Dr. Dennis McKenna is an American ethnopharmacologist, lecturer, and author. He is a founding board member and director of the Hefter Research Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to the use and exploration of psychedelic medicines. Dr. McKenna received his PhD from the University of British Columbia and worked as a post-doc at the National Institute of Mental Health and at Stanford. In his early career, he was the brother of Terence McKenna, who believed that the human relationship with psychedelic plants played a major role in our cognitive and social evolution. He was a founding member of the McKenna Academy for Natural Philosophy, which is dedicated to education about psychedelics and plant medicines. In 2016, he and I first met some years ago, in 2016, at a conference hosted by Mind Matters, where we shared our views on the significance, the potential significance, of altered states of consciousness. Now, eight years later, we re back together again, and Dennis is a much more well-known figure in the psychedelic community. He s been working with the International Society for Psychedelic Research (ISPRR), which is a group dedicated to understanding psychedelics, plant medicines, and their use in everyday life. In this episode, Dennis talks about what it means to be a psychedelicist, and what it s like to be involved in psychedelic research, and how he s been involved in psychedelics in the past 40 years, and in the present, in the future, as well as what he s up to these days, and why he s not paying attention to the safety of psychedelics anymore. Thank you for listening to this episode! Daily Wire Plus is a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety. Go to Dailywireplus.org/Dailywireplus to find out more about Dailywire Plus and how you can be a part of the movement to make a brighter future you deserve a brighter tomorrow you deserve. Subscribe to Daily Wireplus. Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, a podcast that helps you be a better version of yourself in the world by listening to the best of what matters to you, no matter where you are in the most authentic version of your truth and your most authentic voice and your truth is the most beautiful and most authentic and most beautiful, most authentic, most uplifting, most authentically authentic, and most impactful, most profound and most uploved, most influential, your most important, most inspiring, most inspirational, most effective, most beautiful.
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00:00:57.420Hello everyone. Thank you for tuning in and watching and listening.
00:01:12.360I'm very pleased today to have with me Dr. Dennis McKenna.
00:01:17.200He's an American ethnopharmacologist, lecturer, and author.
00:01:22.580He is a founding board member and director of ethnopharmacology at Hefter Research Institute,
00:01:29.460a non-profit organization dedicated to the use and exploration of psychedelic medicines.
00:01:37.060Dr. McKenna received his PhD from the University of British Columbia and worked as a postdoc
00:01:42.880at the National Institute of Mental Health and at Stanford.
00:01:45.920He is the brother of Terence McKenna, who believed that the human relationship with psychedelic plants
00:01:52.660played a major role in our cognitive and social evolution.
00:01:56.320He was a very well-known figure to denizens of the modern psychedelic movement.
00:02:01.860Dr. McKenna and I first met some years ago, 2016, in Toronto at a conference hosted by Mind Matters
00:02:08.940at the University of Toronto, where we shared our views on the significance,
00:02:13.700the potential significance of altered states of consciousness.
00:02:16.920It's really good to see you again, Dennis.
00:02:18.760Thanks very much for agreeing to do this podcast.
00:14:54.260DMT is a short acting psychedelic, but it's not, uh, orally active by itself.
00:15:03.000If you consume DMT, if you drink a tea that contains DMT or, you know, just eat DMT or
00:15:11.620whatever, it's not active because there are enzymes in the gut, monoamine oxidases that
00:15:18.140will inactivate DMT before it's ever absorbed in the active form.
00:15:23.840What indigenous people have done when they prepare ayahuasca, they combine it with another plant
00:15:30.800that contains monoamine oxidase inhibitors, this class of compounds called beta-carbolines,
00:15:38.460very potent, very selective MAO inhibitors.
00:15:42.500So if you make a, a beverage, a drink or decoction is really the technical term with a plant that
00:15:50.820contains DMT and a plant that contains these beta-carbolines, then it becomes orally active.
00:15:58.340And instead of a 10 to 20 minute experience, which is what you get when you smoke DMT or
00:16:07.160vape DMT, they do that now these days, or inject it even, you get about 20 to 30 minutes of an
00:16:15.740experience. But in the oral form, it stretches it out to six or seven hours. So it's a very different
00:16:23.120experience. It's not as intense, but in some way it's deeper. It's more profound. Because the thing
00:16:30.900with taking DMT by a parental route, other than through the gut, it is profound. It's very intense.
00:16:41.100It's also so fast that by the time you're, you know, by the time you're just beginning to sort
00:16:51.340of get to the place, it's already fading. You know, so you come back with not a lot of information,
00:16:58.340kind of a sense of astonishment, but not a lot of hard data. So the idea of ayahuasca is you get to
00:17:05.260spend more time in that place, in that altered state, and there's a chance to learn more.
00:17:12.260Now, how did this come about? The question always comes up, how did these indigenous people
00:17:20.080figure out this combination? One plant containing beta-carbolines and another containing DMT.
00:17:28.760Out of the 80,000 or so species in the Amazon, how did they stumble on this one combination?
00:17:38.040Was it trial and error? Or how? If you talk to the people, they will say, well, the plants told us.
00:17:48.980You know, but to a Western scientist, this doesn't make a lot of sense. You know, the plants told you?
00:17:56.160What are you talking about? You know, actually, I think the real story is a little more prosaic in
00:18:05.220a sense that in our ESPD 50 conference, we had an anthropologist, Dr. Manolo Torres, who presented on
00:18:17.860this. And the fact is that at a certain point, maybe a thousand years ago, possibly a little earlier
00:18:31.660than that, there was a very active, there were different cultures that were living sort of in
00:18:38.680proximity to each other in the region where Colombia, Venezuela, and Peru now come together.
00:18:45.460These cultures were very experimentally oriented toward plants. They had shamanic traditions.
00:18:54.060And they used, they were also very active in making chicha. They were essentially beer producers.
