https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=G1pNqzvhbyI
you you you Welcome everyone to another voices with Reveki. This is a specially wonderful episode for me I’m here with Alexander finer as many of you know him from these one of the founding figures of rebel wisdom and this is a way for me to Do some small payback for the way that many times Ali was interviewing me so graciously and now we get to do some role reversal and I get to interview him and get to Introduce him to many of you on my channel that may not have met him before and his wonderful work that he’s doing So Ali, it’s just great to see you and it’s really wonderful to have you here. Thank you so much Yeah, thank you for having me John it really I’ve been looking forward to this for a while Yeah, it’s a real pleasure to Honor to be on the other side of the conversational process So I thought we’d dive in with your new and wonderful book So first of all, let’s shamelessly promote it and here it is the bigger picture, right and it’s about The subtitle which you might not have been able to see on the screen was how psychedelics can help us make sense of the world So obviously sense-making something that I’m very much interested in is playing a pivotal role of the book So Ali first of all, why this book why this book why this book now? Yeah, so, you know traditionally so so we look at the psychedelic movement in the West say starting from perhaps the Well, really the 1940s when when Albert Hoffman discovered LSD Until now It’s gone through these phases and the first phase was scientific research That was happening in the 50s and 60s where you know clinicians could order LSD from Sandoz labs and that they’d get it and they could they were using it to treat alcohol alcoholism depression anxiety and it was going through kind of a You know, it had its moment and then it kind of left the lab very famously and became Associated with and certainly had an impact on the counterculture the of the 1960s particularly the late 60s So became quite associated with civil rights movement and anti-war movement And so the in the early 70s psychedelics were as many people might know banned and went from having You know quite quite promising medical potential to being put in a class of drugs in most parts of the world where They were seen as having no medical potential Now happily that’s reversed And so most of the narrative now over the last decade or so has been around how psychedelics could be powerful mental health treatments and I’m sure we’ll talk about it a little bit more but as we have to caveat that a lot because it’s not just the drug it’s it’s the drug in combination with a practice like therapy for example or ritual and so That in that process which you know is very welcome in my view What’s been lost is something that really came out of that countercultural era which had many many problems But had had some good sides to it as well Which was the idea that psychedelics could play some kind of meaningful role in Helping us connect to one another connect to the environment and connect to different values in new ways and so that was a kind of Promise of the psychedelic counterculture that was very influential on me when I got into the field about 15 years ago so as a university student a lot of what I was listening to and absorbing was From that counterculture so figures like Ram Dass or Terrence McKenna Timothy Leary is a very complex character and as a person I’m not a huge fan of his actions, but he did have some quite interesting ideas as well So I became really I’ve always been really fascinated with this question of okay well Good psychedelics play a role in changing the world so to speak to use really lofty language And I’ve really gone on a roller coaster of that over the years from thinking no It’s just as prone to lead people into delusion, which is true and then thinking yes No, if they’re using the right way, they could play a role And this book the bigger picture is is really my exploration of that question So instead of how to change your mind which Michael Pollan famously called his book I see it more as kind of how to change society with a whole bunch of caveats as to what that might actually Involve and look like and without without presenting psychedelics as magic panaceas, which they’re they’re certainly not Right, right. Well, thank you for saying that last bit. That’s important. Our culture constantly looks in a quixotic fashion for panaceas So one of the things very interesting about your book is the way it’s structured It’s unlike many of the books that are coming out in the psychedelic renaissance In fact, you participate in a DMT drug study And then there’s passages in the book where you relate your experience from a firsthand account And then you intersperse that with sort of talking about the cognitive science And I’ll just thank you for citing me so frequently in your book. That was very kind of you That was very kind of you And so like I really liked that structure It gives it the feel like you’re moving between the first person or third person perspectives the more Interior existential spiritual dimension than then the more yes, but what what’s actually happening in cognition, etc Was it deliberate? I mean, what was your intent for using that structure? Yeah, it was deliberate and I really also thought about it a lot and especially the percentage of how much would be first person my experiences on this DMT extended state trial, which I’ll talk about in a moment And how much of it is was a kind of a bigger picture as the title suggests Sort of sociological look at where we’re at right now as a culture and where psychedelics fit in It’s probably about 80 20 I would say 80 percent of that kind of more sociological lens and perhaps 20 percent of the more personal lens And the reason I wanted to there’s a couple of reasons I wanted to include the personal experiences And a couple of anxieties I had around it. The first is that there’s a lot of To use a term that you familiarized me with in a new way bullshit in the psychedelic world. Yeah. Yes around People taking their internal subjective states and then making truth claims about reality from that So that’s something I was really careful and was really on my mind I was like really got to be careful and thread that needle carefully because I don’t believe that’s philosophically sound At the same time the psychedelic experience is is a qualitative experience first and foremost in terms of Well, you could argue in terms of where the healing is actually happening and where the transformation the transformation of our Sort of perceptual frame is happening It’s of course a drug as well So there are brain changes that happen, but the nature of the experience will change that someone could have a very Challenging experience that nevertheless really opens something up for them and they have an amazing insight and that really helps them to Experience new things in life and see things in a new way or they could have a challenging experience that doesn’t leave them there And leads them further into a narrow you know difficult way of seeing things so So there’s something about the quality not just of the experience but how an individual navigates the experience And that’s really what I wanted to explore because I am well, i’m very experienced with these Substances, even though I have traditionally used them very ritualistically and quite infrequently um the one of the reasons I was on this Trial at imperial college london that I talk about in the book was because they were looking for healthy volunteers who had a lot of experience because what what the what it involved was intravenous Injections of dimethyltryptamine or dmt and if people aren’t familiar with that, that’s a a very powerful tryptamine halucinogen tryptamine psychedelic that’s found pretty ubiquitously in nature and has been used by indigenous people particularly in the amazon possibly also the middle east for for many thousands of years and so Normally the experience if it’s vaporized, which is how people often take dmt At least nndmt, which there’s two different types I can talk about later Um that that experience is very short. It’s about 15 10 to 15 minutes long very intense a kind of overwhelm of of content, you know people encounter report encountering seemingly autonomous beings and entities that that have messages for them and Rick strassman who’s one of the original who who did a really groundbreaking study on dmt in the 90s? and I would say is actually one of the Fathers of the psychedelic renaissance we see now. He did actually one of the first studies. Um, He he did a study on dmt and he describes it as a very He was surprised because when people think of a mystical experience they think of something that um Or sometimes they think of something which is ego dissolving Yeah, someone’s individual identity Yeah, right. Yeah, and strassman was Is himself a buddhist and a lot of the participants in that