the scholarship of Dennis MacDonald, who writes a fabulous book called The Dionysian Gospel. And this is again why the Greek matters, because once you start to analyze the Greek of John's Gospel, it seems to be a presentation of Jesus very much in the guise of Dionysus. The most obvious example is the wedding at Cana, right? That only occurs in John's Gospel, the famous transformation of water into wine.

S3

Speaker 3

47:59

Now again, to any Greek speaker of the first century, they would have known about the Greek district of Elis on the Peloponnese. And in Elis, around the Epiphany, every January, the priests of Dionysus would deposit these water basins, empty basins, in the Temple of Dionysus. They'd return the next morning and find them magically filled with wine. Now, on the island of Andros, it's even more interesting.

S3

Speaker 3

48:24

Around the same epiphany date, the God's gift day, Dies Theodosia, the wine would emanate from the temple and run like a river for a week. And you can Google the Bacchanal of the Andrians, a wonderful painting by Titian which hangs in the Prado, and you'll see a river of wine behind these people having a great time. This exists for centuries and centuries before the wedding at Cana and before Jesus begins his public ministry with what these scholars call the signature miracle of Dionysus. It would not have been lost on the Greek audience that something very specific is being communicated here.

S3

Speaker 3

49:01

What's being communicated? That you just might find in early Christianity what you hold strong to in these mysteries of Dionysus that you may have inherited from your parents, your grandparents, your great-grandparents for centuries. There was a perfectly good religion. There were perfectly good mystery cults in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds.

S3

Speaker 3

49:20

And here comes this new, untested, illegal cult, illegal, of a dozen or so illiterate day laborers that go on to convert the empire in a few hundred years. The answer to that extraordinary growth is not psychedelics, but I do think it's visionary experiences, and I do think it's this continuity from the pagan world into early Christianity.

S2

Speaker 2

49:42

So what part, you mentioned this idea, it's really interesting, I think you said Paul Stamets, of, I guess, millions of people over millions of years, kind of consuming, really practicing a ritual or a habit of some sort. This idea of rituals is kind of interesting. Again, you mentioned cult.

S2

Speaker 2

50:04

What's the role of ritual consumption of some of these substances or just ritual practice of anything in the intellectual growth of particular groups of people or societies?

S3

Speaker 3

50:17

So again, I would say it is the centerpiece of ancient life, not just the mysteries of Dionysus, which we've only talked a bit about, but the mysteries of Eleusis were probably the most famous and longest lasting of these Greek mystery rites. And I mean, just to put it in simple terms, the best definition for a mystery religion, as the name implies, is something secret. Right, muo from the Greek means to shut the eyes or to shut the mouth, to keep quiet about this stuff.

S3

Speaker 3

50:44

You know, We're always teasing details from the archaeological and the literary record, and we're kind of just grabbing at these secrets. But Eleusis, which survives for like 2,000 years into the Christian period from about 1500 BC to the 4th century AD, it's kind of this centerpiece of Greek life. Cicero, the great Roman statesman, calls what was happening at Eleusis the most exceptional and divine thing that Athens ever produced. So not democracy, the arts and sciences, or philosophy, but the vision that was encountered at Eleusis, perhaps through the ritual consumption of a potent psychedelic over hundreds and hundreds of years, thousands and thousands, if not millions of initiates, pilgrims, who would walk from Athens to Eleusis to encounter this vision.

S3

Speaker 3

51:37

It seems to have been not just an important part of Greek life, but the thing that made life livable, such that as these mysteries are about to be exterminated by the newly Christianized Roman Empire, there's this passage in the ancient literature that talks about these, you know, in the absence of these mysteries life becomes unlivable. Abiotos.

S2

Speaker 2

51:58

Is there ways you can, I mean you write about the mysteries of Eleusis, and is there ways you can convert that into words? Why those are so important to them, more important than any other invention to them? Why is it such a source of meaning to life?

S3

Speaker 3

52:17

So, from what we can reconstruct, they would make that pilgrimage 13 miles northwest of Athens to confront their mortality. Remember we were talking about homo naledi, and in South Africa this recognition of self-mortality, the deliberate disposal of the dead. Plato talks about the real practice of philosophy being the death and dying process.

S3

Speaker 3

52:39

So in some senses, you went to Eleusis to die and to experience a death before your death. We talked about this with Terence McKenna as well, how the psychedelic state seems to share something in common with the near-death or out-of-body experiences or these ecstatic experiences, whether through wine or beer or otherwise, you went to Eleusis to die. And it was said that only those who had witnessed this vision, whatever vision was to be witnessed in Demeter's sanctuary, it essentially vouchsafed you the afterlife, that only those who went there became immortal. And Cicero says that at that point you essentially live with more joy and die with a better hope.