00:19:04.840They distilled, or they didn't distill them, but they had different fermented beverages prepared from
00:19:11.320fruits and grains and things like that. And they had many different kinds of chicha, mostly prepared
00:19:20.400from manioc. And they were also experimentalists. They were like craft brewers today, sort of. You know,
00:19:31.760craft brewers will, they have their beer, but then they'll just reach for anything on the shelf or
00:19:37.920an ingredient will come up and they'll say, oh, let's make a craft brew with kava in it or with some
00:19:46.440other plant. Let's make something interesting. Well, the people making the chicha had the same sort of
00:19:54.420curiosity. And in their medicinal pharmacopoeia, they had the snuffs, right? That's the other way in the
00:20:02.840Amazon that the DMT is used in the form of snuff. And they had these snuffs. They had these anitid
00:20:09.780anthra snuffs, which are, don't require MAO inhibitors because you take them, you know, as a snuff.
00:20:18.080They also had banisteriopsis, which is the vine that contains the beta carbolates. They use that
00:20:26.660separately as a medicinal plant for various reasons. And it has some psychoactivity. Basically,
00:20:35.060I think they stumbled on this formulation. You know, the plants were in the mix, as it were,
00:20:43.420and they stumbled on this formulation. But it wasn't entirely a trial and error. You know,
00:20:53.080it was more like an educated guess, not really from the standpoint of biochemistry. They didn't
00:21:00.640think in terms of monoamine oxidase inhibition and that sort of thing. But they were familiar with the
00:21:07.280effects of these different plants. And they thought, well, what happens if we mix them? You know,
00:21:13.480and they did. They had a spectacular result.
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00:22:25.280I was talking to Brian Murarescu, I think it's probably more than a year ago. He wrote The
00:22:34.020Immortality Key, and you know, he was, although a lawyer, he was, the book is about ethnopharmacology
00:22:41.600in many regards, and it sounds to me like the account that you're making of what happened in
00:22:47.100the Amazon jungle sounds to me very much like what seemed to happen in ancient Greek culture with their
00:22:53.260formulation of various psychedelic wines. That's right. So all these different people were just
00:22:59.460brewing all these different concoctions and experimenting to see what produced the most
00:23:04.380remarkable effect. And in Greece, they seem to have stumbled across something that
00:23:10.240was perhaps LSD-based or essentially LSD-based, whereas in the Amazon jungle, they came across both
00:23:18.180DMT and the chemical that inhibited its breakdown. And so it's very interesting to see that that
00:23:25.500is likely the case in both those disparate cultures.
00:23:28.660Right. Well, shamanism, which is what we're talking about here, shamans are experimentalists,
00:23:36.700you know, and many of our even most important medicines, again, we can point to arrow poisons.
00:23:44.180I mentioned arrow poisons before, and arrow poisons are not regarded as medicines in the context in
00:23:53.280which they're used. You know, they're used as poisons for hunting. On the other hand,
00:23:59.520the ingredients in arrow poisons do have medicinal properties that have been recognized in the 20th
00:24:06.800century and they're important. They're important medicines for muscular surgery and this sort of
00:24:13.580thing. They block the neuromuscular junction. And the reason I mention arrow poisons is that that's
00:24:20.560another example of people, what I like to characterize as mucking around with plants, you know, throw things
00:24:30.660together and see what happens, you know, and that's true of the psychoactive plants and these different
00:24:36.840chicha formulations that they have, or the arrow poisons, which are not just one ingredient, they're
00:24:46.000complex mixtures of many kinds of psychoactive or, you know, more or less toxic plants. So
00:24:54.060it was curiosity driven, you know, that the people immersed in this Amazonian biome, this chemical
00:25:05.120ecology, if you will, of complex secondary plant products and driven by curiosity, you know, what
00:25:16.420happens if we take plant A and plant B and combine them or plant A, B, C, and D and mix them all
00:25:23.420together and what goes, what happens. So in that sense, their approach is very scientific, you know, because
00:25:31.360science really, discovery is driven by curiosity. These folks were curious. They didn't keep notes. They
00:25:42.100didn't write lab reports, you know, what knowledge that they had, they transmitted through the culture,
00:25:50.180through oral traditions. And as, as this knowledge became, you know, more widely disseminated,
00:25:58.120other groups began to also take the core knowledge, but then expand on it because they had species,
00:26:06.960you know, in their biomes that maybe not were originally around. And that's the way, that's the way I
00:26:14.520think folk knowledge works. It's, it's a, it's an evolutionary process. It's a process of sharing
00:26:22.180information and accumulating this knowledge that then is, you know, transmitted through oral traditions and,
00:26:32.980and through migrations and this sort of thing. So it's, it's not formal science, but sort of the impulse
00:26:40.980that leads to this is curiosity, discovery. And that is at the core of science, in my opinion.
00:26:50.280So I was, I got a, I want to tie a couple of things together here. I recently talked with Dr.
00:26:56.680Carl Friston, who works at University College in London, and he's formulated a theory of cognitive
00:27:03.080function that's very influential, or elaborated a theory of cognitive function that's very influential.
00:27:08.720And I want to run it by you because I think it's relevant to, well, it's definitely relevant
00:27:13.940perhaps to your interests in, in, in the effects of psychedelics. So Friston and other observers have
00:27:21.700posited that we, we look at the world through a hierarchy of concepts and that this is necessary
00:27:29.120and that AI systems do exact, do the same thing. Um, and that, that the nested, the hierarchically
00:27:39.400nested concepts range from those that are trivial, that you would just use in a throwaway manner,
00:27:44.940let's say, maybe your opinion about what you're going to do in the next 10 minutes might fall into
00:27:49.460that category to those that are, uh, that are the profound axioms upon which you predicate
00:27:56.600your life. So for example, if you're married, one of your axiomatic conceptions or, or presumptions
00:28:04.160or even perceptions might be the faithfulness of your partner and the willingness of that person
00:28:10.200and you to continue to engage in your long-term, um, relationship. And then you, so then imagine a
00:28:19.400hierarchy of presumptions such that some presumptions are much more fundamental than others. Or in other
00:28:26.440words, upon some presumptions, many other presumptions depend. And then for some other presumptions,
00:28:34.480they're, like I said, they're just the moment, the, the opinion of the moment and easily replaceable.
