00:02:00.000It's a continuation of your important and beautiful work analyzing the complexity of the human psyche.
00:02:08.000And I've already told people that you're not a psychiatrist and you don't like people saying that you are and that you're a normal family doctor.
00:02:22.000Because psychiatrists are trained in a very narrow way.
00:02:25.000Mostly these days they're trained in this biological model of mental illness so that all human distress is medicalized and explained in terms of some inherent dysfunction of the brain, genetic and so on, for which there's no proof whatsoever.
00:02:41.000But it reduces treatment of mental health concerns to pills and medications.
00:02:49.000And they just are not trained, I'm talking for the most part, to look at how life experience actually shapes the brain itself and how life experience is what underlines people's mental distress.
00:03:01.000And furthermore, there's an assumption in mental health diagnoses, like And the assumption is that they explain why people suffer, but they don't.
00:03:55.000So, these diagnoses, they may describe things that don't explain anything, and they certainly cannot be reduced to biological events in the brain.
00:04:03.000It's fascinating that you say that because I suppose these diagnostics become more complex when dealing with neurology and when dealing with behavior.
00:04:13.000When diagnosing, I suppose, a broken arm you can observe, oh the arm is broken, but when you're dealing with complexity within the mind it seems like what you're saying
00:04:22.000is there's a tendency to problematize it and extract the reasons why
00:04:25.000these behaviors might be exhibited or this phenomenon might be exhibited and also I've
00:04:30.000noticed a tendency to extract social conditions and make the
00:04:35.000individual culpable through the process of diagnosis.
00:05:05.000Now, The average physician is trained to understand rheumatoid arthritis as a physical event of the immune system turning against the body and damaging the joints and the connective tissues and so on.
00:05:19.000Why that happens, when you actually study people's lives and the scientific evidence, has to do with people's lives.
00:05:42.000In the 1930s, the gender ratio of multiple sclerosis was 1 to 1.
00:05:47.000No, it's three and a half women for every man, which immediately tells us it can't be genetic, because genes don't change in a population in 80 years.
00:05:56.000It can't be the environment or the climate, or it can't be the climate or the food, because that didn't change more for one gender than the other.
00:06:05.000When you look at who develops multiple sclerosis, it's people who suppress their own needs, who serve the needs of others ahead of their own, who don't know how to express or even experience healthy anger, who tend to be very, very nice people, who have trouble saying no.
00:06:20.000In other words, precisely the characteristics that this society encourages in women, and who absorb the stresses of other people.
00:06:29.000And what's happened in the last 80 years is that women are still playing that role of emotional caregivers to their families and their spouses and their children, of course, and their parents.
00:06:42.000But they also have to make a living out there in the work world.
00:06:46.000And they're under more stress because there's more isolation.
00:06:49.000The more isolated people are, the more stressed they are.
00:06:53.000There's no big mystery, but from the point of view of biological causation, there's no explanation.
00:06:58.000So only if, as you suggest, we look at the social conditions and cultural environment in which people live their lives, can we understand why people are ill.
00:07:10.000And this is, despite all the science that buttresses what I'm telling you, it's completely ignored in medical practice.
00:07:18.000My assumption would be, Gabor, because that immediately politicizes these matters of health, and then it becomes an indicator that there are social power dynamics at play, even when it comes to something as observable and rudimentary as physical health, let alone the complexity that we started on with matters regarding mental health.
00:07:40.000Now it seems like you're willing and able to underwrite the more complex aspects of mental health diagnosis with these physical examples.
00:07:50.000What else are you demonstrating in your book The Myth of Normal?
00:07:54.000I know because I've read bits of it, well the bits with my names in it.
00:08:43.000Because it's criminally stupid in its assumptions.
00:08:48.000I've never met anybody, and I've worked with really hardcore substance users, who actually woke up one morning and said, my ambition is to become a drug addict.
00:08:57.000Second point is that the medical assumption that we're dealing with an inherited brain disease is equally false, so that there's very little evidence despite what they say for any genetic causation of addiction.