first study were buddhist and they were expecting this kind of samadhi experience What they got was very different and in a in a later book strassman argued that It was much more of a prophetic experience and the way he defines that is the kind of mystical experience that um People in the bible report. So if you think about moses in the burning bush There’s agency and purpose and there’s a dialogue With the divine in that experience and so that’s that’s a really interesting aspect of it But the thing is with that short Time frame of 10 minutes or so by the time there’s a there’s a moment of real ontological shock and just bodily Intensity that takes a few minutes to get over and by the time you you you kind of land Uh in this altered state and have your wherewithal it’s ending already so Strasman proposed along with andrew gallimore another researcher. Well, what would happen if we did extended? State dmt where we injected it continuously into the bloodstream because your body metabolizes it very fast because it’s endogenous We produce our own dmt somewhere. We’re not quite sure where And so this is what they did in imperial, but they needed to figure out The correct dosage before they gave it to a wider population on a clinical trial And so we were the dose funding study. So we were the guinea pigs for the guinea pigs. So they needed to dose They needed to dose us. Well for five dosings one of which was placebo So it’s quite a lot of dosings. And so in that sense, it was quite an innovative thing You know, i’m one of only you know, 10 or so people in the world who’ve had that experience. So it also felt Very interesting sort of phenomenologically and and philosophically to explore Well, okay what actually happens in perhaps the most intense psychedelic experience you can have So two questions and taking whichever with whichever order you wish one is so As you said, there’s a lot of bullshit around this and i’ve sometimes wondered it’s an open question if the brevity of The experience and because it’s so shocking Helps to lend the sense of the really real the onto normativity to the experience Whereas if people could have more time in that space and get more centered and start navigating around They might come to a more balanced appraisal Of the experience. I wanted to know if you found that to be the case and then secondly this distinction We could unpack it a little bit because I think it’s very important And it’s been called different things mystical versus visionary mystical I think mystical versus prophetic is uh, really important and one of the one of the important differences is is the uh, it’s the phenomenology in the classic zen samadhi you’re moving into ineffable contentless oneness and and and what and in Many of your descriptions as you said, there’s there’s amazing content It’s like you’re almost in a flow state with that content super salient and it’s dialogical you you either You can often speak to beings or even if the environment is not A sentient being you have this more Interactive dialogical relationship with it and i’m wondering if there’s so there’s sort of a meta question between the two questions Is there a relation between that the fact that it’s dialogical and you can spend more time in it Might that actually allow to you know to get people to get a more balanced appraisal of its ontological status? Is that a plausible question to ask? Yeah, yeah, definitely. It’s a very interesting one. Maybe i’ll do the the first one first So okay duration with dmt in particular. I’ve never actually thought of that. I think it’s possible because there is a A sense of wonder and amazement that that there isn’t much time to process until after the experience with the regular dosing now I definitely think there’s something to this because what I noticed and not just me other participants as well was that phenomenologically, it was very similar when we were injected the first couple of minutes were really really disorienting really sort of overwhelming and then What’s interesting about that particular experience is that you actually need to exercise agency in That altered state to to access content sometimes sometimes things come for you but sometimes you have to make a concerted effort to For want of a better word Like if you imagine you’re in a video game, you’ve got to move around and you’ve got to engage with the environment and do stuff Which is you know, just fascinating So in that sense you do develop more discernment about what’s going on and I think not just the experience itself The experience itself. Yes, there is more of a metacognition possible there too and But it’s the reflecting afterwards and I think that’s absolutely key for these experiences. I think while a lot of people Well, what some people might not do is actually reflect on the experience After the experience in a very detailed way and a really kind of discerning way where they go. Okay, you know luckily in the trial What was particularly helpful is that the team at imperial an hour after the dosing? Would go would have us talk through the dosing in in the first person in real time without Explaining any without going into meaning making or interpretation and it was it was such a great exercise and and it was you know great to have a scientist there who was then Catching us when we would go into meaning making because you know It’s you have to be quite focused and not do that because you’ve had this huge experience And then also they would track our body movement. So they might say something like well, that’s interesting You know, I would say something like oh then I was laughing because I felt this this cosmic joke about this or this And they would say okay that was that perhaps Right when you moved your arm or was that before after and i’d have to go back and think actually was that you know So you start to piece the experience together a bit Um, and because I was taking diaries of the whole thing. I was also having that other that kind of deeper reflection throughout And I think that’s probably one of the key things. I think that the short duration you could Um probably have a more more, um, let’s say broader more nuanced perspective on if you were reflecting on it in a particular way And I think that’s the really really key thing. Yeah, I could just briefly intervene so this is what I tried and meet me when I talk about in in addition to leary set and setting and The sacred context right or where you’re trying to create a ritual Context so that it transfers broadly and deeply into your life and into your psyche There’s also I talk about a sapiential context where you’re trying to set it up and like this was optimal It sounds like were you doing these practices around it that bring in this degree of some metacognitive awareness within and some reflective Um, I like the fact that you did too. This might be something to think about just making part of the practice where you do And because we do this also when we’re doing when we’re testing on the degree to which language interferes with insight problem solving If you allow people to make all kinds of inferences it messes up the insight But if you make them say no, no explaining no justifying don’t interpret just describe Then they don’t it doesn’t mess up the insight machinery in a powerful way and so Yeah, so doing both of those that sort of pure phenomenological and then host like a like the journaling reflection and so Now now to return to it you you’re you’re you’re speculating Reasonably so that that so the duration and then those two things those two components of the sapiential content Sounds like they they influenced your judgment about the realness of the experience. So what was your judgment about that? Yeah, and that was a that was a key question that I was sitting on so firstly I would say I had a a a stance throughout which was of curiosity and Let’s say kind of agnosticism and I think that’s really important because I I well, I mean frankly i’m afraid of Going down rabbit holes or getting carried away and swept away with with Nonsense, basically. It’s it’s a fear. I have I don’t want to do that. So i’m i’m kind of if anything what I had to work on was being less kind of Uh, let like not letting that that stance get in the way of of entertaining particular notions around You know phenomena like synchronicity which tend to increase with dnt, you know, I think to actually have an open mind around that at the same time so um so that was um, that was key and I suppose the realness of the experience so there’s experientially it feels Reeler than real is the term that’s often used and that was used by participants in strassman’s first study and You know it got me inquiring into What is that realness? You know, is it that it’s relevant? I know to draw on your work a little bit. Is it’s just highly relevant. Yeah, sure it is There’s also something mysterious and uncanny but also familiar About the experience and that’s what’s very that’s a very striking Feeling that