00:28:41.400Now then imagine that there's a gradient of information processing so that some neurological
00:28:49.160mechanisms process the relatively trivial conceptions and others process the more profound and deeper
00:28:57.760presumptions. And then imagine that's laid across the hemisphere so that the left hemisphere
00:29:03.720more or less deals with the particulars and the right hemisphere deals with the more fundamental
00:29:11.120presumptions. And then imagine further, and this has been reasonably well documented now, that variants
00:29:18.380of serotonin affect different levels of that hierarchy of conception so that the serotonergic systems that
00:29:27.980are affected by psychedelics affect the deep presumptions affect the deep presumptions and the serotonin mechanisms
00:29:35.380that are affected by antidepressants stabilize the entire structure. And so what Friston's work along with
00:29:43.020Carhart-Harris is indicating, there is others working on this as well, that psychedelics induce entropy
00:29:51.380into the conceptual hierarchy at the most fundamental level. And so, and maybe that's associated, the, the hemispheric
00:30:01.980specialization element is something that I added to that net set of presuppositions, partly because of
00:30:09.580investigations I've done into hemispheric specialization, but also because of the work of Ian McGilchrist,
00:30:14.580who's been positing such things. And so it looks like the psychedelics
00:30:20.040affect systems that are naturally affected by high levels of stress, because when you're extremely
00:30:28.380stressed, maybe that's a time to revisit some of your fundamental presumptions, because something has
00:30:34.740gone wrong in your life so that you're fundamentally stressed. And so, in some sense, what the psychedelics seem
00:30:41.020to do is mimic the process of revolutionary cognitive adaptation. Okay, so that's only half the
00:30:48.600question. But then, then I have another question, though, and that all strikes me as highly plausible,
00:30:53.520except for one thing. And this is a stumbling block for me, and maybe you can shed some light on it.
00:30:59.100I know this is a complicated question, but I read Rick Strassman's book, The Spirit Molecule, after meeting you,
00:31:06.080I believe. And I know Dr. Strassman, who's a pretty, let's say, mainstream psychiatrist,
00:31:13.860was quite shocked, to put it mildly, by what his research subjects were reporting as a consequence of
00:31:22.560being administered DMT. They would report being shot out of their body, and then going to other places,
00:31:31.180places, and encountering what were essentially alien beings of one form or another. And when Strassman would
00:31:38.400suggest to such people that this was like a dream, or maybe they were encountering something akin to a
00:31:45.460Jungian archetype, they would say, no, you don't understand, this was more real than being there, than being in
00:31:51.940reality itself. And so, so this is the thing that doesn't fit for me, is that, and I know that in the shamanic
00:32:00.000rituals that are associated with ayahuasca, people often report encounters with entities. And I don't
00:32:07.560understand how that, if that's true, and I believe it to be true phenomenologically, I don't understand
00:32:12.900how that fits in with the idea that what the psychedelics are doing are loosening the constraints
00:32:19.720on our most fundamental presuppositions. And so, sorry for the tremendously long build-up to that
00:32:27.820question, but it's a complicated question. And I'm wondering what you think about, well, first of all,
00:32:32.820the theory that psychedelics do loosen up our conceptions at the most fundamental level, but
00:32:37.660then how you square that with the reports that people make continually of meeting entities of one
00:32:44.080form or another while they're, while they're under the influence of these chemicals.
00:32:48.360Right. Well, how long have we got here? I mean, it's going to take a while to unpack this.
00:32:58.180Good, good. I'm looking forward to it, man.
00:33:01.040As to the first, the first part of this, the Carhart-Harris notion that psychedelics, I think
00:33:11.580one way they put it is that they disable temporarily this so-called default mode network,
00:33:19.920you know, which is kind of the framework that we construct. I like to call it the reality
00:33:27.440hallucination. It's the model that the brain creates, a model reality that we inhabit. You know,
00:33:36.940we don't live, we don't inhabit reality itself because it would be too overwhelming. What we
00:33:45.480experience is a schematic or a model of reality that is much less information dense than reality
00:33:56.060itself. And the brain does this in order so that we can cope with it. You know, a lot of what the
00:34:04.240brain does, as you well know, you're a neuroscientist, at least to some degree, you know that what the
00:34:10.460brain does is filter information out. There are gating mechanisms. A lot of information from the
00:34:17.900external world through our sensory neural interface never makes it into the brain because it's, it's not,
00:34:25.540I mean, it's not that it's not important. It's just extraneous to our construction of this model
00:34:35.980of reality that we have to inhabit just in order to navigate, you know, in order to function. And what
00:34:44.680psychedelics do is they temporarily disable those gating mechanisms. They just throw the gates wide open,
00:34:53.460you know, and you get flooded with all this information that normally is not accessible. And
00:35:01.100that can be a very useful thing from a therapeutic angle because we can get trapped in our default mode
00:35:09.100network, in our reality hallucination, if you will, our reality model. It can be dysfunctional. It can be
00:35:18.020not helpful, you know, and then you get things like addiction and PTSD and so on. And I think,
00:35:26.060I think something, I think that the core of the therapeutic use of the therapeutic promise,
00:35:36.020if you will, of psychedelics is they let you step out of this reference frame temporarily.