00:09:11.000What we're really looking at, and let's just do a little experiment here, I'll give you a definition of addiction and get you to participate.
00:09:18.000I'm speaking to the audience here and also to my interviewer.
00:09:21.000I'll define addiction as manifested in any behavior in which a person finds temporary pleasure or relief but suffers negative consequences in the long term and doesn't give up despite the negative consequences.
00:09:36.000So pleasure, relief and craving in the short term, harm and inability to give up in the long term.
00:09:44.000Now notice I said nothing about drugs.
00:10:25.000So, here's what I want to ask here from the audience, is if by that definition you recognize that at one time or another you've had any kind of an addiction, just raise your hand.
00:10:37.000So what we've got here is the vast majority, if not everybody.
00:10:39.000Now here's what I'm going to ask you now, I don't know if this works for the podcast purposes, I want to ask some of you to tell me, not what was wrong with your addiction, which you already know, but what was right about it?
00:11:53.000So hence my mantra, not why the addiction, but why the pain?
00:11:56.000And so what I'm saying is, just as you've articulately illustrated, Addictions, these qualities, connection, self-worth, pain relief, are they good things or bad things?
00:12:22.000So, once we recognize that, why are we judging people for desperately seeking to escape states of extreme emotional distress, isolation, disconnection, pain?
00:12:34.000So the addiction is not the primary issue.
00:12:35.000The primary issue is the trauma that induces the mind state from which the person needs to escape.
00:12:42.000And if you look at it from the population and the political point of view, like for example under COVID, just to give a recent instance, Alcoholism went up.
00:12:57.000Because when people are stressed, and they have not the means to resolve their stress, they'll resort, amongst other things, to addictive behaviors.
00:13:05.000Now that has all kinds of political implications, because if you look at, at least in the United States, and I bet if you did a class analysis here in Britain, of who's in jail because of addictions, addicted-related behaviors, in the States it's largely minority people by a huge disproportionate percentage.
00:13:25.000In Canada, 30% of the people in our jails are indigenous people.
00:13:31.00030% of my clients in the addicted area of Vancouver where I work were indigenous people.
00:13:37.000They make up 4% of the Canadian population, 30% of the jail population, and indigenous women make up 50% of the Canadian jail female population, 4% of the general population.
00:14:20.000And of course the reason to answer, I imagine, a rhetorical question that was laced within your answer, the reason that you cannot desist from identifying the individual as the primary culprit in criminal activity when it comes to addiction is because the minute you challenge that paradigm, you are confronted with These issues are socially and politically created and it becomes a challenge to power to resolve the problem.
00:14:51.000As long as it's individual nodes that are culpable rather than an underlying social issue, you don't have to alter society.
00:14:59.000And so a difficult question is never asked.
00:15:03.000One of the broader questions, Gabor, when I was preparing for this conversation, using my mind prior to being here, I used my mind, I went inside it and I thought, what do I want to ask Gabor Mate?
00:15:13.000Because there'll be a moment when I'm looking into his eyes and now that moment is happening.
00:15:19.000How long do you think we can continue to extract compassion and spiritual solutions that recognize the ulterior oneness from our ongoing ideas around change?
00:15:30.000How long can we continue to extract the idea that there needs to be a spiritual and compassionate component to the way that we organize society?
00:15:38.000How long can we continue to have economics as the heart of our political and ideological systems?
00:15:44.000And what Let's just answer that question, I suppose, first, because Fallout is quite an intense question.
00:15:49.000And how do we, I suppose, move these ideas to the center, and is that part of the objective of your book?
00:15:55.000Well, so, if I may just step around the question for a moment and then come back to it.
00:16:00.000This phenomenon that you described, this extraction of the social, political, the spiritual, the experiential, from particular problems, goes way beyond the question of addiction.
00:16:27.000It's a result of millions of individual decisions.
00:16:31.000What Tony Blair and his Neoliberal wisdom utterly ignored was that since the instigation of neoliberal policies, which increase inequality, which put more stress on the lower classes, obesity has become epidemic.