you’re you’re faced with extreme novelty Coupled with a feeling of extreme familiarity and that was certainly my experience and that’s also an experience other people have reported That does something to the sense of realness. Yeah. Okay. Let’s zero in on this. So this is fantastic The phenomenology you’re disclosing is really helpful um Because you know, I think there’s um I’m working on this notion of autonomitivity and how it connects to a much broader Uh sense of rationale and being reasonable, uh, which is more about, you know Really refining your sense of realness so that it actually tracks Our uh the world well and that’s what we should be doing when we’re talking about rationality That should be our primary Under and that means overcoming self-dissension and it means enhancing this so I like this idea about about extreme novelty but also familiarity and Because this sort of lines up with And this comes from work from david schindler This notion of the beautiful as that combination of not I know it can be a horrifying experience So i’m i’m not saying it’s a completely beautiful experience. Just using this as a way At the beauty and being on the horizon of intelligibility. That’s fisher. That’s that’s schindler and this idea that we find things most real Uh when we’re getting a sense of the inexhaustibleness But also the intelligible So inexhaustible intelligibility right seems to be the thing that is the thing that tracks We have just new information Is that what the hell and that can be absurd or horrifying and if it’s just familiar We don’t get we can get the sense of reality flattening right? It’s not very real to us, but when we’re on that horizon we get the sense of this is inexhaustible So right, yeah, and you get this when people when it comes to open world and video games people get really it’s They can get that sense of presence. How does that track for you? Does that land and what what? Definitely does I mean the inexhaustibility I you know, the video game metaphor is also apt, you know I’ll touch on that because I play a lot of video games and a lot of open world games as well. So Um that that sense that there is so much more. This is a very common Feeling that I had that i’ve heard others report the sense that i’m only scratching the surface of this Place that i’m in and this experience that is One of the defining qualities of I would say the dmt experience But but i’d say psychedelic experiences more broadly perhaps as well. There’s a sense of vastness and this sense of um Which in its In itself can recontextualize identity. I think there’s something I talk about in the book, you know that I had this um very powerful overview effect is is the closest experience I could describe to one of What happened in one of my dosings where I had this sense of being part of a vast ecosystem Which is um, I think a very I think probably quite a healthy experience For people to have in the right way, you know, I found it actually quite quite grounding and useful and it also I think what was supportive about that kind of experience and and speaks to what we were just talking about Is that it there’s a sense of connectedness that comes with that? Yeah, it’s a sense of yeah, i’m connected to something much larger than myself Which is also unintelligible because if it was larger than me, but intelligible I do think it would it would flatten somewhat. I’d be like, well, okay, that’s That’s impressively large, but I get it, you know, the fact of not fully getting it is is the Is key So I like this I know of course the connecting to something larger than oneself is a defining feature of meaning in life And that sense of connectedness is at the core of my work religio that sense of connectedness being and that’s where the the sort of Enhanced relevance of it all Is was this also something you mentioned and that’s the normative aspect like I should be doing this because it’s so relevant And then you if you get sort of highly normative because it’s highly relevant inexhaustible intelligibility And like you said you’re on the horizon It’s like I don’t know all of it, but you’re not but there’s a but there’s a sense that I could Right, right So it’s not a disempowering experience because that would be horrifying I take it and I think sometimes it slides into that for people but it sounds like in a lot of your experiences you were Able to and i’m wondering also What do you think about this that actually your agnostic stance helped you to be on the horizon of wonder on a more reliable basis? Yes, I would I would say that and that was the intention with it And you’re absolutely right because there are people even on this trial, you know Who have reported? This sense of being like a child in a nursery and that that is that that happens That’s a kind of trope of dmt, but in a way where the entities or the experience was um So far beyond them that they felt disempowered and then they start to feel feel some fear now the agnostic stance um It does protect against that because I neither like, you know, let’s say if I had the experience of being Um in a nursery and entities, uh, you know saying I was small and insignificant I would you know from an agnostic stance I’m not necessarily taking that on board in a personal way or saying that that’s a truth statement that I have to adopt I’m i’m observing, you know, and obviously I practice mindfulness which helps tremendously with this Which I think is a core skill set for anyone in in alti states Um, so, you know i’m observing that experience and thinking huh fascinating like I mean that’s usually what I was thinking I was thinking what like What is going on here that and that that is really protective because then there’s no you know what i’ve noticed is that if people have an expectation or they have a a prior Ontology that they need to see fulfilled in some way They usually run into trouble because the experience does not give you that the experience gives you a huge variety of different things and you’ll get reports of People you’ve got wildly different reports of what people think the nature of reality is after these experiences Some are consistent panpsychism is a little bit more consistent than than others. Um some sense of of Kind of consciousness being primary. That’s pretty that there is research on that But also you get some out there stuff, you know You get people thinking everything was made by they I encountered a reptilian alien that told me that uh everything was Spawned by them 10 000 years ago, and there’s this great anecdote. I relate in the book from Scott Jeremy Norby. It’s um Jeremy Norby relates the the story of an anthropologist who’s in the in the jungle in the 70s, uh researching ayahuasca and he encounters these um, two giant Snake like dragon like entities that come out of nowhere in his visions and they say that the gods of the universe and everyone needs to Bow before them and they created it. They created everything and he’s terrified and the next day he goes to the shaman And he says oh my god, I had this experience and these these dragons came out and the shamans listening Okay, what do they look like? Okay. What what color were their scales? Uh, uh, oh, wait a minute Did they say that they were the gods of the universe? And he was like, yeah, yeah, that’s what they said He’s like, no, no, they’re full of crap. They’re not the gods of the universe Um, I just love that in cultures that have this um, you know Phenomenological experiences that attract over time They also have a sense that you can’t believe everything that you’re told in these experiences You have to go in with some discernment and that’s absolutely key so I like that because um, um One of the things i’ve often wondered is especially because it’s in we’ll touch on this a little bit more I hope about you know how this is much more dialogical. Uh, uh, like you say you it’s I like A video game you’re interactive. You’re often talking to other beings how that sense of Enhanced realness that we were talking about before if it’s not and I thank you by the way for recommending Mindfulness training before doing all of this. I’ve also made that recommendation repeatedly But the idea that you know that that that onto normativity that really realness of the world Transfers it bleeds into giving authority to the figures that you’re talking to And see and so that brings up, you know the notion that you mentioned I forget the researcher who it’s a guy who started doing some of the original work on dmt But in his second book he talked about uh, the way of thinking of this is like biblical prophecy, right? Now the thing about prophecy is it actually is spoken that way the way you’re sort of hesitant about right? Which is the word of the lord came to me and I say unto you you mice Right, right prophecy isn’t about telling the future. It’s about sort of Giving the god giving the god’s eye point of view about what’s going on now so people wake up to deeper patterns and so There’s a knife edge here