00:35:41.320Look at it as though, you know, as though you're separated. And it helps give you insights as to,
00:35:50.360you know, your, your existential situation. So it enables you to look at trauma or addiction or
00:35:58.320depression or things like that from a different angle, from a different perspective that normally we
00:36:04.520can't because we're trapped inside this, this default mode network framework. And I think,
00:36:11.720I think that's helpful. And I think that that lets you re-engineer it in a certain way. And, and,
00:36:19.800and this is actually reflected on the neurological level because we know that psilocybin, things like this
00:36:26.680can actually, you know, lead to changes in neural architecture and connectivity and all of these
00:36:34.280things. Neuroplasticity is the, is the, is the sort of overarching term for this. And it's really,
00:36:45.080so you disrupt, you blow up the default mode network, but it, the brain is resilient. The brain is always
00:36:53.760going to tend toward equilibrium, right? So it's going to fall back together, but it's going to fall
00:37:00.160back together in a more functional way. I think it's very similar. In fact, maybe I think it's quite
00:37:06.320similar to what happens when you reboot your computer, you get this big reset essentially, and it comes back
00:37:16.240together, but it works more efficiently because it's, you purged all the cludge out of it that builds up in, in this
00:37:25.680system. And in that sense, it's very much like sort of purging your computer when you reset it, you get rid of all
00:37:32.480that stuff. And it works more efficiently. So that's important, I think, for the therapeutic, that's, that's really the
00:37:41.680therapeutic promise. Almost everything that psychedelics, that people are excited about
00:37:48.480psychedelics from a therapeutic standpoint, I think has to do with this ability to, you know,
00:37:57.600first of all, disable and then reconstruct the default mode network in a way that's more functional and,
00:38:04.960and, and, and, you know, more, more, well, in simply in a way that's more functional, less, less
00:38:13.040dysfunctional. So I think that's what's going on. Now, when you blow it up, especially with something like
00:38:24.640DMT, which is where you get more than other places, but ayahuasca, these other things as well,
00:38:32.960you sometimes have a feeling or you get a definite sense that
00:38:42.560you're in a place where, as people say, it seems more real than real. And there are entities there,
00:38:50.400or what's perceived to be entities. And you're in communication with them. And they are
00:38:59.200very interested in communicating and transmitting information.
00:39:07.760I mean, so a number of questions come up about this, right? People have these experience,
00:39:13.040experiences, not always, not always on all psychedelics, not every time, but under some
00:39:21.600circumstances, people have these experiences. I just came from this conference in, in the UK
00:39:28.880a couple of weeks ago. So I'm well primed for this because this, this was the, this was the,
00:39:35.760the topic of the conference. It was called the sentient other. And everyone was presenting their
00:39:42.320ideas about the entities. I am, I mean, my, my first, you know, I, I mean, I don't think you can take
00:39:54.560psychedelics and not be open-minded. I think that one thing that psychedelics do, do teach us is
00:40:03.280how little we know. It's a, it's a useful reminder of how little we know
00:40:09.920about the universe, about reality, about the way things are, you know. And, and in that sense,
00:40:16.720it can be, it can be very useful because science, especially, and scientists particularly, tend to be
00:40:25.120arrogant. You know, there's a, there's a tendency for science to say, we pretty much have this thing
00:40:33.120figured out, you know. And, and psychedelics are a reminder that no, actually, we have only a very
00:40:41.360tiny slice of it figured out. And even that is subject to question, because that's the nature of
00:40:48.480science, right? You never prove a theory. All you can do is not disprove it, you know. So we, we,
00:40:55.280we understand in great detail, a very small piece of reality. But there's an infinitude of reality
00:41:03.120beyond that, that we know basically nothing. So we need science, science and scientists should be humble.
00:41:12.480They should always keep that in mind, how little we know. That said though, so with that preamble,
00:41:19.440I do have to say, you know, reductionism or skepticism, or what they come sometimes call
00:41:29.040Occam's razor approach, the principle of parsimony, is a useful tool in science. Because it's, it is,
00:41:38.400it is a statement that the, what explains the data, the simplest model that explains the data,
00:41:50.720let's start there, you know. And then it's, it's shortcomings, it's limitations, it's deficiencies
00:41:58.320will come to light as we, as we begin to investigate phenomena. And eventually we're going to, but,
00:42:04.880but science starts with hypotheses about the way things are. What my granddad used to call how the
00:42:12.640boar ate the cabbage, you know. It, it, it begins with theories about the way a certain aspect of
00:42:20.800reality is. You create a hypothesis, you test it against the observed data. And if something comes up
00:42:29.280that the data, you know, can't, that, that your model can't explain, then you say, okay, the, the,
00:42:38.000the model is deficient. We either have to modify the model. Maybe we have to blow up the model. Maybe
00:42:43.760it's completely invalid. Usually that's not the way it works. I mean, you tweak it, you change,
00:42:50.720you know, a thing here, a thing there, and you make it fit better with what, you know, what we presume
00:42:57.680that we know, right? When it comes to entities,
00:43:04.720here's the, here's the thing. I know that people say,
00:43:09.360oh no, this is real. This is more real than reality itself. But you know, people are not
00:43:16.160epistemologists. People are not qualified to say what is more real than reality itself.
00:43:22.880You know, I mean, people may think it's more real. It may seem more real than reality itself.
00:43:30.400You know, we've all had vivid dreams, right? And we wake up and we think, oh my God,
00:43:35.760you know, that was so real. But you know, it was a dream, right? Because you woke up and it's not there.
00:43:42.480And so I think that the judgments made by people who encounter these entities,
00:43:53.280you know, the fact that they have this impression that these things are real,
00:43:59.680real and more real than real itself does not necessarily make it so.
00:44:06.880Okay. So, so let me, okay. So let me, let me ask you this. So, um, obviously when we dream,
00:44:14.320as you pointed out, we can encounter entities of our imagination. Those are other dream characters.
00:44:20.960I had a client once who, who was a lucid dreamer and a very good one.
00:44:25.360Right. And she could actually ask her dream characters, what they represented symbolically,
00:44:32.240and they would tell her. Right. And so, okay. So let me, let me modify the question that I posed
00:44:37.680to you before and tell me what you think of this. So we know that the psychedelics produce an increment
00:44:44.160in trait openness. And we know with the site, with the psilocybin in particular, that if people have a
00:44:49.920mystical experience with psilocybin once or a couple of times, that their level of trait openness,
00:44:56.640which is the creativity dimension increases by wonders, one standard deviation, and that appears more
00:45:01.920or less permanent. So we could say that, that one of the things the psychedelics do by loosening the strictures
00:45:10.640on the more, on the more fundamental realms of conception is place people into a state that's
00:45:17.440analogous to the state of creativity. And so if you're creative, you can shift conceptions. And the,
00:45:24.880the downside of that is you shift them when it's not necessary. And the upside is now and then you
00:45:29.520shift them in a direction that's extremely productive. And so that shifting becomes more possible
00:45:36.720under the influence of psychedelics. And then we could say that, well, it's possible that one of the
00:45:44.000sources of creativity might be the capacity of the human imagination to generate fictional
00:45:54.160personalities. We do that in dreams. Obviously your brain is, we would say, your brain is producing these
00:46:00.480fictional characters that have many of the attributes of real characters. When you dream,
00:46:06.000you can see them, you can hear them, you can interact with them. You don't have immediate access to their
00:46:12.000contents, contents of consciousness. They seem like autonomous beings. And so we could say,
00:46:17.520maybe what happens when you're experimenting with psychedelics is that you enter a dreamscape
00:46:24.960that's populated by creatures of the imagination that have a certain degree of autonomy and the influx of
00:46:32.720information that's also characteristic of the psychedelic experience produces that sense of hyper
00:46:38.640reality that's then attributed to the characters themselves. Does that seem plausible? I know it's just
00:46:45.600a hypothesis, obviously, but it is. Well, it does. I mean, obviously all we're doing is trying to construct
00:46:56.240hypotheses, you know, that fit the data, that fit what we know so far, always with the caveat that we
00:47:03.680don't know much and the picture is incomplete and so on. But here's the thing. I think, I mean,
00:47:12.320the question perpetually that comes up with these entities is you encounter these entities
00:47:19.280in the psychedelic state. And then the question is, are they real?