00:17:42.000Well, I can only tell you as long as we're willing to let them get away with it.
00:17:47.000And it's not a question of willingness to let them get away with it, as long as people have wool over their eyes and they don't see reality.
00:17:56.000And my intention in writing this book, and you know this, View that I have of you Russell as well as that what you ultimately committed to is you're committed to truth You know and and that's all I'm trying to say is just what is true about life.
00:18:16.000What is true about health illness and so on?
00:18:20.000People can be kept from the truth for a long long time, and I don't know at what point A society will get to the point of suffering where the majority will say, enough.
00:18:32.000Because for the minority that actually is reaping the benefits, there's no problem whatsoever.
00:18:39.000So when we talk about the system being broken, no it's not.
00:18:44.000Yes, this is a challenge that we continually face, is that situations that we would diagnose or recognize as problematic are for the most powerful interests in the world advantageous.
00:18:55.000This also, Gabor, already this conversation demonstrates the Impossibility of remaining politically neutral when talking about something that previously and actually is still contemporarily presented as a mental health and individual issue.
00:20:00.000Here are some entertainments and distractions.
00:20:02.000But the system requires you dumb and numb and distracted and complacent.
00:20:08.000I suppose to sort of follow up a little on my question, I suppose that we have to become, you know, I know that Jordan Peterson, for example, would be a person that you would be at odds with a lot.
00:20:37.000He's infusing political discourse with psychiatric, in his case, understanding with information that's coming from like Jungian archetypes.
00:20:49.000I think that he is in some ways fundamentally conservative and in some fundamental ways quite traditional.
00:20:56.000And you are socially progressive in ways that are more obvious.
00:21:02.000However, I am beginning to believe that one of the most important fissures that must be healed in our culture is this tension that exists between traditionalism and progressivism.
00:21:12.000And I think the only way this tension can be eased politically and culturally is with a commitment to the decentralization of power wherever possible.
00:21:22.000People must be able to run their own communities.
00:21:24.000People say, like, remember the last time me and you chatted, Gabor?
00:21:31.000Who's a very traditional, conservative, orthodox Jew, right-wing commentator.
00:21:36.000And of course, for those of you who don't know, Gabor is himself Jewish and a Holocaust survivor.
00:21:40.000And we were talking about the issue of Palestine and I knew that I was going on Ben Shapiro or something like that.
00:21:45.000And then I would like to talk to you and you gave me such a sort of like a powerful personal perspective on Palestine.
00:21:52.000And I just, I feel like I've just been on maybe Ben Shapiro.
00:21:54.000Oh, shit, man, I didn't confront him on any of these issues.
00:21:57.000Anyway, like what I ultimately feel is Ben Shapiro has got every right to believe whatever he wants to believe as a Orthodox, you know, or near Orthodox Jew.
00:22:06.000traditional practice and we have got the right to believe whatever we want to
00:22:11.000believe. There are some global power issues that really need addressing but
00:22:16.000at the level of a culture if we're continually killing each other over
00:22:20.000cultural and social issues, refusing to bind with people have a different
00:22:25.000perspective on family, gender, sexuality, if we can't see that what's required
00:22:30.000is a degree of individual freedom, collective autonomy, the ability to form
00:22:33.000our own societies, the willingness to just let people be traditional or
00:22:36.000progressive and that our individual duty becomes about I disagree with you, but I recognize that when it comes to the crunch, it's none of my fucking business, and I'm gonna just leave you the fuck alone.
00:22:46.000Unless we're willing to do that, I don't see how we're gonna actually confront, and I don't want to be dismissive of people that have given their lives for civil rights issues, but what I consider to be the most meaningful power base, which is economic and financial and global.
00:22:59.000Well, you've been very, as I watched you over the last year or so, you've been very concerned with maintaining an independent point of view while being civil to those that didn't agree with you, you know, and to promote that civility in the discourse.
00:23:16.000I think that's great, on the one hand.
00:23:19.000On the other hand, I don't mind telling you, In my book, The Myth of Normal, I was going to write a chapter called The Other Side of Jordan, about Jordan Peterson.