that I the razor’s edge at somerset mall that you’re walking on which is You want what? Hopefully because I um, I would and I think I know you you want there to be transfer from these Experiences you want them that you want them to be proper rituals you want them to transfer broadly and deeply Into your life and to you know, I deprecate deeply into the psyche and alighted in powerful ways Right, and that would be prophetic you’d see more deeply into the world and how it more deeply resonates into you Is that fair just the first part? Yeah, okay but on the other hand You don’t want to believe everything you’re told by the gods in this world because the hyper space elves or the space aliens or the the green smurfs Uh telling you that the world was made three thousand years ago or ten thousand years ago Or the world was this world is actually the shadow of another there’s like you said the ontologies are like all over the place um, and so Do you see what i’m saying your agnosticism is it’s right So you’re trying to dampen down being too prophetic, but you don’t want to dampen it down So it’s not prophetic at all. Do you see that? Absolutely, no, that’s it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that’s it And I think you know your your concept that of of the knowing when to zoom in and zoom out, right? Yeah, that was tremendously helpful, right which I mentioned in the book, but I also used practically during it so you got a A live test subject of some common science ideas but that that is a very important part of it because And this is this is research my wife ashley murphy beiner is is doing around this idea in the psychedelic world that you must always Lean into what’s coming up that that everything that’s coming up You need to lean into it and and accept it and embrace it now often that is Helpful, but what they miss out is well know those sometimes you need to zoom out Yes, and you need to take a step back. Yeah, and and that’s that’s that’s equally important. So So what I would say, I mean for me and this is an argument I make In the book. In fact, I say one of the core arguments I make in the book is that it’s it’s not necessarily the Insights we gain on psychedelics that are useful for then applying to the world we live in although there may be also useful insights it’s actually the existential stance and the attitudes and the practices It’s basically the same practices and attitudes that help us navigate a psychedelic experience can help us navigate an increasingly complex world, which is also increasingly full of Contradictory symbolic meaning and religious energies and intensity So it’s actually a psychedelic approach to problem solving and you know, one of the things psychedelics do very well I think is give us a lived experience of navigating complexity Uh, usually our own complexity, but also the complexity of an environment, you know, there’s also Yeah, there’s there’s people who you know work in say ecology or computer science who use lower doses of psychedelics to Get a picture of the whole system get it, you know So that they can solve problems or that they can zoom out and say, okay, this is how things interconnect So I think that’s the real value and I think we have to be really careful with Um get that more prophetic energy of okay, i’ve come back from the mountaintop and i’m here to say this because um Yeah, it’s it’s probably not true and um, and you know, there’s something um I reference a study in the book by leo roosman who is a researcher at imperial college And he’s done this fascinating or is in sort of the process between this fascinating study with israelis and palestinians Who drink ayahuasca together in ayahuasca? the active ingredient is is dmt and The first part of that study has already been published so people can check it out. Um, but you know, he points out that What’s what’s fascinating about? Having an experience which is prophetic in the sense that it involves agency is that it can also be very political And that’s something that of course happened in the 60s the combination of these experiences with political ideas and there’s you know, that’s something I kind of Uh explore in one of the chapters of the book a lot because I find it very important and fascinating because on the one hand We sometimes do need a kind of political energy To move things forward and change structures But at the same time it’s it’s I told leo when he told me about the study I was like, I feel like you just pulled out a stick of dynamite because it’s incredible At the same time the combination of psychedelics and politics is quite dangerous, you know in a lot of ways So it’s it’s a very it’s a really interesting area. I think Okay. Well, so first of all, um, thank you for saying that it provides some powerful corroboration to an argument I made about higher states and the uh, the the experiment we ran in uh Uh my lab where it’s not the content of a mystical experience that is responsible for um the transformations of people So it most of the most of the heavy lifting is being done by the insight machinery at the the procedural and especially perspectival and sometimes what is transformative participatory machinery and the propositional stuff is wanky and goes all over the place and right, and so That’s why I try and say if you look for knowledge from these experiences You’re going to get messed up if you look for wisdom, which is what you’re pointing to an ability to Orient and navigate complexity in the real world then I think these experiences can be tremendously valuable now what that that brings to mind though is you know One of the ways of affording insight we know this from stefan and dixon right and some of the work I do is You you you dump some noise into the system, right? Yeah, you you uh, right? You’re showing an insight problem and people like yeah get it and you run some static through it or you shake the picture And you put a bit of entropy in the brain and you you you get some insight, right? And then you know, you’ve got carhorn harris and woodward and other people saying well, you know It’s probably like what we have to do in machine learning because when machine learning these machines are getting so powerful In any data sample they overfit to the data Right and that and so so much so that that they they they inappropriately they transfer they make conclusions It’s like saying if if you and I asked is rebel wisdom one of the great all-time channels Well, yeah, we agree. Well, look everybody thinks that that’s a sampling bias, right? Right, that’s overfitting to the data. And of course you can underfit and that can be relevance realization problems but the thing i’m trying to say is we throw noise into the system to Free the system from overfitting opening it up Affording insight letting it explore more of the intelligibility space, you know carhorn harris Has a thesis that psychedelics are doing something similar than What we have to do in machine and machine learning what you do is you throw in noise you turn off half the network at times um And I know you’re exploring ideas like that and the thing about that that I find powerful So i’m giving a bit of an argument but right is the content of noise is exactly not where it is valuable Because if you look for content in the noise, you’re finding illusions. That’s like the classic experience where you give people You know jumbled sounds and they I don’t know and then you read a sentence to them And then they hear the jumbled sound is that sentence right those classic kinds of experiments, right? And so but so it’s not the content. It’s the way it loosens the mind opens it up that entropic stuff Going on psychedelics are in some ways shutting off large areas of the brain, especially like the default mode network So what do you think about all of that? I know that was a lot I was trying to put it to you but It seems like the the phenomenology that we’ve been discussing at length actually maps on to some much more functional explanations Yeah, absolutely, you know what what’s coming to I mean firstly, I think there’s there’s a lot of um I think there’s a lot of signal in that that argument and that possibility and you know, i’m thinking also um card harris has also um, I think suggested that there’s something around Um strain on the organism which which leads to neuroplasticity. So it’s like kind of pressure on an organism and psychedelics Are kind of potentially doing the same thing so that the mechanism for neuroplasticity Is that and I’ve off that that has resonated with me just in terms of my own experience and what i’ve observed in others, right? because the these are difficult very often they are challenging experiences and it’s the Challenging aspects of them dealt with in a particular way that are most transformative It’s actually overcoming and going through like, you know for me in many of my experiences um, uh I will be wrestling with something and I know you’ve talked about this with um, what was