00:47:24.800But I think you have to step back from that. And first of all, you have to say, well, what do you
00:47:28.640mean by real? Well, yeah, that's a problem, man. Yeah. That's a big problem.
00:47:34.640I mean, my sort of default position is anything that you experience is real. It's real because it
00:47:43.840can be experienced. But does it originate within? Does it come from the collective unconscious? Does
00:47:51.120it come from out there in some other dimension? And do these terms even make sense? I mean, you just get
00:47:59.280into an epistemological mess because how can you even posit there is an outside? I mean, one thing
00:48:08.400that psychedelics do is they teach you it's all one. You know, there's no separation between the self
00:48:15.520and the cosmos at large and all that. So it's like it's a non-starter. It's a zero-sum game to,
00:48:24.160you know, maybe it's more useful to say rather than to say, are they real? You know, because they're
00:48:35.360real enough that they're experienced. So in that sense, they're real, whether they're inside or
00:48:40.640outside, originate from the self or some other dimension. Maybe the question we should ask is,
00:48:46.400is the information that they transmit useful? Can we learn from it? Can they teach us something that
00:48:54.800we could not otherwise know? You know, and that seems to me potentially a more useful question.
00:49:03.360You know, and my brother was all about this. Like he would take high doses of mushrooms,
00:49:11.520you know, by himself. And in total darkness, that was his formula, you know, heroic doses in
00:49:19.200total darkness. And he would have these dialogues, these conversations with these entities. And it was
00:49:27.120all about, how do I know you're real? Or more like, can you tell me something that I cannot possibly
00:49:37.440know? And if you do that, I'll know you're real. And they would say, well, we don't care if you think
00:49:43.200we're real or not, you know. But, and then again, how do you define something that you can't possibly
00:49:54.880know? You know, and if they say, I mean, you can say, give me, you know, the square root of a large
00:50:00.400number. And if it comes back and it turns out it's correct, as trivial as that is, that would demonstrate
00:50:06.000that it, that it was real information they're, they're giving to you, but it still doesn't really.
00:50:13.520No, you know, no. And there are mathematical geniuses who can do that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
00:50:19.200Well, okay. So let, let me push, let me push on that a little bit. I, everything that you said so
00:50:24.400far seems to me to be rock solid. So with regards to these entities again, so I was reminded of two
00:50:34.960things. I mean, Carl Jung spent years talking to entities of his imagination, documenting that
00:50:42.480in books like the Red Book. He made that a visionary practice and had illuminating conversations with
00:50:50.320specters of his own imagination. But of course, he also believed that there was a collective element
00:50:54.640to those. And so you might say that, well, to, to the degree, for example, that we're each inhabited by
00:51:03.040dark impulses, we might say, well, we're each prey to the same demonic forces. That's one way of thinking
00:51:11.840about it. And they're the same and they're transpersonal and they exist to some degree
00:51:17.040cross-culturally and they span time. And so these creatures of imagination can have histories and
00:51:24.000can inhabit us in some real sense. And they can do that collectively. And then so, so that complicates
00:51:31.040things tremendously. But then I would also ask in your investigations, your long-term investigations of
00:51:38.240multiple ayahuasca experiences across different people, are there any commonalities of entities
00:51:46.160that strike you as particularly significant? I know people talk about clown figures, for example,
00:51:52.160mechanical clowns in the DMT state. Like the elf machines and this sort of thing. Elves. Yeah,
00:51:58.720yeah, exactly. The elf machines. And of course, that's, that's complicated too, because once one
00:52:03.840person starts talking about it, that might increase the probability that other people would experience it.
00:52:08.560But have you seen commonalities of entity experience that would suggest something,
00:52:15.040the existence of something that is at least transpersonal, even though it might also still be
00:52:20.800subjective, whatever that means in such a context? Yes, yes, I, I, I have, and I think this exists in
00:52:28.480these, in these, in these shamanic traditions, uh, and the ayahuasca is a particularly good, uh, good example of, of that, you know, uh, uh, uh, and, and, and, again, I, I, I have not seen anything that convinces me, I mean, I'm basically a Jungian, you know,
00:52:52.800you know, so I believe in the collective unconscious as this, uh, it's a good model, this, this transpersonal realm of shared archetypes and all that. And then there's the individual unconscious. I haven't seen anything in the reports of the psychonauts that would, that would not fit into that model that says, oh, well, this doesn't really fit. This is outside that model. And it, and, and so that model's not valid. I haven't seen that. I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I
00:53:22.780I think that it is, I think basically these entities, they are experienced as real, but they come from the collective unconscious. And if you, if you look at, uh, the ayahuasca traditions, uh, and there is a, uh, an interesting book here that, that's very illustrative of this, which many people know about. It's, uh, it's the book that, uh, uh, you're familiar with the artist Pablo Avarengo,
00:53:50.780Pablo Avarengo, the, the visionary Peruvian artist. He and Luis Eduardo Luna wrote a, uh, a book. He painted his visions, right? He remembered all his visions in perfect detail, painted these visions.