00:23:31.000Because I think what he represents is repressive, both in the political sense and in the personal sense.
00:23:39.000And, no, to say that about him is to immediately invite all kinds of
00:23:46.000contumely from his followers, but I can't help what I believe.
00:23:51.000And I do quote him briefly in this book, and I'll just give you one example.
00:23:57.000And the reason I'm saying it, there's no meaning of minds here.
00:24:00.000There's no possible meaning of minds here.
00:24:02.000What we have is two very distinct point of views about what it means to be a human being.
00:24:06.000So he says that an angry young child should be made to sit by themselves until they come back to normal.
00:24:15.000anger in a young child is not normal and b. the child should be withdrawn from adult contact until he learns to comply with our expectations.
00:24:23.000That's an invitation for self-repression.
00:24:26.000That invitation to self... What does it mean to... So we have this disease called depression, with which he's been diagnosed, by the way, as have I. Actually, peas in a pod, the two of you.
00:24:42.000But what does it mean to depress something?
00:24:50.000He's inviting people to promote depression in their children.
00:24:54.000He's also inviting them to repress their natural anger, one of the essential requirements for human development.
00:25:01.000And for the child, one of the irreducible needs, and I talk about this in the book, is the ability and the freedom of the child to experience all their emotions, grief, sadness, anger, joy, whatever, and still be fully accepted and celebrated by the parents.
00:25:17.000Now, he would wish to deny children that, which, to my mind, promotes not only mental illness, but also autoimmune disease.
00:25:25.000Because one of the commonest features of people with immune illness is their incapacity to experience healthy anger.
00:25:32.000So from my point of view, and then he talks about intimidating kids, even by hitting them necessarily.
00:25:38.000He actually makes the case in his book, 12 Rules for Life.
00:25:46.000Well that's pernicious and all the studies show that children who are spent, even occasionally, they suffer as many symptoms of trauma as kids who are abused more severely.
00:26:17.000So the idea that I might agree with a set of Canadian academics... So what I would say, with regard to that, is that I'm really interested in hearing Jordan Peterson's opinion.
00:26:48.000I'm thinking now and I'm remembering my own childhood, of course, I'm doing trying to do to do all these things simultaneously. I'm thinking, no, I
00:26:54.000don't want to be, you can't leave Peggy or Mabel on their own when they're raging. You've
00:26:58.000got to sit with them and feel that stuff with them. But then I also think, you know, and
00:27:02.000that is what I would do. I wouldn't do what Jordan Peterson is suggesting with that matter. I
00:27:07.000wouldn't do that. So I would agree with you because I've, but I also recognize it's
00:27:48.000But I still think it's yet more important to go, Jordan Peterson believes this, Gabo Mate believes this.
00:27:55.000When it comes to our own children, here is a range of information and a raft of data.
00:28:00.000You choose what's right, you know, like the, you know, there doesn't need to be a meeting of minds.
00:28:04.000I think there needs to be a symposium of communication and discussion.
00:28:08.000And for like, and even and I think more, you know, God, if I may say even more importantly, when it comes to something like democracy, that we have to get to a position where you say, I advocate for this, I, I believe in immigration, for these reasons, I think that immigration should be handled in these ways.
00:28:21.000But if you don't want If you want immigration in your community, then you are entitled to vote against it.
00:28:26.000And if you do want immigration in your community, you are entitled to vote for it.
00:28:30.000Now the people of Britain don't have to... The working class in this country doesn't have to be at war with each other over the issue of immigration anymore.
00:28:51.000The reason I didn't write the chapter on the other side of Jordan is because I thought it's just not that important what I think of Jordan Peterson.
00:28:59.000And why waste the whole chapter on disagreeing with somebody?
00:29:02.000Let them speak their reality and I'll speak mine and we'll see what happens.
00:29:10.000Insofar, for example, as he stood up for the right to use whatever language he wanted, I totally support him.