this? Socrates or no. Plato was a wrestler. It wasn’t so yeah. Yeah. So so you know that that that Plato’s wrestler. Yeah, so so that resonates because there is this sense of Chewing something and wrestling it and in the in the psychedelic therapy Manuals and literature there’s this kind of um again something my wife is researching at the moment There’s this, you know deep question about how much do you let people wrestle before you give them support, you know And that’s something that you know, I run um along with natasha pelgrim colleague. We run Legal retreats in the netherlands with psilocybin which is legal there for for healthy, you know, healthy volunteers based for healthy participants and you know, that’s a question that we Um We consider as well. It’s like how you know, how much resourcing do you give someone how much support you give them and how much you let Them do it, you know, it’s it’s kind of very contextual but but on that point as well The other thing that is absolutely core to what we’re trying to teach people really what we’re trying to do is give people the skill Set and the kind of phenomenological toolkit to navigate the experience well and that actually requires a lot of preparation There’s a lot of talk in the psychedelic world about the importance of integration So how you reflect on and then integrate your experiences that is extremely important But what isn’t spoken about that much and that’s that’s also something I touch on in the book because I think it’s under Valued is is good preparation because the preparation will give you Tools like, you know coming back to your breath mindfulness tools tools of discernment and curiosity Um that will help you in the experience to go deeper and one of those tools, you know This speaks to what you were talking about before Because we’re in a room with with say 10 or 12 participants and everyone is you know, we’re effectively keeping the energy Um in the in the right place so that everyone can be simultaneously in their own space But feel safe and held and also supportive if they need to be so it’s actually a very very complex Uh task, you know as a counselor and a facilitator one of the things that is really common is that People will say open their eyes and look at another person Who’s you know in their own process? And become convinced that they know what’s going on with that person and you’ll hear it afterwards in the reflection It’s like, you know, you were I just knew you were crying and I could just feel you really letting go of all this grief and we’ll have to be like That was you you had the experience of the person having grief and the person very often would be like Oh, no, that’s all what’s going on at all. And so there’s something very very distinct that’s a real good learning opportunity where it’s like The content that you’re experiencing in that moment is tricky and you have to really navigate it Well, because what you’re actually having is an experience that seems like it’s about the other But it’s actually about you and the skill set the real skill is going I’m right now having an experience of thinking that person is experiencing grief What does that experience tell me about me in this moment? Right, so there’s a lot of metacognitive skill Required to do these experiences well and people do tend to learn those the the more they practice with with good prep and integration So three things come up for me. The first is israel means to wrestle with god And of course, that’s one of the earliest of the prophetic things we have um in the old testament um, and then So i’m doing work with michelle ferrari jennifer stiller jinsung kim on awe And we’re getting some pretty convincing evidence and he’s also done some jinsung has done some work with brian ostafen awe doesn’t increase like um Your capacity for insight All makes you more confident of the insights you might be having and of course that is a double-edged sword What it does is right? It sort of empowers you if you have an insight to carry it into your life But people can and this goes back to the problem you’re talking about before people can misconstru that confidence with realness uh, and so i’ve been proposing that we need to teach people the virtue of reverence, which is how to properly relate to awe let it inspire you with confidence, but will not make but you have to you have to couple that to deep epistemic humility and Like what you’re talking about here the cultivation of epistemic virtue You don’t just run with your awe because that’s not what the awe is doing For you Now the third thing that comes out for this is the and this goes to a broader thing you’re doing in the book Which is you know, you’re addressing you call it the big crisis. You also call it the meta crisis Um And you know And I think the argument for calling it the meta crisis rather than the poly crisis is a very good one So I tend to use that term That’s not non-podge hangs on that but this idea You know that we’re wrestling with um Well, i’m going to be talking i’m going to be in the uk in the end of september I’m going to record a four-hour session with daniel schmuckdenberger and neil magocrist And I propose to them that the the core of our topic should be That the sacred is trying to be reborn in our world And that’s what we’re what’s what we’re wrestling with And I got that sense in your book too and even the bigger picture, right? And so There’s this idea in the book, which I find really tasty that Within an ecology of practices and properly set within setting and setting and sacredness and a sapiential Framework, right the psychedelics could contribute to that needed Rebirthing a religio of connectedness to sacredness and a new I think meaning understanding of sacredness and I think that’s fair to say that’s a theme in your book Um, and i’d like to but i’d like to give you the opportunity to like unpack that unfold that a little bit more please Yeah, and and it it may well also be the most significant contribution psychedelics could make to sort of finding a way through the meaning crisis and Yeah, the revival of the sacred. So You know, it’s it’s interesting. This has been a part of Psychedelics reliably elicit mystical type experiences as they’re called in the literature And in fact, especially in the u.s Researchers it’s a bit different in europe They attribute that mystical experience that sense of a deep connection to something beyond ourselves as the one of if not the core Factor in healing depression or anxiety or helping with putting smoking or alcoholism That that’s the really profound shift in our frame so So that’s that’s a big part of the psychedelic experience now the What i’m really interested in is Okay, but what conception of the sacred, you know, um in in sociology and particularly in the Tradition of dirkheim, you know the idea is that the sacred is everywhere in society We always make some things sacred and some things profane Um, and and I and I kind of make the argument that I think you’ve made as well Which is that we we make we flip them around too much in culture We make profane things sacred and sacred things profane, right? So, you know, we’re worshiping worshiping money worshiping Certain types of achievement over things that are profound and intangible And deeply human, right? So So the question is how can We have these individual experiences of Encountering the sacred in some way fairly reliably psychedelics done in the right way How do we then? um feed that back into our lives in a meaningful way and The point I came to as I really wrestled with that question is that I think fundamentally and not everyone will agree with this but I think one of the the Use a schmacktenberger phrase generator functions of of the crisis we’re in Is that we have a cultural story about what reality is that that is incredibly limited and narrow? And effectively only allows us to see matter as real psychedelics Do move people fairly reliably toward a more panpsychist perspective Not always staunch materialists generally say staunch materialists people who are a little bit open-minded will tend to move To seeing a con to a consciousness first perspective. I think that’s incredibly promising because I think fundamentally if we allow consciousness into The conversation about what is real Uh, and you know away from the situation we have now where effectively it’s you know We have like emergentism where it’s like it’s kind of it’s a byproduct and it’s not really real It’s you feel like a real person, but you’re not really real, you know, and I actually I quote some of your um uh one of the awakening from the meaning crisis episodes around when you’re talking about sort of the Origins of this later in the book because I then really dive into panpsychism and idealism looking at But what are the implications of a widely adopted more panpsychist worldview? And I think they’re they’re they’re potentially quite profound. Um And one of the things it does is orient us toward quality over quantity as