S2

Speaker 2

53:24

Can I ask you a question about this human contention with death, this confrontation of death that seems to be at the core of things? I don't know how deep to the core, but it seems to be a central element of the human condition. What do you think about Ernest Becker and those guys that put death at the, what is it?

S2

Speaker 2

53:47

The warm of the core, which as the main thing, the main create, like this confrontation of our own mortality first of all, being understand that we're mortal and then confronting the terror of it, the fear of it as the creative, like trying to escape the fear of death as the creative force of human society. So like the reason we do anything is because we're just running away from our death, scared. Do you find some of that to be true? First of all, as somebody who looks in the mirror, looks at yourself and your own as a human being, 2, just looking at society today, and 3, at this whole big spread of human history and all the cool stuff we've created, including the mysteries of Eleusis.

S3

Speaker 3

54:39

I wonder what life would look like in the absence of the fear of our mortality. I wonder how we'd interact with 1 another, if there was relatively little or no fear of death. I really do when it comes to Becker's work and others.

S3

Speaker 3

54:54

If the ancients were known for anything, it was running to death. It was the opposite. In fact, dying before dying, which is the immortality key, by the way. It's not psychedelics, but when I refer to this key, I'm referring to this notion that's preserved in Greek.

S3

Speaker 3

55:08

Anpethanis, brinpethanis, denthepethanis, otanpethanis. If you die before you die, You won't die when you die. For some reason, the ancients prized that experience. And we talked about the mystics of Sufism and Kabbalism and Christian mysticism, where you have this same self-nodding, this death before death, the divine nothingness, right?

S3

Speaker 3

55:32

For some reason, the mystic saints, visionaries, and ancient philosophers, they ran to death. And the 1 message I wanted to try and communicate with this book is how they viewed life, that it can only be fully experienced, fully embodied in the wake of a really intense, perhaps terrifying, but utterly transformational encounter with death.

S1

Speaker 1

55:57

So running to death, not running away from death.

S2

Speaker 2

56:01

You talk about Aldous Huxley and mind changers. So if we look at the history where the ancients were running to death and maybe using some performance enhancing permacons to run more effectively towards death. And now we're using like tools of modern society, whether they're psychological, sociological, or in this case pharmaceutical, to run away from this conception.

S2

Speaker 2

56:36

So what do you see as a hopeful future for human civilization? Like which, if all of these kinds of societies are ice cream flavors, how do you create the perfect ice cream flavor? Like what is the future of religious experience, of psychedelic experience, of intellectual journeys, of facing death, running away from death? What do you hope that looks like and what kind of idea should we look to?

S3

Speaker 3

57:05

My next book will be entitled Performance Enhancing Pharmaca. You get full copyright.

S2

Speaker 2

57:13

Yeah, I like it. So, but that's a historical view. I mean, what in that book would you suggest in 1 of the last chapters about the future of this process?

S3

Speaker 3

57:27

Well, Huxley has to stop you, he stopped me in my tracks, Aldous Huxley. So in 1958, he pens this op-ed of sorts. And it just, it reads incredibly prescient because I really do think in many ways as the fog of the war drug is ending and finally lifting, that we've kind of come full circle back to the late 1950s, which might sound strange.

S3

Speaker 3

57:55

It'll make more sense when you hear what Huxley said about psychedelics. And so he was looking forward to a revival of religion, which is why I subtitled the book, The Religion with No Name. And to him, to Huxley, this revival wouldn't come about through televangelistic mass meetings or photogenic clergymen, as he says. But he points to the biochemical discoveries, such as we have today, that would allow for large numbers of men and women to achieve a radical self-transcendence and a deeper understanding of the nature of things.

S3

Speaker 3

58:31

In other words, that this revival of religion, he says, would be a revolution. And Alan Watts comes along and says that there's nothing more dangerous to authority than a popular outbreak of mysticism. But I think This is what Huxley was pointing to, and he talks about religion in these terms, about being less about symbols and returning to a sense of experience and intuition. And Huxley says that he envisions a religion which gives rise to everyday mysticism, And he talks about something that would undergird everyday rationality, everyday tasks and duties, and everyday human relationships.

S3

Speaker 3

59:12

In other words, religion has to mean something. And these altered states of awareness that we seem to be able to produce quite easily inside the lab at Hopkins, NYU and elsewhere with psilocybin, I think this is kind of part of Huxley's prediction about a time when we would have legal access, safe access, efficacious access to this material that would allow for insight in an afternoon. And what do you do when millions of people can become mystics in an afternoon?

S2

Speaker 2

59:48

So psychedelics, psilocybin might be the practical way of having these kinds of, maybe could be termed religious experiences. And then many people participate in that.