00:29:19.000At the end, when I evaluate any movement institution, like my own profession of medical practice, I see this playing not only a much more limited role in healing that it could possibly play, but actually playing an ideological role in buttressing a system that atomizes individuals, atomizes people.
00:29:42.000And insofar as I speak of what I think about that, In that same sense, if anybody asks me about Peterson, I'll tell them what I think of Peterson and his ideology.
00:29:51.000Do I deprive him, or do I even have the power or the desire to deprive him of the right to speak?
00:30:32.000I should be myself as I truly am, not as somebody would have me be.
00:30:37.000Not as I would want somebody to be, but as they need to be for themselves.
00:30:41.000And my argument, one of the arguments about the health The deleterious impacts on health of this particular social structure and cultural arrangement is that it just denies people their authenticity.
00:30:57.000And that has huge implications for their mental and physical health.
00:31:00.000And so I'm all in favor of authenticity, whether or not I agree with the outcome or not.
00:31:05.000One thing I feel, Gabor, is that many successful polemicists that occupy our cultural space, when I watch them, what I do not feel is love.
00:31:18.000And this is what I do feel when I'm communicating with you, that love has to be at the center of our discourse.
00:31:24.000Now, one of our challenges is that love can feel a little bit woo-woo, a little bit like it's something that's difficult to...
00:31:32.000Introducing to patriarchal systems of financial dominance the idea that we have to love one another and also a post-enlightenment system of rationalism.
00:31:41.000I feel that the rational argument for love is I feel that love is the felt experience of oneness.
00:31:46.000Love is some experience beyond our psyche that we are connected to all things and our body understands this and tells us this.
00:31:55.000Absolutely, and that is just the truth about human beings.
00:31:58.000And I don't know how this will sound to your audience, but you know about this because I wrote you about it.
00:32:04.000Three months ago or so, I was in the middle of a psilocybin ceremony with some indigenous leaders in Canada.
00:32:13.000Now these people, for reasons that I've touched upon briefly, amongst the most traumatized people on earth.
00:32:20.000Their children were abducted from their homes for over a hundred years by the state into institutions run by the Catholic Church where as one woman I know who was in her 60s now when she was four years old and taking this residential school where the intention was to educate the Indian out of the Indian as they put it.
00:32:48.000She couldn't put her tongue back in her mouth because she would cut her lips.
00:32:52.000That's the indigenous experience in Canada.
00:32:56.000And in these church-run residential schools, one of the people at this retreat that I was at where we were doing this, which I'll tell you more about in a moment, was an indigenous leader who was next week going to travel to the Vatican where the Pope was going to issue an apology for the appalling suffering that the church had imposed and the church and he traveled to the Vatican and the Pope Francis did issue an apology.
00:33:23.000He said, I'm sorry for what some Catholics did to your people.
00:33:27.000That's kind of like saying, a German saying, I'm so sorry to you Jewish people.
00:33:33.000I'm so sorry for what some Germans did to you.
00:33:36.000It was the most paltry apology I've heard in history.
00:33:41.000But to go back to the event, these are leaders of indigenous people in Canada who want to work through the trauma and heal the trauma of their people.
00:34:17.000The sorrow that I experienced was unlike anywhere else in the world, as was the love and the beauty and the connection to nature and spirituality and welcome.
00:34:28.000It was also incredible, but In the middle of the ceremony, you came up for me.
00:34:34.000And I actually wrote you that night, you know?
00:34:37.000And what came up for me was just the love that you are in the world, you know?
00:34:41.000Behind the... I wouldn't say behind, but along with the outrageous humor and just cutting wit and rationality.
00:35:33.000That's what happens when you get stoned, people, is that you have hallucinations.
00:35:37.000Just to clarify, you were on drugs, so it's possible your perception was warped by this.
00:35:44.000Also, during that time, and as is covered in your book, you talk about these hallucinogenic and psychedelic experiences of potentially revelatory.
00:35:52.000Around these I have a raft of questions about the potential for the psychedelic experience to allow us to access aspects of our consciousness that may be concealed, as William James said, by veils, but that are ever-present and within us.