a value and this is um, Here’s the robert piercig’s argument in design in the art of motorcycle maintenance Which I sort of rediscovered because I was like I kind of kind of got to this point I was like, oh my god, it’s all about quality and I was like, wait a minute I’ve heard someone say that before it’s like piercing so I kind of you know Went back to his metaphysics of quality and I found that as a really important starting point and you know, even when I Spoke to michael pollen for the book. Uh, he you know, I think pollen is a fairly scientific materialist thinker overall Um, and he said, you know, we were talking about these recent results from johns hopkins Which said that people who take psychedelics at a very statistically significant level attribute agency to things in the world Whether that’s rocks or trees and even You know cans of cans of coca-cola, right less so but more so into nature And he was saying hey look If you know animism is widespread in some form And we’re probably not going to go back to some kind of traditional style animism But he was saying if we pretended to be animist that might even be better for the way we approach the environment each other The natural world, etc and so I found that quite striking because you know, you know, even if we don’t fully adopt the ontological assumptions of say Panpsychism or idealism we can still adopt some of the behaviors and perspectives that come from them And that could be very meaningful and also There’s something about the nature connection element because you know, that’s i’ve often wondered Okay, if there had to be a world religion that filled the gap of the meaning crisis And it wasn’t an existing religion That would what what might be the least destructive and I thought well nature worship Has it got a pretty good bet for that as opposed to some you know? Well, I think we’ll see an ai religion in the next few years as well. So But yeah, so that’s kind of that’s why I think it’s very important I think it’s I think it goes right to the heart of what we believe is real Um, I think that’s where the psychedelics have the most impact Well, thank you that was really so that’s very rich so right you’re gonna have to allow me a fairly complex reply then and then we can keep going um so first of all I appreciate your caution because we we developed an argument together earlier that it’s not so much the propositional content but the you know The cultivation of wisdom that is what we should be paying attention to We should be paying attention to and I want to I wanted to pick up on a proposal i’ve made that some Sacred is when we are connected to The inexhaustible intelligible in a way that affords reciprocal opening which you mention in the book as opposed Reciprocal narrowing mark lewis’s addiction and we lose agency the world flattens it becomes a prison And reciprocal opening it opens up and our two this is plato’s argument our two meta desires are being met We are being integrated into inner peace We’re getting deeper and deeper in contact with reality and the sacred is that which satisfies those meta desires While disclosing more and more within and without in a coordinated manner So a functional a phenomenological account rather than trying to give an a final ontological Account and then then the idea about that is that gets up to this the most highest levels, you know You know fristan’s work and predictive processing it gets up to the level of the hyper priors and really Opens them up and changes them and that’s what we’re talking about. We’re talking about wisdom. So just Because I know you invoked the reciprocal opening in the book So I just wanted to put that out there as a way of bringing it in talk about the sacred And then yeah, you mentioned the panpsychism And of course and the and i’m glad you distinguish panpsychism from idealism bernardo castro will be very Appreciative of you doing that because they’re very different physicians. I’ve been making another argument I don’t know how much you’re aware some of my more recent work, but i’ve been making the argument that The philosophical tradition that actually takes a look at Um, like really tries to get at the nature of reality from intelligibility is the whole platonic and the neoplatonic tradition And that neoplatonism actually is the spiritual grammar of the west. It’s on it’s on a par For the west of what zen is to the east, right? It’s this huge integrative thing And and neoplatonism i’ve argued is is actually badder and panpsychism and Absolute idealism for being able to integrate this spiritual and the scientific world views and also they have a long-standing tradition of Dealing with altered states of consciousness and integrating them into a coherent worldview so i’m not going to argue for that because I would have you at a Disadvantager but i’m going to recommend that you take a look perhaps just at some of the recent work i’ve done Around and because there is this revival of neoplatonism happening right now And what’s interesting about it is neoplatonism has this amazing history of being able to enter into reciprocal reconstruction with Christianity you get people like Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa With islam you get sufism with judy with judaism you get kabbalah Looks like there’s interactions along the silk road with vedanta with buddhism But also with science at the beginning of the scientific revolution and at the beginning of the einsteinian revolution So it’s got a really good track record too that recommends it Very powerfully and it it comes to a very similar conclusion to the one that I just proposed to you James filler in his book on how to get neoplatonism and the ground of being argues that this notion Right of you know of really trying to understand In what intelligibility really is ontologically and making it primary Really gives you a very powerful way of um Getting an ultimate ontology that is nevertheless Consistent can be readed consistent with a scientific worldview So i’m just making an argument and a recommendation to you on the basis of that argument. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, i’m i’m fast I mean I have I we um, I have tracked a little bit this argument We had a conversation about it for a piece I put out on my sub stack. Um when you released um the the series on socrates and um, I am intrigued I have to say because i’m not Too fine. I’m not a diehard panpsychist. I kind of lean towards pans I have panpsychist leanings and it’s funny you mentioned about castra because I said um, I I interviewed castra for the book and then I saw him at a conference. I was oh bernardo. I um, You know, I was like i’ve got you in the book with um Two other philosophers he was like but they’re panpsychists. I was like, yes, I know and i’m actually i’m talking about the difference between idealists and panpsychists. He was like so, um, yeah important distinction but You know in a sense what what i’m most interested in is What is a framework and model that will actually work at scale, you know, and I think you know something with a track record is is really um Fits that bill also most people it also has to be intelligible to people through different lenses Whereas you know it took me weeks to get to the bottom of the differences between panpsychism and idealism for my book And I was already you know, I studied philosophy Already had some kind of backing in it. So it’s it’s a level of complexity. And so I think it’s um, yeah, I think I’m open to whatever whatever works really. Yeah, well and at the other edges, of course is the neoplethotic tradition Weds all of these transformative experiences to a profound reflection on wisdom And what wisdom is and how it can be cultivated. That’s why I compare it. It’s it’s very much like zen to that to that level so Do you think Uh, and I agree with you by the way, um, I don’t know if you know I’ve got I did a video essay on the looming advent of a gi and then i’ve got a popular book out a book Designed to be sort of stepped down not dumbed down but stepped down for more popular audience around this called mentoring the machines And I definitely think that sort of Uh religions around ai are coming for sure In fact, they’re already happening. I get I get email all the time about people who they don’t realize it But they’ve taken up a religious stance and attitude towards even chat gbt4, which is like um, yeah, so But this goes to the bigger than the bigger thing Because you know you talk about the dark side in the book, too Right and the thing around what I in the book, you know, so in my work around You know sacredness and then in the stuff about the ai You know in the work i’ve done with jordan hall and other people, right? There’s molokian forces at work Uh, I think some of your earlier work was on psychedelic capitalism or capitalistic psychedelic Yeah, yeah, and so there’s there’s a lot. I mean being able to manipulate people And make things it’s alien open them up to bullshit