00:54:07.780And Eduardo and he collaborated on a book called Ayahuasca visions, the religious iconography of a Peruvian shaman. Uh, it's still in print. The book is remarkable because it's, it's typical coffee table style format with full color illustrations of, of the visions on one page.
00:54:35.440And Eduardo's descriptions in English on the facing page, dissecting all the elements of the entities and everything else that you see in these visions.
00:54:48.320As narrated by Pablo, I mean, Pablo, you know, Eduardo Luna was, was basically just the transcriber, but, uh, uh, Pablo described in great detail, dissected each one of these paintings and the, and there are about, I guess, 20 or so of these, of these paintings in this book.
00:55:12.600And it's basically a course in vegetalismo. It's talking about vegetalismo, this, this practice, which is really a, a, amalgam of many indigenous traditions and, and kind of mushed together into a mestizo tradition.
00:55:31.000But he describes, uh, these entities, you know, they all have names, they have a particular appearance, the, and, you know, the plants, the animals, even, you know, there are UFOs, there are all kinds of things in this, in these visions.
00:55:50.440Pablo describes every one of them, and any ayahuasquero in, in training, work, you know, in apprenticing under, under Pablo or any of these traditional, uh, ayahuasqueros, they're going to see these things, you know?
00:56:14.140And what they see is going to be similar, you know?
00:56:17.880So it's sort of like, it's sort of like, uh, Terrence's, uh, you know, self-transforming elf machines.
00:56:26.260I mean, Terrence says that, you know, he has a huge voice in the meme sphere.
00:56:32.560Pretty soon's everybody seen self-transforming elf machines.
00:56:36.640You know, people, that's what people see.
00:56:39.060Well, you could imagine, you know, the, the, the, the, the brain is obviously a, an organ that can produce personalities.
00:56:49.940Because it produces our personalities.
00:56:52.400And it's, it seems to me that it's highly probable that the way that we, we organize information is in the form of personality.
00:57:02.060So, I mean, and I certainly got a fair bit of this from thinking about Jung's work.
00:57:06.960I mean, if you're inhabited by a rage state, which I think is a good way of thinking about it, you might think, well, what form does the anger take?
00:57:17.200And the answer is, well, it has a personality.
00:57:20.220You might act like enraged people that you've seen in movies.
00:57:24.180You might act like enraged people that you've seen in your life.
00:57:27.940The rage has a goal, which is the crushing of the opponent, let's say.
00:57:31.780And it has perceptions and it has action patterns.
00:57:34.740It's a personality and you could conceptualize the rage spirit as Aries, the god of war.
00:57:41.560And that would be a perfectly reasonable way of looking at it.
00:57:44.800And it could be that all of our micro perceptions and all of our macro perceptions, for that matter, have the intrinsic form of personality.
00:57:54.260And that that's partly what we encounter when we dream.
00:57:58.140And so I was thinking, too, you know, that as the gods, if the gods are aggregates of micro personalities, that might be one way of thinking about it.
00:58:06.660They're micro personalities that are aggregated within societies across time and then can be apprehended collectively to some degree.
00:58:16.740As you move towards a monotheistic vision of the world, what you're moving toward is the ultimate aggregation of all these socially modified micro personalities into one conceptual scheme.
00:58:30.940And that would parallel that hierarchy of cognition and conception that, well, we already discussed that people like Fristin are working on.
00:58:39.100And so it isn't that surprising, I suppose, if you think about it that way, if the brain is a personality producing machine, so to speak, that there are certain states that you can encounter under the influence of chemical alteration where you encounter those personalities, even those that have some degree of autonomy.
00:58:58.440I mean, rage has some degree of autonomy, and so does lust, and so does thirst, and so does hunger.
00:59:21.600I mean, this totally fits within the Jungian model, you know, that within the collective unconscious, there are these, I forget the exact term that he used, but these complexes, almost like autonomous personalities.
00:59:42.420You know, and multiple personality disorder is a recognized thing, and I guess in some ways, all of us have it in a certain sense, in that we have, you know, we do have these multiple personalities, but they, like rage, lust, and so on, but they don't take over the controls.
01:00:06.160You know, most of the time, you know, most of the time, you know, most of the time, they're suppressed to a certain degree, but they're always there, and they're influencing whoever it is in the cabin, at the bridge that's running the thing, and in pathology, they can take over, you know, and then you've got a problem.
01:00:24.200Well, they do with Tourette's syndrome.
01:00:29.800And, you know, and you can think about the relationship between these motivational states, like rage or anxiety, let's say, that are transpersonal, and that everyone experiences them.
01:00:41.760We know that with the psychedelic experience, that set is very important, and that if someone is in a negative emotional state, or situation that elicits fear and, let's say, rage,
01:00:53.900and then they embark upon a psychedelic experience, that that particular state can be magnified beyond belief, and so that's a good way to have a hellish experience.
01:01:04.100And so, you know, we do have to remember, and I know, of course, you do, that the psychedelic experiences that we're talking about are ritualized so that an absolutely dreadful outcome is less probable.
01:01:18.620But you might say if it was just done randomly, it could easily be the magnification of a state of terror or a state of rage as the magnification as a state of enlightenment or bliss.
01:01:31.260So this is the importance of the ritual context.
01:01:36.180This is exactly that, what these traditions have grown around, is the idea that there needs to be an appropriate set and setting.
01:01:49.080There needs to be an appropriate set, the most important variable, certainly.
01:01:54.180And, you know, I sometimes say in my talks, I say, ayahuasca is a liquid.
01:02:00.680Ayahuasca will fill any vessel you create for it, you know, and hopefully the vessel is appropriate to, you know, to foster a positive experience and insights and all that.
01:02:14.760But we know that it's not always that way.
01:02:17.540You know, we know that, you know, again, like with any spiritual tradition where you're finding, where you're dealing with powerful spiritual forces,
01:02:33.640there are always bad apples, you know.
01:03:48.000Well, the same thing applies when you're looking for a psychotherapist.
01:03:51.440I mean, and in terms of the importance of set in relationship to positive transformation,
01:03:57.040I mean, Carl Rogers tried to lay out some of the preconditions for successful psychotherapy.