00:36:03.000Also, Gabor, as a recovering drug addict, I'm just chomping at the bit to take some drugs.
00:36:08.000So, is there a way that people in recovery, such as myself, could, under certain circumstances, use hallucinogens for part of an ongoing... First of all, I would say, let's watch your language, OK?
00:36:40.000A drug is taken, whether it's heroin or whether it's Prozac, a drug is taken to temporarily change the chemical functioning of your brain, so as to induce a different internal mental psychological experience.
00:37:00.000The medicine is taken to promote healing.
00:37:20.000So I don't use drug in a negative sense.
00:37:22.000I just use it in the sense of a substance that you take to temporarily change the biology of your brain so as to induce a different mind state than the distrusting one that you're in.
00:38:04.000I said, even if this is the best book in the world ever written, I'm not going to endorse it.
00:38:07.000Because the title was, How Psychedelics Will Save the World.
00:38:11.000And I said, for God's sakes, nothing is going to save the world, least of all psychedelics.
00:38:15.000But that doesn't mean they can't be helpful in certain situations.
00:38:19.000So, Freud once said that dreams are the royal road to the unconscious.
00:38:24.000Well, today he might well say that psychedelics are another royal road to the unconscious, because As you said, quoting William James, they remove the veil of the conscious and programmed, defensive, egoic mind, and you get to experience what's underneath it.
00:38:42.000And you get to experience the terror, And the pain that you've been running away from all your life with not you personally but any of us with our addictions.
00:38:53.000You experience the rage that you've been suppressing because somebody told you not to be angry as a kid and you wouldn't be accepted if you're angry.
00:39:02.000So you repress your rage and now you've got multiple sclerosis.
00:39:11.000Underneath of that is also this tremendous love that I experienced a few months ago.
00:39:15.000There's also the truth, there's also clarity, there's also connection to everything that is.
00:39:21.000All of this is veiled by the conscious and repressed egotistical mind.
00:39:27.000In the right context, and I have to really emphasize the right context, under the right guidance, with proper pre-experience support and with proper integration afterwards, these substances can be really healing.
00:39:43.000And I've seen people recover from addictions, from autoimmune diseases, from mental health conditions.
00:39:49.000Some people, of course, Shouldn't take them.
00:39:53.000Those with psychosis, mania, heart disease, whatever, you know, there's exclusions.
00:39:57.000But we're talking about people who have no contraindications, given the right environment, the right substance, and the right leadership.
00:40:18.000And I said, I asked Michael, and I quote him in my book, were you surprised?
00:40:24.000And he says what he was most surprised by is that he expected all kinds of pushback and negative response from within the psychiatric profession.
00:40:34.000But he actually said he got a lot of appreciation and interest, because they know how thin their toolkit really is.
00:40:41.000They know how essentially ineffective their understandings and methodologies are.
00:40:48.000So therefore, they're open, many of them, to looking at psychedelics as a new adjunct to their work.
00:40:55.000Now, I would say that would be a minority of psychiatrists at this point, but what I'm saying to you is, don't think of them as drugs.
00:41:01.000When you took drugs, you took them to escape from reality, not to experience reality.
00:41:06.000When you take ayahuasca, you take it to experience reality.
00:41:10.000Even if it's a reality that you don't like, but it's a reality that's healing.
00:41:19.000The set is the mindset with which you do it.
00:41:22.000Now, if you do it with the mindset to escape, to have a good time with your buddies and so on, well, certain things you shouldn't even try, because they're not going to give you that.
00:41:34.000But then you're doing it for the wrong reason, the wrong mindset.
00:41:38.000If you're doing it in the wrong setting, it's not going to work.
00:41:43.000But with the right set, the right mindset and the right setting, the right guidance, I've seen them, I've experienced them.
00:41:52.000So yeah, I spend, out of 33 chapters, I spend one on this question of my own experience with psychedelics and my own clinical observations.
00:42:03.000I don't see it as a huge deal, but in terms of what I've experienced, their value is just self-evident.