I mean it makes them more malleable blah blah blah blah blah blah blah You already said there was that you know There was a lot of abuse in the counterculture because of the way psychedelics open people up right cult formations and all kinds of bad stuff Right. Um, so can you talk a little bit now about the dark side? Yeah, and this is a i devote a whole chapter to this because it’s so important and because also because you know As a as a preface to that, you know, I think psychedelics are So powerful because they are so dangerous in some ways or at least they’re dangerous really it correlates It goes hand in hand. Um, and so yeah The darkness has many facets. It has the one facet of The individual level of that these experiences can be really dangerous and can Really lead to permanent psychological damage, you know, that’s just the reality of it um And so that is being swept under the rug in the press releases of labs around the world because it’s an inconvenient truth Right now and the attitude is let’s get this over the line However, we can and we’ll deal with all the problems later Which I think is a fundamentally bad attitude to have in life or or culture it just never works, right so Um, you know like the doubted ching talks about that, you know deal with a problem when it’s here right now and small Not later when it’s bigger. So That bothers me a lot Um, and there are you know, there are groups, you know, jules evans ed prudeau’s a few journalists and researchers really focusing on Um, you know jules runs the challenging psychedelic experiences project. We’re really trying to do, you know, they’re doing proper research on okay Well, what are these experiences that people are having and that’s that’s really important So there’s that side of it. Uh, there’s also the side of it of the market forces capturing psychedelics and we saw this with mindfulness and yoga You know we we have you you will always have deep profound expressions of these practices like you know the pasana or you know or Different types of zen and you know lots of different traditions have these deep practices And then you have what happens when the dominant culture Or let’s let’s say capitalism and the incentive structures of capitalism take it over Commoditize it and then sell it back because the way it is sold back will never be um truly transformative in the sense that it could lead to systemic change because the system is now co-opting it and it’s not like any individual within the system has some kind of grand master plan in fact ironically A lot of the people who work in psychedelic pharma companies have the absolute best intentions and are wrestling with the fact that they’re up against these profit motives um, and so they’re looking at What often happened with the psychedelic there was a big uh gold rush in about 2020 with lots of money coming to the space And what a lot of people Were ignoring and this is a this is a problem with a certain type of new age spiritual or individualized spirituality It was like yeah, but actually if people are coming from the right place the right things will happen. It’s like No, that’s not true systems are more powerful than people and they could be the most well-intentioned people in the world So there was this amazing. Um short story called we will call it pala which came out around then which was a story of a young woman who Has uh, you know her own healing journey with lsd and then decides to open a clinic And the story tracks her journey from having the best intentions to having to then cut corners with her investors You know another clinic opens up and her investors say well, no three days of integration just do one day that you know They’re doing two days. We’ll do one day So you see this race to the bottom scenario happening? and that that happens with psychedelics what’s um What’s different about psychedelics is that they are a drug and so they fit into the business model of pharmaceutical companies in a way That mindfulness or yoga never did right or even breath work. So the the Reality of it is quite different now on the plus side Since that 2020 boom now and you know 2023 Half of the companies have gone bust There’s half the amount of money in the space that there was before Which for some is a bad thing for me and a few others we’re thrilled because a we said it would happen because they were trying to monetize These experience they were trying to monetize what they thought was a drug But actually it’s a healing experience Which includes a whole lot more than the drug and they had no idea a lot of them came from the cannabis space And they came with a lot of money So i’m thrilled that the it’s leveled out because what’s also happened is that hopefully many of the people remaining? have a more nuanced view on on what this is, you know, and my My friend ben cessa Who’s a psychiatrist here in the uk and is one of the first, you know people pushing the psychedelic wagon forward in the uk You know, he said like there’s not really that much money to be made in psychedelics ultimately compared to say, uh, you know A diabetes drug whatever it might be, you know, you need proper therapy It takes time you would ideally need two therapists for eight hours a session and then all the integration etc and you know in um, there’s a Psychiatrist in switzerland called peter gasser who’s able to do legal psychedelic treatment with his patients on health insurance in switzerland as well Um, you know, I organized this conference breaking convention. Um, the largest one on psychedelics in europe And he was speaking there and he said um He was like, you know, we we just do a lot of free work Because the insurance doesn’t cover what’s actually required to give people a safe beneficial experience So they do you know, they get paid some money, but they end up doing it for the love You know, that’s that’s how the reality of it is and I think there are ways that could be somewhat profitable But I think the reality is now hitting where they’re realizing. Okay, it’s not that profitable now That doesn’t mean we’re out of the woods in terms of the dangers of commodification because of course Places like california are decriminalizing and then the next thing will be commodifying to the general public Hey, you know, you’re feeling a little bit blue take some lsd. So That’s a huge concern as well and that we need to kind of uh guard against that Hopefully some of the work we’re doing you’re doing and undoing and we’re doing here together will help our give people alternative framing um So I wanted to return back to something Which is the the dialogical character Of these experiences and how they’re very different from samadhi or moksha Or you know many sort of uh classic experiences of enlightenment or and you and I both Are heavily invested in dialogical practices as a way of trying to train people With you know and and setting that those dialogical practices into you know In a prominent place within an ecology of practices and we’ve had discussions about this and um, then again you touch on that connection too in the book and I thought it would be good for people to hear because I i’m wondering if you know in addition to you know the sad and the setting and this and and the sacred of the sapiential or perhaps as part of the sacred of the sapiential we try to you know can Can we get the inner and the outer dialogos to more properly resonate and talk with each other and could psychedelics afford that? Or is is it that the experiences are too intense and idiosyncratic that we can’t get a Intended and healthy bleed between inner outer Dialogos or do you think that’s a possibility and should we be considering it? What do you think about that? Yeah, this I love this question this is right at the edge of my my thinking and uh and plans actually for the future so you know I um my main training in Dialogical practices is from the diamond approach. So the practice of inquiry, although I also really do enjoy circling and other similar practices and I um, you know Yes, the the dmt experience in particular but is is very dialogical But so is in for me and you know, not everyone but for me All psychedelic experiences have this that quality of of being in a deep dialogue with uh Whatever aspect of myself who knows maybe maybe something beyond me And so it’s always been my experience in every everyone and some people have that same same thing other people interpret the experience differently But for me, that’s that’s always been how I learn in some way, right and transform and so Transform and so the so the question is Can we? Can we combine this this? Yeah, like you said the the inner dialogue is with the outer and I think what one thing i’m really interested one thing i’m working on right now is i’m I want to do a um A process design a process focused on helping people Engage with complex problems in their particular field whatever it might be on on dose on psilocybin. So doing it in holland I’m just in the process of