01:04:04.320And so, I'll just run through those because they're very much akin to the manner in which the stage needs to be set for a positive psychedelic experience.
01:04:14.500So, Rogers, essentially, I'm paraphrasing, but it's okay.
01:04:18.520So, first of all, the person who's coming to psychotherapy has to want to change.
01:04:25.500And that's actually something that's been hammered home by now generations of psychotherapeutic practitioners regardless of their theoretical school.
01:04:35.720That voluntary exposure to information that might have a transformative quality so that can be threatening, voluntary exposure is redemptive.
01:05:16.960You have to be willing to learn and change.
01:05:20.020You have to engage in truthful exploration and dialogue.
01:05:23.680And you have to be aiming for improvement.
01:05:26.960And if all of those things are there, then, well, in principle, the psychotherapeutic process can begin.
01:05:31.960And you might say, well, if all those things are there, then learning itself can begin.
01:05:37.380And it might be that the set that is being established at the beginning of a psychedelic experience is just precisely akin to establishing the preconditions for learning and personality expansion itself.
01:05:50.260Because, you know, in this conversation, you and I, well, look, we're sitting here.
01:05:54.860We trust each other for a variety of different reasons.
01:05:58.060We've met before, but I know of your reputation scientifically, and I trust your work.
01:06:04.160And so, we can embark on a creative dialogue that's hypothetically mutually redemptive because we're both going to learn something, and we can bring everyone else along for the ride.
01:06:18.480And I don't really see that as any different in some fundamental sense than establishing the proper set for a psychedelic experience or the proper preconditions for any relationship, including a therapeutic relationship.
01:07:09.020But you're bringing it to this very special situation.
01:07:13.040And then the other variables that are sort of in the background, not often mentioned but very important, are the dose and the medicine, you know,
01:07:23.080because that's part of this four-part dynamic of variables that's going to interact.
01:07:29.880And the most important thing about a therapeutic psychedelic session, really, like you say, it applies to any therapeutic session.
01:07:43.400It's, number one, you know, a safe setting, a setting where you feel you trust the other person,
01:07:53.980you feel that the situation is safe, not threatening.
01:08:02.880You do everything you can to make sure everything's kosher.
01:08:09.240And then at the critical moment, you just have to let go because that's an important thing.
01:08:13.760You have to say, okay, let go, you know.
01:08:19.080I mean, it's kind of like jumping off a cliff or out of a plane.
01:08:22.480I mean, you trust that the parachute is going to open at some point, you know, and you just have to accept that.
01:08:31.440Yeah, well, we do that while we're talking, you and I.
01:08:34.100I mean, because at the beginning of this podcast, neither of us knew what direction the conversation was going to take.
01:08:42.420But what we're doing, in some sense, is loosening up our cognitive structures.
01:08:47.340You and I both have some perspectives on what the psychedelic experience might consist of and what psychological transformation means.
01:08:54.940But we're willing to play with that to some degree.
01:08:57.800And so we're willing to open ourselves up to the transformative process that obtains during the course of what we try to make into a genuine dialogue.
01:09:08.680And so, and again, I do see that as exactly the, essentially exactly the same thing.
01:09:14.560And I think you can think about it in terms of classical virtue, in some sense.
01:09:19.040So what you want to do is bring an attitude of humility and courageous trust to the situation.
01:09:26.840And the humility would be, well, you know, good as I am, I probably still have a few things to learn.
01:09:32.640And the courageous trust is, well, if we undertake the process correctly, then the information that will be generated will actually be of benefit to everyone involved.
01:09:43.560But that's a statement of faith in some sense, right?
01:09:46.320Because you don't know that to begin with.
01:09:48.180But then it's faith in the dialogue, essentially.
01:09:50.640And I don't see that as being particularly different in the psychedelic situation.
01:10:03.020What have you made of the research that's being conducted in the labs by Roland Griffith and his crew?
01:10:10.440Well, well, I mean, obviously it's groundbreaking, you know, and Roland and his colleagues are, you know, they have set the bar very high and they're the pioneers for sure.
01:10:27.600And, you know, everyone else is kind of following along from that.
01:10:35.280I think that they have, you know, particularly in their work with end-of-life anxiety and this sort of thing.
01:10:45.580I mean, I think that's setting new paradigms for medicine.
01:10:49.680And it's addressing a really important deficit in medicine, right?
01:10:59.980Because medicine, the way it's practiced, biomedicine, I sort of make a distinction there from, say, alternative complementary medicine.
01:11:12.120But biomedicine is about preventing people from dying, right?
01:11:17.960And they will go to great lengths to keep people alive.
01:11:24.500Maybe to, like, certain, like, cancer therapy and this sort of thing.
01:11:29.380Maybe going too far to keep people alive.
01:18:14.340And to be preoccupied with that, obviously, can produce very counterproductive consequences.
01:18:19.380Well, so I just did a lecture series on the Sermon on the Mount for this Peterson Academy that we're putting together, online educational initiative.
01:18:29.400And I want to just run that by you for a second in relationship to what we just described.
01:18:34.040So, as far as I can tell, the ethos in the Sermon on the Mount is quite straightforward.
01:18:41.500It's not party like there's no tomorrow because the lilies of the field do not toil and do not spin.
01:18:57.580The first part is, it's to love God with all your heart and soul.
01:19:01.900And that means to me, technically speaking, psychologically speaking, let's say, to do something like orient yourself as much as you possibly can to the highest good that you're capable of conceptualizing.
01:19:15.420And so, for example, when you're ensconced in a family and facing a mortal challenge, one of the higher goods that you might attend to is to make the most out of every moment that you have with the people that you love.
01:19:33.380And so, and then, once you're oriented in that direction, then to pay as much attention to the moment as possible, right?
01:19:45.620Let the troubles of the day be sufficient to the day.
01:19:50.800To say that sufficient unto the day are the troubles therein.
01:19:54.700It's an injunction to focus on the moment.
01:19:57.040And then you might say, well, there's a tremendous amount of information in the moment, a tremendous amount of redemptive information, and the more you pay attention to the moment, the more you open yourself up to what's, in some sense, the infinite complexity of the moment.