00:42:15.000The reason I suppose there is a particularity when someone has a history of addiction that is distinct from using these substances, these medicines, to use your preferred vernacular, is that if you're using the medicine in order to transition from active chemical dependency to freedom from chemical dependency, I can understand that.
00:42:35.000And also, I guess you cover with your use of the term set and set in what the conditions are and perhaps could be.
00:42:44.000In particular, there is a sort of an understanding among people in recovery that to meddle with the kind of this, the thing is, is with the 12 step methodology, there is necessarily in an abstinence based model, some Puritanism, also because of the time of its advent and creation.
00:43:04.0001930s America is a kind of a sort of, whilst there is the influence of William James and of Carl Jung, there's a good deal of good old fashioned American Protestantism in there as well.
00:43:14.000And what I suppose interests me is that, you know, Bill Wilson, the founder of the Alcoholics Anonymous group, was borderline shamanic profit material, like flashes of white light.
00:43:28.000He used LSD, of course, you know, subsequent to his sobriety date.
00:43:32.000However, there's a sort of an understanding that for people that are in, e.g., long-term recovery, long-term sobriety, that the use of, you know, even medicines of this nature could could create a kind of a disruption,
00:43:44.000and that we're sort of uniquely unable to make rational choices when it comes to mood or in
00:44:09.000And unless he's directed towards, sort of, purpose, you know, like... The things about the 12 steps that, in my opinion, are irrefutable, and we've discussed before the lack of particular address around trauma, although they caveat their information with, more will be revealed, we know only a little, more will be discovered, we're at the beginning of this journey.
00:44:28.000You know, the things that are beautiful about this piece of folk technology, this folk ideology, the 12 steps, is the idea that you must overcome precisely this nexus of internal data that we regard as the self this set of patterns and beliefs and memories this conglomeration of trauma that if you that you do not give up the substance you give up this set of beliefs and you will transcend it
00:44:54.000And integral to these ideas is the notion of surrender of self-will, which I have found almost word for word in like, you know, sort of some what you might term New Age thinkers, but also in pretty devout and esoterically underwritten Buddhist studies, trying to transcend self, transcend self.
00:45:11.000And, you know, I'm sometimes unable, Gabor, to identify which, who's, as they say in Twelve Steps, who's driving the bus.
00:45:19.000If I may say, what I hear in your The narration is a certain degree of lack of self-trust.
00:45:27.000Like you don't trust yourself to make the right decision.
00:45:30.000And I can understand why anybody with a serious history of substance addiction might have that suspicion of, you know, which part of me wants to do this?
00:45:41.000The part that really is committed to healing or just the part that wants to space out and have a better, beautiful experience?
00:45:48.000This is why I talked about the importance of preparation beforehand.
00:45:52.000Because it would take some conversation with somebody like you to discern where your interest in a psychic experience might even come from.
00:46:00.000We might very well come to the conversation and, you know, Russell, let me issue the public invitation.
00:46:07.000Every time you want to have that conversation, just give me a call and we'll have a Zoom talk about it.
00:46:11.000Not for public consumption, but just for you and I.
00:47:17.000You know, I'm only saying, what was it that I know?
00:47:19.000Now, how did I find out about this stuff?
00:47:22.000After my book on addiction in the Realm of Hunger Ghosts was published, I would travel talking about the book, and people would say, what do you know about the healing of addiction in Ayahuasca?
00:50:01.000And I've seen it over and over again in so many others.
00:50:03.000Jung's correspondence with the founder of the 12-step program, Bill Wilson, included the interesting observation that the requirement for recovery from substance dependency, in this instance alcoholism, was a spiritual experience And then the ongoing support of a like-minded community.
00:50:23.000And I can imagine that that would be helpful in integrating the kind of epiphanies that you're describing.
00:50:29.000We will go to questions for the audience for like sort of 20 minutes.
00:50:31.000I just want to say this thing because it came out, it's very personal, I suppose.
00:50:35.000When you've had this relationship that I have had with appetite, how do you, Gabor, how do I, Gabor, discern between The appetites that are being guided by what we might call higher purpose, higher case self versus lower case self, and the just sort of the ongoing will and wants.