figuring that out and saying okay. Well As part of that process, that’s a kind of problem solving process Can we actually get better at problem solving but a big part of what i’m looking at in the protocol is being an inquiry During the experience during the acute experience now the first thing i’m thinking of is That the dose has to be lower Quite a bit lower than it might be for when you’re just in your own world um, i’ve had my own experiences of of Doing inquiry with psilocybin and it was very profound. It was very very profound It really was probably the deepest experience one of the deepest experiences i’ve had and so I think there’s much to be gained from from that and You know, there’s this model of psychedelic therapy that comes from america primarily Which is high doses to elicit that mystical experience which is then seen as the healing thing and then through therapy That’s then integrated and that sure that that can work really well In europe, there’s more of a focus on what’s called psycholytic therapy Which is where the therapist continues the therapy with the patient as they’re on the under the acute effects of the drug Um, and I believe the mdma therapy that that maps do in the us is a little bit more That kind of psycholytic style, right? and so that’s kind of um You know, there’s a there’s a real precedent for it and I think it can absolutely be done And I think people need training in advance in those practices like I would never do it what would happen I would almost guarantee if someone’s never done circling or dialogue practice and they don’t have that That skill set which I think can be developed in reasonable time then They’re likely going to be Uh too distracted. It’s going to be too difficult for them to to Simultaneously you’ve got to rub your belly and pat your head at the same time You got to simultaneously feel what you’re feeling and communicate and connect with the other and listen. It’s a lot to ask And the other thing is that you need what? Frederica mechel who’s a researcher? psychedelic researcher Also in switzerland she calls state competence, right? You need to actually know How to navigate psilocybin you have to have done it a few times before you have to have some sense of Okay, this is normal sometimes you feel like this some you know There’s also every drug is different and psilocybin can can very much Some some content will be coming up and then it can suddenly switch and it goes oh, but now look at this So you you need to kind of be able to work with that. However all that considered I think it’s absolutely Fascinating as an area to explore because it could actually what i’m really interested in is Could we could someone come in with a complex problem that they’re facing? Let’s say they’re uh, they work for greenpeace or something and they’re like well We’re trying to figure out how we’re going to get this, you know this uh, protection for this lake But knowing canvas it’s all these different government bodies all these different things Is there a way where there’s a protocol that could reasonably get them towards at least a better place they could have gotten brainstorming on a whiteboard well, i’m just gonna if if it if if it helps I like Um, if I could be of any help in that dimension of your work, uh count me out count me out Um, I mean for me, I and I won’t say when uh, I let you know But the very first time in fact, I did uh, sadosai by magic mushrooms um, you know and how about how hot so he talks about the is-ness and I was with somebody who and uh, you know, and I’ve done it up and I did tai chi on one and so I hadn’t At work because that part of why I did it is I wanted to I wanted to give myself a phenomenological touch stone What would it be like to do tai chi where and I hear you’re much less egocentric you’re much more open to flow And and I remembered it and so I used that as a touchstone in my training so I could train myself to get there Without and I think that’s one thing we should think about too about the pedagogical Like things like that creating, you know creating phenomenological touchstones in the experience that people can use as benchmarks that they can work towards Outside of being on the drug and that’s a powerful way of bringing about bringing about transfer but back to the thing and then the other thing is We were both highly interested in heidegger We were both having this shared intense is-ness experience and I we I had some of the best and I remember them And I remember even noting at the time that I you know, I thought you’re supposed to be sort of irrational When you’re on, you know when you’re high, but some of them and I remembered them So I when I when I was no longer high I was able to evaluate them and yet these were really profoundly You know philosophically astute reflections on heidegger’s reflection on being and then there was something there was this deep resonance between the Internal dialogue and the external dialogue going on So I I know what that’s like and then I I think there might be something between these two so just one more minute So you get the idea of creating a phenomenological touchstone, right? And then you can practice towards it What have we and then I had an experience like this in dialogical Why did we use the experiences to create? Dialogical touchstones that people can then work towards while they’re in their dialogical practices outside of the experience as a way of trying Take it into a really really deep thing I love that. I love that. Can you give an example of what a dialogical touchstone might be? Well, so So, you know, so when you’re getting into dialectic into dialogos you get to you you you know people There’s sort of stages they get at and they and you can describe the phenomenology in terms of senses of intimacy So very very rapidly people get interpersonal intimacy and and and that’s good and and you know And and a lot of people that’s it. That’s where they stay Some people start to get an experience of the we space the geist the logos the third that takes on a life of its own And then and what they can do is they can move to a sense of intimacy with that right And then there’s a third possibility is people can move through those two They can find a through line through them The the interpersonal intimacy the intimacy with the logos and they can find an intimacy through that to the intimacy to the ground of being itself right And you see what i’m saying we could give people phenomenological touchstones about these two deeper kinds of intimacy Especially the third and and that could help them feel and find their way to those deeper kinds of intimacy While they’re doing the dialogical practice That’s exciting. That’s very exciting. Yeah. Yeah, love that Ali I could talk to you for days. This is a wonderful book. Let’s bring it up again Let’s people see this book buy this book read this book buy this book read this book Okay, that and you you you know, you can see that, you know, ali is not here. He’s not showing something He’s deeply, you know, virtue virtuously and with virtuosity invested in trying to address the meaning crisis and explore this The psychedelic renaissance as a possible viable venue for doing that and I think he’s doing it in an admirable manner I want to thank you ali and I always give my guests The the last word it can be summative. It can be cumulative. It can be provocative. It can be prophetic if you wish But what’s the final word you want to leave us with? Well, first thing I just want to say thank you john because you know There’s a there’s a reason you’re probably one of the most quoted people in that book and it’s it’s it’s it’s a The impact that your work has had on on my thinking which I’m very grateful for I’m grateful to be here as well This was hugely enjoyable for me And oh the final word I austere I steer away from the the prophetic but I suppose it’s about Suppose what I what I yes, I would love if people bought or listened to the book. This is also on audible, but I suppose it’s If there’s one thing that I think is really important If there’s one thing that I think that that ties in a lot of this What we’ve been talking about through, you know Dialogous practices and what I talk about in the book is this sense of deep epistemic humility and curiosity and I think You know regardless of whether people are interested in psychedelics, you know or or the meaning crisis I think perhaps people are interested in the meaning crisis listening to this But I think coming into that and deepening that and letting that take us somewhere new Uh is is something that I think is absolutely vital right now And so the different ways we can all contribute to that and do that and bring that into the culture as a way of being Um, I think that’s a big part of the work to be done right now. So um, we all have we all have some kind of Contribution for that. So yeah, so yeah, thank you. John. It’s it’s been an absolute pleasure Thank you. Ali. It’s so good to talk to you again