01:20:15.460And so, you might say, if you orient yourself properly, and that would be a matter of getting the set right at all times, not just when you're preparing for a psychedelic experience.
01:20:25.220If you get the set right and you open yourself up to the moment, then you can find all the meaning that you need to immerse yourself in life in that moment.
01:20:34.600And that's dependent on the intensity of your attention.
01:20:37.080Yeah, well, that's, okay, so that's very useful, that conceptualization.
01:20:40.820So, your sense is that it turns people's, the insights, the mystical insights, turn people away from the precipice of death to the infinite possibility of the moment.
01:20:55.080That fear of death might be one of those screens, in some sense, that are blocking or inhibiting the flow of redemptive information.
01:21:04.260And so, the psychedelic experience obliterates that and says, remember what's right in front of you.
01:21:10.820Yeah, and the fear of death is, you know, this is what the psychedelic experience helps defuse, you know, by refocusing on the moment.
01:21:24.380I am hopeful, I don't know if it will ever happen, but I think the next step in psilocybin or psychedelic therapy for the end of life,
01:21:37.040an interesting threshold could be crossed, if you will, if people would, if you could arrange this therapy so that the family members could also participate with the dying person.
01:21:59.060You know, can you imagine the dynamic that that would let, that that would engender, you know, people to share this experience of, you know, the loved ones impending immortality, impending mortality for sure,
01:22:17.300but just the richness of the relationships, the ability that psychedelics give you some time to honestly relate to your loved ones, you know, in a way that is unfiltered.
01:22:32.740And you know how hard it is sometimes for us to really express to someone our love, you know, even though we love them, but sometimes the words, I love you, is a hard thing to say, you know.
01:22:50.160And I think it would be very helpful for the family to be able to not only be present, but also be in the altered state with, with the people, you know, and because it would be as healing for them as it is for the person who is dying.
01:23:08.320Yeah, well, I've noticed that families who cope well with the impending death of someone that's central to the family often do that in no small part by paying increased attention to the remaining relationships.
01:23:28.180And so that as they lose one, they deepen the others, and sometimes, in some sense, as a consequence of that loss, right?
01:23:37.280And so that might be an analog to what you're describing.
01:23:41.800I guess the trick with a family would be to try to get the set of the entire family matched to the circumstance,
01:23:50.020because it is also the case that the stress that impending mortality can place a family within can also bring out the pathologies and divide people further.
01:24:05.700And so, but obviously, that's a suboptimal situation.
01:24:12.620And again, I think, I think if we look to the indigenous model, you know, as probably something we should look at as a way to approach this,
01:24:21.980because they often do exactly this kind of thing, you know, but they're, you know, very much more about the collective and all that.
01:24:35.760I mean, it'd be interesting if it could happen, you know.
01:24:39.220Yeah, well, I don't think any experiments have been done yet on, like, family experience of,
01:24:46.920collective family experience of psychedelic transformation, for example.
01:24:51.780We haven't got that far in the scientific analysis of such things.
01:24:55.580Hard to get, hard to get FDA approval for that.
01:24:59.220But it's worth, it's worth attempting to do that, because I think that that would, again, be a significant step toward creating this new paradigm around death, you know, that medicine, you know, that's a big deficit in medicine, you know.
01:25:20.720And this idea that death can be, death is inevitable, but death doesn't have to be terrible, you know.
01:25:37.140So let me ask you about your plans for the future.
01:25:39.980So what, what looms on the horizon for you and your work at the moment?
01:25:46.060Well, right at the moment, my work is, you know, I mean, I'm not really doing research in psychedelics anymore, and never really worked in the therapeutic area.
01:26:01.000I was always kind of a nuts and bolts guy looking at the plants, the molecules, the pharmacology, and so on.
01:26:07.720But right now, what's occupying my time is this project in Iquitos with the herbarium.
01:26:16.720That's going to be, that's going to be a two to five year project.
01:26:21.620I need, I need to raise somewhere between five and $10 million.
01:26:28.220I should mention that the McKenna Academy is a 501c3.
01:26:34.060We're happy to accept your money, and that's what we're going to, that's where we're going to put our resources, as well as doing additional conferences in a, you know, and retreats, you know, to some degree.
01:26:49.360But our main focus is going to be this, this big project.
01:26:53.340And then we'll probably do another ESPD conference in a, in a few years.
01:26:58.020But it takes a lot of effort to pull that off, so.
01:28:49.520And as a researcher, I am looking at looking at what I can do to preserve indigenous knowledge, preserve biodiversity, slow down the devastation of the Amazon.
01:29:06.660A very small part, really, of the total thing.
01:29:11.060But, you know, it's what I'm trying to do.
01:29:16.100I have, in fact, psychedelics have been an unallied blessing for me in the sense that I've learned a lot, I feel like, from psychedelics.
01:29:28.520And the people I've encountered and, you know, the experiences I've had along the way have all been rich, you know, and, and really, I cherish them.
01:29:42.160I mean, I'm getting to the point now, I'll be 72 in December.
01:30:04.360But whatever happens, I'm happy with the journey so far.
01:30:10.900And it's, it's, it's been, it's been marvelous.
01:30:15.640And I've been able to meet so many interesting people and go interesting places and meet people like you, for example, and just have these great conversations.
01:30:31.400Well, that's a, that's a lovely place to stop.
01:30:34.160And we've come to the end of our discussion as well.
01:30:36.900And so I would like to thank you, Dr. McKenna, for agreeing to talk to me today and for sharing your insights into this remarkable domain of ethnobotanical research and, and research on the psychopharmacological frontier.
01:30:53.880And I wish you luck with your documentation project and with your upcoming conventions.
01:30:59.740I think that would be something quite remarkable to attend.
01:31:03.060And so maybe you can keep me in the loop with regards to the timing of the next conference.
01:31:08.000For all of those who are watching and listening, I'm going to spend an extra half an hour, as I always do with my guests, talking to Dr. Dennis McKenna.
01:31:17.460We'll talk about the particulars of his career, which I think will make for a very interesting discussion.