00:50:57.000Have you any experience or understanding?
00:51:00.000Because I still feel powerful will and I'm sometimes unable to identify when this is the kind of shack the rising service of a higher entity type energy,
00:51:12.000and when it's just, well, I would like that, and I'm gonna do whatever it takes to get it.
00:51:15.000I can be very stubborn, obstinate, willful, self-centered.
00:51:47.000But I also learned to trust the process and the people I work with and the people whose hands I entrust myself in.
00:51:53.000And I also trust myself that when I go into that experience, it's not going to be for the purpose of pleasure or escape or temporary joy at the expense of my own true Self, that I'm actually going there to help remove that veil and to see an aspect of reality that otherwise I may have more trouble contacting.
00:52:23.000And again that would take some conversation and that would actually take some conversation because I sense at least two parts of you here or maybe even three.
00:52:32.000One of them that urgent If you have a child desperate to escape suffering, showing up in the adult body of an addicted individual, you also have this deep desire for truth and transcendence and depth and divinity.
00:52:57.000And then you have at least a third persona who's trying to evaluate who's in charge here.
00:53:00.000So it would take a conversation to really get at who's really Whose call really do you want to follow?
00:53:16.000But that's a conversation that can be had, and I believe it is within you to arrive at the truth of it.
00:53:21.000At the end of each conversation, with yourself, maybe a guided one, but you'll arrive at, yeah, this is just the addict part of me wanting one more escape experience.
00:53:29.000Or no, this is the part of me that wants to go deeper.
00:53:35.000One way that we might make such a diagnosis is with some eternal verification and validation, particularly this is built into the sort of 12 step cultural experience that is coming only from inside you, then you are not really able to determine which of this inner familial system is in that particular instance, you know, providing the governing principle.
00:53:56.000And for clarity, I was inquiring not only with regard to the matter that we're discussing, but with all matters of appetite where Sometimes, when I'm not careful, my life just becomes the expression of want.
00:54:09.000Particularly, almost within the domain, Gabor, of your first book, Hungry Ghosts.
00:54:16.000Like, all I want is this thing that wants filling up and it will stop at nothing.
00:54:23.000Well, let me jump in and say something.
00:54:25.000You did this little routine a while ago, which was very entertaining, I'm going to God and transcend and transform and burning bush.
00:55:29.000I'm not telling you to do psychedelics, but the question that you're asking about which part of you is driving the boat here, that answer you owe to yourself, because there's a part of you that Wants to serve the world.
00:55:45.000And part of your fascination, but sort of an anxious fascination with psychedelics, is there's a part of you that really wants to know, maybe this would enhance my capacity to fulfill my mission on earth.
00:55:59.000I'm not saying therefore you should do it, but I'm saying you've got that same tension.
00:56:04.000So what I'm saying to you is, like you said to me, that you're not writing this book for you, you're not asking this question just for yourself.
00:56:14.000Yes, fear not for I have redeemed you, I have called you by your name, you are mine, Isaiah.
00:56:19.000We can be free of fear when we surrender to the purpose, when we don't exist anymore, when we belong to God, then there is no self and then we're cool.
00:56:27.000Gabor, I'm very grateful to you for joining us.
00:56:30.000I feel that you help to ferry people across.
00:56:32.000I recognize in you great suffering and great beauty and great love and I feel it when I'm around you and I think everybody feels it.
00:56:40.000I feel that you are a great teacher and you bring wisdom in an accessible way and you are never As far as I can tell, pious or condescending, and it seems to me that, you know, what I know wounded people need, speaking as one, is of course we need instruction, and of course we need guidance, but above all, we need love.
00:57:19.000You know, I was pilloried as a right-wing demon.
00:57:23.000You want a goal that you can never attain, so you can always move closer to the goal.
00:57:30.000Welcome to a new episode of System Update.
00:57:32.000Since the last time you heard any of them in any earnest way engage in self-reflection, what is it that we did to lose the trust and faith of the public?